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COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

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Cognitive Regime Shift I - When the Brain Breaks/Consciousness, Cognition, and the Prefrontal Cortex

From Complex Time

July 23, 2018
11:20 am - 12:10 pm

Presenter

George Mashour (Univ. Michigan)

Abstract

The goal of my talk was to inform the group on the current controversies in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, to distinguish phenomenal vs. access consciousness, and to highlight the potential role of recurrent processing (also known as reafferent, reentrant, reverberant or feedback processing) in conscious experience. I also wanted to show that anesthesia can be a reversible, functional model of a "broken brain" and demonstrate interventions (in this case, cholinergic stimulation of prefrontal cortex) that might reverse phenotypes of brokenness.

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Post-meeting Reflection

George Mashour (Univ. Michigan) Link to the source page

The meeting was illuminating in a number of regards. In addition to the new content knowledge, the framework of emergence/causality/time/complexity was of great interest and utility. In terms of specific knowledge that will inform my future work, the limitations of DTI as a metric for human structural connectivity was important to learn. Also, the lecture on critical dynamics was- in my opinion- important in linking scales from neuronal spike activity to large scale networks. Criticalitycan potentiallyfunction as a surrogate for optimal "health" in the system and distance from criticality can potentially function as a surrogate for "disease."

Reference Material