For instance, if you had a muscle cramp and you feel a discomfort and relative pain and restriction that comes from the muscle spasm, we experience the cramp, now that is an image. Because it is a resonant representation in the nervous system of the state of something out there in the periphery. They are the end results of an enormously complex neurological and biochemical process that produces subjective experiences. Those experiences we put names on. That’s the image. We say this is joyful, this is unhappy, this is irritating, etc., but they are equally resonant representations. Compared to the state they are resident and since they are not the state they are a representation. So I think the term resident representation is a useful one.
We have to make clear what we mean by an image because in common usage most of us when the word image is made use of we think of a visual image. What I found useful, because it involves the same neural processes and subjectively we experience them in the same way, and that is to call an entire arena of the productions of the central nervous system images, so we have sensory images and those would be images coming through vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. And then we also have this very, very elaborate aspect of the nervous system about which not enough has been said that has invested every organ system in our body from muscles all the way through individual organ functions and so forth and all of this also feeds back through the nervous system into various aspects of our brain and images are built but now we refer to them, for instance as inner sensations of hunger or fatigue or satiate. What we put into words as an image of that state is really a result of all of the processes that are going on in those individual organ parts or systems and the way in which the nervous system brings together the results of all those processes that are going on. For instance, if you had a muscle cramp and you feel a discomfort and relative pain and restriction that comes from the muscle spasm, we experience the cramp, now that is an image. Because it is a resonant representation in the nervous system of the state of something out there in the periphery, in this case a piece of skeletal muscle. So we can have images that are purely in the sensory arena, all our senses, both outside and inside, then we get into this interesting arena of feelings or emotions of joy, of depression, etc. Those can also be looked upon as images because they are equally our approach to the other levels of image, they are equally products. They are the end results of an enormously complex neurological and biochemical process that produces subjective experiences. Those experiences we put names on. That’s the image. We say this is joyful, this is unhappy, this is irritating, etc., but they are equally resonant representations. Compared to the state they are resonant and since they are not the state they are a representation. So I think the term resident representation is a useful one. You could use it interchangeably with image. All images are resonant representations. When we come to the neocortical processes, the high brain or in the terminology we like to make use of is the third brain because evolutionary wise it has matured in order of the first primitive or musculoskeletal or sensory motor brain and then the limbic or emotional brain and finally the neocortical brain.
SummaryTranscript