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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query neurogenesis. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query neurogenesis. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Model for Function of Neurogenesis in Olfactory Bulb

It has been a continuing feature of this blog to cover areas of research related to the human sensorium. While I do not take the view of the connectionists that the mind can be modeled on a silly Rube Goldberg-like grammar tree structure a la Nim Chimpsky, I do think that the memory and sense of smell have are shown to be dependent upon the creation of new brain cells.

It is not surprising that wave forms in the brain are of a spiral nature and that these waves correlate to organization of mental states. It has been hypothesized that the extinction of these wave allows for the succession of consciousness. Likewise it has been hypothesized that neurogenesis allows for new memories to form by perhaps displacing older patterns of connections along synapses. This paper makes a similar case for the role of neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb.

It certainly is striking how memories are often strongly evoked by the sense of smell such that certain smells have an almost seemingly supernatural vicarious appeal.

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting its roses-
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses:

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies-
A rosemary odor,
Commingled with pansies-
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.

Poe

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Motivation for a New Direction in Mathematical Modeling

(DNA Topology as a Dual Function of Homotopy Induced Solitonic and Discrete Resonance)

This quality of duality cannot be resolved merely by assuming a stochastic frame of reference for the unique problem inherent in phase space transformations. This is as true for the field quantum physics; and in general self organization theory that induces the formation of discrete attractor and emergent states from any “arbitrary” random preconditions. The toroidal dynamics (hence torsion, chirality, asymmetry, as well as orientation) of n dimensional Riemannian space as it undergoes homotopy to Costa Surface of n degree embedded in such space, is the equivalence of subsumption of transfinite ordinals extended outside the simple number theoretical domain of the “continuum.” The Vernadskyian definition of a modular continuum, delimited by irreducible boundary conditions into interoperating domains, i.e., the inert, biotic, and noosphere conforms to this conception. Further, the Hopf positively curved minimal surface’s connection with Costa in the sense of phase transformation allows for the orientability via Cartan Repere Mobile construction of Kiehn to evolve naturally, rather than stochastically. (It is of no small note that Vernadsky references Cartan’s geometry within his text explicating the Noosphere.) The model for the positively curved space wave function transformation to the hyperbolic horn (Mach cone) is Riemann’s paper on shock wave propagation. Toroidal action is a metastable configuration of Alfven’s plasma cosmogony in the macrocosmic scale and is invariant down to the infinitesimal. In this context, the metastable formation of solitons of determinate orderings is properly located. The connection these have with catalysis, DNA replication, and far from equilibrium systems in general is instructive. (See Davia) The fact that autowave dynamics are differentia specifica in the biotic domain as in contrast with the inert is not negligible and is suggestive of a further refinement of possible wave dynamics within the higher transfinite dimension of the noosphere. The application of Hausdorff fractional dimension and its fractal sequelae does not conform with my use of term transfinite dimension in the foregoing. However, it does properly situate the question of induced singularities from a continuous manifold.

Neurogenesis and conformality resonance

It is proven that an enriched environment is directly related to adult neurogenesis in certain cortical regions. As classical music is the semi-mediated expression of human creativity, the case for sonic resonance in this instance is not a trivial topological problem. Again, the connection at the cosmological scale of star formation and topological invariance is intriguing. This, if you will, is the true locus of “connectionism.” It is decidedly not the theory of “encoding” prevalent in academia today. (As a matter of fact the craze of trying to undo the relevance of Goedel’s proof among logicians and information theorists has led to a rather degenerate embracing of non-reality as substance. This has its approximate correlative in the attempt at ergodic modeling and distribution theory as a replacement for causality.) In this light, it is intriguing that current studies show that the orientation of the plane of cleavage in neurogenesis that regulates brain tissue growth. The Gbetagamma subunits of heterotrimeric G proteins are likely causal elements. Additionally, the vortical-like chiral nature of the enzyme ATP synthase is well understood. It is further evidence of a topological refinement for the biological equivalent of the model of toroidal torsion. It is also astounding that this enzyme exhibits nearly 100% mechanical chemical efficiency as an engine that makes possible the cellular consumption of free energy for the biosphere, including both aerobic and anaerobic types. (Also, separation in these two domains is defined as counter- or clockwise rotation on the mitochondria, exclusively (!)) All of which further reflects on the need for a model that can account for the formation of solitonic singularities within this transfinite hierarchical domain. Another qualifying refinement of in the arena of bioenergetics is that the quantum mechanical “laws” governing regimes of possible spin topologies are violated by biophysical macromolecular states.

