I have been, since childhood, obsessed with the power of satisfaction. Very worried that something in me might be satisfied with less than the things I really wanted. I think I was considering even then how being satisfied with something can make you stop there, and repeat that cycle, stay there, build your home/habits, spend your time around those things that satisfy you.
Recently I realised how that related to some problems in cog sci.
We know that the limbic system adds emotional value to our experience. We also know that during cognitive processing of certain stimuli, like the visual perception of an object, the brain sends back and forth some signals to the limbic system. Why that happens we are not sure, but Ramachandran is one of the ones that think that might have something to do with our inability to easily get rid of an image, of an object, of a way of looking at a visual picture once we discerned a way of looking at it that makes sense to us (that has coherence). Some of these apply for the double images, in which one is prompted by some cues, and groups the image in a certain structure, and has to make a conscious effort to shake off the object thus perceived in order to try to get the cues and do the groupings for the other object.
If the constant appeal that the processing makes to the limbic system is anything like getting some sort of marker of satisfaction, or added interest (or arousal, or other type of emotional value) for that particular found solution, or possibility of coherence to jump the queue in order to get our attention and be studied in further depth, we might build a theory on how priority is set in the brain and how that functions, and also on how we make some of our problem-searching.
We will discuss priority first. The problem of priority has relevance for some very disputed and unsolved yet basic issues, like the frame problem.
In a world in which we know how our brain prioritises information, we might not need to explain how to specify in AI what remains unchanged, or consider all the elements of the environment, we might have danger cues in the agent's experience, the sensation gathering data that is similar to the danger cues, and the priority system only alerting the system when something significantly similar to danger cues happens and needs the attention and decision-to-action of the higher cognitive functions.
We all know the sensation of being suddenly alerted by something in the environment, without exactly knowing what prompted us. We know how it feels when something is wrong or different, although we need our perceptual abilities to take more time and search through the available stimuli until we get a more detailed report on what prompted our attention. But the feeling of arousal gets priority - we are stopped in our task and look around, and a little bit later it strikes us what is different in that picture, relevant, or dangerous.
The limbic system thus seems to work like a full-break, full-ignition system. It can radically hijack our attention from the task at hand. And that ability of ours has negative consequences over the people that live in very stressful environments. It is known that children/teenagers that live in anxiety-filled or unstable environments can't focus on learning and have much more difficulties on achieving at school. One could say they have to put much more effort into making their constantly slipping attention focus on something that for the brain probably doesn't seem a priority at the time (considering the other things happening around). Also, one knows how calm is needed in order to absorb information, or think clearly.
So our alarm limbic-system can work against us, against our power of reasoning, getting the necessary information, learning about the situation or about new things that can be applied in the situation at hand, and acting thus in a fully informed manner.
Which creates a paradox. It means that the alert system can mainly put us in the position of focusing on the right thing, or give us the extra edge of motivation (adrenalin?) that we needed to achieve a task now, and faster than normally. But we need our calm to gather information, learn (memorise, compare new info to old info and build new categories). So how do we get calm? Can a limbic response only hijack? Does it take no emotional colouring for us to be able to process cognitively at full efficiency in some ways?
Or is calm itself an emotional colouring?
Time to wrap our thoughts again, in a tighter coat. Back to where we started, the limbic response that we fear was satisfaction. For me, satisfaction used to be a more powerful type of hijack, if happening in the wrong moment, for the wrong reasons.
Because you wouldn't know any better, knowing is feeling in some ways, and your feelings might prevail and what you verbally knew might have no strength to fight them, or take priority in front of them.
So how do we know if it works how it's supposed to? How do we know we are "right" to be satisfied when we are, and alerted when we are?
The costs for being alerted much more often than the danger being relevant is little, compared with the cost of not being alerted when one has to.
What about the costs of being satisfied?
If Ramachandran's hypothesis is true... one might imagine a neural network which weights are updated, increased or decreased through the strength of the limbic response. Thus, before even getting cues or achieving any groupings, features that match each other can attract our limbic boost to be further considered as bases of a higher order grouping. This might be repeated a number of times before the highest order of grouping being achieved. The cues themselves are only the first stage of processing, when some features already fitted together neatly in middle level structures like edges, vertexes, contours. The highest order of grouping represents getting a meaningful object, and having enough information about the area to know there isn't any other object around, or not needing more information (in the case of the pictures, one can make assumptions about other objects not existing when one already found one covering a significant amount of the space).
The trick with double images is that they both cover the same space, they just use different cues, or the same cues to have different functions in the various unitary structures.
The reinforcement through limbic response, and the persistence of the image reinforced might explain other things as well.
Let's also consider what that means from a thought-processing perspective. It means that our meanings are in our head. Not that they can't be outside as well, they just need to be built in our head in order to exist for us. We could potentially lose them, if not reinforced properly. Some might get reinforced but not be necessarily useful in the future processes of categorization and interpretation of events.
That is one of the reasons why we have psychotherapies - for people to get rid of some of their own way of interpreting things, of associating present things with bad meanings from their past. Learning to see new images, new structures of meaning in our life is sometimes a very important lesson, the thing that motivates us to walk further.
