--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ]...\ > At least Fred Travis is trying to ground his > theorizing with up-to-date brain functioning theory > and EEG studies. He also doesn't regress into > metaphorical analogies that are closer to phrenology > than neurology. >
There's more to the theory than that, of course. I mean, HOW does TM lead to this state in the first place and how does it keep going? Fred is feeding me the theory in bits and pieces as I try to animate it. Right now I'm still at step one, showing the initial input from the eye, through optic nerve into the thalamus, where most of the data is fed directly to the primary visual cortex, percolates through the rest of the visual cortex and the temporal lobe, and then sent back to the thalamus to merge with the incoming visual signal. Once I get that looking pretty (or at least quasi-acceptable), we'll go to step two, to show what happens when one closes one's eyes, where the initial input ceases, but the feedback loop tends to continue for a bit. The "inner tv screen" of your mind really IS like one in a certain respect: the pattern of activation of the rods and cones in the brain is kept intact, almost like a bitmapped image, all the way through the thalmus into the visual cortex. There's pretty much a one-to-one correspondance between the raw data collected from the retina through the optic nerve back to the back of the head. The primary visual cortex is practically in a straigh line drawn from the eye through the thalamus to the back of the head and the info, while its been split and inverted along the way, is pretty much in the same overall pattern as it was during the original physical impact of photons on the retina. IOW, if the nerve bundle were a fiber optic cable, you could aim it at a regular screen and you would see pretty much the original image that hit the eye or at least half of it, upside down--the other half goes to the other half of the brain.. wha's amazing is that the output from the processed image gets fed back into the original raw data stream in some kind of "meaningful" way after having been processed by 100's of millions of neurons in half a dozen different parts of the brain with presumably radically different processing styles. That's where the miracle part comes in, IMHO. Smadhi itself is overwhelmingly simple by comparison. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
