"Brain/MINDS"
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Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) represent a large group of hereditary degenerative diseases of the nervous system, in particular the cerebellum, and other systems that manifest with a variety of progressive motor, cognitive, and behavioral deficits with the leading symptom of cerebellar ataxia. SCAs often lead to severe impairments of the patient's functioning, quality of life, and life expectancy. For SCAs, there are no proven effective pharmacotherapies that improve the symptoms or substantially delay disease progress, i.e., disease-modifying therapies. To study SCA pathogenesis and potential therapies, animal models have been widely used and are an essential part of pre-clinical research. They mainly include mice, but also other vertebrates and invertebrates. Each animal model has its strengths and weaknesses arising from model animal species, type of genetic manipulation, and similarity to human diseases. The types of murine and non-murine models of SCAs, their contribution to the investigation of SCA pathogenesis, pathological phenotype, and therapeutic approaches including their advantages and disadvantages are reviewed in this paper. There is a consensus among the panel of experts that (1) animal models represent valuable tools to improve our understanding of SCAs and discover and assess novel therapies for this group of neurological disorders characterized by diverse mechanisms and differential degenerative progressions, (2) thorough phenotypic assessment of individual animal models is required for studies addressing therapeutic approaches, (3) comparative studies are needed to bring pre-clinical research closer to clinical trials, and (4) mouse models complement cellular and invertebrate models which remain limited in terms of clinical translation for complex neurological disorders such as SCAs.
In this paper, I focus on a couple of features of quantum field theory commenting briefly on how they have been emerging also as key aspects in brain studies. In particular, I comment on the relation between brain functional activity and mind (mental activity). The role played by the doubling of the system degrees of freedom (the Double) is considered also in connection with von Neumann's analysis of measurement processes.
elektronický časopis
- MeSH
- duševní procesy MeSH
- neurovědy MeSH
- Konspekt
- Fyziologie člověka a srovnávací fyziologie
- NLK Obory
- neurovědy
- NLK Publikační typ
- elektronické časopisy
Mens Sana monographs, ISSN 0973-1229
viii, 384 s. : il., tab. ; 22 cm
- MeSH
- mezioborová komunikace MeSH
- mozek MeSH
- myšlení MeSH
- neurofyziologie MeSH
- vědomí MeSH
- Publikační typ
- sborníky MeSH
- Konspekt
- Lékařské vědy. Lékařství
- NLK Obory
- neurovědy
elektronický časopis
252 s. : il. ; 24 cm
- MeSH
- mozek fyziologie MeSH
- parapsychologie MeSH
- psychofyziologie MeSH
- Publikační typ
- kongresy MeSH
- sborníky MeSH
- Konspekt
- Psychologie
- NLK Obory
- psychologie, klinická psychologie
In this commentary to Henry Stapp's target paper, I defend a view alternative to both von Neumann's methodological Dualism, and Stapp's choice of Idealist metaphysics. I argue for a Monist metaphysical thesis, claiming that the observed physical systems and the observers who study them originate from a common “neutral” source (neither material nor mental). Scientifically, I argue for an epistemological view of the neurosciences in which the brain/mind system has a circular topology, affording conscious experiences. In this Monist view of the brain/mind, the decoherence process is not fully completed, as in the “mental collapse” view: there is a “recoherence” process in living tissue that generates conscious episodes experienced by the organisms.
One of major challenges facing contemporary psychiatry is the insufficient grasp of relationship between individual and collective mental pathologies. A long tradition of diagnosing "mental illness" of society-exemplified by Erich Fromm-stands apart from approach of contemporary social psychiatry and is not perceived as relevant for psychiatric discourse. In this Perspective article, I argue that it is possible to uphold the idea of a supra-individual dimension to mental health, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls involved in categorical diagnosing of society as suffering from mental illness. I argue for an extended notion of public mental ill-health, which goes beyond the quantitative understanding of mental health as an aggregate of individual diseased minds captured in statistics, and which can be conceived as a dynamic, emergent property resulting from interactions of individual brains/minds in social space. Such a notion, in turn, presents a challenge of how to account for the interfacing between individual minds/brains and the collective mental phenomena. A suitable theoretical framework is provided by the notion of epidemiology of representations, originally formulated by cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber. Within this framework, it is possible to highlight the role of public (material) representations in inter-individual transfer of mental representations and mental states. It is a suitable conceptual platform to explain how the troubling experiences with causal or mediating role on mental health, to a significant degree arise through a person's direct interaction with material representations and participation in collective mental states, again generated by material representations.
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
Among the main challenges of the predictive brain/mind concept is how to link prediction at the neural level to prediction at the cognitive-psychological level and finding conceptually robust and empirically verifiable ways to harness this theoretical framework toward explaining higher-order mental and cognitive phenomena, including the subjective experience of aesthetic and symbolic forms. Building on the tentative prediction error account of visual art, this article extends the application of the predictive coding framework to the visual arts. It does so by linking this theoretical discussion to a subjective, phenomenological account of how a work of art is experienced. In order to engage more deeply with a work of art, viewers must be able to tune or adapt their prediction mechanism to recognize art as a specific class of objects whose ontological nature defies predictability, and they must be able to sustain a productive flow of predictions from low-level sensory, recognitional to abstract semantic, conceptual, and affective inferences. The affective component of the process of predictive error optimization that occurs when a viewer enters into dialog with a painting is constituted both by activating the affective affordances within the image and by the affective consequences of prediction error minimization itself. The predictive coding framework also has implications for the problem of the culturality of vision. A person's mindset, which determines what top-down expectations and predictions are generated, is co-constituted by culture-relative skills and knowledge, which form hyperpriors that operate in the perception of art.
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
