systemity

Continuation. Part I: systemity.livejournal.com/61740.html
                     Part II:systemity.livejournal.com/62002.html
                     Part III:systemity.livejournal.com/62382.html
                            Part IV:systemity.livejournal.com/62870.html
                              Part V:systemity.livejournal.com/63520.html
                     Part VI:systemity.livejournal.com/64029.html
Long-term memory (LTM) is the foundation of our conscience, without which the concsience cannot function. The knowledge accumulated as a result of extensive, decades-long studies of neurons that are involved in recording and storage of information in the human brain, as well as all the research papers and books available on this subject, are certainly of great interest and value to specialists in the field of human conscience. Much of the knowledge in this field can be generalized and systematized; however, the entire ocean of details known in this field hardly contains a single piece of holistic knowledge. Transfer of information is accompanied by transmittal of electrical signals. Neurons may differ in size by as much as one and a half order of magnitude; neurons form cell ensembles, and any excitement of a neuron that belongs to that ensemble will cause an excitement of the entire ensemble; a brain injury may cause a memory deterioration or complete amnesia depending on which part of the brain has been injured; and so on and so forth.

Certainly, throughout the history of science, every new level of knowledge of details of the brain structure and functioning provided new and theretofore inaccessible opportunities in consolidation of the fragmentary details into a holistic picture. One of the first researchers who dissected human and animal brains, a Roman physician and philosopher of Greek origin Claudius Galen (AD 130 – 200), believed that the most important part of the brain was not the solid substance but fluid-filled structures, which nowadays are known as the ventricular system filled with cerebrospinal fluid. That idea was so firmly established in the Western academic school of thought, that during almost 15 centuries no one ever cast doubt upon its validity. In view of the contemporary science, equipped with modern research methods and tools, Galen’s views, certainly, are seen as extremely naïve. Galen could not have known about neurons, electric signal exchange between them, as well as many other currently known facts. However, he was the first to attempt getting a general picture of how the mammal brain functions. Nowadays, the more concrete details we obtain about the functioning of the brain, the more unanswered questions arise, and that pursuit of details can never end.

New methods in physico-chemical research and new methodological approaches are certainly necessary and important; however, just like cubed raw meat and vegetables are not yet a meal course, a multitude of details is not a synonym of holistic knowledge which is the only truly valuable product of a scientific effort. Raw food ingredients that are not yet a dish can be used for preparing various dishes that can be tasted, compared, and discussed in terms of technology of their preparation. In science, such “dishes” are called paradigms, which may represent philosophical or theoretical frameworks of any kind of knowledge. Such frameworks help us to view phenomena that are in the focus of our thinking, or memory, or dreams, as consolidated objects – that is, in the same way as, for instance, we view the Moon in the sky, rather than in the form of moon rocks collected on the Moon. My views on dreaming as a natural mechanism for performing, in optimal conditions, of two vitally important processes – revitalization of long-term memory (LTM) by means of copying of information from intermediate-term memory (ITM), and the cleaning up of ITM by erasing junk information – represent an example of a scientific paradigm.

Given that the human brain contains tens of billions of neurons, the total amount of information that a human receives in the course of life, through visual perception only, is tens of millions of billions of bits. Even if one can imagine some kind of a mechanism in the human brain which would allow it to store such an amount of information in the memory, it is still hard to imagine how a human – without the capability to selectively erase most of such information, such as, for instance, scenes that are rushing by before the eyes of a driving motorist – would be able to intellectually function. How the brain achieves that selectivity in erasing information is a mystery whose solution is very important.

Our mind can identify episodes or images whose exact equivalent is stored in our LTM. Our mind can identify episodes or images that, remotely or closely, remind us of episodes or images stored in our LTM. Our mind can attribute, in accordance with certain logic that is unclear to us, episodes or images to certain groups of episodes or images that are stored in our LTM. Our mind can evoke a whole chain of memories about episodes or images in such a way that we may have a hard time understanding why A led to B, and B to C.

When we are awake, our conscience is constantly working, and logically complete episodes that are somehow associated with short-term and intermediate-term memory (STM and ITM) are constantly transferred to LTM where they get a place among other information that is similar by certain parameters. Our conscience forms subjective images, and those subjective images influence the extraction, to LTM, of the objective images delivered by our sense organs. However, as a rule, most of these processes that occur when we are awake are superficial. They are similar to the way people read blogs – typically, one starts with postings that have catchy headlines and are concise and clear. Reading postings that contain more complex information requires concentration and thinking which is not always possible amid all the distractions that go along with being awake. Thus, in the state of being awake, a significant part of information goes to ITM unprocessed. In the state of sleep, information that was received during the day is subjected to a more thorough processing. Our mind does that work during the slow-wave sleep when it is free from distractions.

In humans, normal sleep consists of an orthodox (slow wave) and paradoxical (fast) stages. The slow wave stage has four phases. The duration of an entire cycle of five phases is usually 1.5 – 2 hours, and normal sleep consists of 4-5 cycles. Although by the end of a sleep period, the relative duration of the phases changes , the structure of individual cycles is the same. This observation is very important as it indicates that the mechanisms of processing of information stored in ITM are the same in each of the sleep cycles. This, in its turn, indicates that information stored in ITM is unsorted, and each sleep cycle provides for processing of a certain amount of information. The amount of information that is processed during the first cycle is inversely proportional to the number of hours of sleep needed for a given person. As is known, Napoleon and Edison slept only 3-4 hours out of 24 hours. Newborns sleep 14-18 hours per day. This fact can be explained based on the considerations provided below.