Ideal Eye Posture: Relaxing the Lower Eyelid and Strengthening the Upper Eyelid

I have become convinced that the way people hold their lower eyelid strongly affects their emotional wellbeing. The lower eyelid has the ability to remain tonically tense. Its muscles can remain flexed, maintaining a wincing posture throughout the day, without the person being aware. I used to spend my days continually wincing, but I was oblivious to it. Spend a few minutes in front of the mirror and watch your lower eyelid move. It will twitch involuntarily when you think negative thoughts. In fact, it acts as an anchor in the face that recruits the rest of the wincing facial posture. You can control it voluntarily of course, and I think it is beneficial to spend some time watching it and exercising control over it. Start in front of a mirror with your eyes as wide open as possible. Do this without raising or tensing your eyebrows. As you watch yourself in front of the mirror, you will notice that as your attention shifts away, the lower eyelid will become tense again due to the force of habit. It has developed a natural tendency to maintain tonic myogenic activity because lower brain centers are accustomed to keeping it active. These evolutionarily old brain centers do this in an effort to help protect your eyes, but in doing so, they are actually increasing your susceptibility to stress and anxiety.

 

 

Here is why I think it is bad to constantly flex the lower eyelids. The lower eyelid, more so than the upper one, has an ability to potentiate the blinking response. Animals do this unconsciously when they assume that the safety of their eyes (evolutionarily precious organs) may be in jeopardy. Remember, the blinking response is a defensive response meant to protect the eye from damage. An animal that has been attacked or traumatized becomes programmed to squint in order to maintain a defensive eyelid posture that will allow it to blink faster in response to a threatening stimulus. Moreover, squinting with the lower eyelid pulls up ocular muscles (the inferior tarsus and the lower orbicularis oculi) to pad and protect the eyeball. In fact, many points in the body (especially in the face and spine) hold on to the trauma in an effort to maintain a low-grade defensive posture in anticipation of threat. Lower eyelid clenching is associated with the startle response, which of course is involved in flinching during threat and wincing during pain. Allowing unconscious brain centers to maintain tension in the lower eyelid sends messages to other threat centers in the brain, communicating to them that the current environment is adverse and potentially threatening to the eyes. This is ironic of course because in today’s world, our eyes are rarely threatened. In the ancestral past, it was adaptive for anxiety and fear to potentiate squinting but today, work and relationship stress are practically never indicative of impending threat to the eyes. Lower eyelid tension is rarely necessary, and the only way to remedy it (besides perhaps injecting these muscles with botox) is to make a  conscious effort about eye posture, to relax the lower lid and to try to walk around with wide eyes.

 

Sadly, lower lid tension can become the natural, default state. In fact, many people sleep with their faces tight, their teeth clenched and their eyelids clamped together. What state are your eyes in when you wake up? What state are they in now? I cannot imagine that lower lid tension is conducive to restful, restorative sleep, and I think that it makes waking life more strained. PTSD sufferers and military personnel have a distinct, tense, tired look that is centered around the eyes. Pictures taken before and after warzone deployment really illustrate the difference. At the martial arts studios that I used to practice at, the instructors and most of the students were always squinting, often had one eye more affected than the other, and had purple rings, dark circles and bags under their eyes. This is because walking into a martial arts studio with eyes wide open sends a signal: “I am not afraid,” a signal that many people are too conscientious to allow themselves to make. On the other hand, people that are candidly carefree and cheerful are often wide-eyed. Many children have this look. I think that common phrases in the vernacular, like “sensitive eyes,” “gleam in the eye,” sparkling eyes,” “light in the eyes” or “twinkle in the eyes,” describe this look.

Widening your eyes will seem difficult at first, but try a few things. Widen your eyes as much as possible and then raise your eyebrows, which will allow you to widen your eyes even further. Subsequently, allow your eyebrows to relax while keeping your eyelids just as wide. This helps. Moreover, try pulling down on the skin just below your eyes, exposing the underside of both eyelids to the air. Open your eyes as wide as you can while doing this and it helps you to change to a wider setting. Another trick is to roll your eyes slowly in an upward arc, raising them as high as possible. Looking up in general helps you to have wider eyes.

