August 2, 2024
The Biggest Russo-American Hostage Exchange since the Cold War.
Neuroplatonism: Make Up Your Mind
Vladimir Putin gave Vadim Krasikov the red carpet treatment welcoming a person our American news media call a hit man and assassin. Krasikov was serving a life sentence for shooting a man in broad daylight. Putin considers him a great brave patriot and is likely to re-deploy him. I have admired certain kidnappers and assassins, myself. Which leads me to make a banal observation: One man’s hero is another’s hated criminal and to inquire on the neural basis of such preference. This has wide application. Prokofiev’s music, sublimely beautiful to me, is an irritating noise to someone else. What is rectitude, truth and beauty? And what determines this in the human brain?
Like you, I carry an inner model of what’s ideal. Exposed to any stimulus, we have a response of short latency. I liken it to recognizing faces. Something snaps into place, conforms to an inner model. Opinions and emotions are framed by previous experience. That is what I find goes on in my own head. What I perceive, clicks like a key in a lock, an inner ideal like Plato’s perfect forms.
Where does this inner model reside? First candidate is the fusiform facial recognition area at the junction of the occipital or visual part of the brain, close in the evaluation or recognition area in the brain’s temporal lobe, the lateral inferior temporal cortex. The facility of instant facial recognition does not arrive until after puberty. People have widely divergent abilities in facial recognition. Someone in business or politics works instantly with names and backgrounds. Absence of facial recognition that implicates the temporo-occipital junction is famously called prosopagnosia. Agnosia means inability to recognize.
The temporal lobe connects to the amygdala, and limbic system, the emotional territory of the brain, bestowing everything with emotional value. Seeing or hearing your mother or wife, triggers emotion. Lacking an emotional response, you may perceive another human as a stranger.
The other area of the brain, tying strongly to evaluation, is the frontal pole which again does not develop fully until late or after adolescence. Even then, your opinion is likely to be modified by experience and thought. But most of us have strong values of good and evil, attraction and repulsion. Still another brain region that needs to interact in this personally evaluative process, is the temporparietal junction. A brain lesion here can cause misattribution of an inner voice as coming from a Deity or someone else as in hallucination, prophesy or schizophrenia.
And we cannot forget the reward areas of the brain which yield positive feedback such as the nucleus accumbens that secretes the reward chemical dopamine and hypothalamic oxytocin secreting areas of the brain which further color emotional response.
In other words, the brain territories that contribute to evaluation of other humans are highly experiential and personal. They form a complex network of brain function.
Platonic Solids:
