IMAGINATIONDefinition of imagination: Imagination is the subjective experience that arises from neural representations of sensory stimuli and actions. Your subjective experience activates similar pathways in the brain as directly experiencing stimuli or engaging in actions. From Doidge: “One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from aneuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. ”“... imagining an act engages the same motor and sensory programs that are involved indoing [that act].”What does the lecture tell us about the purpose of imagination?The purpose of imagination is to allow for flexible and predictive decision making Imagination is the product of the interaction between our brain and our body.What is meant by “ The brain spills out into the body ” ? What experiments (including their results) illustrate this idea?Due to the fact that sensory and motor neurons work to simulate action and sensory perception during imagination AND the same neurons and pathways are activated to a somewhat lesser degree during imagination. Sometimes when imaging things and the motor neurons are activated there are related actions and motor function. Subtle movements reflect cognition. For example, Experiment 1. Eye movement and performing arithmetic. Researchers had participants complete a series of addition and subtraction problems using number, symbols, dots etc. They also tracked participants eye movement through a computerized algorithm that tracks the activity of the part of the brain that controls eye movement. The concluded that when you look to the right when performing addition, and left when performing subtraction. It is an unintended consequence of performing math because that is how we understand math -- in terms of space. Experiment 2. Gesturing and motor threshold. While a person is talking, if they are talking about an action that they have a sufficient amount of experience and simulating it in their imagination it will pass a motor threshold and the person will begin gesturing. There was an experiment that had subjects in 2 conditions. 1 they showed dot patterns then asked subject to describe the patterns. In the second condition they showed dot patterns to subjects then had them recreate them using wooden sticks. Then they had participants describe the patterns. Found that participants that had to recreate the patterns used more representation gestureExperiment 3. LyingWhat is meant by “ The body spills in and affects cognition ” ? What experiments (including their results) illustrate this idea?The body spills in and affects cognition suggests that body affects the brain and reason in subtle waysStudy 1: In an experiment they had people stand on wii standing pads that would very slightly adjust the direction in which they were leaning and asked subjects to estimate the size of different things. They asked subjects to estimate the size of things that had no bounds (e.g., the eiffel tower) and also things that had limits (e.g., how many times do ppl move). They found that when people are leaning slightly to the left they had lowerestimations that when leaning slightly to the right especially in the unbounded condition.The orientation of the body in space affects someone's ability to estimate numbers. Imagining our location in space. (Hey Dude, where ’ s my car?)Place cells: Place cells are in the hippocampus. They fire when we are in a particular spot in our immediate environment. They are location specific so they fire at a specific location in space in a given environment. Grid cells: Grid cells are in the entorhinal cortex (just outside the hippocampus). They lay out a map encompassing a large area of your immediate location. Fires in many different locations but with a pattern. If fires in a grid and provides a coordinate system in an environment. The hippocampus and entorhinal cortex connect to each other, so you can think of these two regions as constantly talking to each other. As you move around ( e.g., from one class to another ) the grid cells record your general location (e.g., which class room) and different place cells fire when you are in different parts of that classroom. So the area activating grid cells is constantly changing as you move through the world and the place cells fire when you are in a single location in that grid. What would happen if you were just thinking about a classroom and your seat in it? Both grid cells and place cells would also fire because during simulation the same pathways and motor neurons fire(this is why gesturing and other spilling into the body happens)Memories and the Hippocampus: The story of Henry Molaison (patient H.M.)Henry died in 2008 at the age of 82. He was a pretty happy guy with a goodsense of humor, though he had to live in a care facility for all of his life after the surgery. He was referred to as H.M. to protect his identity until his death when his name was revealed.What was wrong with Henry and what did surgeons do to try to fix his condition?Henry had both his hippocampi removed is attempt to resolve his epilepsy conditionThe surgery worked, but what was the unfortunate outcome of the surgery?He couldn't form any new episodic memory but still had procedural memory (i.e., could learn to play tennis, but could remember practicing)Since the hippocampus is used to make memories, but not store them, how does this explain Henry ’ s condition?It is because the hippocampus is involved in specific type of memory. Episodic memory but not procedural memory. The hippocampus points to where episodic memory is stored but if there is no pointer there will be no memory. What is meant by thinking about the future?Thinking about the future is the difference between local representation and non-local representation. Non-local rep is areas that a person is not currently occupied. The place cells that represent whatever location the future is in will be active but not the space that is currently being occupied. Neuronally representing some other space that a person is not currently occupying. What are some experiments that demonstrate this process?Rat in a maze is taught that there is food at two locations in the maze. The rat comes to a fork inthe maze and can go left or right(has been taught that there is food on both paths, but one mighthave more than the other) and they will hesitate looking to the left and right. It is shown through