 

You will probably notice that relaxing the lower lid looks unnatural at first. This is because your facial expressions and general countenance have not adapted to the look. This takes time. When you have bad posture in your shoulders, back, neck and torso, and try to make up for it by assuming better posture, people can tell. It looks fake, and exaggerated because your muscles do not look natural in holding the posture. A few weeks of concerted effort can fix this problem though. It is the same with the lower eyelids. When I first relaxed my lower eyelid it looked ridiculous. I looked like a anxious person that was trying too hard to look calm. At first, I looked like a sickly drug addict that was walking around with wide open eyes. Even people that didn’t know me could tell that it was unnatural. With time though, it becomes natural. In fact, the cheeks and the areas under the eyes begin to look more healthy. I think the solution is to start practicing the relaxation of the lower eyelid alone in the mirror. Then when it is comfortable try it alone around the house. Once it looks natural, do it outdoors or in public. Soon it will look genuine conversationally, and after some practice you should be able to do it while falling asleep. When you find yourself wide-eyed when public speaking, and when waking up in the morning, you know you have gotten the hang of it. The most difficult thing is to do it while smiling. Most people have a “crazed” or manic look in their eyes if they relax their lower lids while smiling. With a few weeks practice though, you should be able to do this too.

 Here is a relevant quote from a book that I read in 2^nd grade. I never forgot Roald Dahl’s admonition:

 “I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.”

 

― Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

I am trying to teach myself to "fake it" habitually, and in so doing, fake myself out into becoming a happier person.



Here is a picture of some talented comedians faking it for comic effect (Danny's not doing it).

 

 

Me wincing and smiling vs. me not wincing and smiling:

 

 

The first picture was taken in 2008 and I was so used to squinting that my eyes are barely open. This was how I smiled all the time back then. It looks very unhealthy and is the smile of an anxious, depressed and/or defensive person. It feels much better to have clear eyes.

The Eyebrow / Eyelid Axis

We all have suffer from exaggerated tension in our eyebrow and eyelids. I refer to these two structures together as an axis because they form a principle structure, about which the face functions. The optimal eyebrow/eyelid posture is to have very wide eyes and unraised eyebrows. This feels great and looks amazing. But trauma and social signaling causes us to squint our eyes and raise our eyebrows. These two things are actually linked. When you try to widen your eyes, your eyebrows raise. So basically you trade one form of tension for another. When you try to let your eyebrows relax, the eyes squint. However, you can work toward alleviating the tension here. One way to is massage and apply compressive pressure to the muscles in order to release them from tension. This is necessary to fix the problem completely. It is also important though to perform mirror work. You want to practice widening your eyes without raising your eyebrows in front of a mirror. Take a minute every day for a week to work on this. Once you have the coordination down you can work on it when you are not in front of a mirror. It is important so it should become a part of your natural daily routines, and part of your self-monitoring schemas.

 Don’t Wince in Your Sleep

Pay careful attention to your eyelids at night. Do not sleep through every night with your eyelids squeezing together. This was very difficult for me at first because my upper lids were very weak. If your upper lids are not strong enough to close the eye on their own, they will flutter and fail, waiting for the lower lids to tense up, raise and meet them. Thus, in order to close my eyes I had to squint. Spend a few minutes trying to close your eyes without wincing and notice the feeling of the upper lids fluttering involuntarily. Every night before sleep I shut my eyes closed very tight, using only the upper lids. Doing this every night for five minutes worked, they slowly became stronger over the course of a few weeks. I believe that taping the lids closed can also help relax the lower lid. Also pin your eyelids closed with your index and middle fingers and try to open them while looking up, this strengthens the muscles responsible for the wide-eyed look.

Look Up More Often

I find that looking up while facing forward helps this process. To try this, stare up towards your eyebrows without actually raising your brows. I also think that looking upward is good for the brain and breaks down negative implicit and procedural memories. When you roll your eyes, you also look up and these two things - both the cultural gesture and the neural reprogramming technique that I am advocating – are related. We are often afraid to look up when we are encountering an equal or a superior. It can be a sign of disdain or disregard. This is why people roll their eyes when they feel that someone has demonstrated a form of inferiority. It is a nonverbal statement that is saying: “I am too good for that.” The fact that we rarely roll our eyes or look up in the presence of others communicates to subcortical systems in the brain that our environment might be intimidating and that we should not look up for fear of reprimand or reprisal. Looking up, while alone, and in social situations retunes different subconscious neurological systems The more you look up, the more you disintegrate this unconscious fear system, and the more you break the hold of the wincing facial posture. There are several other nonverbal gestures that do this including: 1) standing erect, 2) holding your chin or nose high, 3) yawning in the presence of others, 4) breathing slowly and deeply around others, 5) speaking slowly, 6) speaking in a low as opposed to a high voice, 7) refraining from raising your eyebrows during conversation. Each of these things can be threatening when combined with negative affect or negative statements. These things are all very empowering and calming to others though when combined with positive affect and positive statements.   

