Brain Study #9..#9 - Providing Function(t or d?)

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Providing Function

Fig. 5

 

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Figure 5 shows the addition of a motor controller between the

decision matrix and the motor to be controlled. As the organism

became more complex, the output of the decision matrix was required

to drive ever more complex devices and to coordinate those devices.

If the complexity of the drive signals was required of the decision

matrix, it would need be enormously wide, complex and slow. The human

voice alone, for example, requires many thousands of simultaneous

signals in the formation of phonemes. A simple command to say, " ah "

is enormously complex with tongue and mouth position, breath control,

etc. Similarly, the movement and focusing of the eyes would require

many thousands of instructions. These are provided by an eye

controller mechanism rather than directly from the decision matrix.

 

Here again, trial and error adopted the controller option, a post-

processor device, by building a device which performs the detail

translation from decision to performance. The phoneme processor is an

excellent example. It is located primarily in man on the lower

portion of the left frontal lobe, whereas in woman it is located in

roughly equal parts on each side of the brain in the same location on

both frontal lobes. Other small patches of the brain show that they

are also a part of this same mechanism. When the decision mechanism

makes the decision to say, " ah " , the phoneme processor translates

that phoneme demand into the multitude of muscular controls needed to

accomplish that task. This controller is trained as the child learns

to talk. The basic speech elements may be obtained in less than two

years. Vocabulary additions and pronunciation corrections may be made

throughout the life of the individual.

 

Each motor device (leg, arm, finger, eye, tongue, etc.) has a

trainable controller for the expansion and translation of the command

to that device , an area of gray matter set aside and specifically

designed for that function.

 

It has been shown that the act of seeing provides a scaled version of

the scene along the gray matter surface of the occipital lobe. If a

subject is given a map to study then asked to trace the route from a

given location on the map to another both with the eyes and from

memory, it takes the same amount of time either way. If a portion of

the visual area in the occipital lobe is damaged, it can be shown

that that the seeing is damaged in an exact reflected way, even

though the eyes were not damaged.

 

An important finding with respect to the eyes is that if a perception

area is damaged (in the surface layer of the occipital lobes), not

only is the visual perception damaged, but any scene memory will show

defects in that same area. This indicates that sensory memory is a

part of the sensory perception mechanism. All of our memory scenes

are stored in that same layer. It is an easy step, then, to the

generalization that all sensory memory is stored in the sensory

perception area for that sensor. A memory recalled which is complete

with sight, touch, sound and smell is an assembly from the various

sensory memories.

 

A final important finding: if a visual perception area in the

occipital lobe is damaged, the subject not only loses the ability to

see in the damaged portion, and is not able to recall any historical

scene detail in that same area but from before the damage, the

subject is also unable to 'imagine' (construct a mental scene) in

that damaged area. This gives insight into the human creative

process. The human 'builds' a scene in the sensory areas as he

invents.