I am referring the reader to a highly technical article entitled “Common neural choice signals emerge artifactually amidst multiple distinct value signals,” authored by R. Fromer et al, October 2022. In their significance statement the authors state that “these findings call for a significant reexamination of established links between neural and computational mechanisms of choice, while inviting deeper consideration of the array of cognitive and affective processes that occur in parallel.” they go on to conclude their article with the comment, “our work shows that evidence of accumulation is not sufficient to argue for an evidence accumulation account, and that to better understand the array of signals that appear over the course of a decision, we need to incorporate insights from affective science, metacognition and cognitive control [Italics added].”

i suggest that neuroscientists are acknowledging that there is more to cognition than what is considered by the perspective of materialist reductionism that maintains that the mind is the brain. i refer you to my last blog post that deals with metacognition.

I am referring IN THIS WRITING to a blog dated july 30, 2015, by arthur l. costa, professor emeritus, california state university, sacramento. it is entitled “metacognition: what makes humans unique?” recall that i have endeavored to provide A compelling ACCUMULATION OF evidence FOR bidirectional, dual interaction between the immaterial mind and the material components of the neural synaptic networks of the brain in my writings. this perspective is in contrast to that of materialist reductionism that posits that the brain is the mind. I will post several excerpts from this blog by costa and suggest that it is not possible to reduce metacognition solely to the physiological activities of the brain’s synaptic networks. I AM ADDING A FEW COMMENTS IN BRACKETS FROM MY OWN WORK.

“if you caUGHT YOURSELF HAVING AN ‘INNER’DIALOGUE INSIDE YOUR BRAIN, AND IF YOU HAD TO STOP TO EVALUATE YOUR OWN DECISION MAKING/PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESSES, YOU WERE EXPERIENCING METACOGNITION. . . . HOMO SAPIENS, SAPIENS, [IS] A BEING THAT KNOWS THEIR KNOWING (OR MAYBE IT IS ‘KNOWS THEY ARE KNOWING’) . . . . METACOGNITION - THE ABILITY TO BE A SPECTATOR OF OWN THOUGHTS WHILE WE ENGAGE IN THEM. . . . OCCURRING IN THE NEOCORTEX AND THEREFORE THOUGHT BY SOME NEUROLOGISTS TO BE UNIQUELY HUMAN, METACOGNITION IS OUR ABILITY TO KNOW WHAT WE KNOW [ARCHIVED IN MEMORY] AND WHAT WE DON’T KNOW. IT IS OUR ABILITY TO PLAN A STRATEGY FOR PRODUCING [BY THE IMMATERIAL MIND] WHAT INFORMATION [THE SOURCE BEING ONLY A/THE MIND] IS NEEDED, TO BE CONSCIOUS OF OUR OWN STEPS AND STRATEGIES DURING THE ACT OF PROBLEM SOLVING, AND TO REFLECT ON AND EVALUATE THE PRODUCTIVENESS OF OUR OWN THINKING.”

THE AUTHOR STATES THAT PEOPLE WITH WELL-DEVELOPED METACOGNITIVE ABILITIES ARE “THOSE WHO ‘MANAGE’ THEIR INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES WELL: 1) THEIR BASIC PERCEPTUAL-MOTOR SKILLS; 2) THEIR LANGUAGE, BELIEFS, KNOWLEDGE OF CONTENT, AND MEMORY PROCESSES; AND 3) THEIR PURPOSEFUL AND VOLUNTARY STRATEGIES INTENDED TO ACHIEVE A DESIRED OUTCOME; 4) SELF-KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ONE’S OWN LEARNING STYLES AND HOW TO ALLOCATE RESOURCES ACCORDINGLY.”

