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Questions related from Edward J Tehovnik
According to Meshberger (1990) the depiction of the ‘Creation of Adam’ by Michaelangelo (1512) suggests that it is the imagination of Adam that created God (not vica versa), since in the painting...
1 weeks ago 1,721 2 View
Since the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) it has been presumed that humans and other species by extension are not born as clean slates, but rather that they are endowed with a mechanism for the...
2 weeks ago 7,422 1 View
International Humanitarian Law (IHL) allows combatants to target other combatants, but prohibits attacks on civilians, and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) has protections against taking a...
2 weeks ago 8,290 1 View
In the Book of Job (Old Testament, King James) God’s judgment is pitted against Satan’s skepticism by having Satan suggest to God that Job, a follower of God, is only righteous because God has...
3 weeks ago 6,816 2 View
It is very apparent that over the past half century that the per capita GDP (gross domestic product) of the United States has been increasing linearly (see Figure 1), whereas the gain of the US...
4 weeks ago 6,824 3 View
“And you shall count seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years; and the time of the seven sabbaths of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall cause the trumpet...
4 weeks ago 3,547 1 View
“Survival is more important than economic prosperity,” these are the words uttered by the realist political scientist John Mearsheimer (2001). The following scenario makes the point: if an army is...
5 weeks ago 9,362 0 View
It has been known since 600 BCE Babylonia that the aggregate debt of society increases exponentially, whereas the aggregate economic growth (GDP, gross domestic product) of a society increases...
last month 5,789 3 View
If you track Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches following his invasion of the Gaza Strip, he has said to the Israeli people, “You must remember what the Amalekites have done to you” which is in...
last month 4,908 4 View
Anyone who has ever had an aquarium of guppies whereby brother and sister guppies are left to mate will find that after months the number of offspring is reduced to zero. In ancient times, before...
last month 1,292 0 View
Key concepts of the Old Testament that coincide with Christian Nationalism: The economy was designed to support continuous warfare. This was done to unify the population through battle which was...
last month 500 4 View
In the United States today there is a major dispute going on about the appropriate conditions for rejuvenation of the working class, whose livelihood has been outsourced and whose income has...
last month 6,708 0 View
In 2005, the work of Daniel Everett challenged a central dictate of conventional linguistics that all languages exhibit properties of ‘recursion’, which is fundamental the Chomsky’s Universal...
29 July 2025 5,519 3 View
In 2007, I had the opportunity to take out a $800,000 loan (and with no down payment) to purchase a beach-front property in Revere, Massachusetts, USA. At the time, I was making $55,000 per year....
19 July 2025 2,023 10 View
The Old Testament was formulated as an idea—a myth—even before it was written down and this formulation came about in 1,200 BCE or thereafter (Finkelstein and Siberman 2002). If one reads the Old...
16 July 2025 9,916 3 View
In 1970 the median income in the United States was $56,000 per year, and in 2017 the median income was $68,000 per year (see Fig. 1, top curve). In 1970 the median cost of a three-bedroom family...
14 July 2025 2,772 5 View
Chomsky (2012) asserted that verbal language in Homo sapiens started abruptly some 70,000 to 60,000 years ago—but with no evidence. This view was challenged by Everett (2017) who advanced the idea...
14 July 2025 9,351 7 View
In the United States, a person spends up to five hours per day gazing at a smart-phone (Duarte 2025). Similar values are found for other countries such as Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, China, and...
08 July 2025 6,505 2 View
If a country is at the extremes of the Gini coefficient (0 or 1, see Figure 1), this means that the incentive system of the society has been destroyed. Therefore, having a value in the middle...
07 July 2025 6,007 0 View
If a person increases his income by one order of magnitude (e.g., from $10,000 to $100,000) and another person decreases his income by one order of magnitude (e.g., from $1,000,000 to $100,000),...
05 July 2025 9,020 4 View
"And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of...
02 July 2025 9,657 2 View
If one were to travel to any part of Europe or Asia today one would easily find individuals whose genomes contain about 1 to 4% of genes from Homo neanderthalensis (Green et al. 2010). If you were...
30 June 2025 9,938 1 View
Palantir Technologies Incorporated, based in Denver Colorado, was founded by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and associates in 2003 and it received its initial funding from the Central Intelligence Agency...
29 June 2025 1,881 3 View
“Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do often their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.” (Exodus 23:24) The forgoing quotation...
22 June 2025 386 0 View
There have been two approaches to the study of the neural basis of consciousness: (1) that consciousness is located somewhere in the brain, and (2) that consciousness is a biological process. Many...
18 June 2025 3,477 3 View
During warfare, the killing of males is a human attribute (Obermeyer et al. 2008; as well as an attribute of other primates, Wilson et al. 2014), which to all historians of war is well-accepted....
12 June 2025 6,758 1 View
Over the last decade, libertarians behind crypto exchanges (e.g., Bitcoin became the 5th most treasured asset in the world valued at 1.8 trillion dollars, Nguyen 2025) have advocated that digital...
01 June 2025 3,776 3 View
In ~ 5,000 BCE there was a radical change in the composition of the Y chromosomes on the planet, while the XX distribution (by analyzing mitochondrial DNA) remained relatively unaltered (see Fig....
29 May 2025 5,084 1 View
Neely, Carmena et al. (2018) implanted electrodes in the visual cortex (V1) of rats such that the neural responses were transmitted to an audio device. It was a rat’s job to generate a specific...
01 May 2025 8,924 14 View
Much current-day wealth in the United States has been created by optimized engineering to miniaturize computer chips in combination with elaborate programming to yield ChatGPT/DeepSeek, for...