Dynamics of Human Thought

Media of transmission for human thought are certainly of the most complex and excitable types imaginable. The first question to be addressed is that of the quality of hylozoic monism of this subject matter. We can view many different aspects or dimensions of human thinking and their impact upon various portions or manifolds of relationships of the continuum of reality. (This notion of continuum is not restricted to the idea of linear extension and types of number, as will be developed further on.) However, it is essential to comprehend that there exists a world line of development whereby ideas are characterized as ordered in the sense of Cantor’s transfinite. In this sense, the entirety of human history of advancement of thought and praxis is invariantly self similar. (By the way, in this regard the principle of fractal generation is simply a convenient mathematical device for producing discreteness out of such self similarity. It is not the generating principle but merely a relic of that generation, in reality the generation of singularities rarely proceeds by such a uniformly simple manner.)
For humanity, it is the ability of scientific discovery to overcome the relatively fixed limits or boundary conditions of any particular mode of functioning of society from the standpoint of thermodynamic disequilibrium, i.e. negative entropy. By this, it must be understood that due to the necessary nature of directedness or hylozoism, if you will, one mode must be superceded by another. This quality of the vectoring of society is not merely accidental, but is built into the very ordering of the inorganic and biological substrates. For example, the fact that there exists a birefringent axis or anisotropy for electromagnetic propagation in the universe, which at the most macroscopic regime exhibits precisely this quality. Similarly, the anti-racemic and optical chirality distinguishing the dynamics of living systems is a further higher ordered transfinite development of this same anisotropy that characterizes the inorganic. Electromagnetic propagation is now ordered once again according to a new lawfulness. Now, human thought or what Vernadsky labeled the Noosphere, is of a yet further transfinite such ordering distinguished by its own particular power over the lower two subsumed realms. It is only here, that an awareness for consciousness of these ordering principles has any meaning.

As to the question of interaction of wave functions and the excitable media: firstly the approach of Riemann in his groundbreaking paper on the principle of the dynamics of propagation of sound and pressure in a physical medium. In this, he established the principle that the medium itself possesses a boundary of rate of transmissibility. The resulting shockwave formation induces a change in the quality of curvature of wave propagation. (For astrobiology compare galactic ram pressure.)The so-called Mach cone, taken as an accelerated series as the speed of sound (pressure) continuously surpassed, represents in its entirety a negatively curved hyperbolic horn. That is, what was a propagation of a radiative spherical kind now has gone over through a shockwave formation into a different species of curvature. In the instance of the propagation of electromagnetic at the speed of light, the medium is not able to rectify itself as for sound and instead, a transformation of a different sort occurs via Einstein’s equation. This being a different transfinite species of boundary.

This same principle certainly applies to the two remaining substrates, i.e. the biosphere and the noosphere. Mutagenic transformations, I contend, are nothing but the same shockwave principle applied to the biological realm. When an organization of life develops an ability to reduce energy through a new quality hitherto unknown, this is nothing but the surpassing of the previously fixed rate of transmissibility of the medium. In the same way that the speed of light represents a higher kind of boundary condition for the inorganic, the boundary separating humanity from all other biology is a sort of speed limit, if you will, for mutagenic transformations. This again, of course, is of a higher ordered transfinite than Einstein’s principle was for the inorganic.

