View Single Post
Old 11-26-2006, 04:45 AM   #20 (permalink)
Acting Like Godot
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 4,800
Acting Like Godot will become famous soon enough
Default

Yup, neurons and memory.

Your electrical impulses ran along your neurons and synapses when light reflected off the mountain and fell into your eyes and your optic nerve sent signals to your brain.

What happened next?

Those electrical impulses vanished from your brain, when you walked away from that mountain scene, back to your car, where you started thinking about where to go for dinner, and how far is it to the next motel, and where did you put your care keys now.

(In other words, other electrical impulses started running).

Where did the earlier impulses (mountain-related) vanish to?

How come, so many years later, you can close your eyes and reconnect your mountain-related electrical impulses?

You call it memory. Ok, so that electrical impulse was still running around in your brain somewhere for all those years? All the way to the year 2006? Aha. Now you see the problem. If that were the case, as you grew older and older and had more thoughts, memories and perceptions, and all of them were electrical impulses still running around in your brain, it would be sizzling with voltage by the time you were 50.

Whereas if you did a brain scan, you'd notice that actually the amount of electricty running around your brain is more or less constant through the years. (It fluctuates with mental activity, that's about it).

So "memory" is the term we like to use - but the term itself doesn't explain how the process occurs.

=========

If you don't like the memory example, try another one.

I just thought to myself, "Next month I will win the lottery."

This thought is an electrical impulse. It just ran through my brain. Electricity is energy. Energy can't be destroyed. Where did it go? Wherever it went, does this energy have or not have the potential to affect its surroundings?
Acting Like Godot is offline   Reply With Quote