Biology buffs: Explain "conditioning" to me

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2007-10-18 08:10pm

Justforfun000 wrote:So getting to the nitty gritty...how does it get imbedded in the genome? Explain best as you can for a laymen's sake, what is the "how" behind instinct and behaviour? Is there a way to actually trace this or is it just simply THERE and the explanation is just beyond us?

If you want an instinctive behavior, the answer is neural processing. When you process information your respond to it in different ways that are determined in this by the structure of your brain. The structure of your brain is determined by regulatory pathways during development. These regulatory pathways are ultimately controlled by genes. It depends on what specific stimulus you are looking at. Smell is easy, it is a simple chemical stimulus that is turned either on or off and is processed as pleasurable or aversive depending on how it gets routed. With more complex stimuli there are a number of ways that it could work, and these are only being investigated recently (in fact we have only had the ability to start investigating them recently)

Justforfun000 · Post by **Justforfun000** » 2007-10-18 08:16pm

Aly Wrote:

If you want an instinctive behavior, the answer is neural processing. When you process information your respond to it in different ways that are determined in this by the structure of your brain. The structure of your brain is determined by regulatory pathways during development.

Ok, so what is the mechanism that changes the pathway when the brain is developing to include new threat information such as the sound of a swarm? Is this something that can be answered at this time?

Smell is easy, it is a simple chemical stimulus that is turned either on or off and is processed as pleasurable or aversive depending on how it gets routed. With more complex stimuli there are a number of ways that it could work, and these are only being investigated recently (in fact we have only had the ability to start investigating them recently)

Can you elaborate on this? What is it they are doing now that enables them to delve into this...

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2007-10-18 08:21pm

Ok, so what is the mechanism that changes the pathway when the brain is developing to include new threat information such as the sound of a swarm? Is this something that can be answered at this time?

Various regulatory genes... and that is about as far as we know. We know in many cases what parts of the brain process what, but we dont know how it processes them which makes it really really hard to know the mechanism beyond "These gene seems to cause this outcome and this part of the brain is involved"

Can you elaborate on this? What is it they are doing now that enables them to delve into this...

Just technological advances really. The ability to sequence entire genomes, etc