Keegan Keplinger

2,157 reputation

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BS Physics (received)

MS Computational Neuroscience (received)

PhD Theoretical Neuroscience (attending/pursuing)

	2,157 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year
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Dec 27	awarded	Revival
Dec 26	answered	The effects of bilingualism on colour perception
Dec 26	answered	How does one study the effect of a dietary supplement on cognition?
Dec 4	comment	Difference between parallel processing done by human brain and by computers Chuck, graded potentials would be important in gap-junction coupling, probably partiuclarly axo-axonic gap junction coupling (which occurs in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus). They're mostly known for their role in network synchronization. But also, underlying membrane potential is always fluxuation due to passive currents both in and outside the cell; thresholds are kind of a fuzzy value that can be altered by global activity in the body.
Dec 4	comment	What regulates the strength of motoric signals? Seems to me you basically nailed it, Chuck. I think a simplified view is that extra recruitment can recruit more muscle, firing rate can make a fixed set of muscles "try harder". So there's spatial distribution and an intensity. To specifically answer about sensory dependence... you're getting feedback sensory from your muscles as you lift, so it's possible the extra input is from the muscles themselves doing work. This is some speculation though, so I keep it a comment.
Dec 4	answered	How does the brain process concurrent visual or sensory data?
Dec 4	comment	Possibility of perfect virtual reality The generic thought experiment pertaining to this is brain in vat. It's not falsifiable. A lot of signal processing does go straight from mechanoreception to electrical signal. However, is the electrical signal where subjective experience occurs? We have no way of knowing, currently.
Dec 4	answered	What causes people to remember events which did not take place?
Nov 19	awarded	Revival
Oct 21	comment	What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent? Speculation: (I couldn't find any research to confirm my intuition about this) Negative exponent is for sensory information that's integrated into contextual processing, it's adaptive, so it has less of an effect as more is present and the mind adapts to the stimulus. Positive exponent is more related to an alert system. There's a threshold at which it takes off (similar to a transistor). Note: Wikipedia documents some strong criticisms of Steven's Power Law.
Oct 18	answered	How can motivation be increased by improving brain chemistry with nutrition and activities?
Oct 9	answered	Is there any fMRI evidence for different “states of mind”?
Sep 21	comment	What explains habitual or even occasional incidences of self-talk? reminds me of the Dialogical Self. Not sure about the neurobiology off the top of my head but my gut is screaming Wernicke's and Broca's areas.
Sep 21	comment	Does breastfeeding lead to increased intelligence? Jeromy, I don't mind edits at all. The way I see it, answers belong to the public domain. But I see a typo in the last inline reference ([25] Weaver IC). Not sure what you were going for there as far as formatting.
Sep 17	comment	What is the current “accepted” science behind dream interpretation? I believe that's the nature of the beast. There are so many degeneracies in brain sciences (many different ways to get to the same functionality, sometimes more than one are actually valid, so different brains can arrive at different network architectures that produce the same result). Eve Marder has published some work on this.
Sep 14	comment	Is there a correlation between facial features and personality? I didn't really intend to judge Physiognomy, just lay the terms out there for further research (Phrenology is another story.. it made particular now-falsified claims about local functionality being isolated in brain regions). On Physiognomy, The wiki says it's made a little bit of a comeback lately and I can intuit some rationality in the muscular use line of argument. So I withhold judgment for now. But yeah, definitely something to tread carefully with.
Sep 13	awarded	Critic
Sep 13	comment	Is there a correlation between facial features and personality? it's called Physiognomy. It's gained and lost popularity several times in history. There's an excellent science-fiction novel called "The Physiognomy" based on the medievel version of the practice. Phrenology was a similar, less credible idea.
Sep 8	comment	What is the mechanism explaining the effect of a positive attitude on immune system functioning? I saw something today about this in an interview with Gabor Mate (near the end, ~40 minutes, but I suggest watching the whole interview, good stuff). Dr. Mate brings up several studies. He called the discipline Psychoneuroimmunology
Sep 8	comment	Cultural brain hypothesis and gene-culture co-evolution are you interested strictly in genetics or epigenetics as well (particularly, changes in how genes are expressed)?