COGNITION: THE MENTAL ACTION OR PROCESS OF ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING THROUGH THOUGHT, EXPERIENCE, AND THE SENSES. (wIKIPEDIA)

I refer you to an article by joni d. Wallis entitled “Decoding Cognitive processes from neural ensembles.” it appeared in trends in cognitive science, 2018, dec; 22(12): 1091-1102. i am identifying this work since it shows how neuroscientists are endeavoring to decode cognitive processes, called “unobservable states that exist in between observable responses to the sensory environment. cognitive states must be inferred from indirect behavioral measures.” the author does not reduce cognition soley to the activities of the physical brain; hence my interest in this work.

the author identifies a central tenet of neuroscience, that neurons represent information as codes. tHEY ARE instantiated within action potentials at various frequencies, amplitudes, phases and shapes, discussed at length in my writings. it is stated that “the experimenter has little control over the cognitive process. . . [the approach is] to record the activity of many single neurons simultaneously and then project the pattern of neural ACTIVITY INTO A HIGH DIMENSIONAL SPACE THAT CAN BE USED TO CLASSIFY THE INFORMATION REPRESENTED BY THE NEURONS.”

NEUROSCIENTISTS ARE WORKING TO APPLY “DECODING ANALYSES TO UNCOVER OTHERWISE UNOBSERVABLE STates. . . . it has been possible to decode speech from neural activity in the superior temporal cortex evoked by speech,” but immaterial, unobservable cognition, such as choice, cannot be directly interpreted from codes within neural activity. but neuroscientists are getting close!

the author states “that hippocampal neural activity may provide an insight into the decision-making process. the experimenters [cited by the author] used decoders trained on established ground truths (hippocampal place fields during actual navigation) to measure hidden cognitive states (navigational decisions). however, they lack a critical piece of the decision: what makes one option preferable to another?” the selection of an option is a cognitive act of an immaterial mind. the author goes on to state the following, “unlike sensory stimuli, value judgments are frequently hidden states [of a mind] that must be inferred. . . . because value is a hidden state and inherently subjective, studying the mechanisms underpinning value-based decision-making is particularly difficult. decoding provides a potential solution. . . . what is noticeably absent from the above discussion is how the choice is implemented. . . . one of the posited reasons that we have working memory is so that we are not ‘stimulus-bound’: we can think about things we are not necessarily looking at.” the author asks “how do we access the contents of working memory, which is an unobservable, covert process?”

i highly value this article. it strongly suggests the reality of the immateriality of the human mind (the “unobservable”) that causally interacts with the material components of the synaptic networks of the brain.

the author makes the following statement toward the end of the article: “decoding enables neuroscientists to measure cognitive processes as they unfold. however, there are some caveats to keep in mind in interpreting the results of a decoding analysis. most importantly, just because we can decode information from the activity of a neural ensemble, this does not mean that individual neurons are encoding that information.”

I trust that i have been able to provide compelling evidence that the immaterial mind is the source of the power, perhaps as wave forms, to instantiate specified information into neural codes.

in my blogs and books i have endeavored to provide compelling evidence for what is called interactive dualism. This is a concept that refers to a personal interaction between the immaterial mind of god and His holy spirit, sent as promised by the living jesus christ, and the immaterial mind of man, working in large part through the material neural synaptic networks of the human brain. it is a bidirectional process. for those who have been following the content of my posts, i am sharing two scriptures that should now be understood as to reality. these are:

john 10:27 my sheep listen to my voice; i know them, and they follow me.

hebrews 10:16 this is the covenant i will make with them after that time, says the lord. i will put my laws in their hearts, and i will write them on their minds.

synaptic transmission involves the linguistic features of neural codes “written” within action potentials that are interpreted by the human immaterial mind and archived in memory. i address this process extensively in my posts and books.

it is my hope that we are seeing the harmony and concordance between what is being learned in the neurosciences and properly interpreted scripture.

thank you.

