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“Simulation-based research is an inevitability,” he declared in Bern. “If I get stopped from doing this, it's going to happen. It has happened already in many areas of science. And it is going to happen in life science.”
The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we are that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.
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What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.
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We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things).
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For 23 years Rom Houben was imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.
Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.
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Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally.
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The Belgian former engineering student, who speaks four languages, said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. He told doctors he had "travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether". Sometimes, he said, "I was only my consciousness and nothing else".
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The best that neuroscience can do is to show that behavior X is neurally correlated with activity in brain structure Y.
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* Neuroscience cannot actually establish the truth of determinism. At best, that’s an area of competence of physics.
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* Libet’s classical experiments have done close to zero to show that we do not make conscious decisions. Indeed, good neurobiological evidence shows that conscious deliberation plays a primary role in some of our decision making processes.
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John Maynard Keynes thought that most economic decision-making occurs in ambiguous situations in which probabilities are not known. He concluded that much of our business cycle is driven by fluctuations in “animal spirits,” something in the mind – and not understood by economists.
Of course, the problem with economics is that there are often as many interpretations of any crisis as there are economists. An economy is a remarkably complex structure, and fathoming it depends on understanding its laws, regulations, business practices and customs, and balance sheets, among many other details.
Yet it is likely that one day we will know much more about how economies work – or fail to work – by understanding better the physical structures that underlie brain functioning. Those structures – networks of neurons that communicate with each other via axons and dendrites – underlie the familiar analogy of the brain to a computer – networks of transistors that communicate with each other via electric wires. The economy is the next analogy: a network of people who communicate with each other via electronic and other connections.
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Scholars can become so trapped in their methods – in the language and assumptions of the accepted approach to their discipline – that their research becomes repetitive or trivial.
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Then something exciting comes along from someone who was never involved with these methods – some new idea that attracts young scholars and a few iconoclastic old scholars, who are willing to learn a different science and its different research methods.
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The human brain is the most complex object we know. To describe it, thinkers and writers quite understandably reach for the most complicated thing they can imagine. Four centuries ago the brain was considered a particularly fiendish plumbing problem; later it turned into a steam engine; then a telegraph office. Now it's "like the internet". The brain is no more a computer network than it is a heating system. Proper neuroscientists know this. The baseless assumption that the brain is some sort of meat computer has combined oddly with the IT revolution, giving many otherwise rational people the idea that our computers will someday soon acquire consciousness. If mere computational power were enough, of course, then any complex system would be conscious. The weather would be conscious. The oceans would think as they turned.
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in our desire to think great things about our IT "cloud", we're deliberately oversimplifying ourselves. We're hammering ourselves into ridiculously reductive boxes. In our desire to be part of something greater, we're making ourselves small.
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what reductionism is, and why a science that simply anatomises phenomena into smaller and smaller parts misses a vast portion of scientifically explorable reality.
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While neuroscience may well have very interesting things to say about how brains go about making decisions and producing different interpretations, though, it does not follow that the knowledge thus produced replaces humanistic knowledge. In fact, the only way we can understand this debate is by using humanist methodology — from reading historical and literary texts to interpreting them to using them in the form of an argument
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science would be hard to reconcile with historical explanation, the human “sciences,” the humanities, theology and in our own interior psychological monologs. These undertakings trade on a universal, culturally inherited “understanding” that interprets human affairs via narratives that “make sense” of what we do. Interpretation is supposed to explain events, usually in motivations that participants themselves recognize, sometimes by uncovering meanings the participants don’t themselves appreciate.
Natural science deals only in momentum and force, elements and compounds, genes and fitness, neurotransmitters and synapses. These things are not enough to give us what introspection tells us we have: meaningful thoughts about ourselves and the world that bring about our actions. Philosophers since Descartes have agreed with introspection, and they have provided fiendishly clever arguments for the same conclusion. These arguments ruled science out of the business of explaining our actions because it cannot take thoughts seriously as causes of anything.
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should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like “addiction” and “fix” aren’t as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is “love.”
Recent converging studies are showing that liberals tend to have a larger and/or more active anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC—useful in detecting and judging conflict and error—and conservatives are more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, where the development and storage of emotional memories takes place. More than one study has shown these same results, which is why I felt it was worth investigating.
