God forbade...must reading!

Sense and attention


   Sensing is something animals and some plants and machines can do. Sensing involves a sensing organ or device to actively respond to environmental circumstances. A system may sense light, sound, water, prey or a predator. The sensing is usually manifest in behavior. Though everything responds passively to outside forces, the system for sense is active. The system's discriminations inform your senses. Careful experimental design goes into predicting migratory birds and fish sense navigating their long courses.


   Secondly, sentience, sensation or feeling and qualia, the sense of  'what kind'  involves information treated by the system to develop a subjective character. By having the sense of cold, sound and pain we understand the reference of having a sensation.



David Cole


  
 What are you doing when you aren't doing anything at all? If you said “nothing” you've passed a test in logic... but flunked a test in neuroscience. When performing mental tasks-- adding numbers or identifying faces-- different areas of the brain become active. Brain scans show active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull background. Researchers have found when these areas light up, other areas go dark.


 
  The dark network is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. If you climbed into an MRI, while waiting for instructions, the dark area would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your task began, the bees would freeze and the network falls silent. We appear to be doing nothing, but we are clearly doing something. But what? Time travel?


 
  The human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Our talent for this is unparalled in the animal kingdom. We are time travelers capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become suspended or trapped in the present. Alzheimer's disease specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows, or is it remember their marriages, but forgot what they had for breakfast?
 
 
   Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repitition. When busy with life's experiences-- herding children, signing checks and battling traffic-- the dark network is silent, but after completion we move across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn-- for free.




    One of the most startling facts about the dark network isn't, so much, what it does, but how often it does it. Neuroscientists call it the brain's default mode, which is to say we spend more of our time away from the present than in it. People overestimate how often they're in the moment because they rarely notice when they take leave. Its only when the dog barks, a child cries or the phone rings our mental time machines switch off and we get a bump in the here and now. We stay long enough to take a message and we slip off, again, to where the dark networks awash in light.



Stumbling on Happiness- Gilbert and Buckner, Harvard.