Massage Your Orbits

I recently began massaging the muscles around my eyes. Using a Brookstone vibrating massager on my face I realized that there were small, penny sized sore spots – one below each eye and one above each eye. At first, these were actually difficult to massage because they were very painful. These are the tense muscles responsible for my squinting during the day and my wincing during sleep.

The orbicularis oculi muscles are some of the tightest in the face and tension here makes us look old and tired. You should have four particularly sore spots around the eyes. One an inch below each eye from squinting and one an inch above each eye from raising your eyebrows. Massaging this area will help you to stop squinting. I bought a blue squash ball and worked on these for several weeks. The day after they feel especially sore but you can also feel the relief. Don’t skip a day just because the area is sore, work through the soreness. I would do circular motions putting between 3 and 10 pounds of pressure into my cheek bones. I had a small knot about an inch and a half below each eye and reliving myself of these was very freeing.

When a squash ball becomes too soft, slowly and carefully compress these with your knuckles or a baseball, it might take 6 months to work through them completely but I promise if you do it 5 minutes a day, 5 days a week, you will see significant weekly results. You will stop squinting so much and the bags under your eyes will disappear.

Most people have a crease that runs from the inside corner of the eye down diagonally toward the cheek. This crease is caused from perpetual squinting – tension in the lower portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle. People who squint more are more likely to have a more prominent crease here and more likely to have darker, discolored bags under the eyes. Compression can take this away completely.

Place the fingertips of your pointer fingers along the edge of your eye’s orbits, the bony ridge that encircles the eyes. If you place them along the lower ridge, just under the eye you should be able to feel painful strings of muscle. At first I thought that these were veins and I assumed that I should leave them alone. They are merely tense muscles and they will completely disappear if you compress them. Push down on them with your fingertips and squeeze them against the orbital bone. When they are gone your squint will disappear, and the skin under your eyes will become smooth and will lose its discoloration.

You also want to pay particular attention to the bony ridges of the corners of your eyes, otherwise known as your orbits. We hold a great deal of tension here, as if we were always on the verge of crying. Releasing this tension make you feel wide-eyed and happier. You can also place the section of the orbit associated with crows feet wrinkles between two of your second knuckles and press inward as you stroke up and down. It will feel painful at first but the pain here can be alleviated in as little as two weeks. Your crows feet will also diminish in size and depth as the muscle becomes healthy and circulation improves.

Spend Time in the Sun

Most people wince and squint heavily in direct sunlight and many people do this when they are merely out of doors. Spend some time in the daylight while trying to keep from squinting. Phototherapy is a treatment for depression and anxiety, and I believe that one of the main reasons it works is it teaches people to squint less when exposed to bright lights. I think phototherapy would be more effective if people tried to remain wide-eyed while exposed to the light source. I personally was a vampire before - I constantly squinted in the light. Now I can be out of doors with my eyes wide open.

What is Your Opinion on These Beliefs?

What follows is a list of statements that I wrote and attributed to intellectuals that could be best alligned with them. They were all positions that I found interesting and wanted to know more about. I wanted to know what other people thought of these statements as well. For my dissertation, I hoped to expose people to these statements and rate their personal "belief strength" in each using a Likert scale from 0-10. I was interested in seeing the averages, standard deviations and demographic predictors of these ratings. I also had an experiment that I wanted to do that is detailed below in the form of an excerpt from an abandoned dissertation proposal.

Belief Statements:

 

Sigmund Freud: Our actions, behaviors and beliefs and guided largely by subconscious processes in the brain that operate “silently” and are hard to recognize consciously.

 

Burrhus Skinner: Human behavior and thought can be reduced (or explained down) to the level of reflex, instinct and very simple associative learning.

 

Charles Darwin: All life on Earth is a product of evolution and the process of natural selection.

 

René Descartes: Unlike humans, no animals have the capacity for true consciousness.

 

Charles Spearman: People vary in their intelligence and genetics plays a role in this.

 

Jane Goodall: The recent findings that chimpanzees and other animals can make a variety of sophisticated tools challenges the notion that their mental lives are too dull to meaningfully compare them to humans.


Pierre-Simon La Place: Free will is an illusion and the behavior of all systems, involving people or objects, are actually governed by the laws of physics.

 

Richard Dawkins: The bodies of all life forms, from bacteria to plants to animals, are simply “survival machines” designed to make sure that they pass their genes on into the future.

 

Niccolò Machiavelli: The best way to ensure success is to be cunning, this includes lying and taking advantage of others, when need be.

 

Mary Baker Eddy: Instantaneous healing can take place due to prayer, mindstate or religious conviction.

Virginia Woolf: Honesty, thoughtfulness and morality are important social tools that reliably create positive outcomes.

 

Edward Wilson: With a few exceptions, animals only help one another when it will benefit them or when they are helping a family member.

 

Ludwig Feuerbach: God is a human invention and religious activities are misguided.

 

Noam Chomsky: The human ability for language is so advanced that, like a burrowing insect’s ability to dig, humans are genetically programmed or optimized to be able to learn and speak a language.

 
Thomas Aquinas: In order to be happy one must be kind.

 

Ayn Rand: The world wouldn’t need morality if everyone just took care of themselves.


If you would like to take this survey, go to the following link:

https://usccollege.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eb9LzK3VkhuCuz3

"In order to build on the current knowledge and our past findings we designed a questionnaire-based experiment to assess to what extent people will alter an existing belief based on the reported views of scientists or average Americans. This experiment will build on our previous research conceptually but will employ an empirical methodology with random assignment to groups and manipulation of variables. Our questionnaire will expose participants to one of four treatments. One half will be exposed to the beliefs of scientists on a variety of topics and the other will be exposed to the beliefs of average Americans. The experiment actually involves frank deception and we will mislead our participants into thinking that they are viewing averages taken from polls of either scientists or Americans on the beliefs in question. One half of the group exposed to the supposed belief of scientists will see ratings extremely cynical/deterministic ratings and the other half will see the opposite, naive/humanistic ratings. We hypothesize that participants will change their certainty strength to be in line with the stances taken by scientists but not with the stances taken by average Americans. We expect that this difference will persist even when the belief strengths for scientists and Americans are reversed (meaning that people will tend to agree with scientists no matter what the stance on the position is).

The second part of the experiment will focus on three of the previous beliefs and manipulate the evidence for and against each belief to see if the weight of evidence has a bearing on certainty strength. Participants will be asked to read short essays that either support or repudiated the belief. Participants will actually be split each of three ways, for a total of 3 treatment groups. The three variations will be groups where people are exposed to 1) convincing evidence in support of the belief, 2) convincing evidence that contradicts the belief and 3) a balance of supporting and contradicting evidence. We expect to find that belief strength can be manipulated by the weight of evidence offered."

Firework Analogy for Sustained Neural Firing

Pretend that you are lying on your back watching fireworks. Imagine that each firework explodes in the same area of the sky, one after another. A giant constellation of points appears, disappears and is replaced by an entirely new, unrelated constellation of points. This is what the distribution of neural activity is like in a lower animal. The animal is constantly recreating its representation of its environment, using a new set of neurons. More intelligent animals, like mammals, have neurons in association areas that are capable of prolonged firing. How would this prolonged firing change the firework pattern?

Now imagine a higher animal that has cells that show sustained firing. Imagine that some of the small points of light in the previous firework, don’t fade rapidly but rather remain, suspended in the sky. They persist there even through the explosion of 1, 2, even 3 subsequent fireworks. Imagine that each of these subsequent fireworks also have points of light that remain persistently. Now the firework display is much more interesting and temporally dynamic (especially if each firework is a different color) and it serves as a nice visual analogy for the persistence of information in working memory, made possible by sustained neural firing. If this persistence didn’t exist we would lose most of our mental continuity and individual, instantaneous mental states would be discrete and could not carry over information to subsequent states. Without prolonged neural firing, human experience and capabilities would be vastly different.