A few questions to keep in mind: If these differences do legitimately exist, how can—or better yet—how should we use this knowledge? How can insight gained from research of this kind prove helpful in the quest for more effective communication across party lines? Can empathy and understanding of personality differences, without judgments or stereotyping, aid in the productivity of political debates around topics such as climate change or evolution?
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some of these correlations between brain function/anatomy and specific political party are consistent across multiple studies, of varying design and methodology, over years of research. That tells me something. The exact analysis or interpretation of the individual studies might not be 100% correct as stated in those papers, but there is obviously a pattern, and that’s what I’m most interested in. In cases like these I tend to look more at the data and pay less attention to the analyses, drawing my own conclusions from the data across all the studies. One paper may not have all the answers, but I think there is enough mounting evidence in the stack of literature that we can start (carefully) drawing some conclusions.
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liberalism correlated with greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, or the ACC, while the Kanai study found that liberalism correlated with increased gray matter volume or a larger ACC, as shown in MRI scans. Additionally, the Kanai study found that conservatism was correlated with increased volume of the right amygdala.
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Early in any scientific enterprise, it is best to forge ahead and not get bogged down by semantic distinctions. But “forging ahead” is a concept alien to philosophers, even those as distinguished as McGinn. To a philosopher who demanded that he define consciousness before studying it scientifically, Francis Crick once responded, “My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around the table with a bunch of philosophers saying ‘let us define life first.’ We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix.” In the sciences, definitions often follow, rather than precede, conceptual advances.
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Although one can’t be sure, there is no reason to doubt that this strategy will be equally successful in unraveling such neurological questions as the nature of metaphor, body image, self awareness, free will, or qualia—the felt properties of our mental states. Phantom limbs and out-of-body experiences must surely tell us something about how the brain constructs body image. Similarly, the phenomenon of “blindsight” (in which patients with no perceptual awareness nonetheless predict certain properties of visual stimuli at levels well above chance) seems to promise insights about qualia (qualitative subjective experiences, like seeing red) and related philosophical problems.
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The main thesis of my book is that the fortuitous coemergence of some of these abilities in evolution—and the equally fortuitous interactions between them—culminated in human uniqueness as it is generally understood. I agree that this concept is tainted with human chauvinism (after all giraffes are unique in having a long neck) but so what? So long as our ideas and findings lead to new insights, the terminology doesn’t matter.
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Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Californian law banning the sale of violent videogames to children was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free speech.
However, the ruling wasn't unanimous. Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion. Unfortunately, it contains a whopping misuse of neuroscience.
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Breyer says (on page 13 of his bit)
Cutting-edge neuroscience has shown that “virtual violence in video game playing results in those neural patterns that are considered characteristic for aggressive cognition and behavior.”
He then cites this fMRI study from 2006. It's from the same group as this one I wrote about recently. -
does this study show that playing violent games causes aggressive brain activity? Not exactly. By which I mean "no".
They scanned 13 young men playing a shooter game. The main finding was that during "violent" moments of the game, activity in the rostral ACC and the amygdala activity falls - 1 more annotation(s)...
The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation. It is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression.
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The authors offer the hypothesis that the greater hippocampal atrophy in selected religious groups might be related to stress. They argue that some individuals in the religious minority, or those who struggle with their beliefs, experience higher levels of stress. This causes a release of stress hormones that are known to depress the volume of the hippocampus over time. This might also explain the fact that both non-religious as well as some religious individuals have smaller hippocampal volumes.
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This is an interesting hypothesis. Many studies have shown positive effects of religion and spirituality on mental health, but there are also plenty of examples of negative impacts. There is evidence that members of religious groups who are persecuted or in the minority might have markedly greater stress and anxiety as they try to navigate their own society. Other times, a person might perceive God to be punishing them and therefore have significant stress in the face of their religious struggle. Others experience religious struggle because of conflicting ideas with their religious tradition or their family.
Over the past decade, an army of psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists has been busy trying to uncover the neural “clockwork” that underlies human morality. They have started to trace the evolutionary origins of pro-social sentiments such as empathy, and have begun to uncover the genes that dispose some individuals to senseless violence and others to acts of altruism, and the pathways in our brain that shape our ethical decisions. And to understand how something works is also to begin to see ways to modify and even control it.
Indeed, scientists have not only identified some of the brain pathways that shape our ethical decisions, but also chemical substances that modulate this neural activity.
