Re: Cognition as Opium? Yeah!


George Cherry wrote:
Can mentation turn you on? This article says yes. My experience says yes.

George

"Thirst For Knowledge' May Be Opium Craving

Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of
grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the
brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of
the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited
article in the latest issue of American Scientist.

"While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said
Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and
Sciences.

"But once you get it, you just feel fabulous."

The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which
they absorb knowledge, he said.

"I think we're exquisitely tuned to this as if we're junkies, second by
second."

Biederman hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary
value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence.

Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for
knowledge, he added.

The same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience, Biederman said,
providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art.

"This account may provide a plausible and very simple mechanism for
aesthetic and perceptual and cognitive curiosity."

Biederman's theory was inspired by a widely ignored 25-year-old finding that
mu-opioid receptors - binding sites for natural opiates - increase in
density along the ventral visual pathway, a part of the brain involved in
image recognition and processing.

The receptors are tightly packed in the areas of the pathway linked to
comprehension and interpretation of images, but sparse in areas where visual
stimuli first hit the cortex.

Biederman's theory holds that the greater the neural activity in the areas
rich in opioid receptors, the greater the pleasure.

In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human
volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman's research group
found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in
more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway. (The data from the studies
are being submitted for publication.)

Biederman also found that repeated viewing of an attractive image lessened
both the rating of pleasure and the activity in the opioid-rich areas. In
his article, he explains this familiar experience with a neural-network
model termed "competitive learning."

In competitive learning (also known as "Neural Darwinism"), the first
presentation of an image activates many neurons, some strongly and a greater
number only weakly.

With repetition of the image, the connections to the strongly activated
neurons grow in strength. But the strongly activated neurons inhibit their
weakly activated neighbors, causing a net reduction in activity. This
reduction in activity, Biederman's research shows, parallels the decline in
the pleasure felt during repeated viewing.

"One advantage of competitive learning is that the inhibited neurons are now
free to code for other stimulus patterns," Biederman writes.

This preference for novel concepts also has evolutionary value, he added.

"The system is essentially designed to maximize the rate at which you
acquire new but interpretable [understandable] information. Once you have
acquired the information, you best spend your time learning something else.

"There's this incredible selectivity that we show in real time. Without
thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but
novel."

The theory, while currently tested only in the visual system, likely applies
to other senses, Biederman said.

Edward Vessel, who was Biederman's graduate student at USC, is now a
postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
Vessel collaborated on the studies and co-authored the American Scientist
article.

University of Southern California
http://tinyurl.com/yw0t
-----------------------------------------------------
This reeks of vivisection and a federal grant.

They rarely tell you how many monkeys they tortured
in these 'studies'.

Vivisectors have been at it since the Roman Empire.
They were the original nazis.

.

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