As my research continues, I seek articles that give testimony to the workings of the mind and the material components of the brain. Material reductionism posits that the mind is the brain, its neurophysiological, electrochemical activities. the role of a mind that is immaterial and separate from the material synaptic networks but interactive with them in causal fashion is discounted.

i have discussed this issue extensively in my books and blog posts over time. I am finding more acceptance of dualism within neuroscience, especially in my more recent posts dealing with near death and out of body experiences. Along the way i have cited numerous authors and their literary works, to which one can refer if interested.

recall that the human mind has been created in the image of the mind of god. as we see validation of the activities of an immaterial mind and its interaction with the synaptic components of the material brain of man, we should derive a degree of understanding of how the mind of god, his holy spirit, interacts personally with mankind.

in the writings of my books and blog posts I have addressed how specified information with meaning is transmitted along synchronous synaptic networks within encoded wave forms of action potentials. it is a complex mechanism which is becoming better understood with advancing technological capabilities. that the process has more than a material basis within the brain is frequently discounted from discussion since dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the synaptic networks of the physical brain is not considered when there is a commitment to materialist reductionism. However, dualist interaction is becoming increasingly accepted and addressed in more current neurological postings.

memory is increasingly explained by encoded neural activity within specific parts of the brain that is accessed in an associative manner. Though dualism is not mentioned, i am referring to an article by lukas kunz et al in nature neuroscience, vol. 27, march 2024. the authors show how multiple regions of the brain are active in retrieving selected memories. it is a process referred to as associative memory that “enables the encoding and retrieval of relations beween different stimuli.” the authors “investigated whether associative memory involves temporally correlated spiking of medial temporal lobe neurons that exhibit stimulus-specific tuning. . . . the individual stimuli contributing to particular associative memories are encoded by separate sets of functionally specialized neurons and . . . these neurons interact transiently when individuals encode and retrieve the memories.”

here i question to whom or what the authors are referring by the word “individuals.” in their study the neural basis of associative memory was “in the setting of object-location associations.” they asked “whether the encoding and retrieval of such object-location memories is correlated with the simultaneous activation of object cells, which represent specific objects, and place cells, which code for particular spatial locations. [they] predicted that these coactivatons would occur in a temporally confined manner during hippocampal high-frequency oscillations, termed ‘ripples,’ which are considered important for synchronizing neural activity across brain regions. such ripple-locked coactivity of object and place cells could potentially underlie the encoding and retrieval of associative object-location memories by inducing and (re)activating synaptic connections between the object and place cells that represent the memory elements.” in both animals and humans “hippocampal ripples are relevant to various cognitive functions. neural recordings in patients with epilepsy revealed that ripples correlate with memory encoding, retrieval and consolidation. . . . ripple-locked coactivity of stimulus-specific neurons provides a neural mechanism for the formation and retrieval of associative memories and, more broadly, consititutes a key property of information processing in the human brain.”

hippocampal ripples are defined by the authors as “neural events with brain-wide effects that are considered beneficial for establishing or strengthening synaptic connections.” the authors reasoned that “hippocampal ripples could support associative memory by triggering brain states in which otherwise separate neural representations become linked.”

that a cognitive process of an immaterial mind was involved in this process is suggested by the following statement: “we hypothesized that coactivations of associative object and place cells during retrieval would indicate that the participant remembered a particular location given a specific object, whereas their coactivations during re-encoding would indicate that the participant aimed at (re)learning or updating the correct location of a given object.” I question how the “participant’s” remembering, (re)learning or updating could be reduced solely to the activity of the material brain of the study patient.

i recommend this article to the interested reader of this blog post. information (which can only be generated by a mind, as has been pointed out in previous blog posts) may, according to the authors, propagate from the hippocampus to extra-hippocampal regions during retrieval along synchronous neural pathways, a process that would involve associative, interpretive coordination by an immaterial, cognitive mind.