Read the full article that I wrote on this topic here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938416308289

If you found this interesting, please visit aithought.com. The site delves into my model of working memory and its application to AI, illustrating how human thought patterns can be emulated to achieve machine consciousness and superintelligence. Featuring over 50 detailed figures, the article provides a visually engaging exploration of how bridging the gap between psychology and neuroscience can unlock the future of intelligent machines.

The Octopus Analogy for Thought

The same process that gives the octopus mobility and stability with its arms,

gives us mobility, stability and continuity in our thought.

Thinking about how thought changes within the brain through time, I came to the conclusion that groups of neurons interact in a very specific, repeating pattern over time. I tried to come up with an analogy to explain this pattern. I  likened it to the pattern of footsteps taken by an octopus that is “seafloor walking.” I feel the analogy works in a few different ways, but the main point is that while much activation in the brain is often rapid and transient, some activation is relatively more long lasting. I think that the long lasting activations lend structure and continuity to thought and contribute to the phenomenon of sentience.

Octopuses occasionally walk along the seafloor and when they do, they often exhibit a particular stride. As they move forward, they plant some of their arms on the sand below them and replant arms that they have left behind. Imagine yourself climbing up a ladder. You hold on to each rung until the rung is so low that you let go and reach for a higher one. Now imagine climbing a ladder with many arms. They wouldn’t all move at once, only the lowest ones would move. This is very similar to how an octopus walks. The key idea is that, at any one point in time, some arms retract from their positions, some arms are relocated to new positions but yet most remain planted firmly where they are. This is very much like the pattern of activation in the cerebral cortex.

Individual nodes (groups of cells that are wired together) in the brain correspond to specific mental representations. Each thought that we have necessitates large numbers of these nodes to represent the various things going on in our mind. The octopus analogy uniquely describes a system where certain nodes are conserved through time as others come and go. The stride of an octopus that plants the majority of its arms temporarily while actively repositioning arms that have let go of their footholds, represents the uninterrupted, nonlinear, spatio-temporal pattern of node activation, deactivation and coactivation in the brain.

Some nodes can probably be retained even after the transitions between a number of thoughts. This happens when your thoughts cycle and change but hold a common element or theme constant. When we attempt to solve a novel and complex problem we try to keep the majority of our octopus arms firmly planted so that we can keep the problem set in mind. The fact that some nodes (within association areas) remain active for prolonged periods (i.e. the octopus arms remain planted), during reciprocal top-down to bottom-up communications, accounts for the continuity found between successive brain states. The longer nodes in association areas can be continuously activated - over a series of states - the longer they can influence sequences of bottom-up imagery in a sustained and consistent way allowing modeling, planning and working memory in general. The result is a stream of consciousness where each thought is quantitatively different from the ones preceding, as newly relevant nodes are added and the least relevant ones are removed.

The fact that the placement of some of its arms are conserved, over sequential moments, gives the octopus balance and stability and it also provides the physical basis for the continuity of thought. The nodes that are conserved reside mostly in association areas whereas nodes in early sensory areas are activated much more transiently. This is as if the arms in back of the octopus (corresponding to posterior sensory cortices) move much more quickly than the forelimbs (which find firm, reliable footholds in anterior association cortices and the PFC). The octopus analogy has the advantage of demonstrating how several interacting elements combine to allow thought. Also because these elements remain active for different durations, thought does not stop and go in discrete steps but is continually “carried along” by those elements that endure through time. All elements, or neural nodes, will deactivate within several seconds, but the intermingling of nodes of some temporal stability with those of more fleeting persistence sustains the associative bridges that allow the thematic and unifying consistency that is a hallmark of cognition.

The routine of node activation and deactivation is very similar to “polypedal locomotion” or movement in animals with many legs. It is not much like the locomotion of an insect such as a millipede or a centipede though because these animals move their legs in stereotypical, repetitive ways where the placement of each leg is not actively influenced by the placements of other legs or of the qualities of the footholds. The pattern of activations in the brain is more like the polypedal locomotion of an octopus that is seafloor walking because it is asymmetrical, dynamic and the placement of the next legs is influenced by the octopus’ stance, posture and the characteristics of the footholds themselves. Most importantly, this model can accommodate nonlinear aspects of neurodynamics. One neural node does not activate the next in sequence. Several nodes are coactivated together and they pool their activation energy to determine which nodes will be activated next.

