Hey folks. I thought given some of the wonderful intellects we have here it would be fun to have an “ask an expert” thread. Don’t get hung up on if you’re an expert or not, if you want to ask a question or supply an answer, have at it!
I was flying into LAX two nights ago and I could see the moon (nearly full) being reflected in a body of water. I began thinking about how the light of the sun had bounced off of the moon and the water create the image in my eyes, like a game of photonic billiards. Which brings me to my question:
If photons are being reflected (“bouncing”) off of the face of the moon, shouldn’t the edges of the moon appear dimmer because the angle should be less favourable to bouncing photons my way?
Getting a song stuck in your head is, as I heard in high school, a experience with schizophrenia . It shows the memory is overtaking the free will. Indeed i say this is the whole problem with all mental problems. Triggering errors dealing with the memory. so Savants being a extreme case of great memories and very retarded.
Music is just a memory exercise unless creating it. this is why children easily can do great deeds in playing music. Its just a issue of memory and they were provoked to memorize it. Its not actually a intelligent thing as people think.
The important conclusion is to realize, I say, that memmory is 95% of the human brain and the other 5% is thinking from our soul.
No brain wiring need be invoked. Its a error. Brain or head size is irrelevant to human intelligence or animals. We might only have bigger ‘brains” because we have bigger memory abilities. Our intelligence is exclusively in our soul as far as thinking goes. However memory interference is a great issue.
They don’t teach this today. Its still about brain evolution and brain juices and doing MRI’s on the brain as if discovering something.
Do all creatures have souls?
That’s a question for the experts.
Lizzie,
I could certainly do with some discipline on the classical side – my reading is terrible, because I commit a piece to memory and then just pretend I’m following the dots!
Conversely – it’s probably different for complex music – at open mikes I run I recommend people (should they seek my advice!) not to perform a song with sheets. As an amateur, I think if you don’t know the song well enough to do it without the sheet, you don’t know it well enough full stop. It should be on ‘auto-pilot’, as a friend says (all very well for her; she has an uncanny ability to reconstruct never-tried songs ‘in flight’ on audience request).
People say ‘I don’t have your memory’, but I insist that they do. It’s nothing but preparation, not different memorisation ability (abilities do differ, but people shouldn’t just assume they’re in the bottom half of the distribution). My current sticking point is the last verse of Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys. “Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers, trumpets, towers and tenements, wide oceans full of tears. Flags, rags, ferryboats, saddlebags and scars …”. All to the enthusiastic strumming befitting the climax! You can still see the wheels turning, though it’s hardly Molly Bloom’s final speech.
I was thinking more of post-practice, when a song is learned.
The standard advice is never to think about a the physical playing of a known song while you are playing it (“if you think, you stink”). Similarly for sports. Has that “fact” been used to study the physical mechanisms of memory and consciousness, eg by fMRIing a performer who is trying to think about a song he or she normally performs flawlessly?
On a related note, if recalling a memory consciously reconstructs it and possibly modifies it (which is how I understood some of your earlier comments), how can one recall the procedural memories associated with playing many times without changing them (unless one thinks about them while playing?)
Thanks Petrushka, Neil and Glen for your responses. I’m inclined to agree with Glen about birds, nests and innate ability. Also, regarding spiders and webs, some spiderlets begin their independent existence by consuming their mother, far from receiving any training in web building. And spiders do not seem to improve the quality of their web building, it actually deteriorates a little as the spider ages, so their is little indication of any learning process.
However, Joe Gallien has kindly supplied the definitive answer:
Joe, it has to be the chemistry. It has to be in the chromosomes of the parents or in the epigenetic material in the egg. There is nowhere else for it to be. I agree there is no evolutionary explanation for precisely how innate behaviour patterns can be passed on through generations. Are you suggesting there is an “Intelligent Design” explanation? Do tell!
ETA
Regarding web building, I have no doubt that variation occurs in whatever it is that is heritable that endows spiders with the behaviour patterns that result in spider webs. So evolutionary learning takes place over time in a population of orb-web spiders.
Alan Fox,
May be of interest:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626545/
It’s likely that automatic behaviours predated learnt ones. Although the pathways are not clear, it’s probable that common behaviours are implemented in much the same way as common attachment points for tendons, common bones and muscles, or common structures in general. A neural network is just a developmental structure. That’s vague, I know, but I don’t know if we have the genetic narrative of any structure in detail.
Well, like any one trait, trying to unpick the evolutionary history is an equation in too many unknowns.
But there is a lot of literature about the genetics of certain behaviours.
I don’t think there are any innate behaviours in creatures.Not quite sure.
I think its all learned from presumptions and memory dealing with them.
By the way. I read about Edelmans REMEMERED PRESENT.
I don’t think this was related to what i said.
He was going on about abstract things that seem too much guessing.
I recently watched in Ontario on shows about the brain and they showed how what we see or feel is seconds after the fact. etc
They didn;’t say it was memory but they showed how we don’t see things LIVE.
I say it all fits a simple equation.
We are souls just immersed with our memory.
So aLL we sense is from a repeat by the memory. Thats all there is. not complicated after all. We have nEVER sensed anything as it really is. We have only had a machine to translate it for us.
This fits in also that all mental problems are and could only be issues of the memory.
Triggering problems for the memory. Including as babies or when drunk.
Its impossible for our souls to experience the material world without the memory machine in the brain. Its impossible for us to be interfered with by the material world with our thinking.
A christian foundation here that fits analysis of natures data.
A option for healing is better made with this presumption.
No more brains or brain wiring . Our brain us just a memory machine connected to our body. I’m not an expert but I know when I’m right.
Do you know when you are wrong?
I see there is a whole new* avenue of research of “behavioural genetics” or “behaviour genetics”. They even have their own journal!
*New to me, I mean!