14 March 2025 2,889 2 View
When one claps one’s hands in the presence of a Great White Egret, this long-legged bird standing knee-deep in a pond will extend its large wings in preparation for flight. But if one ignores the...
27 February 2025 9,109 2 View
The fastest sense on record is proprioception (Fadiga and Pupilli 1964; Fuchs and Kornhuber 1969; Schubert and Minor 2004; Snider and Stowell 1944) but the vestibular sense is comparable (Miles...
16 February 2025 5,587 1 View
For the neocortex and its vertebrate and invertebrate homologue to be functional for consciousness, the neurons must exhibit a high and protracted metabolic rate as maintained by dopamine and as...
16 February 2025 7,592 0 View
“Machine learning tells us nothing!!!! It [human language] is too rich. … It [language] works as well with impossible languages as with regular languages. … [AI] is as useful as a bulldozer is...
07 February 2025 4,236 6 View
In our discourse (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, and Chen 2025), we will present empirical evidence for the notion that consciousness in animals from the amoeba to the human is subserved by processes...
05 February 2025 398 0 View
“It is imagination that allows us to predict future events and use that to guide our actions.” (Tai Sing Lee 2016). In the early part of the last century Wilder Penfield reported that as he was...
16 January 2025 4,184 1 View
If you have ever watched the film ‘Awakenings’ starring Robin Williams as Oliver Sacks and Robert De Niro as the Parkinsonian patient Leonard (see Footnote 1) then you will understand that once...
14 January 2025 6,162 3 View
In an August 2, 2024 interview with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk suggested that brain machine interfaces that depend on electrodes implanted in the neocortex will have the capacity to transmit some 1 x...
11 January 2025 8,279 3 View
(1) The basal lobe is the ultimate controller which contains two lobes that are connected by commissures. Electrical stimulation of the lobes evokes eye, head, and tentacle movements, and removal...
27 December 2024 8,812 2 View
08 December 2024 2,671 3 View
When learning either a primary or secondary language this process is incremental and advancements are not made in days but in months and years. For example, a group of Japanese students was...
07 December 2024 5,787 5 View
The electric organ of the elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii) of the Congo River of Central Africa evolved from muscle cells over 200 million years ago, when the continents of Africa and...
04 December 2024 8,078 0 View
The reason humans, but no other primates, have been endowed with the ability to generate language is because the alpha motor neurons of the brain stem and spinal cord are innervated directly by...
28 November 2024 314 0 View
“Genes are destiny and nurture finalizes this destiny; therefore, every organism has a distinct conscious experience making the Hard Problem irrelevant.” (Tehovnik et al. 2025, in: Automaticity...
21 November 2024 5,466 2 View
The neurophysiology of primate express, oculomotor and skeletomotor behavior has received renewed interest in systems neuroscience (e.g., Cecala et al. 2023; Ito et al. 2022; Mekhaiel et al....
14 November 2024 3,159 0 View
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, some believe that one’s consciousness (post-death) will be stored in the cloud with the possibility of it being hooked up to a biological or...
12 November 2024 3,675 1 View
Recently it has been found that the lateral intraparietal area does not command ocular responses (despite previous suggestions, e.g., Mountcastle et al. 1975), since monkeys exposed to a...
11 November 2024 9,090 0 View
It has been proposed that consciousness is mediated at the level of the neocortex according to a string of declarative, conscious units, which encodes a sequence of sounds or visual objects. A...
09 November 2024 5,655 3 View
Sherrington (1906) predicted that the neocortex mediates all program changes to movement (which is regulated by consciousness/learning, Hebb 1949, 1968), whereas the cerebellum maintains a steady...
07 November 2024 2,955 2 View
The rate of glucose consumption by the neocortex is reduced by over 80% during anesthesia (Sibson et al. 1998), which disables the synapses (Richards 2002) that are supported by glial tissue (Engl...
06 November 2024 4,023 3 View
1—The organism must be mobile (James 1890), which would exclude plants and rocks and inanimate objects from this category. 2—The organism must be uni- or multi-cellular and eukaryotic, and...
05 November 2024 3,540 4 View
The issue of chunking information is a way of having an entire data-set represented by one concept or idea (Miller 1956). Unconscious information (or thinking-fast, Kahneman 2011) assumes a high...
04 November 2024 3,921 0 View
Aficionados of brain machine interfaces (BMI) have the goal of hooking up the neocortical neurons of an individual with spinal cord or brain stem damage to have him or her control a device with...
01 November 2024 7,436 2 View
Although the establishment of the truth of information requires the scientific method (Harari 2024), bad information in biology can lead to species extinction, e.g., disregarding the coloration of...
28 October 2024 6,097 1 View
As mentioned, multicellular organisms came about during the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago (Bronfman et al. 2016; Cisek 2019). A notion that is common to evolutionary biologists is...
21 October 2024 4,995 10 View
Hydranencephaly (not to be confused with hydrocephaly) is a condition in which the neocortex fails to develop due to neonatal stroke, for example, whereby the space normally occupied by the...
16 October 2024 4,996 0 View
As discussed, parallel processing between the neocortical and subcortical networks is central to the efficient transfer of information via the brain for both sensorimotor behavior as well as...
14 October 2024 9,820 0 View
Many have criticized Chomsky’s theory of the Universal Grammar of language (e.g., Pinker as described in Sihombing 2022), but the most effective criticisms have come from Daniel Everett, given...
05 October 2024 9,384 4 View
According to Noam Chomsky, the purpose of language is not to communicate (given that Chomsky did not want to confuse the communication of animals and plants with that of humans), but rather to...
03 October 2024 5,178 0 View
As discussed, the cerebellum cannot ‘feel’ itself, for the current threshold of detection is similar to the current threshold of behavioral (motor) elicitation (Doty 1969, 2007), and thus the...