Now, you are probably asking yourself, how might this same shockwave principle apply to human thought? In any mode of functioning of society there exists an active “media/manifold” of a set of relationships created by the successive discovery of principles of underlying organization of the three substrates, i.e. inert, biota, and human cognition and interrelationships among these (see for example the role of Deinococcus radiodurans). The human individual’s cognitive development occurs, of course in an historically concrete/discrete context. The previous associated development of society has made the medium of cognition transparent for the mental development of this individual. For example as a thought experiment, consider the following: (along the same line of dialectic of mnemonics from Plato’s Meno) how is it possible that a gifted young child in the modern era is able to seemingly intuitively grasp the principles of projective geometry and readily apply them in drawing? View the historical artifacts of the lengthy and arduous development of these principles; compare Massacio’s nearly completed perspectival artwork with that of DaVinci. So, I posit that the substrate of the mind is also a developing organic “compact” type of n + m dimensional manifold, a multi-sheeted hyper-surface, connected through topological singularities, (unfortunately sometimes referred to analytically as defects) and exhibiting negative and positive regions of curvature. Now, crucial scientific discoveries necessarily create for human practice free energy that allows society to overcome the bounding conditions of this thermodynamically relatively fixed reactive medium. This signifies the movement from n dimensions to n + m (topological cobordism.) Further, the geometrical transformation of such a succession, I posit, also acts upon the principle of least actional, minimal surface, topological constraints. For example, the latest in a centuries’ long mathematical development in this arena is the remarkable discovery of the Brazilian geometer Celsoe Costa of a principle of generation of such surface by way of homotopic deformation of toroidal types. Here, from this perspective, are properly situated considerations of self similar, relatively “force free” species of action, found in the subsumed substrates we have been considering, i.e. solitons and cellular automata or autowaves. Such species of hypertori and their deformations are intimately connected with what has come before as the geometrical analysis situs of instantiations of “compact” manifolds as a substrate capable of resolving and emerging whole the principle of shockwave transformations. Topological singularities that are either discovered in nature, e.g. Falaco, morning glories, hurricanes, spiral nebula, Davidov, aorta autowaves etc. or produced in the laboratory under extreme circumstances, e.g. plasma kink instabilities, light bullets, BEC breathers, sonoluminescence etc. are representative of anomalous conditions, which when their principles of organization are made explicit through scientific investigation act to transform the domain of human practice and create new thermodynamic boundary conditions.

Such qualities of human thinking themselves may be cognized as having a wavelike nature in terms of propagation through the medium of human practice. Consider for example, how the historical personage of Plato was directly and mediately responsible for sparking off a methodological renaissance centuries after his death. His opus may be viewed as propagating itself historically in two senses from the standpoint of curved space. In his own epoch, his attempts to win over the Syracusan tyrant to his system, create an academy, etc. represent a radiative propagation of his method analogical to the previously instanced propagation of plane waves below the limits that the medium is capable of supporting. Why? Primarily because his efforts failed to transform his own society. That is to say, even though the ideas were effectively transmitted in the medium of language and otherwise of his day, the power (potential energy) inhering in them failed to catalyze the desired transformation of society. However, centuries later Plato’s class of ideas were able to transform the practice of society very much in principle as a shockwave. So then, human thought, although it is insubstantial from the perspective of spatial extension, except as it adheres in some way to the nervous system, cortical manifold is able to act in a particular sense to transform the geometry of human practice. In the same oriented/vectored characteristic of action that birefringence has for electromagnetic inert propagation, chiral or helical enantiomorphisms for the biotic, thought has but on a transfinitely higher ordering for human practice.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Leonardo Project and the Ultrasound Continuum Mechanics Hypothesis

Lately, news has surfaced of a DARPA funded research upon ultrasound neurological modulation effects. The author of this research has a well developed hypothesis of possible wave mechanical effects on extracellular cerebrospinal fluid.

This evokes a further refinement of what I have lately termed the Leonardo project. The field of physical geometry initiated by Gauss known as conformal mapping theory comes into relevancy here. After all, the mind is a type of Riemannian multi-dimensional conformal mapping process that has a physical brain substrate which is provably fluidic both in the sense above as well as electromagnetically.  The wonderful studies of solitonic disruptions in the aorta akin to hurricane formation surely correspond to epileptic seizures. The phenomenon of hippocampal neurogenesis was hypothesized by Riemann in what are referred to as his philosophical fragments. Importantly here is that Riemann explicitly states that ideation itself has a directed physical effect. Ideas generate what he termed geistesmassen or thought mass.

I believe that there are some further avenues that need to be explored here. One is the holographic or gestalt nature of the brain mind function. This directly brings into focus the Gauss mapping of extended topological curvature onto a unit sphere. That is a model for this gestalt principle. If that mapping process is then expanded to include a sort of multi-dimensional connectivity into relevant facets (i.e. art, science, metaphysics, et al.) of thought then what emerges is a conceptual model for noetic processes.

