Original_To:  BITNET%"csg-l@uiucvmd.bitnet"
Original_cc:  TBOURBON
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Tue, 15 Dec 1992 14:13:00 CDT
From:         Tom Bourbon <TBOURBON@UTMBEACH.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: neuroscience

From: Tom Bourbon (921215.0925  CST)

Re:  Mark William Olson   (14 Dec 1992 10:35:50 CST)

You were having trouble with your text editor and only part of your
message arrived, but I think at least part of your point came
through.

>(cont).
>then you've got something related to memory, no matter how you
>describe it.  Hubel and Wiesel (sp?) found some pretty interesting
>(although incomplete)  stufff about the organization of the
>occipital cortex and probably never even  heard of PCT.  Do you
>want to claim that they are wronb because they have the  wrong
>paradigm?


No.  I never did and I never will.  I started teaching long enough
ago that, for the first several years, whenever I discussed the
work of Hubel and Wiesel I included a totally safe prediction that
they would share a Nobel Prize.  They did, and they deserved it.
But I also predict that when someone finally picks up the challenge
and the opportunity to study nervous systems as though organisms
control some of their perceptions, that person will learn things
Hubel and Wiesel did not, and could not, learn.  And I believe it
is totally safe to predict that the person, or someone else soon
after, will win a Nobel Prize.  If I had the skills and techniques
to work at the single-cell level with Aplysia, the marine snail, I
would drop everything else and begin a crash program, starting with
behavioral studies to test whether the creature controls anything.
After demonstrating the obvious, I would begin a systematic
analysis of the control-system properties of the creature's
exquisitely mapped nervous system -- anatomically exquisite, I do
not trust most of the functional maps.  They were created in S-R,
or I-O, research procedures.  If anyone out there is interested in
a trip to Oslo, I believe I just handed you a ticket.


>We know alot of visual processing occurs in occipital.  We  know
>that attention mechanisms are involved in at least prefrontal
>areas.  We  know that the hippocampus is involved in at least one
>form of memory.  WE  didn't need PCT to find that out, because we
>are working at a levelof analysis  below PCT.

Yes, we do; and no, "WE" didn't.  But the meaning of what we know
is not very clear.  Many of the biggest problems in our
understanding of how brain and behavior-psychology are related come
from the vagueness or the inadequacy of our ideas about the
behavioral and psychological phenomena we try to explain.  What
does it mean to say that a particular "area" or "region" of the
brain is "involved" in a particular function or process, whose
definition or existence is not established?  Which of the many
conceptualizations of attention can we explain in terms of
involvement in the prefrontal areas?  Are there "forms" of
something called "memory" and how is the hippocampus involved in
one of them?  Please realize I am NOT saying that people do not
find correlations between, on the one hand, damage to or
stimulation of different parts of the brain, and on the other hand,
the behavior of organisms.  But the correlations are often poor,
and so is the localization of any perturbation applied to the
brain.  And our conventional understanding and portrayal of
behavior is often poor.

To explain what we think we know about behavior, we use what we
think we know about brains; to explain what we think we know about
brains, we use what we think we know about behavior. Most of what
we think we know about either topic comes from research in which
brains, neurons, whole organisms, small groups, societies,
behavioral actions, and consequences of actions are all conceived
of in classic S - R terms, or in more modern, but identical, I - O
terms.  All of that accumulated knowledge must be re-examined in
light of the fact that organisms control many of their perceptions.


>Sure PCT could help inform the process but it isn't as necessary
>as it would be for levels above PCT--the rest of psychology.

PCT is not about a few "higher" levels of perception.  It is about
control by living systems.  Living systems control the perceived
states of so many variables that control, achieved through negative
feedback interactions with the environment, is probably a defining
property of life.  If that is so, no part of the life sciences is
immune from the need for a theory that explains control.  PCT
explains control.

Until later,

Tom Bourbon                             e-mail:
Magnetoencephalography Laboratory       TBOURBON@UTMBEACH.BITNET
Division of Neurosurgery, E-17          TBOURBON@BEACH.UTMB.EDU
University of Texas Medical Branch      PHONE  (409) 763-6325
Galveston, TX 77550                     FAX    (409) 762-9961 USA
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU