On 8/18/2018 5:41 PM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
I can see from the images that you refer to each of these Peircean categories taking place in a different part of the brain.
That's not what I meant. The categories are correlated with the interconnections of different areas. For further explanation, I'll have to refer to several diagrams. Instead of the 117-slide long version, please download the 21-slide short version: http://jfsowa.com/talks/vrshort.pdf Slide 7 asks "What is cognition?" and summarizes the answer by the psychologist Lawrence Barsalou. That is useful background. After that, slides 8 to 11 discuss the experiment of teaching 14 students about the workings of four devices: bathroom scale, fire extinguisher, disk brake system, and trumpet. At different stages of learning, they asked the students questions about those four devices and recorded the fMRI scans of their brains while they were answering. Instead of showing the scans of the left sides of their brains (which are dominated by the language processing), they showed the scans of the right sides (which are dominated by the processes of imagining and interpreting the images). All 14 students had similar brain activations for the same 3 kinds of questions about the 4 different devices. It's significant that all 168 patterns (14 x 3 x 4) were remarkably similar. For my summary of the study, please review slides 8 and 9. For the full article, the link is at the bottom of slide 8. Then slide 10 summarizes issues about Intentionality, which is the most characteristic aspect of Thirdness. It quotes Brentano and Lynn Margulis before summarizing Peirce's views. Finally, slide 11 relates the brain scans to 1ns, 2ns, and 3ns. Following are three quotations from that slide, each followed by my further commentary: 1. "Perception is based on localized percepts or prototypes. It classifies phenomena by the monadic predicates of Firstness (fMRI image #1)." What is critical here is not which part of the brain lights up, but the fact that only one very narrow area is active. In this case, its the visual cortex, which is active in both direct perception and in mental imagery of remembered or anticipated scenes. Auditory or tactile perception would be localized in different, but equally narrow areas. 2. "Long-distance connections in the parietal lobes support dyadic relations that connect all sensory and motor modalities. They represent the structures of Secondness (image #2)." By long-distance, I mean crossing from one lobe to another. In image #2, the visual cortex is still active, but there is more activation in related areas, especially the parietal lobes, which relate the visual aspects various to kinds of patterns. The tactile and motor areas are also active. This kind of activity would be characteristic of dyadic relations that relate structural aspects of the four devices. 3. "The frontal lobes process the mediating Thirdness in reasoning, planning, causality, and intentionality (image #3)." The frontal lobes, which are the most active, involve the most complex reasoning. The frontal lobes are also adjacent to the tactile and motor areas that are also involved in reasoning about how the four devices work. Mike B
The full paper without charge [on "Gradual Progression from Sensory to Task-Related Processing in Cerebral Cortex"] http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/30/E7202.full.pdf
This paper is consistent with the one about the four devices. Note that image #1 in slide 11 of vrshort.pdf would be the first area to become active when someone is looking at the device. Then images #2 and #3 would become active when thinking about tasks that use the device. John
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