Operational architectonics

 

Fingelkurts, Andrew A, Fingelkurts, A. A., & Neves, C. F. H. (2013). Consciousness as a phenomenon in the operational architectonics of brain organization: Criticality and self-organization considerations. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 55, 13–31. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2013.02.007 (p. 12)

More complex physical operations of the brain emerge from the collective activity of many neurons – neuronal assembly. It is well established, that single neurons (highly distributed along the cortex) can quickly become associated (or dis-associated) by synchronization of their activity and giving rise to functional transient assemblies (Kogan and Choraian, 1977; von der Malsburg, 1999). Anatomical connections are not necessarily important prerequisite for such synchronization; it is rather a stimulus (external – physical or internal – mental) and/or a task that is important and is the causal source of synchrony (see Ryder and Favorov, 2001). Each of these functional assemblies maintains discrete complex brain operations some of which may have already mental/subjective ontology in addition to their neurophysiological ontology (Tabl. 1): They process different attributes of object or environmental scene, thus being simple cognitive operations (Valera et al., 2001; Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2003). The joint functionally connected activity of many neuronal assemblies produces already complex cognitive/mental operations3 (Tabl. 1; see also McIntosh, 1999, 2000). Each neuronal assembly makes a specific contribution to the performance of complex cognitive operation, and the contribution is determined by the position which a particular neural assembly occupies within the richly connected, parallel, and distributed brain system (see Petersen and Fiez, 1993). The temporal synchronization of many operations of local neuronal assemblies together (Operational Synchrony, OS) gives rise to a new level of brain abstractness – metastable4 brain states (for the review, see Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2004). It is suggested that these metastable brain states or functional Operational Modules (OM), as we name them, underlie complex brain functions and/or mind complex operations (cognitive percepts and mental states that have representational nature)5. The sequence of these metastable OMs, thus, represents6 the stream of thoughts (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001). It is only at this level of integration we may hope relate brain and mind through functional isomorphism principle (see Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2004).

Fingelkurts, A. A, & Fingelkurts, A. A. (2005). Mapping of the brain operational architectonics. Authors' draft, p. 4.