30 September 2024 1,813 0 View
A major goal of learning and consciousness is to automate behavior--i.e., to transition from ‘thinking slow’ to ‘thinking fast’ (Kahneman 2011)--so that when an organism is subjected to a specific...
21 September 2024 2,144 1 View
As already discussed, the cerebellum is unlike the neocortex, for it is dedicated to motor control (Eccles 1967). To establish this control, circuits at the level of the Purkinje neurons are...
18 September 2024 2,235 0 View
Zheng and Meister (2024) have made a significant observation about human behavior: the throughput for most behaviors averages about 10 bits per second (or a little over 1,000 possibilities per...
13 September 2024 5,684 0 View
Much like the telencephalon, which eventually evolved into the neocortex of mammals, the cerebellum too has existed in vertebrates for hundreds of millions of years evolving in parallel with the...
11 September 2024 3,693 0 View
Although the neurons of the hippocampal formation have been studied in detail within the context of information storage, a better way of thinking about this subcortical region is that it is a...
09 September 2024 2,509 2 View
A lesson from Terry Laughlin on training to be an Olympic swimmer: “The surest sign of failure (in swimming), Terry Laughlin reckoned, was bubbles, though he found that froth created by swimmers...
04 September 2024 8,367 2 View
Since the time of William James (1890), consciousness has been described as occurring in a stream. In 2013, Chomsky reminded an audience that consciousness is continuous and that it never seems to...
27 August 2024 531 4 View
Using a variation of the classical conditioning paradigm with electrical stimulation of neural tissue in behaving primates, Robert Doty (1965, 1969) was able to deduce the ‘sensational’ coding...
26 August 2024 6,958 1 View
Damage of the neocortex that disconnects this structure from subcortical networks creates a condition in which behavioral routines that depend on the neocortex can no longer be modified. For...
22 August 2024 1,219 3 View
Alan Turing’s attribution of consciousness to a machine rests on the presumption that if one thinks the machine is conscious then it is conscious (Turing 1950). In truth, the only thing conscious...
14 August 2024 5,424 0 View
“…we investigated neural responses to a silent, 15 iso-luminant, black and white movie in head-fixed mice without any task or locomotion demands, or rewards. The activity of most neurons (97%,...
14 August 2024 6,886 0 View
Soccer robots have both proprioception to note the position of their bodies as well as a visual sense that is egocentric to detect the ball, the goals, and the position of other robots (Behnke and...
13 August 2024 4,312 4 View
Chess Masters have the ability to imagine many moves ahead using patterns based on a range of possible moves by an opponent, all done within seconds (Coates 2013). Chess requires the same...
13 August 2024 4,008 1 View
Embodiment is the idea that the brain does not need a detailed representation of the world, since the world is always present to organisms via an intact sensorimotor apparatus (Clark 1998). An...
13 August 2024 6,779 2 View
We know from the work of Robert Doty (1965, 1969), which was inspired by a study done on dogs (Baer 1905), that when electrical pulses are delivered to two cortical sites in monkeys that after...
13 August 2024 7,699 12 View
“Here is a thought experiment. Let's place Rodolpho Llinas's jarred-brain on top of a body (Fig. 1). I bet Llinas would argue that his jarred-brain retains its own consciousness, and the android...
12 August 2024 2,541 1 View
Single-cell organisms can be conditioned (Saigusa et al. 2008); therefore, it should be expected that single cells in the neocortex can also be conditioned (Prsa et al. 2017). In the study of...
12 August 2024 7,884 1 View
Willett, Shenoy et al. (2021) have developed a brain computer interface (BCI) that used neural signal collected from the hand area of the motor cortex (area M1) of a paralyzed patient. The...
11 August 2024 8,973 0 View
The rate of glucose consumption by the neocortex is reduced by over 80% during anesthesia (Sibson et al. 1998), which disables the synapses (Richards 2002) that are inundated by glial tissue (Engl...
09 August 2024 4,225 0 View
Vertebrates and invertebrates (e.g., arthropods: insects, crustaceans, etc.) have two different neuro-muscular systems given their differential construction: the former have an endoskeleton and...
08 August 2024 1,356 0 View
Evolutionary fitness is based on an organism’s ability to adapt rapidly to changing environmental circumstances. Large-bodied mammals have been equipped with large brains (and hence a high...
07 August 2024 5,922 2 View
Larger brains, which typically contain more neurons, store and transfer more information (Tehovnik and Chen 2015), but the precise relationship between number of neurons and information has yet to...
06 August 2024 2,177 2 View
Brain and body mass together are positively correlated with lifespan (Hofman 1993). The duration of neural development is one of the best predictors of brain size, and conception is the best...
06 August 2024 7,269 3 View
When the entire neocortex is ablated in rodents, although they are still able to swim, all the limbs move continuously and asynchronously (Vanderwolf 2006; Vanderwolf et al. 1978). Normal animals...
04 August 2024 1,566 3 View
When the eyes of a person are damaged this causes complete blindness. Likewise, when Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas of neocortex are damaged this causes complete aphasia, losing the ability to...
02 August 2024 7,349 2 View
Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code, understood that certain letters in the English language occurred more frequently than others (Gallistel and King 2010). To deal with this, Morse used...
02 August 2024 5,228 2 View
I attended a lecture at the Baylor College of Medicine (~ 2019) where one of the questions was “Does birdsong have anything to do with human language?” Noam Chomsky would say, “Absolutely not!”...
01 August 2024 1,986 4 View
As animals learn a task, they become more reliant on their long-term memories as compared to the real-time sensory information to guide behavioral performance (Ahilan et al. 2018). This process...
