Wednesday, September 26, 2007
conscious and non-conscious attention in humans
Here you may want to read quite an interesting article about new discoveries about human perception
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925090253.htm
Non-conscious Visual Attention System Identified In Humans
Added Tooby: "Many people think that experience is the only thing that makes us what we are. What this tells us is that the evolved organization of the mind matters, even in determining what we pay attention to. And that's surprising to conventional thought."
Well, people might be shocked that experience is not the only thing we are shaped by. But a question: what it is adaptive pressure in savannah and how did our ancestors adjust to their environment? Well, by experience. So what Cosmides and Tooby have found is nothing but imprinted and condensed experience.
There is nearly endless row of experiences getting stored in living organisms as they adapt to their surroundings, when the surrounding conditions change in a way then organisms can feel it only by experiencing many failures when using – unconsciously – the stored experiences of their ancestors.
Each next experience, sufficiently repeated many times, may give rise to a new storage of this experience and will be passed over to the next generation. But it does not mean that the old information stored gets deleted. The new information just might be only added to the biological memory space of organism, in that way equipping the organism with two pieces of information, the old one and the new one as well.
Some information might prove as useless and these will be deleted, therefore we have normally no tails as dogs. The question here might be how organism can know whether some information is not needed anymore and some is. There are many hypothetical attempts to explain this, some of them go to the level of quantum world inside a cell.
So what have Cosmides and Tooby actually discovered? Well, they discovered that people as a specific type of biological entity are capable of storing information in the form of behavioral algorithm that helped our human ancestors to survive many thousands of years ago. Somehow I believe we had known that already before. So it is not surprising at all. What is positive about this discovery is that we have another piece of evidence supporting this notion of getting adjusted to surroundings by training, by manifold repetition of certain situation and responses to it and being able to store this information and pass it over to the next generation. And it is good to have further evidence for this idea.
There are many activities of human body that run unconsciously. It is not only that of noticing animals. Driving a car produces the same behavior. If someone drives a car for the first time , he or she is shocked the conscious system of processing information totally overloaded and therefore these first-time drivers display typical signs of being in high stress, their eyes are wide open, their hand firmly on the steering wheel and going maximally 30. If a driver have repeated driving many times his brain shifted the processing of information acquired from frontal cortex to limbic system and these reaction are much faster, unconscious, automated, therefore such driver can go 100 or even 130 and have no signs of stress, actually even at this speed such a driver is capable of smoking in the car or listening to music or follow interesting news on radio.
In very distant future, when we have been driving cars for millennia we even might be able to pass this information down to our children so that they will be born and can drive car immediately. This might be similar to the ability of acquiring speech. Every baby is born equipped with the ability to learn a language, whatever language. This might be due to fact that the ability to use language is relatively young in humans, and therefore babies are born only with general ability to learn language and not with the ability to learn specific language of their parents. This also might be the case in future, if there will be no children produced by couples having different mother tongues. This condition might be really difficult to fulfill. And therefore we might expect that human children will be for many next future generations born only with ability to learn whatever language.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925090253.htm
Non-conscious Visual Attention System Identified In Humans
Added Tooby: "Many people think that experience is the only thing that makes us what we are. What this tells us is that the evolved organization of the mind matters, even in determining what we pay attention to. And that's surprising to conventional thought."
Well, people might be shocked that experience is not the only thing we are shaped by. But a question: what it is adaptive pressure in savannah and how did our ancestors adjust to their environment? Well, by experience. So what Cosmides and Tooby have found is nothing but imprinted and condensed experience.
There is nearly endless row of experiences getting stored in living organisms as they adapt to their surroundings, when the surrounding conditions change in a way then organisms can feel it only by experiencing many failures when using – unconsciously – the stored experiences of their ancestors.
Each next experience, sufficiently repeated many times, may give rise to a new storage of this experience and will be passed over to the next generation. But it does not mean that the old information stored gets deleted. The new information just might be only added to the biological memory space of organism, in that way equipping the organism with two pieces of information, the old one and the new one as well.
Some information might prove as useless and these will be deleted, therefore we have normally no tails as dogs. The question here might be how organism can know whether some information is not needed anymore and some is. There are many hypothetical attempts to explain this, some of them go to the level of quantum world inside a cell.
So what have Cosmides and Tooby actually discovered? Well, they discovered that people as a specific type of biological entity are capable of storing information in the form of behavioral algorithm that helped our human ancestors to survive many thousands of years ago. Somehow I believe we had known that already before. So it is not surprising at all. What is positive about this discovery is that we have another piece of evidence supporting this notion of getting adjusted to surroundings by training, by manifold repetition of certain situation and responses to it and being able to store this information and pass it over to the next generation. And it is good to have further evidence for this idea.
There are many activities of human body that run unconsciously. It is not only that of noticing animals. Driving a car produces the same behavior. If someone drives a car for the first time , he or she is shocked the conscious system of processing information totally overloaded and therefore these first-time drivers display typical signs of being in high stress, their eyes are wide open, their hand firmly on the steering wheel and going maximally 30. If a driver have repeated driving many times his brain shifted the processing of information acquired from frontal cortex to limbic system and these reaction are much faster, unconscious, automated, therefore such driver can go 100 or even 130 and have no signs of stress, actually even at this speed such a driver is capable of smoking in the car or listening to music or follow interesting news on radio.
In very distant future, when we have been driving cars for millennia we even might be able to pass this information down to our children so that they will be born and can drive car immediately. This might be similar to the ability of acquiring speech. Every baby is born equipped with the ability to learn a language, whatever language. This might be due to fact that the ability to use language is relatively young in humans, and therefore babies are born only with general ability to learn language and not with the ability to learn specific language of their parents. This also might be the case in future, if there will be no children produced by couples having different mother tongues. This condition might be really difficult to fulfill. And therefore we might expect that human children will be for many next future generations born only with ability to learn whatever language.
# posted by Dalibor @ 1:38 AM 