The second avenue is that the nature of shockwave-like hypothesis generation alters the medium of thought transmission via successive technological breakthroughs. The importance of Riemann's working through of hypersonic shockwave phenomena in his seminal paper from 1860 is relevant here. The kernel of that paper is that when the speed of sound or pressure goes beyond the bounds of transmissability for a medium the production of  shockwave ensues. This continuously alters the curvature of transmission from positive to negative curvature. Likewise, there are classes of hypotheses regarding nature that alter the relations of physical production for humanity. There is a sort of revolution in the underpinning of the physical mode of production. Viewing that mode of production as a medium for transmission of technology, what has occurred is a type of shockwave has swept over societal relationships. Then that shockwave has been annealed by adopting the said technology and society has acquired a new basis for a medium of transmissability of technology. I believe that this foregoing principle must find its parallelism in the functioning brain probably via neurogenesis and plasticity.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Every Time a Light Goes Off New Brain Cells Are Being Born

The culminating proof of an hypothesis that was proffered by what Bernhard Riemann denominated "geistesmassen" or loosely "thought-masses" some 150 years ago is to be applauded. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute have demonstrated that neurogenesis in mice correlates with learning and memory. This has been for readers of these pages been a recurring theme from the first.

But here I want to pause for a moment to reflect on why with what would see to be no empirical evidence Riemann could have foretold this astounding development. The effort to locate some intimate connection between the "soul" and the material goes back to the earliest of thinkers. Leibniz who successfully refuted Descartes' formula for force, posited an harmonic principle of continuous development among differential degrees of substance in his great work the Monadology.

It was a major setback for humanity that Leibniz' bid to become prime minister of England was put down by the Cabal of practitioners of the black arts promoting the crazed Isaac Newton's useless mathematical scribblings. It is to be rued that this anti German prejudice continued to be fueled in the nascent American republic. For example, it was considered slander to label Poe's writings "Germanic." The fact that Schiller's ideas of aesthetics were instrumental in ousting that meglomaniac Napoleon notwithstanding...

But the genius of Franklin's Constitution that hearkens back to Cusa's Universal Concordance principles knows no boundaries religious or dogmatic. And it is the establishment of a government of, by, and for the wise that promotes the improvements in physical wealth that correlates with scientific breakthroughs, that provides the proof of the same principle discovery of the function of neurogenesis writ large. So, it is only lawful that there is a concrete parallelism in the realm of the small, even within the brain of a mouse! For as Leibniz would have it, we are not a blank slate thrown into this world as empty potter's vessels, but rather the willful microcosm of unfolding universal harmonic and continuing development best exemplified most immediately in the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Proof of Spiral Wave in Neocortex

It is with great satisfaction that I welcome the news of this spectacular research. Over the course of this blog's history, I have maintained that there is an analogy with a form of spiral shockwave in nature with its correlative acting upon human society via technological advance. It is therefore absolutely lawful that these researchers show that so called traveling brainwaves are also spiral. This advances Bernardt Riemann's insight that new ideas create actual massive objects or in today's parlance neurogenesis, coupled with his work on shockwave propagation. It is the case that a spiral form of pathway along a horn results in an acceleration of a shockwave dynamic up to a singularity. This is what I have attributed to how society passes in a nonlinear fashion from one technological mode of functioning to an ever higher manifold of functioning.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Why Science Benefits Humanity

No matter how much we as a species may uncover by explicating the mechanics of certain classes of phenomena, it is demonstrable that we will nevertheless remain an infinite distance from ascertaining a lasting mechanistic resolution of them.

These phenomena are of the type that Nicholas of Cusa referred to as the incommensurable cardinality spanning the divide between the other and non-other. However, following Cantor, we can further refine that notion of a quality of transfinite incommensurals. This being his distinction between the absolute infinite and transfinite. We may now locate certain classes of scientific investigations on the peripheries or boundaries of the transition from the Vernadskyan categorical domains as having a precisely analogous character. Firstly, the transition from the inorganic to the organic/biosphere. (This for today's current hypotheses is included among the "RNA World" hypothesis and Astrobiological pursuits.) Secondly, the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere. (One aspect of this, for example, would be the the research of neurogenesis and its correlation with a hippocampal locus for memory.)

Taking the latter case poses a stark case in point of a fundamental incommensurabilty. When the mind functions, whether through memory or other distinguishable modes, there is a correlated physical creation of new neuronal networks. Is it not apparent that while we may continuously define sundry connections at an ever greater infinitesimal scale of this biophysical domain, we can never come to a thorough resolution along this boundary because of the unique way that the universe is composed? However, we can expect that proceeding to investigate anomalies along these boundaries should spark breakthroughs that will of necessity benefit humanity's unceasing requirement for technological innovation.

Leibniz understood that it were a fool's errand (a la R.D. Laing) to attempt to unravel the labyrinthine paradox of the number continuum, because it is merely a mental artifact of the underlying issue to which I am referring here and not physical reality. Unfortunately, Cantor and Goedel, inter alia, did not.

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