Lecture notes
Life without a nervous system
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- University Of Portsmouth (UoP)
Document about creatures who live without a nervous system.
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Life Without a Nervous SystemKey Words:
o Intelligence = the ability to adapt to the environment (Trewavas, 2005).
Key Studies:
Rashkevsky (1954): identified a common process loop in the metabolising of any
living system and self-producing system – viral creatures don’t process the same
loop (they can’t live without a host).
Jacob et al (2004): bacteria use their intracellular flexibility (involving signal
transduction networks and genomic plasticity) to collectively maintain linguistic
communication (self and shared interpretations of chemical cues, exchange of
chemical messages and dialogues. Meaning based communication permits colonial
identity intentional behaviour (e.g., pheromone courtship), purposeful alteration of
colony structure, decision making (e.g., to produce spores) and recognition and
identification of other colonies – these features we would associate with bacterial
social intelligence. If this communication does exist, more research would be needed
in unknown intracellular processes to generate genomic context.
Trewavas (2005): plants regarded as a prototypical intelligent organism – this would
have considerable consequences for investigations of whole plant communication,
computation and signal transduction.
Notes:
Discovery of the nervous system:
Early views = based on mythological and religious ideas.
Herophilus (3rd century BC) distinguished between sensory and motor nerves and
proved the existence of the nervous system by dissection.
The dualist view of mind and body persisted for centuries. Even today, our
understanding of how the nervous system performs various cognitive tasks is limited
and there are a lot of mysteries.
Cognitive psychology represents today’s mainstream view – full of hypothetical
assumptions.
Cognitive psychology:
Based on the idea of information processing and relies on how information is used to
create a symbolic representation of the world.
Trying to answer how perceptual cues provide the basis of representation and action
and aims to create an accurate representation of the physical world and others mind
(theory of mind).
Actions are planned based on the stored representation (memory) and then
executed in the real world based on feedback.
Cognitive functions are based on neural processes and provide the basis of
intelligence.
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