The total number of cortical nodes that can be coactivated must be somewhat stable given known limitations on things like neural excitability, cortical hemodynamics and working memory. In our analogy the number of available octopus arms is very stable and this represents our fixed, innate capacity for working memory. Even though the number of chunks (psychologically perceptible units of perception and meaning) that can be held in working memory, 7 plus or minus 2, coincidentally coincides with the number of arms that a living octopus has (8), this is not a reliable indication of the number of nodes that can be coactivated in association cortex. This is true because even though chunks and nodes may be relatively congruent, the exact relationship between them is currently unclear. It seems clear though that the octopus has a relatively invariant number of arms and that perhaps, in order to bring a new node into the train of thought it must first let go of some other node. Surely the number of activatable nodes differs from area to area and from task to task, but it probably remains relatively constant within tasks.

It is not always the case that the majority of nodes are conserved from one thought to another. Most nodes can be dropped or abandoned at the same time, i.e. when they become a lower priority. This readily happens when we are exposed to a new, salient, perhaps emotionally laden, stimulus. When this occurs, the octopus “jumps,” taking all of its arms with it, and reorients to the new stimulus and its accompanying set of features. Such a jump would constitute a disruption of mental continuity. So clearly mental continuity can be viewed on a continuum where a high proportion of nodes are conserved between brain states on one end of the continuum and a low proportion are conserved on the other end. Disruptions in continuity might occur due to a distracting stimulus in the environment, or from an internally generated stimulus. Evolution has probably programmed the octopus to jump and reposition its arms quickly in order to respond to important sensory stimuli, so that mammals react to them with all of their cognitive resources. Mental continuity is less easily disrupted in humans than it is in other mammals, although perhaps more easily disrupted in people with habituation deficits. Attention and distraction must be intimately related to the temporal conservation of nodes. In fact, the extent of attention deficit and distractibility should be inversely related to the neurological capacity to conserve nodes in association areas from second to second.

Another analog of this analogy is the idea that the octopus will “topple” if it loses its grip on a sufficient number of nodes. This makes the body of the octopus analogous to consciousness because brains become unconscious once coactivation (especially in the frontal and parietal fields) is sufficiently diminished. Nodes in early sensory areas are often active during unconscious states, but nodes in association areas are less active and out of sync with those in sensory areas. Thus anterior-posterior balance and coordination are important for our allegorical octopus.

Unlike subcortical areas, strictly one-to-one, linear activation is probably rare in the cortex. Also, unlike subcortical areas, information processing in the cortex is not compartmentalized into individual nuclei that are relatively isolated from processing occuring elsewhere. Rather, cortical nodes coactivate together to spread the activation energy necessary to recruit, or converge upon, the next set of nodes that will be coactivated with the remaining nodes from the previous cycle. An node is released from coactivation when it no longer receives sufficient activation energy from its inputs i.e. its relevance to the processing demands diminishes. When a node is deactivated, the perceptual or conceptual element corresponding to it becomes deactivated and can no longer impact present experience. Whatever new node is introduced will inform the present sum of coactivates in a unique and informative way.

The nodes that are coactivated, at any one time, sum their component features together to create mental imagery and this occurs in both sensory and association areas.  Mental imagery changes plastically as nodes that continue to be useful are maintained, nodes that are rendered less useful are released from activation, and nodes that are newly recognized as useful are activated and incorporated into the remaining amalgamation of useful coactivations.

Table 1: Definitions of Terms

	Psychological Aspects	Neurological Aspects	Octopus Analogy Analog
Neuron	Variable if not negligible	A single cell	A grain of sand on the cortical seafloor that the octopus stands on
Neural Assembly	Element, feature, or fragment of a construct in long-term memory	A cortical minicolumn or a collection of cells with very similar receptive fields	A patch of sand that is currently in contact with a suction cup on an octopus arm
Neural Ensemble	A psychologically perceptible construct of long-term memory that can serve as a feature of a current thought	A collection of coactivated assemblies that are bound in a Hebbian manner	A region of sand that is currently in contact with a single octopus arm and its suction cups
A Thought	A composite of several representations that combine to create mental imagery	A set of coactivated ensembles	The set of all octopus arms that are currently in contact with the cortical seafloor
Thinking / Consciousness	A progression of related imagery formed through reciprocating transformations between association and sensory cortex	A sequence of related sets of coactivated ensembles where some remain active over the duration	The locomotive behavior or past and present footsteps of the octopus
Unconscious Processes	Implicit mental behavior unavailable to psychological introspection	The connectivity responsible for the selection of assemblies and ensembles	The automatic processes corresponding to the selection of arm placements

Read the full article that I wrote on this topic here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938416308289

If you found this interesting, please also consider visiting aithought.com. The site delves into my model of working memory and its application to AI, illustrating how human thought patterns can be emulated to achieve machine consciousness and superintelligence. Featuring over 50 detailed figures, the article provides a visually engaging exploration of how bridging the gap between psychology and neuroscience can unlock the future of intelligent machines.

