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Information Metabolism
Information metabolism, sometimes referred to as informational metabolism or energetic-informational metabolism, is a psychological theory of interaction between biological organisms and their environment, developed by Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński. Overview Kępiński described his psychological theory in several books but the most detailed description is given in his 1974 book ''Melancholy'' (in Polish: "Melancholia"). In order to explain psychological phenomena encountered in humans, he borrowed many concepts from the field of cybernetics which gained popularity in Poland at that time, thanks to the works of Marian Mazur (the father of the Polish school of cybernetics). Kępiński starts with the consideration of most basic organisms and how they are different from inanimate matter. First of all, any organism may be treated as an autonomous but open system, separated from its environment by means of a boundary (skin or cell membrane). As an open system, it is en ...
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Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.Fernald LD (2008)''Psychology: Six perspectives'' (pp.12–15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. Ψ (''psi''), the first letter of the Greek word ''psyche'' from which the term psychology is derived (see below), is commonly associated with the science. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psyc ...
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Consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked. Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one's sense of selfhood or sou ...
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Orienting Response
The orienting response (OR), also called ''orienting reflex'', is an organism's immediate response to a change in its environment, when that change is not sudden enough to elicit the startle response, startle reflex. The phenomenon was first described by Russian physiologist Ivan Sechenov in his 1863 book ''Reflexes of the Brain'', and the term ('ориентировочный рефлекс' in Russian) was coined by Ivan Pavlov, who also referred to it as the ''Shto takoye?'' (Что такое? or ''What is it?'') reflex. The orienting response is a reaction to novel or significant stimuli. In the 1950s the orienting response was studied systematically by the Russian scientist Eugene Sokolov, Evgeny Sokolov, who documented the phenomenon called "habituation", referring to a gradual "familiarity effect" and reduction of the orienting response with repeated stimulus presentations.Sokolov, E.N, Neuronal models and the orienting reflex, in ''The Central Nervous System and Behavior'', ...
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Perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.Goldstein (2009) pp. 5–7 Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Gregory, Richard. "Perception" in Gregory, Zangwill (1987) pp. 598–601. Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The process that follows connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as ...
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Attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data (at around one megabyte per second) can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness. Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. ...
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Subjective Character Of Experience
The ''subjective character of experience'' is a term in psychology and the philosophy of mind denoting that all subjectivity, subjective phenomena are associated with a single perspective (cognitive), point of view ("Id, ego and super-ego, ego"). The term was coined and illuminated by Thomas Nagel in his famous paper "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?"Nagel, Thomas (1974) What is It Like to Be a Bat? ''The Philosophical Review'' LXXXIII, 4 (October): 435–50. Nagel argues that, because bats are apparently conscious mammals with a way of perceiving their environment entirely different from that of human beings, it is impossible to speak of "what is it like to ''be'' a bat ''for'' the bat" or, while the example of the bat is particularly illustrative, any conscious species, as each organism has a unique point of view from which no other organism can gather experience. To Nagel, the subjective character of experience implies the Cognitive closure (philosophy), cognitive closure of the hum ...
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Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or more rare within a population. The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic is common or rare within a population constantly change, resulting in a change in heritable characteristics arising over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. The theory of evolution by ...
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Sensory Receptor
Sensory neurons, also known as afferent neurons, are neurons in the nervous system, that convert a specific type of stimulus, via their receptors, into action potentials or graded potentials. This process is called sensory transduction. The cell bodies of the sensory neurons are located in the dorsal ganglia of the spinal cord. The sensory information travels on the afferent nerve fibers in a sensory nerve, to the brain via the spinal cord. The stimulus can come from ''exteroreceptors'' outside the body, for example those that detect light and sound, or from ''interoreceptors'' inside the body, for example those that are responsive to blood pressure or the sense of body position. Types and function Different types of sensory neurons have different sensory receptors that respond to different kinds of stimuli. There are at least six external and two internal sensory receptors: External receptors External receptors that respond to stimuli from outside the body are called ex ...
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Nervous System
In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes that impact the body, then works in tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events. Nervous tissue first arose in wormlike organisms about 550 to 600 million years ago. In vertebrates it consists of two main parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. Nerves that transmit signals from the brain are called motor nerves or '' efferent'' nerves, while those nerves that transmit information from the body to the CNS are called sensory nerves or '' afferent''. Spinal nerves are mixed nerves that serve both fu ...
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Complexity
Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interaction, interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence. The term is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, culminating in a higher order of emergence greater than the sum of its parts. The study of these complex linkages at various scales is the main goal of complex systems theory. The intuitive criterion of complexity can be formulated as follows: a system would be more complex if more parts could be distinguished, and if more connections between them existed. Science takes a number of approaches to characterizing complexity; Zayed ''et al.'' reflect many of these. Neil F. Johnson, Neil Johnson states that "even among scientists, there is no unique definition of complexity – and the scientific notion has traditionally been conveyed ...
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Frame Problem
In artificial intelligence, the frame problem describes an issue with using first-order logic (FOL) to express facts about a robot in the world. Representing the state of a robot with traditional FOL requires the use of many axioms that simply imply that things in the environment do not change arbitrarily. For example, Hayes describes a "block world" with rules about stacking blocks together. In a FOL system, additional axioms are required to make inferences about the environment (for example, that a block cannot change position unless it is physically moved). The frame problem is the problem of finding adequate collections of axioms for a viable description of a robot environment. John McCarthy (computer scientist), John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes defined this problem in their 1969 article, ''Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence''. In this paper, and many that came after, the formal mathematical problem was a starting point for more general ...
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Unconscious Mind
The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection and include thought processes, memories, interests, and motivations. Even though these processes exist well under the surface of conscious awareness, they are theorized to exert an effect on behavior. The term was coined by the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Christopher John Murray, ''Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850'' (Taylor & Francis, 2004: ), pp. 1001–1002. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions, and possibly also Complex (psychology), complexes, hidden phobias, and desires. The concept was popularized by the Austrian neurologist and Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalytic theory#The uncon ...
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