[MURG] Not off [dead] during sleep

[James Swayze]

>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:29:43 +0200
>From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
>To: murg at minduploading.org
>Cc: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [MURG] homeostating despite rapid flux
>Reply-To: murg at minduploading.org
>
>  
>
<snip>

>But Tsien says that as well as this shape-maintaining pressure from within,
>synapses may be just as dependent on pressures from without - the old
>"jangling trace" hypothesis. Back in the early 1990s it was discovered that
>there is a kind of compressed replay of the day's accumulated memories duri=
>ng
>slow wave sleep. The networks of cells active during learning would burst to
>life again. This led to the theory that the hippocampus consolidates new
>learning to the cortex when the brain is off-line. But Tsien feels this
>spontaneous jangling of neural traces is probably a much more general
>homeostatic mechanism that helps to keep labile synapses stabilized. And the
>jangling probably goes on around the clock, in all areas of the brain, at
>regular intervals to remind each synaptic connection of its place in the
>great scheme of things (Wittenberg, Sullivan and Tsien, 2002).
>
>  
>
<snip>

>This kind of topsy-turvey picture can only be resolved by taking a more
>holistic view of the brain as the organ of consciousness. The whole shapes
>the parts as much as the parts shape the whole. No component of the system =
>is
>itself stable but the entire production locks together to have stable
>existence. This is how you can manage to persist even though much of you is
>being recycled by day if not the hour.
>  
>
This is purely a layman's view of this but to me it makes incorrect the 
idea that we are turned off or as good as dead and a new identical upon 
waking that has bolstered ideas that copies are the same as originals. 
We apparently are not entirely turned off during sleep. Somehow I 'feel' 
this impinges on those arguments.

James

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