I refer you to AN ARTICLE MY jamali et al in nature, vol 631, 18 july 2024, entitled “Semantic Encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution.” the authors state the following: “from sequences of speech sounds or letters, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language.”

in my writings i have addressed this capacity at length. the authors state that “the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown.” it is this point which i have addressed over time in my writings. they continue to state that there is “a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information by individual neurons. . . . we also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how these representations mapped onto the cell population.”

i am identifying this particular article because it shows how the action potentials transmitted by neuronal networks (in this case by single cells) are encoded semantically. According to the authors, their “results therefore together suggested that these cell ensembles encoded richly detailed information about the hierarchical semantic relationship between words. . . . these findings reveal a highly detailed representation of semantic information within prefrontal cortical populations, and a cellular process that could allow the meaning of words to be accurately decoded in real time during speech.”

what i do not see in their article is the role of the immaterial mind in this process, though mention is made of “comprehension” without defining how and where it occurs. i submit that it is the mind which interprets the semantic neural codes, dynamic as they are as the authors point out. no mention of memory archived within neural networks is made which the mind accesses in establishing context to meanings.

I do recommend this article with elaborate methodology and on the forefront of learning how semantic communication occurs. It is my hope that my writings shed some light on this complex topic.

in miller’s conclusion he cites a number of individuals whose examination of nde’s “compelled them to believe that death isn’t the end of life.” he states that “this fascinating field provides remarkable evidence for both life after death and the existence of a loving, brilliant Being who knows us intimately. to me, nde’s are remarkably consistent with a theistic worldview. . . . we have strong evidence to support both life after death and the existence of a personal god.”

i close this series of excerpts from the book by j. steve miller whose writings, based on years of nde research, give strong testimony to a personal, loving and gracious creator god who desires an intimate communion with us. this has been restored by the sin sacrifice of his son, jesus christ, who sent as promised his holy spirit to once again indwell repentant believers so we can experience this bidirectional communion, now and into eternity.

miller includes descriptions of people with lifelong deafness and blindness who have had nde’s with the capacity to hear and to see. an account is shared of a boy born deaf who had a nde in which he had “direct communication with about twenty ancestors . . . he’s neither heard nor understood verbal communication. yet he finds himself communicating effortlessly, not through sign language, but directly mind-to-mind, without learning a new form of communication.”

miller also shared that “blind persons, including those blind from birth, do report classic nde’s of the kind common to sighted persons; that the great preponderance of blind persons claim to see during nde’s and obe’s [out of body experiences]; and that occasionally claims of visually-based knowledge that could not have been obtained by normal means can be independently corroborated.”

miller stated further, “yet, nde’s reveal a personal god who both knows and cares about each of us.” the encounter with a being of light “is felt to be the most intense and most essential part of the experience. . . this encounter [with the being of light] is always accompanied by an overwhelming sense of unconditional love and acceptance . . . it is a personal being. it has a very definite personality. . . . the light . . . was of a kind that i’d never seen before and that differs from any other kind such as sunlight.”

so in these several accounts we are seeing a possible revelation of the truth of the living jesus christ given us in our space-time by god’s grace and boundless love.

i am posting selected excerpts from miller’s book:

“in a near-death experience, the person is truly alive, with a fully functioning mind in a nonmaterial, spiritual world outside the body.”

“by far the typical experience reported by those undergoing anesthesia or experiencing cardiac arrest is no memory of anything. in such circumstances, the brain is unable to either maintain consciousness or form memories. yet, during this time, nde’rs consistently report, not vague, confused consciousness, but vivid, ‘realer than real’ consciousness. it’s like their brains are on hyper drive, some reliving their entire lives within a brief span of time. and their memories, as we have seen, far from being cloudy and fleeting (as we’d expect from a compromised brain) are retained so efficiently that decades later they report remembering each detail as if it happened yesterday.”

“who would expect the typical experience of communicating directly mind-to-mind rather than using the medium of language? [i remind the reader of the interaction between the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks of the brain in which linguistic neural codes are transmitted through synchronous pathways] who expects to encounter a dimension where both time and space seem to vanish, where they can see both up close and far away with equal clarity, and view an entire lifetime in an instant? a bright light might be expected by some, but who expects the common experience of not having to squint while looking at the extreme brightness?”

my posts will continue, featuring how the deaf hear, how the blind see, and how a personal loving god is experienced.