Discussions of the how the brain works.
I’m here outside Chicago with my grandchildren finishing up my 2nd full day. By the time you read this, however it will be the next day, so ‘yesterday’ below really means ‘two days ago’. Sorry for the confusion… Yesterday I mentioned William’s multimodal way of taking in information: his eyes staring at things I could […]
My interest in the brain arises from having a brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. For the longest time I wanted to understand what the brain does and why my brother is the way he is. Today’s post and yesterday’s post focus on an effort from 1934 to define what thought is and […]
Yesterday, my post was about language and thought. My interest in this topic stems from trying to communicate with my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. It is a mystery to me what, if anything, he is thinking. Today’s post is a first look at an attempt to explain thought, from many […]
This is a huge topic. I hope to investigate this realm and relate my findings to a long-standing issue of mine: communication with my older brother who is low functioning, autistic and nonverbal. Those of you who follow my posts know that I am probably obsessed with the idea of communicating with Mike. In some […]
I mentioned in my last post that I am very much interested in communication because of my inability to communicate with Mike, my older brother, who is autistic, profoundly retarded and nonverbal. I would like to discuss the concept of communication in general, see how its underlying principles apply to language, and the problems that […]
I was greatly impressed by a recent book, Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë, who presents a different way to look at consciousness. He believes that current approaches to the question of consciousness are wrongheaded: instead of looking for consciousness as arising inside a person’s head, it is a result of interaction of with […]
Negative space is a concept frequently taught in visual design courses. When looking through a viewfinder of a camera or composing a sketch or painting, the shape of spaces in between objects becomes a design element. It is odd however, that this idea is considered negative ‘space’, since it is generally realized in two-dimensional representations. […]
Language Managing the task of understanding language – sentences – combinations of words we have never heard before, is an enormous computational task, if we were to program a computer to decipher natural language. Much of what we understand of the spoken word comes from context. In fact, it is often true, that when people […]
I just started reading Out of Our Heads by Alva Noë. [1] Noë operates from the premise that consciousness is not merely a mental process that comes from the machinations of the brain. In a wonderfully insightful metaphor he states, “Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion.” Brain and environment The idea […]
Post as I go I am trying to sift through information available about biomedical interventions used in treating symptoms of autism. I realize that my approach is not scholarly or academic, but I would like to write a series of posts that chronicle my efforts to discover what biomedical intervention options are and how I […]
