Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The progress in neurophysiologic knowledge increasingly convinces us that it
is the structures of brains that are the reason and the drivers of the ways in which
minds operate. Those structures demonstrate the obvious dependency of the com-
plexity of mind forms on the complexity of the brain itself. What is more, the in-
creasing complexity of the mind and the brain is evidenced by complex forms of
behaviour. It seems indisputable that the increasingly professional computer mod-
els created using neurophysiologic data contribute to a more and more detailed
explanation of aspects of the mind's operation. Every self-organising system cur-
rently exhibits intentional behaviour coming from the pursuit of general values
and needs of this system which result from its biological structure or technical de-
sign. In the process of developing such models of information systems which al-
low information to be processed and understood in a way modelled on the human
brain function, we should now expect increasingly complex forms of behaviour.
The human brain is the location of real neurophysiologic processes which cause
real, conscious impressions. Many of the above processes are executed by areas of
the brain that have now been well located and are observable using various tech-
niques, combining morphological imaging with functional monitoring, for in-
stance the positron emission tomography [92]. This allows us to study processes
during which several sensory modalities must cooperate and references must be
made to episodic memory layers located in a specific area of the cerebral cortex.
The most frequent ones are analyses of sensory data, such as segmenting an im-
age. Components kept in the episodic memory contain the aspects of a specific
modality that cannot be executed locally. What becomes necessary for the whole
process is a mechanism for distributing information and combining results ob-
tained from various areas of the brain into one whole. This integrating operation of
the brain means that perception processes use fragments of mental representations
supplied by the senses and internal stimulations of areas processing sensory in-
formation, or a holistic representation of a complex situation containing all the
fragments currently stimulated. This is a perceptual meta-representation of this
complex situation, probably produced by the global dynamics of bioelectric dis-
charges in the brain, which can be observed as β waves on the EEG.
Cognitive science concepts are useful as far as they approximate models de-
scribing the brain's operation at the neurophysiologic level. If some regularities
can be found in neurophysiologic observations, an attempt is made to express
them as certain rules of logical procedure which can then be mapped to cognitive
science models. Consequently, in some models of information systems, it is con-
venient to use the notions of classical cognitive science, primarily logical rules
used to explain mind states in order to simplify their biophysical models. This
paradigm can be related to many levels of the description of neural structures and
functions, which include:
•
the sub-molecular, or the genetic, level;
•
the molecular cell structure level;
•
the level of neurochemical phenomena;
•
the level of single neuron activity;
