How the Brain Becomes the Mind: Can Thermodynamics Explain the Emergence and Nature of Emotions?

The neural systems' electric activities are fundamental for the phenomenology of consciousness. Sensory perception triggers an information/energy exchange with the environment, but the brain's recurrent activations maintain a resting state with constant parameters. Therefore, perception forms a closed thermodynamic cycle.

The thermodynamic brain and the evolution of intellect: the role of mental energy.

The living state is low entropy, highly complex organization, yet it is part of the energy cycle of the environment. Due to the recurring presence of the resting state, stimulus and its response form a thermodynamic cycle of perception that can be modeled by the Carnot engine. The endothermic reversed Carnot engine relies on energy from the environment to increase entropy (i.

Relationships between short and fast brain timescales.

Brain electric activity exhibits two important features: oscillations with different timescales, characterized by diverse functional and psychological outcomes, and a temporal power law distribution. In order to further investigate the relationships between low- and high- frequency spikes in the brain, we used a variant of the Borsuk-Ulam theorem which states that, when we assess the nervous activity as embedded in a sphere equipped with a fractal dimension, we achieve two antipodal points with similar features (the slow and fast, scale-free oscillations). We demonstrate that slow and fast nervous oscillations mirror each other over time via a sinusoid relationship and provide, through the Bloch theorem from solid-state physics, the possible equation which links the two timescale activities.