**5. Pursuing top-down strategy in autonomy and goal-directed behavior**

Viewed from the dynamic aspect of function, the order of causal priority is reversed where the chief influences underlying organization and performance are systemic and teleological. Lesions of higher-order neural functions, like memory, appear thereby as dysfunctional properties of global representations. Risk alleles, in this reading, and similar reductive approaches can be expected to offer little insight into cognitive operation at the level of neural constructs likely to be impaired in cognitive diseases. Investigations into cognition, instead, seem better directed when exploring the operation of extended networks that function as components of larger systemic or even global operations. By extension, lesions that may fruitfully reveal aspects of large-scale operation are more likely to involve systemic effects that are more closely apposed to global processes mediating organismal tasking.

Models that define the source of this tasking, accordingly, are likely to be helpful for identifying the sorts of lesions that can be usefully exploited for cognitive study. Key features underwriting global cognition notably include those preserving existential independence and the integration of the organism as a whole, that is, those providing for autonomous existence [28]. Understood as a capacity, autonomy implicates dispositional qualities of self-recognition and self-directedness; that is, it invokes self-constructs that elicit higher order operations, which, accordingly, can be disrupted by cognitive disease. As one such higher order operation, for instance, memory is directly elicited by such self constructs in order to facilitate autonomy. Lesions of higher-order capacities like memory, which are evoked by global constructs, may thus be usefully exploited for their properties and manner of elicitation [29, 30].

Emerging from the global operation of the brain, constructs like the self are clearly extraordinarily complex and in many respects seem less tangible than material constituents of reductive and low-level functions. Nonetheless, their organismal reality is clearly evident in manifestations of behavioral activity. For example, the association between a representation of the whole individual by his body and its

**9**

*Introductory Chapter: Beyond Risk Alleles - Invoking Cognitive Lesions in Top-Down Strategic…*

physical realization in the neural activity of the brain, that is, as a global brain state, is consistently observed in varied perceptual realizations of the self. And in another example the failure of infants in the A not B task to move toward a goal where last seen is interpreted as a failure in motor planning due to maturational insufficiency in mechanisms needed to situate the motor plan that are associated with representing the self as the whole body [31]. These examples suggest that top down aproaches can offer strategic alternatives that more readily yield insight into global brain

Indeed, the modern concept of the neural representation of the self, for example,

evoked in circumstances where the body is dynamically engaged in intentional actions, is an increasingly well-understood global operation that has emerged from several experimental legacies traced to the notion of the motor image [24]. The image is now known to involve a covert action undertaken only mentally and as a simulation of a non-executed action, with current evidence suggesting that there is a close correspondence between goal-directed information and self-representation [32]. Mechanisms that are likely to shape self-content can therefore be expected to include, for example, cells, circuits, or processes that bear desires and intentions of the author, which are likely to be contained in egocentric networks [33], and which encode agent specific content about an experience. These have been sited to specific domains of the hippocampus, such as the lateral entorhinal cortex where they appear to be influenced by memory recall [34] such as the lateral entorhinal cortex, and to the angular gyrus of the parietal cortex, a region that has been previously identified with self- and bodily representation. Indeed, goal-directed information contained in these networks can be expected to uniquely modify the self-representation by relating the individual to an intended terminus via information that is goal specific.

**6. Reconsidering lesions: AD and KS in top-down strategic analysis**

The promise of top-down analysis predicts that global organization is selectively impaired at intermediate and even higher levels of brain function, such as those now being investigated through the motor plan. Indeed, disturbances in the sense of self that mark schizophrenia, for example, in prodromal and acute stages, have led to the recognition of the loss of self as a core symptom [35] where both body ownershipa nd sense of agency are impacted [36]. Current evidence on how representational content of the self may be affected and how this may be linked to the body suggest, in fact, that it is mediated through the motor plan, which thereby offers a strategic investigative tool. Insight into the neural features that these results may implicate, for example, can be inferred from misattribution errors that are experimentally evoked in normal individuals and that appear to be pathologically

By extension, memory losses in AD and KS are in their broad features consistent with functional losses that have organismal bearing and that can be revealed through such top-down analysis. Accordingly, this volume represents an effort to forward an argument for global strategies that can be pursued in cognitive etiopathologies. It is a proposal that emerges from the intractability of reductive study faced with the incredible complexity of operation that is intrinsic to cognition. While lacking in the tangible manifestations that have come to mark genetic and molecular study, the reality of global operation is nonetheless manifestly evident. Moreover, it is a reality for which new investigative tools are emerging from research studies, such as the motor plan. Revelation of distinct functional differences in memory loss in diseases like AD and KS, therefore, can be expected to

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85415*

operations that are manifested at organismal scales.

exacerbated in schizophrenic individuals [37].

further options for global, top-down study.

#### *Introductory Chapter: Beyond Risk Alleles - Invoking Cognitive Lesions in Top-Down Strategic… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85415*

physical realization in the neural activity of the brain, that is, as a global brain state, is consistently observed in varied perceptual realizations of the self. And in another example the failure of infants in the A not B task to move toward a goal where last seen is interpreted as a failure in motor planning due to maturational insufficiency in mechanisms needed to situate the motor plan that are associated with representing the self as the whole body [31]. These examples suggest that top down aproaches can offer strategic alternatives that more readily yield insight into global brain operations that are manifested at organismal scales.

Indeed, the modern concept of the neural representation of the self, for example, evoked in circumstances where the body is dynamically engaged in intentional actions, is an increasingly well-understood global operation that has emerged from several experimental legacies traced to the notion of the motor image [24]. The image is now known to involve a covert action undertaken only mentally and as a simulation of a non-executed action, with current evidence suggesting that there is a close correspondence between goal-directed information and self-representation [32]. Mechanisms that are likely to shape self-content can therefore be expected to include, for example, cells, circuits, or processes that bear desires and intentions of the author, which are likely to be contained in egocentric networks [33], and which encode agent specific content about an experience. These have been sited to specific domains of the hippocampus, such as the lateral entorhinal cortex where they appear to be influenced by memory recall [34] such as the lateral entorhinal cortex, and to the angular gyrus of the parietal cortex, a region that has been previously identified with self- and bodily representation. Indeed, goal-directed information contained in these networks can be expected to uniquely modify the self-representation by relating the individual to an intended terminus via information that is goal specific.