Oliver Sacks’ Confabulating Butcher

I found a lego minifigure the other day who is dressed as a butcher and it reminded me of the the delicatessen owner in Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. In the chapter titled “A Matter of Identity,” Sacks enters a clinic room where he is greeted by a delusional Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson is a former deli owner who, because of Korsakoff’s dementia, struggles to remember anything new. The disorder is often due to severe alcoholism and is associated with anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia, lack of insight, apathy and confabulation. Confabulation is a verbal statement that contains a memory disturbance that causes the person to inaccurately describe the past or present. It is often referred to as honest lying.   I think that confabulation, as a natural phenomenon, is fascinating – mostly because I catch myself doing it on small scales all the time. We all confabulate when we tell stories or relate past events. We add small bits that don’t belong as our memory tries its best to fill in gaps. Mr. Thompson’s degree of confabulation though, taught me a lesson that I’ll never forget. The following passage showed me that when memory fails utterly, humans have a tendency to compensate, by inventing reality:

'What'll it be today?' he says, rubbing his hands. 'Half a pound of Virginia, a nice piece of Nova?' (Evidently he saw me as a customer—he would often pick up the phone on the ward, and say 'Thompson's Delicatessen'.)

'Oh Mr Thompson!' I exclaim. 'And who do you think I am?'

'Good heavens, the light's bad—I took you for a customer. As if it isn't my old friend Tom Pitkins ... Me and Tom' (he whispers in an aside to the nurse) 'was always going to the races together.'

'Mr Thompson, you are mistaken again.'

'So I am,' he rejoins, not put out for a moment. 'Why would you be wearing a white coat if you were Tom? You're Hymie, the kosher butcher next door. No bloodstains on your coat though. Business bad today? You'll look like a slaughterhouse by the end of the week!'

Feeling a bit swept away myself in this whirlpool of identities, I finger the stethoscope dangling from my neck.

'A stethoscope!' he exploded. 'And you pretending to be Hymie! You mechanics are all starting to fancy yourselves to be doctors, what with your white coats and stethoscopes—as if you need a stethoscope to listen to a car! So, you're my old friend Manners from the Mobil station up the block, come in to get your boloney-and-rye ...'

William Thompson rubbed his hands again, in his salesman-grocer's gesture, and looked for the counter. Not finding it, he looked at me strangely again.

'Where am I?' he said, with a sudden scared look. 'I thought I was in my shop, doctor. My mind must have wandered ... You'll be wanting my shirt off, to sound me as usual?'

'No, not the usual. I'm not your usual doctor.'

'Indeed you're not. I could see that straightaway! You're not my usual chest-thumping doctor. And, by God, you've a beard! You look like Sigmund Freud—have I gone bonkers, round the bend?'

'No, Mr Thompson. Not round the bend. Just a little trouble with your memory—difficulties remembering and recognising people.'

'My memory has been playing me some tricks,' he admitted. 'Sometimes I make mistakes—I take somebody for somebody else ... What'll it be now—Nova or Virginia?'

So it would happen, with variations, every time—with improvisations, always prompt, often funny, sometimes brilliant, and ul¬timately tragic. Mr Thompson would identify me—misidentify, pseudo-identify me—as a dozen different people in the course of five minutes. He would whirl, fluently, from one guess, one hypothesis, one belief, to the next, without any appearance of un¬certainty at any point—he never knew who I was, or what and where he was, an ex-grocer, with severe Korsakov's, in a neurological institution.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted,the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant—there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him—an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations—continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations. For Mr Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fancies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable and factual world. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter…


From: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. 1970. Touchstone. Chapter 12.

To read more about my own memory failures that I have noticed click here:

My Personal Experience with Chronic Stress: Compromised Cognition


Here are a few of my favorite books by Oliver Sacks: