The Brain Needs Downs to Have Ups. Four neurochemicals cause happiness : endorphins, dopamine , oxytocin and serotonin.
Each evolved to do a different job. When you know what the job is, you know why your happy chemicals can't be on all the time. 1. Endorphins evolved to mask pain. If you're escaping a predator, neurochemical euphoria promotes survival by mask pain until you're in a safe place.
Brain Imaging. Video channel on TED.com. Oliver Sacks: What hallucination reveals about our minds. Charles Limb: Your brain on improv. The Science of "Chunking," Working Memory, and How Pattern Recognition Fuels Creativity. By Maria Popova “Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view… We are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.”
It seems to be the season for fascinating meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as what happens while we sleep, how complex cognition evolved, and why the world exists. Joining them and prior explorations of what it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life.
To illustrate the power of chunking, Bor gives an astounding example of how one man was able to use this mental mechanism in greatly expanding the capacity of his working memory. Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome. Diffusion MRI image of the brain. Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain.
Autism. Alzheimer's. Brain & Behaviour.