01 August 2024 10,281 0 View
“Yerkes (1912) trained an earthworm to choose one arm of a T-maze, using electric shock as punishment for error and the moist burrow as reward for correct choice. The habit was acquired in twenty...
01 August 2024 8,961 0 View
There are many types of symbolic judgements. For example, when an Israeli pilot flattens the home of a Palestinian family (even if they are forewarned), it is natural for them to experience shock...
29 July 2024 2,940 1 View
A vegetative state is caused by having massive damage to the mesencephalon, which can include both the pontine nuclei and the thalamus (Plum and Posner 1980). During this state, the metabolic...
24 July 2024 6,341 0 View
Donald Hebb (1949) posited that the neocortex is an organ that mediates learning in animal (specifically mammals) and that this learning comes about by changing the synaptic weights between...
19 July 2024 5,954 0 View
While living in Boston, which has a fine metro system, there were times that I would exit from underground at the wrong location, thereby expecting a particular visual scene only to be momentarily...
18 July 2024 3,430 10 View
Information transfer by the brain is dependent on the connectivity between neurons as mediated by learning (Hebb 1949). This connectivity is limited by the biophysical properties of neurons...
17 July 2024 4,348 0 View
Many motivators drive behavior from temperature and sleep regulation to water and food sustenance to the avoidance of predators (Mogenson 1977), but there are few drives as powerful as sex, which...
17 July 2024 6,196 2 View
Many have criticized Noam Chomsky’s theory of language (e.g., Pinker as described in Sihombing 2022), but the most effective criticisms have come from Daniel Everett, given that Chomsky (according...
16 July 2024 641 4 View
According to Chomsky, the purpose of language is not to communicate (given that animals and plants can communicate), but rather to establish a cognitive mechanism for thoughts to be generated...
15 July 2024 1,956 1 View
Unlike humans, it is believed that birds do not have a symbolic language system that can be reduced to words (Berwick et al. 2012). But they do have a nervous system that can generate sequences...
15 July 2024 9,939 0 View
A more neuroscientifically appropriate speculation would be to have the same neurons mediate both processes, with the more active neurons participating in the stream of consciousness (Tehovnik...
13 July 2024 1,925 0 View
After writing a piece toI suggest that the information transfer rate of consolidation of children and adults is similar based on my back-of-the-envelope calculation for the consolidation of...
12 July 2024 3,689 2 View
Much has been made of the idea that humans are genetically programmed to learn languages at an early age, suggesting that learning plays a minor role in this process (Chomsky 1959). But we have...
11 July 2024 6,210 6 View
Anticipating five moves ahead in chess is the sign of a good player. For every chess position there are more than 30 moves. Each player has 3 minutes to move in a game. To anticipate five moves...
10 July 2024 1,908 1 View
Nodes critical for the transfer of declarative information exist throughout the brain, particularly in the neocortex for sharing faces (for identifying friends), sound bites (for music...
10 July 2024 9,343 0 View
For evolution to act on the conscious process it must be expressed as a behavioral output (Dawkins 1976). So, thinking about an idea without writing it down or saying it will not do. So far, an...
08 July 2024 5,912 0 View
It is well known that the larger the organism, the less energy consumed per unit mass (Delong et al. 2010; Moses et al. 2016; Wells 2007). This is known as Kleiber’s Law, whereby the energy...
07 July 2024 8,779 0 View
Gestalt psychologists have proposed many ways in which items are concatenated within a single block of time so that perceptual elements can be combined into complete objects as defined in space...
30 June 2024 2,758 1 View
Information theorists have been preoccupied with how the brain might compress or ‘chunk’ information to enhance the information transfer rates (Miller 1956). On this point, it is known that a...
26 June 2024 5,225 5 View
In 1995-96, when Andreas Tolias arrived at MIT to work in the laboratory of Peter Schiller, it was clear that he would become an exceptional neuroscientist. One of the first recommendations...
25 June 2024 7,985 0 View
Vestibular agnosia is a cognitive disability that prevents a patient from detecting body motion that includes the head during periods of imbalance (Calzolari et al. 2020; Hadi et al. 2022), which...
22 June 2024 2,104 1 View
Receiving reviews of a paper (Tehovnik, Carvey et al. 2003) in which we electrically stimulated the visual cortex of primates to evoke saccadic eye movements under various behavioral conditions to...
20 June 2024 4,761 0 View
The hippocampal formation is central to the consolidation and retrieval of long-term declarative memory, memories that are stored throughout the neocortex with putative subcortical participation...
20 June 2024 10,081 5 View
It was gestalt psychologists that took issue with elementalism (Kohler 1929), that all perception/consciousness can be broken down into component parts. The expression ‘the whole is greater than...
17 June 2024 9,279 0 View
When animals (including humans) engage in volitional acts such as walking, running, and swimming—and in the case of humans, speaking, reading, and general focused thinking/learning—signals...
15 June 2024 7,160 0 View
It is commonly accepted that neocortical learning in adult mammals is mediated by changes at the synaptic level (Hebb 1949; Kandel 2006) rather than by the addition of new neurons, as seems to be...
12 June 2024 3,048 0 View
Mammals (from rodents to primates) can detect and therefore become aware of visual stimuli exhibiting luminance-contrast levels as low as 1 to 2% (Schiller and Tehovnik 2015; Histed et al. 2012)....
11 June 2024 4,681 1 View
We are taught in elementary statistics that a correlation does not prove causation. Nevertheless, given that the number of neurons in the neocortex scales at the slope of one with respect to the...
08 June 2024 1,850 0 View
“Theoretically, the computation of passive motion requires a comparison between an internal estimate of the sensory consequences of active self-motion (i.e., forward model) and the actual sensory...
04 June 2024 3,349 0 View
“Several recent studies have shown the feasibility of decoding or synthesis [of] sentences of non-tonal languages, such as English (2-10) and Japanese (11), using intracranial neural recordings,...
02 June 2024 8,603 0 View
“It was Pavlov who showed that language was a consequence of the human cerebral complexity and that it objectified the superiority and specificity of the human brain with respect to animal brains....
02 June 2024 3,016 3 View
See Figure 1: Figure 1: Neocortical-cerebellar loops per language. A language command to speak is issued from the neocortex (cortex) which has access to the cerebellar cortex at the Purkinje...
30 May 2024 5,384 4 View
The cerebellum is partitioned into three functional units: the anterior lobe (lobules I to V) plus vermal lobule VI, the posterior lobe (lobules VIII to X), and the mediolateral lobe (lobules VII,...
29 May 2024 8,367 0 View
Peter Schiller once made an insightful comment on the operant training of behaving monkeys to investigate the visual system: “Perhaps we are just studying a monkey’s thirst for apple juice, and...
28 May 2024 5,182 0 View
The field of systems neuroscience is feeling pretty good about itself. Volumes have been written on all the successes over the past half century, yielding many Nobel prizes. Some distinguished...
26 May 2024 8,189 8 View
While recording electrical activity from the prefrontal cortex of primates it has been found that a 1-9 Hz burst of activity (i.e., theta activity) occurs immediately before a perceptual...
25 May 2024 6,534 0 View
One of the first studies to deduce how structures external to the cerebellum are involved in setting the adaptation signal in the cerebellum during learning has been performed by Soetedjo, Fuchs...
23 May 2024 7,680 0 View
Anyone who has ever watched a Mafia film is familiar with the scene of a gangster relieving himself with pants pulled to the ankles, as the cubicle door bursts open followed by a barrage of...
22 May 2024 508 0 View
There is now overwhelming evidence to suggest, as anticipated by David Marr (1969), that for the neocortex to be fully operative all neural signals must loop through the cerebellum during and...
21 May 2024 5,607 0 View
David Marr (1969) believed that all cerebellar learning is initiated by the neocortex such that a particular context (conveyed through the neocortex) triggers an automated response: “The learning...
20 May 2024 2,746 0 View
The type I and type II behavioral--EEG correlate established by Case Vanderwolf (Vanderwolf 1969) and taught ‘as fact’ in his laboratory course has turned out to be one of the most significant...
17 May 2024 5,206 0 View
In the mid-1980's at the University of Toronto, John Eccles delivered a lecture on consciousness. Eccles, being a dualist, declared that the interface to consciousness is in the supplementary...
17 May 2024 3,602 1 View
Ablation of the cerebellum does not abolish locomotion in mammals (Ioffe 2013); it merely induces atonia: body movements become clumsy with postural and vestibular deficits, which is related to...
14 May 2024 9,350 3 View
The hippocampus is necessary for the consolidation of recent memories, but the neocortex is important for the archival storage of these memories. This is borne out by studies in both humans and...
13 May 2024 3,716 1 View
"Under the assumption that passive-sensory information processing remains intact in completely locked-in ALS [Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis] patients, the failure to control autonomic functions...
09 May 2024 8,289 0 View
During locomotion on a track ball by a mouse as compared to immobility, microzones measuring 200 μm (mediolaterally) at the cerebellar cortex exhibit a stable and synchronized firing rate...
08 May 2024 313 0 View
When Usain Bolt charges down the track one must be reminded that this event represents many years of dedication to one aim: to be the best. As Bolt recalls, “When I was young, I didn’t really...
06 May 2024 6,933 0 View
The inferior olive generates complex spikes at the cerebellar Purkinje neurons by way of the climbing fibres, and these spikes are real-time event signals (Ekerot, Schouenborg et al. 1987;...
02 May 2024 213 0 View
In terms of communication, Gnasthenomus petersii has been compared to songbirds, bats, elephants, dolphins, whales, as well as humans. On this point, Chomsky (2012) believes that the ability to...
28 April 2024 1,133 0 View
Even though Saeedi, Logothetis et al. (2024) have concluded that visual illusions are a product of extrastriate rather than striate mechanisms (based on neural response latencies of illusions...
26 April 2024 9,013 0 View
In humans, there are just 10^3 skeletal muscles in the body (this is a round up from 750 skeletal muscles for the sake of simplicity). This means that every muscle (involved in volitional...
24 April 2024 3,664 0 View
To measure the gain of the vestibulo-ocular reflex, subjects must have their head displaced abruptly in the dark, such that moving the head by 10 degrees leftward will induce rightward eye...
18 April 2024 515 0 View
Is the survival instinct found in single cells as exists in humans, and can single cells communicate for the benefit of the group? The answer seems to be yes (see: Reber, Slijepcević et al. 2024...
13 April 2024 10,080 1 View
In 1980, Fred Miles proposed (contrary to the views of Masao Ito 1972) that the purpose of the cerebellum is to house efference-copy representations of all movements being commanded by the...
12 April 2024 1,734 0 View
New learning can range from an astronaut returning from space to adjust his vestibular system to 1G, an individual associating a group of stimuli to generate a conditioned response, or someone...
10 April 2024 6,321 0 View
Theta activity (~ 6-10 Hz) has been associated with transitions between different frames of consciousness, as studied using binocular rivalry (Dwarakanath, Logothetis 2023). This rhythm is...
07 April 2024 10,016 3 View
The parallel fibres of the cerebellar cortex interconnect the mossy fibres (the carriers of sensory input) with the Purkinje neurons, which are critical for adaptation during the learning of new...
07 April 2024 5,808 0 View
07 April 2024 2,168 0 View
An attempt was made by Miles and Lisberger (1981) to address this question, but the best they could do was to put a ‘black-box’ (see Fig. 1, flocculus) around the granular-Purkinje circuit and...
04 April 2024 565 0 View
Based on information-transfer statistics for humans, once one becomes adept at a language, irrespective of the language, the information transfer rate is about 40 bits per second (which translates...
02 April 2024 8,641 0 View
According to Thach et al. (1992) there are three homuncular representations in the cerebellum: one at the anterior lobe that innervates the fastigial nucleus, a second at the posterior lobe that...
28 March 2024 1,095 1 View
Many have attributed the unconscious processing of sensory events to the cerebellum (Bosco and Poppele 2001; Eccles et al.1967; Gelfan and Carter 1967; Doty 1969; Tononi et al. 2008ab). For a...
27 March 2024 4,358 5 View
During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, mammals exhibit skeletal muscle twitches as well as disjunctive eye movements (Zhou and King 1997), under suppression of skeletal body movements due to the...
26 March 2024 3,848 1 View
Theta activity (~ 6-10 Hz) is prevalent throughout the brain including the hippocampus, the neocortex, and the cerebellum (Berry and Thompson 1976, 1978; Dwarakanath, Logothetis et al. 2023;...
22 March 2024 8,665 1 View
When rats negotiate a previously learned T maze for a reward, hippocampal place cells are activated during periods of large-amplitude irregular activity (containing ripples) punctuated by theta...
21 March 2024 7,432 0 View
Thomas Thach and colleagues made the following observation (Thach et al. 1992) as summarized here: Myotomes are a group of muscle fibres innervated by a single spinal nerve composed of sensory and...
18 March 2024 5,702 0 View
Dickey et al. (2022) has established that 70-ms duration, 90 Hz ripples are synchronized to within 500 ms throughout human neocortex. This occurs within and between hemispheres (including the...
14 March 2024 7,154 0 View
Lecturing and performing on the football pitch are very complex motor routines that depend on an intact neocortex with access to new declarative information via the hippocampus (Corkin 2002)....
14 March 2024 3,524 0 View
Donald Hebb proposed that consciousness is synonymous with learning, and he believed that the neocortex is centrally involved in this process (Hebb 1949, 1961, 1968). In humans, electrical...
12 March 2024 8,779 9 View
Unlike structures in the brain that control body movements such as the brain stem, cerebellum, and spinal cord, whose energy consumption is related to movement execution and the maintenance of...
11 March 2024 6,782 2 View
The motivational machinery of the brain in primates (composed of the anterior cingulate cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala, periaqueductal grey, lateral reticular formation, and parabrachial nucleus)...
11 March 2024 7,889 0 View
Elon Musk has the mind of an investor rather than the mind of a scientist. A case in point is his recent adventure into brain-machine interfaces via Neuralink...
10 March 2024 2,103 0 View
Activation of subcortical fiber systems such as the locus coeruleus and the ventral tegmental area, both of which have access to wide expanses of the neocortex, accelerates recovery from...
09 March 2024 3,159 0 View
Audiences who attend a lecture can be divided into three types: (1) those who are totally disengaged since they are preoccupied with their laptops, iPhones, and so on; (2) those who must write...
09 March 2024 7,799 1 View
Regarding the volitional control of neurons in completely paralyzed patients, Birbaumer (2006) made the following observation: “With the lack of reinforcing contingencies [via the body]...
07 March 2024 1,160 0 View
The hippocampal formation is distinctly different from the sensory maps of the neocortex. First, rather than being topographically organized to encode the spatial characteristics of a single sense...
06 March 2024 1,539 3 View
Without a neocortex language processing in humans is impossible (Kimura 1993; Ojemann 1983, 1991; Penfield and Roberts 1966) and without a hippocampus (but with an intact neocortex and cerebellum)...
01 March 2024 9,816 2 View
John Eccles reflected deeply on the cerebellum, the unconscious organ (Eccles et al. 1967). Eccles remained a dualist to the very end (Eccles 1982), perhaps because he was unclear about the...
29 February 2024 2,944 8 View
Damage to either M1 or the cerebellum disables a musician’s ability to play an instrument (Holms 1922; Nudo 2013; Watson 2006). But one of the differences between damage of M1 and cerebellum is...
29 February 2024 2,207 0 View
Anyone who has ever walked past a school yard filled with elementary school children will notice the loud piercing shrill coming from the yard. This shrill can be witnessed anywhere on the planet...
27 February 2024 8,231 0 View
Every time we undergo major surgery, we are reminded that anesthesia abolishes all consciousness for the duration of the anesthesia. The causal agent is that anesthetics disable communication (or...
25 February 2024 8,117 0 View
The neocortex is distinctly different from the cerebellum in that when electrical stimulation is delivered to the neocortex, a detection response related to an evoked sensation is exhibited by...
23 February 2024 3,326 7 View
Some believe that the time has come to connect two (or more) brains together to transfer information from one brain to another, much as we do routinely by transferring files between computers....
21 February 2024 6,465 1 View
Neocortical neurons in mammals (including primates and rodents) consume 20 times more energy per neuron than do cerebellar neurons (Herculano-Houzel 2011); the neocortex, unlike the cerebellum, is...
21 February 2024 8,239 0 View
In Western societies there is a prevailing stereotype that a beautiful blonde—man or woman—is an unintelligent man or woman. It has been known since the days of Kings and Queens of 18th century...
18 February 2024 8,119 0 View
It has been known for almost a century that when animals learn new routines that the synaptic strength within the brain, especially within the neocortex, is systematically altered (Hebb 1949;...
15 February 2024 1,878 6 View
Neurons have been found in V1 of mice and marmosets that exhibit a diminution of activity immediately after the start of a gaze shift (eye and head movements in mice) or saccadic eye movements (in...
14 February 2024 10,013 0 View
The preparatory activity that precedes movement execution can be thought of as a thinking process that anticipates the characteristics of an up-and-coming movement (Darlington and Lisberger 2020;...
13 February 2024 3,855 0 View
See the attached figure below (from Zacks and Jablonka 2023). Notice that ‘sensory’ is segregated from ‘motor’ (except at the midbrain) just as it is for humans; in short, no sensory (and no...
05 February 2024 812 29 View
In 1974, AG Feldman published on the equilibrium-point idea in Biofizika (Feldman, A.G., 1974. Change of muscle length due to shift of the equilibrium point of the muscle-load system. Biofizika,...
05 February 2024 5,403 1 View
It is now believed that prior to any gain change by Purkinje neurons, they are anchored to either a high spontaneous spike rate (Z- neurons), a low spontaneous spike rate (Z+ neurons), or an...
04 February 2024 1,158 2 View
It is well established through animal research that mammals (and other vertebrates) exhibit both short- and long-term memory. It takes about one month of training to finalize the change from...
02 February 2024 7,920 1 View
We know that the human neocortex has a tremendous capacity to store information at some 1.6 x 10^14 bits—or 2 ^(1.6 x 10^14) possibilities (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024). What is unclear is...
24 January 2024 5,072 8 View
To determine if animals have a sense of ‘self’, it is common practice in psychology to subject an animal to a mirror test, such that if an animal fails to be threatened by its mirror image, it is...
22 January 2024 4,545 0 View
That the Purkinje circuitry establishes the efference-copy code is believed to hold true from fishes to primates (Bell et al. 1997; De Zeeuw 2021; Gallistel et al. 2022; Giovannucci et al. 2017;...
21 January 2024 9,793 0 View
We all evolved from the oceans some 3.7 billion years ago during the Archean period (Ohtomo et al. 2013), when the earth had no visible continents at the surface for it was a water world according...
21 January 2024 2,734 2 View
Neuroscientists have obsessed over the hard problem of consciousness for over two decades (Chalmers 1995, 1997; Koch and Chalmers 2023): namely, can the physical organization of the brain ever...
20 January 2024 5,740 7 View
The neurophysiology of express oculo- and skeleto-motor behavior of primates has received renewed interest in systems neuroscience (e.g., Cecala, Corneil et al. 2023; Ito, Maldonado et al. 2022;...
16 January 2024 7,879 2 View
16 January 2024 8,026 2 View
Science fiction enthusiasts have often suggested that a time will come when one’s consciousness after death can be stored somewhere to continue its life, but obviously it takes more than storage...
14 January 2024 4,102 4 View
The neurology of learning to ride a bike is illustrated in the left panel (this is not a proof but rather a heuristic, Fig, 3 of Gallistel et al. 2022). The cell is a Purkinje neuron (that is...
14 January 2024 9,529 2 View
Listening to the BBC this morning (Jan 13, 2024), whereby the guests were inter-language translators of literary books. The question addressed by the host of the program was: Will AI replace...
13 January 2024 5,504 2 View
The poster symbolizes the power of Donald Trump and his neo-Nazi movement to ‘Make America Great Again’. Be warned: his playbook is totally Hitlerian and therefore should not be portrayed (as some...
12 January 2024 4,193 3 View
1. A telencephalon must contain preparatory neurons that predict a future motor response, whether or not a response follows the activity (Darlington and Lisberger 2020). This activity can be...
11 January 2024 8,225 0 View
Tononi and associates (2016) believe that different neurons control consciousness over unconsciousness, subjecting the brain to a dualism that can be traced back to René Descartes of the 17...
10 January 2024 8,591 11 View
The optic tectum and pretectum of mammals mediate blindsight by establishing a connection between the retina and extrastriate cortex and by permitting an orientation response to punctate and...
03 January 2024 9,999 0 View
Darlington and Lisberger (2020) have brought to the fore the notion that we now have an empirical way of evaluating a vertebrate’s level of consciousness/thinking by assessing the prevalence of...
30 December 2023 6,990 0 View
Thach et al. (1992, see attached figure): The return loop of the cerebellar maps to the motor cortex via the cerebellar nuclei is from the fastigial nucleus (connected to the anterior lobe of...
27 December 2023 4,949 0 View
Recently it has been found that area LIP (the lateral intraparietal area) does not command ocular responses (despite previous hypotheses, e.g., Mountcastle et al. 1975), since subjects subjected...
26 December 2023 567 0 View
The artist Salvador Dali was a master of imbedding images into his paintings to challenge perception (Fig. 1, from fig. 13-21 of Schiller and Tehovnik 2015). The head of Voltaire in the painting...
24 December 2023 7,194 2 View
The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) can occur in total darkness, which means that it is independent of visual sensation putting it under efference-copy control, a control whose vital circuitry...
24 December 2023 9,582 0 View
We propose that the nucleus of a single neuron regulates the synapses connected to a unique group of follower cells via collaterals for the purpose of creating one unit of consciousness (Tehovnik,...
22 December 2023 7,086 0 View
You will understand the figure immediately after reading the caption of figure 2 of Zeng, Weidner et al. (2023); the pathways cover declarative/procedural memory consolidation (hippocampus),...
19 December 2023 3,614 0 View
19 December 2023 4,660 0 View
The neural segregation of declarative and procedural memory is based on an outdated idea that the mind is separate from the body [but for a recent example see Fig. 3 of Sendhilnathan, Goldberg et...
18 December 2023 6,607 1 View
Over 50% of human neocortex is devoted to three main sensory modalities—vision, audition, and somatosensation/proprioception—which are topographic senses (Sereno et al. 2022); olfaction and taste...
18 December 2023 4,509 1 View
18 December 2023 4,833 1 View
During the Vietnam War it was common for the US military to publish a body-bag count for the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam per day; once the war was over the number of American soldiers...
16 December 2023 4,019 1 View
People have often compared Donald Trump to being in ‘the skin’ of Adolf Hitler, with many Americans laughing off the comparison since they believe that Hitler was smart but a devil, while Trump is...
14 December 2023 295 4 View
Schiller and Carvey (2006) studied perceptual grouping of 4 x 4 clusters of stimuli (see Fig. 1) by having subjects view a collection of quartet stimuli (a cluster) composed of a central spot with...
13 December 2023 4,890 0 View
Professor Miguel Nicolelis (2019) has published a free copy of his contributions to BMI (brain-machine interfaces) emphasizing his twenty years of work starting in 1999 and continuing through...
13 December 2023 9,304 2 View
The polysynaptic connections between the neocortex and the cerebellum (as verified by fMRI resting-state functional connectivity) are such that the anterior lobe of the cerebellum mediates...
08 December 2023 2,664 2 View
If you have ever been a witness of a serious crime, you will understand that a witness is initially required to make a verbal statement of the criminal event along with a description of a...
05 December 2023 2,576 0 View
05 December 2023 225 0 View
Ito, Maldonado et al. (2022) ascertain (and we believe for all mammals once consulting the literature) that in order to study even area V1 (classically a sensory area, Schiller and Tehovnik 2015),...
03 December 2023 3,703 0 View
The best way to create a whole generation of terrorists is to warn them (and not kill them as they did in the old days not too long ago) before dropping bombs on their homes and workplace. And...
09 November 2023 825 1 View
When Norman Finkelstein, an anti-war activist and intellectual (Princeton PhD, 1988), was asked what his mother, who was in the Majdanek concentration camp in Europe during WWII, thought of...
28 October 2023 420 1 View
The concept ‘cortical point image’ can be traced to the work of Hubel and Wiesel (1974) where they obsessed over the relationship between the amount of V1 tissue dedicated to processing visual...
17 January 2021 3,740 0 View
One of the assumptions behind neuroethology is that the brain and the genes that are involved in its development are shaped by the success of the behaviors exhibited by a species so that the genes...
05 January 2021 10,081 6 View
As many of you know, the US police departments are well armed with the latest technology to keep us safe. Robotics is being added to their arsenal of things to acquire—social work is usually not...
11 December 2020 5,911 3 View
The Hulu production ‘Harlots’ highlights how during the 18th Century, aristocrats would often disregard the law (which they implemented and had enforced on their subjects) in their lust for power...
11 December 2020 8,232 4 View
Eric Kandel (2006) has revealed that the consolidation of memory at the level of the nucleus is a bipolar process: chemical agents exist in our cells that can either potentiate or suppress memory....
11 December 2020 1,057 3 View
I would argue that FOX New is an example of Edmond Burke (an Originalist from England) on steroids. The late founder of FOX News, Roger Eugene Ailes, surrounded himself with tall, blue-eyed,...
01 November 2020 1,561 3 View
On White Supremacy: The obsession as to whether human-kind is fundamentally bad or good has preoccupied scholars for millennia. This can be traced back to the Catholic theologian, Augustine...
04 June 2020 3,129 2 View
Given the recent interest in creating swarms of robotic flies that carry explosives and contain face recognition circuitry (as described in Bot Flies, The Economist, Dec 16, 2017) will a time come...
23 December 2017 4,166 5 View
PubPeer: May 29, 2017 Unregistered Submission: (May 25th, 2017 2:46 am UTC) In this review the authors...
05 June 2017 1,683 3 View
Brain-machine interfaces have become important in rehabilitation with the goal to restore motor function to paralyzed people. The topics discussed in the lecture include: (1) the bits of...
17 September 2014 1,875 3 View
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16 April 2014 398 21 View
PubPeer commentary on ‘Spinal cord stimulation restores locomotion in animal models of Parkinson's disease’ by Romulo Fuentes, Per Petersson, William B Siesser, Marc G Caron, Miguel A L Nicolelis,...
18 March 2014 7,158 3 View
Let's compare two lifestyles in Brazil. First, we have Paulinha from Natal, Brazil who is a domestic worker with nine children. Every month she receives 500 Reais from the Brazilian government...
12 March 2014 847 7 View
On June 12th a paralyzed individual connected to a robotic exoskeleton is to open the FIFA World Cup by using his brain activity to kick a soccer ball. What percentage of the signal will originate...
20 February 2014 620 0 View
Brain-to-brain transfer of information has been illustrated between a pair of rats (Pais-Vieira et al. 2013). We evaluate the scientific validity of this study. First, the rats receiving the...
11 February 2014 5,545 7 View
Clearly, neuroscience is in trouble given some of the flawed experiments being published in high-profile journals such as Science and Nature (e.g. see recent scandal of Shigeaki Kato of the...
23 January 2014 5,620 6 View
The late Doreen Kimura, a renowned Canadian neuropsychologist, declared that "...you [the individual] just have to go ahead and find things out for yourself. This is the mark of a good...
17 January 2014 3,647 13 View
The Economist magazine (Aug. 3, 2013) published the following statement in the article entitled ‘The Machine of a New Soul’: “An important property of a real brain is that it is what is referred...
30 August 2013 501 2 View
Corruption has often been a thorn in the development of countries. Brazil is no exception. By some estimates, 7% of the gross domestic product of Brazil is siphoned off yearly in the form of...
01 January 1970 2,857 13 View
