After I got past the bump in the road of trying to understand how a machine like an fMRI maps our brains I ran into another little problem.
I don’t know how a brains work.
I don’t know what parts of what do what.
I don’t know what is called what.
So when the ASMR study I reading about starting talk about how the middle frontal gyrus and the nucleus accumbens had the highest activity when watching ASMR but the bilateral insular cortices had the activity when only listening to ASMR I had no idea what any of that meant.
As I’ve said, I am uneducated.
So this is how my uneducated brain attempted to understand.
I asked AI.
Starting with the middle frontal gyrus.
I asked what it was. What it did. Where it was. To see a picture of it.
All I got was summaries, facts and zero understanding or ideas on how to understand.
Sometimes the way to understand things is not in directly understanding them.
It’s easier to do in the gaps. In understanding the contrast or maybe the opposite.
Or in seeing the negative space around the thing I am trying to understand.
This works in writing and in drawing and even in acting in a way.
Highlighting the negative space around a thing rather than the thing itself.
By the negative space I mean the effect the thing has on the things around it.
Without that thing I am trying to see or understand what would not be possible?
I did not know this was a way to study. I figured this out when I realized reading about what a middle frontal gryus is not help me understand it.
Reading about what a middle frontal gryrus does did not help me understand it.
But reading about what happens when you disrupt the middle frontal gyrus did help me start to understand it. To at least be able to grasp it as a real thing. And not just a concept or an idea or a fact to remember.
In the final post on this subject I’ll include all the specific studies I read.
The main study I read (by read I mean was able to grasp in any way shape or form) described the middle frontal gyrus as a gateway between the cognitive (top down) and the affective (bottom up).
I was familiar with ‘top down’ because I’ve heard men say it before to describe will power. I’d never however heard the term ‘bottom up’.
But ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ are very easy to understand. Because it’s a very intuitive concept to every single human being.
It’s the little wars we have with ourselves.
Going to the gym versus staying in bed.
Not eating the cake in front of us versus eating it.
Controlling temper versus releasing it.
The thinking versus feeling.
This is a real thing we all understand. We can all feel this little war. It’s not an obscure little fact off somewhere being overly intellectualized. It’s a real thing in our real lives.
We can feel the mechanisms even if we don’t know how they work. It doesn’t matter what fancy Greek or Latin names they get. We can still understand that we all have thoughts and we all have feelings and that they often contradict each other.
So this middle frontal thing is switching control between them in some way or something? How?
To understand that you mess with it. How do you mess with it?
With an rTMS.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is another whole tangent. That I want to return to later because before I did not understand it but now I think I do.
That takes extra puzzling out though and for now I just want to finish this post.
So you electrocute a person’s mfg (not actually. That’s just how I translated it to myself before I understood.) the mfg slows down or whatever and what happens?
What does it do to the person? Or the group of people that made up this study how did they behave?
They became more rational.
More rational? What does ‘more rational’ mean then?
More rational means they became more aware of social consequences.
People with a disrupted MFG are more likely to withhold ideas and information they are unsure is sound and be more aware of social consequences and therefore behave rationally.
I can for the moment consider rationally to be a top down function and also a product of a heightened awareness of social consequence.
That’s interesting. I’ve never thought of being rational as just awareness of social consequences. But that makes a lot of sense.
Okay, so what about the opposite? What does an overactive MFG do?
Something to do with what part of the mfg and what frequency of the rTMS but in the simple terms an overactive mfg looks like ADHD.
Jumping from novelty to novelty impulsively and destroying focus on anything that seems irrelevant.
I have a slight and basic understanding of the mechanism now and it makes sense.
I can relate to it.
This blog is a good example of how I can relate to it. I sort of alternate between being careful with information and impulsively whatever grabs my interest.
Of only stating complete and absolute facts so I can’t get into any trouble.
And then I fall back into running wild with my most immediate thought or feeling that’s keeping me so interested in doing this. I’m not even aware of consequences in that state.
I’m slowly developing a healthy balance between those two things.
I wouldn’t want to be disrupted or overactive. I want to bounce back and forth.
How this all relates to why the mfg is active in the ASMR study makes a bit more sense now. It’s more complicated than I can understand because I haven’t given understanding these complex things enough time.
But I can relate to a basic functioning of if I’m interested in something and it’s pulling my focus my mfg is at play.
And how it’s at play depends on whether it’s forgotten about social consequences and is simply engaged in what’s it’s doing without awareness of how it might be coming off to other people. Or it’s very aware and thinking rationally to avoid consequence.
This is the fun in studying things in my own way. It can be a bit backwards and imperfect but when I found out what actually helps me learn things it gave me a way to protect my mind.
I don’t have to listen to the general description of a thing. I can test a thing out for myself and form my own description.
Which is hard to do. Because to be able to do that I have to trust myself. I have to have confidence that I am leading myself in the right direction.
To have confidence in myself I have to have real life examples I can look back on where I was right.
It’s very hard to be right all the time. Most of the time we are wrong and we need guidance and feedback and instruction.
But. I don’t have to be right if I know I can reason with myself.
If I can trust myself to problem solve myself out of being wrong. If I can trust myself to find the right guidance when I need it. Or on what feedback to listen to and what to filter out. If I can trust myself to take the right instruction and reject the wrong instruction. I never need to be right.
And the way to figure out how to reason so I can do all that, is to figure out how I learn. To figure out how I learn I have to admit when I don’t understand. And try several different angles and have the patience to be stuck.
The other area of the brain mentioned in the study were the nucleus accumbens and the bilateral insular cortices.
Since I learned to some vague degree of an idea what the nucleus accumbens is I’ve heard them mentioned one thousand hundred million times.
It seems to be the most talked about section of the brain and I struggled to find interest in it.
So it’s the are I’ll talk about last.
The bilateral insular cortices were of the most interest to me. Because I understood them the most intuitively and I made instant associations with them that answered a lot of questions I never knew I had.
That will be the next thing I talk about.
Jess lanai 