For a while now I have been able to create a feeling/sensation in my body, similar to a state of arousal or adrenaline release. I couldn't really explain it until I realised this feeling/sensation made my pupils dilate. Curious, I began my research and finally came across something called the SNS (Sympathetic Nervous System) which is a branch from the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System). The SNS is responsible for the body's fight or flight response, and its key functions are to: increase heart rate, dilate airways, inhibit digestion, dilate pupils, release glucose and stimulate sweating. According to the internet, having control or ability to activate this part of the nervous system is extremely rare and I'm curious to see if anyone can relate to this. After a few more searches, it turned out my suspicion that this was a form of adrenaline release was correct. Although only released in micro doses, a burn-out feeling occurs after prolonged inducement. I am very eager to hear from someone with knowledge on this topic.

For a while now I have been able to create a feeling/sensation in my body, similar to a state of arousal or adrenaline release. I couldn't really explain it until I realised this feeling/sensation made my pupils dilate. Curious, I began my research and finally came across something called the SNS (Sympathetic Nervous System) which is a branch from the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System). The SNS is responsible for the body's fight or flight response, and its key functions are to: increase heart rate, dilate airways, inhibit digestion, dilate pupils, release glucose and stimulate sweating. According to the internet, having control or ability to activate this part of the nervous system is extremely rare and I'm curious to see if anyone can relate to this. After a few more searches, it turned out my suspicion that this was a form of adrenaline release was correct. Although only released in micro doses, a burn-out feeling occurs after prolonged inducement. I am very eager to hear from someone with knowledge on this topic.

Need help with this project.

Hey guys it's a ambitious project... I am trying to add functionality on top of the malecns.

Can anyone help or guide me on how to take it forward.

how this is related to ADD and trauma. How parents and occupational therapists can improve this in children?

how this is related to ADD and trauma. How parents and occupational therapists can improve this in children?

I recently heard this information, but I have a question in mind, what if the subject is a whole in one sense and a part in another. for example, the tires of the car are part of the car, but it's a whole because it is composed of rubber, steel, and perhaps more fundamental chemical substances etc.., so if a person has a problem with the right hemisphere would he recognize the tire because it's a part of the car? Or wouldn't he, because it's a whole some way

The part of the brain and nervous system primarily responsible for "playing possum" to reserve energy and sustain survival is the brainstem acting in concert with the dorsal vagal complex (DVC) of the parasympathetic nervous system.

In neuroscience and evolutionary biology (such as Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory) -- this survival mechanism is known as the feign death, tonic immobility, or functional shutdown response.

When encountering a threat so overwhelming that fighting or fleeing is impossible, the higher-processing parts of the brain step aside.

The oldest evolutionary part of the brain -- the primitive brainstem -- takes complete control.

The Dorsal Vagal Pathway. The brainstem sends an intense signal down the 'unmyelinated' dorsal vagal nerve (part of the vagus nerve system).

The "Brake" System. In lieu of putting the body into "fight-or-flight" (sympathetic nervous system).

The dorsal vagal complex acts as an emergency metabolic brake. Reserve and Sustain.

It instantly drops heart rate, slows respiration, and lowers blood pressure to absolute minimums.

This preserves oxygen, protects vital organs, and minimizes energy expenditure while the organism bides its time.

Unmasking Neural Signals: Distinguishing Spikes from Movement Artifacts

While recording extracellular potentials from an isolated cockroach leg using a TL074 amplifier, rhythmic spike bursts initially suggested mechanical artifacts linked to periodic tarsal twitches.

To test this, the preparation was cooled. While physical motion ceased entirely, the rhythmic burst pattern persisted. Upon rewarming, twitches returned at half the frequency of the neural bursts. This temperature-dependent dissociation conclusively proves that the recorded signals are genuine motor nerve spike trains, not movement artifacts.

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One of the things I find most fascinating about the human brain is that we rarely experience the world as a collection of raw sensory signals.

We experience a world.

That distinction sounds simple, but it is enormous.

When you look at a tree, you don't consciously experience millions of photons reaching your retina, patterns of electrical activity traveling through neural pathways, and successive transformations occurring across different cortical areas. You experience a tree.

When someone says your name, you don't experience fluctuations in air pressure. You experience a meaningful sound that immediately seems connected to a particular person: you.

When you remember something from years ago, you don't experience the original event again. Yet the memory can feel surprisingly vivid, emotionally meaningful, and sometimes even more convincing than the evidence available in the present moment.

This raises a question that I think sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence:

How does the brain construct the experience of a continuous reality from incomplete, noisy, constantly changing information?

The brain does not simply "receive" reality

A common intuitive picture of perception is that the outside world sends information into the brain, and the brain simply processes it.

But modern neuroscience gives us a much more interesting picture.

Sensory information is incomplete.

The brain has to deal with ambiguity, noise, missing information, changing lighting, occlusion, movement, and countless other uncertainties.

Yet perception usually feels stable.

You can recognize your friend's face under different lighting conditions. You can identify an object even when part of it is hidden. You can understand a sentence even when some sounds are unclear.

This suggests that perception involves much more than passive reception.

The brain is constantly combining incoming sensory information with information it already has.

In other words, perception can be thought of as an interaction between what is coming in and what the brain expects.

This is one reason predictive-processing theories are so interesting.

The brain is often described as continuously generating predictions about what it expects to encounter and then updating those predictions based on incoming sensory evidence.

The fascinating part is that this means our experience of the world may depend not only on what reaches our senses, but also on what our brains believe is likely to be there.

Why don't we notice all of this?

Because conscious perception is incredibly efficient.

We don't consciously calculate every intermediate transformation.

Imagine trying to consciously determine the identity, distance, shape, color, motion, and meaning of every object in your visual field.

You couldn't.

Instead, much of this processing happens automatically.

The conscious mind receives an already highly processed interpretation.

This creates a strange situation:

The brain performs enormous amounts of computation that we never consciously experience.

And yet the final result feels immediate.

You simply see.

You simply hear.

You simply recognize.

You simply remember.

There is no obvious feeling of waiting for billions of neurons to perform calculations.

Attention makes the problem even stranger

We often behave as though attention is a spotlight that illuminates whatever we choose to focus on.

But attention seems more complicated than that.

At any given moment, an enormous amount of information reaches our sensory systems, while only a fraction becomes the focus of conscious processing.

You can be sitting in a room surrounded by sounds without consciously identifying every individual sound.

Then someone says your name from across the room.

Suddenly, something that was previously irrelevant becomes highly important.

This makes me wonder whether consciousness is less like a camera recording everything and more like a continuously changing selection process.

The brain is not necessarily asking:

"What exists?"

It may often be asking something closer to:

"What matters right now?"

That distinction could be fundamental.

Memory is not a perfect recording

Another thing that completely changes the way I think about consciousness is memory.

We often imagine memories as files stored somewhere in the brain.

But human memory doesn't behave like a video archive.

Remembering is reconstructive.

Every time we retrieve a memory, we are reconstructing aspects of a past experience using stored information, context, emotional associations, and current circumstances.

This doesn't mean memories are simply "fake."

It means that remembering is an active neural process rather than passive playback.

And this creates a fascinating relationship between memory and perception.

We use previous experiences to interpret the present.

At the same time, our interpretation of the present can influence how we later remember the past.

So perception and memory may not be two completely separate systems.

They can interact continuously.

The self may also be constructed

This leads to an even bigger question.

If the brain constructs a model of the external world, could it also construct a model of itself?

Think about what happens when you say:

"I am thinking."

There seems to be a clear distinction between the person and the thought.

But from a neuroscience perspective, the experience of being a self is associated with activity distributed across many interacting brain systems.

There isn't one tiny location in the brain where the "self" is stored.

Instead, the brain integrates information about the body, memories, goals, emotions, social relationships, internal states, and the surrounding environment.

From these processes emerges a remarkably coherent sense of being a particular person existing through time.

That continuity is fascinating.

Your body changes.

Your beliefs change.

Your memories change.

Your relationships change.

Your brain itself changes.

And yet you usually experience yourself as the same person you were yesterday.

What does this mean for artificial intelligence?

This is where cognitive neuroscience becomes especially interesting to me.

Artificial intelligence systems can process enormous quantities of information.

They can recognize patterns, generate language, classify images, predict outcomes, and perform complex calculations.

But intelligence and consciousness are not necessarily the same thing.

A system can produce an intelligent response without us knowing whether it has subjective experience.

That distinction becomes extremely important if we ever build increasingly sophisticated artificial systems.

If we want to understand machine consciousness, perhaps we first need a better understanding of biological consciousness.

And to understand biological consciousness, we need to understand how the brain integrates perception, memory, attention, prediction, emotion, bodily states, and self-representation.

The problem is that we still don't have a complete explanation.

We have many powerful theories.

We have increasingly sophisticated experiments.

We have neuroimaging, electrophysiology, computational models, behavioral experiments, and enormous amounts of data.

But the central mystery remains.

Why does all of this neural processing feel like something from the inside?

Why isn't the brain simply performing computations without any subjective experience?

Why does there seem to be a first-person perspective?

The strangest part

Perhaps the strangest thing is that the brain is both the observer and the object being observed.

We use the brain to study the brain.

We use consciousness to investigate consciousness.

We use memory to remember experiments about memory.

We use perception to study perception.

It's almost like the system is attempting to build a scientific model of itself while being trapped inside its own processing architecture.

And maybe that's why neuroscience is so difficult.

We aren't studying something completely external.

We're studying the biological system that allows us to ask the question in the first place.

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I'd love to hear what other people think:

Do you think consciousness will eventually be explained entirely through neuroscience and computational models?

Or do you think there is something about subjective experience that cannot be captured by describing neural activity alone?

And if consciousness is fundamentally a product of information processing, what would actually distinguish a genuinely conscious artificial system from an extremely sophisticated system that only behaves as though it is conscious?

In this talk, Michael Levin explores neuroscience beyond neurons, proposing that intelligence is not limited to neural systems but is a fundamental property of life at various scales. He argues that even non-neural cells, such as those involved in morphogenesis (how organisms develop their body shapes), exhibit collective problem-solving and cognitive behaviors.

Key concepts include:

• Cognition beyond brains: Levin posits that cells, tissues, and organisms can navigate "morphospace" (the space of possible body shapes) using bioelectric signaling, similar to how brains use electrical activity for neural computation (0:08 - 0:15).
• Morphogenesis as behavior: He demonstrates that embryos and cells use bioelectric patterns to "decide" how to build structures, and that these patterns can be manipulated to create novel anatomies or repair damage (0:30 - 0:34).
• Unconventional cognitive agents: The talk highlights experimental work with Xenobots—living machines made from frog cells—which demonstrate the ability to navigate, remember experiences, and exhibit behaviors despite having no nervous system (0:49 - 0:53).
• Implications for intelligence: By studying these "unconventional minds," Levin suggests we can better understand the nature of intelligence, agency, and how biological systems store information and make decisions (0:58 - 1:00).