Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience

he term psychodynamics was introduced in 1874 by Ernst von Brücke, the renowned German physiologist and Freud’s research supervisor at the University of Vienna. Together with Helmholtz and others, Brücke proposed that all living organisms are energy systems, regulated by the same thermodynamic laws. Since Freud was a student of Brücke and a deep admirer of Helmholtz, he adopted this view, thus laying the foundations for his metapsychology. The discovery of the Default Network and the birth of Neuropsychoanalysis, twenty years ago, facilitated a deep return to this classical conception of the brain as an energy system, and therefore a return to Freud's early ambition to establish psychology as natural science. Our current investigations of neural networks and applications of the Free Energy Principle are equally ‘psychodynamic’ in Brücke’s original sense of the term. Some branches of contemporary neuroscience still eschew subjective data and therefore exclude the brain’s most remarkable property – its selfhood – from the field, and many neuroscientists remain skeptical about psychoanalytic methods, theories, and concepts. Likewise, some psychoanalysts continue to reject any consideration of the structure and functions of the brain from their conceptualization of the mind in health and disease. Both cases seem to perpetuate a Cartesian attitude in which the mind is linked to the brain in some equivocal relationship and an attitude that detaches the brain from the body -- rather than considering it an integral part of the complex and dynamic living organism as a whole. Evidence from psychodynamic neuroscience suggests that Freudian constructs can now be realized neurobiologically. For example, Freud’s notion of primary and secondary processes is consistent with the hierarchical organization of self-organized cortical and subcortical systems, and his description of the ego is consistent with the functions of the Default Network and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. Moreover, thanks to new methods of measuring brain entropy, we can now operationalize the primary and secondary processes and therefore test predictions arising from these Freudian constructs. All of this makes it possible to deepen the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in ways and to a degree that was unimaginable in Freud's time, and even compared to twenty years ago. Many psychoanalytical hypotheses are now well integrated with contemporary neuroscience. Other Freudian and post-Freudian hypotheses about the structure and function of the mind seem ripe for the detailed and sophisticated development that modern psychodynamic neuroscience can offer. This Research Topic aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors are invited to submit papers (original research, case reports, review articles, commentaries) that deploy, review, compare or develop the methods and theories of psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors include researchers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists

Technology for knowledge innovation: A realistic pluralist scientific problem solving capability

The aim of this study is to define and describe a scientific problem solving capability to be used by the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT) in its Decision Support Domain in order to provide a scientific support service to decision makers in the South African Navy. Cognisance is given to the fact that the context within which this scientific service functions is of a complex nature, and so are some of the problems which the Decision Support Domain are required to study. For this reason a methodology developed by the proponents of complexity modelling for management and organisational science, namely to approach the problem through “Perspective Filters” is used. The aim is therefore to identify emergent patterns in the development of various disciplines commonly utilised for problem solving. Their respective developments during the twentieth century are studied with this stated aim in mind. Scientific method is seen to be a dominant perspective in this pursuit. The outcome of the study is a proposed generic, pluralist scientific problem solving process which provides a stable definition of such a service despite its constantly changing environment. This greatly enhances the robustness of the service, which makes it cost-effective to develop. The definition of pluralism which is used in this study, and which underpins the definition of the capability, differs from other current dominant views of pluralism in that it upholds the realist aim of science. Although this process is developed in the specific context of IMT, its generic nature makes it a general knowledge technology for any such a service with the aim of providing a scientific service, not limited to the context within which it is developed.Dissertation (MSc (Technology Management))--University of Pretoria, 2007.Graduate School of Technology Management (GSTM)unrestricte

Autobiography From St. Augustine to David Antin: Examining the Construction of the Self as Mutually Reflective of Cultural Developments in Science and Technology, Art, and Literary Theory.

In this study, I look at the mutually reflective changes in society and autobiography in works definitive for their various periods: Augustine\u27s The Confessions from antiquity; Rousseau\u27s The Confessions from the eighteenth century; the autobiographical writings of Gertrude Stein, from the modernist period; and, most importantly here, the focus on the development of David Antin\u27s work as representative of both postmodernism and current culture. Specifically, I consider the construction of the self in respect to art, literary theory, memory research, and science and technology. During the second half of the twentieth century, computers have permeated almost every facet of society. Transmission of information in a high-speed, electronic society is represented as fragments and collage, and Antin\u27s early disjointed autobiographies reflect this. His work, however, does not merely extend or expand upon traditional autobiographical methods; it turns sharply and breaks from long-held cultural notions of how nature and the self function as illustrated in autobiography, rejecting all previous beliefs of order and where the self may be located. As he ages, his work moves toward a radical type of order or unity, reflecting the current technology and the ongoing cultural desire for order. This desire is reinforced by the growing interest in neural networks, quantum physics, and chaos theory, all of which promote the premise that underlying patterns or recursions exist throughout various levels of a highly interconnected system. By finding the recursion, we allow the order of the system to emerge. However, because patterns may not be immediately observable when a system is in a particular stage of change or scale of measurement, a system often is mistakenly considered random or without order. Essential to finding the pattern or order of the system is increasing the scale used to measure the system until period doubling, repetition, or a strange attractor is established. Similarly, Antin believes that no definitive view of the self can be constructed in a limited, single text called an autobiography. Instead, numerous works spanning a vast time period are necessary to allow patterns that create sense and coherency to emerge, thus defining the self

Brain and Human Body Modeling 2020

​This open access book describes modern applications of computational human modeling in an effort to advance neurology, cancer treatment, and radio-frequency studies including regulatory, safety, and wireless communication fields. Readers working on any application that may expose human subjects to electromagnetic radiation will benefit from this book’s coverage of the latest models and techniques available to assess a given technology’s safety and efficacy in a timely and efficient manner. Describes computational human body phantom construction and application; Explains new practices in computational human body modeling for electromagnetic safety and exposure evaluations; Includes a survey of modern applications for which computational human phantoms are critical

From the body to language: life and mind in literature and film from the Modernist Era to the present

My dissertation focuses on the ways in which twentieth-century literature intersects with theories of living systems and biosemiotics, the biological capacity for meaning making. My critical readings highlight the process of subjective emergence in Beckett, the drawing out of a world in Woolf, a dynamic, embodied socio-political subjectivity and resistance in Wright and Ellison, and the parallel emergence of art and life in the films of David Lynch. These works present a step-by-step reading that grounds subjectivity in biological processes and demonstrate that an understanding of the coemergence of subject and world, and by extension meaning-making, is a wholly embodied phenomenon. Reading with a focus on the biological foundations of meaningmaking supplemented by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze at once dissolves the partition between the individual and the objective world so often identified in the literature as well as mobilizes these texts in order to draw out a theory of biosemiotics that is as much aesthetic as it is scientific.Includes bibliographical references

Liquid notations:A common language of transitions

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes’ "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina’s graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away

Feedback control tames disorder in attractor neural networks

It is shown that a disordered neural network like the Hopfield model tends toward becoming more ordered in presence of a backreaction coming from the environmen