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study has shown that the anti-depressant Citalopram can change the responses of individuals to hypothetical moral dilemma scenarios. Individuals given the drug were less willing to sacrifice an individual to save the lives of several others. Another series of studies has shown that when the hormone oxytocin is administered via nasal spray, it increases trusting and cooperative behavior within social groups, but also decreases cooperation with those perceived as outsiders. Neuroscientists have even magnetically “zapped” carefully targeted areas of people’s brains to influence their moral judgments in surprising ways – for example, making it easier for them to lie.
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the research is advancing fast, and it is almost certain to suggest new ways to reshape our moral intuitions, sentiments, and motivations.
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Damasio has a new book coming out this week, and it’s his most ambitious work yet. In Self Comes To Mind, Damasio seeks to explain how the primordial elements of the mind – all these body maps and recursive loops – get transformed into conscious experience, into that metaphysical figment we call the self. It’s a lucid and important work, and scrambles all the conventional categories of the brain. It turns out that the “higher” parts of the cortex are inseparable from the “lower” parts, and that “you” – the “you” reading these words – emerge in large part from the brain stem, the nub of tissue just above the spinal cord. We arise, in other words, from the place were brain and body meet, where flesh and feeling are emulsified together
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On average, people have to turn over about 50 cards before they began to draw solely from the profitable decks. Logic is slow.
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What the scientists found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hands of the experimental subjects got “nervous” whenever they reached for the negative decks. Although the subjects still had little inkling of which card piles were the most lucrative, their emotions had developed an accurate sense of fear. They knew which decks were dangerous. In other words, their feelings figured out the game first – the hand was leading the brain.
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Homeostasis is the whole collection of systems and strategies which allow a living organism to regulate life to its best advantage. By and large, even though humans are very complicated, if you leave things alone you'll be fine; if you respond to the commands homeostasis is giving you, you will be able to stay in check.
However, because the world we live in is so complex, you need to introduce another layer of regulation. That's what social networks and culture provide. And the beautiful thing is that this socio-cultural homeostasis has exactly the same role as basic homeostasis: regulating life so we can survive, and do so with a modicum of well-being. That's why, for example, people have managed throughout history to be under despotic regimes and emerge on the other side with better regimes. That's happening right now, even as we speak.
Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, is best known for his pioneering work on how the brain generates emotion and how emotion, in turn, helps people make decisions. His books "Descartes' Error" and "Looking for Spinoza" were international bestsellers. His latest work, "Self Comes to Mind," extends his theories and adds new facts to the ever-vexing question of consciousness — what it is, why it evolved and how it contributes to human culture.
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What is consciousness?
It's this ability that we have to look out on the world and grasp it. It is a way evolution found to increase our effectiveness in dealing with life and its struggles.
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understand the relationship between the mind and an organism. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
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HAL HINKLE: Oliver, that completes the first emotional scan. I would like to hear how that was for you.
OLIVER SACKS: The Bach sort of blew me away, especially that point where the soprano came in and there was a wonderful harmonic modulation. But the Beethoven I'm afraid sort of left me flat.
NARRATOR: The results of the scan, amazingly, seem to confirm his feelings.
JOY HIRSCH (Columbia University Medical Center): What you can see just in an immediate overview here is that this is your Bach brain and this is your Beethoven brain.
OLIVER SACKS: Sorry, Ludwig.
JOY HIRSCH: Yeah, sorry Ludwig. There's not much there.
NARRATOR: Bach clearly excited much of his brain, including the many regions essential to appreciating the complexity of music. But unlike Beethoven, Bach activated the amygdala, which is vital to processing emotions.
JOY HIRSCH: Here we see large activity associated with the right amygdala when you're listening to Bach. There is none of that when you're listening this very comparable piece in Beethoven.
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NARRATOR: But during another part of the test, Dr. Sacks was unable to distinguish Bach from Beethoven.
HAL HINKLE: Ah, again, we'd like to hear what your response was to it.
OLIVER SACKS: Well, I'm sort of confused. I could hardly differentiate Bach from Beethoven and neither seemed to move me very much.
NARRATOR: But his brain tells a different story.
HAL HINKLE: The remarkable finding for you was even when you might have thought it was Beethoven...
OLIVER SACKS: Even when I was confused...
HAL HINKLE: Your brain can tell Bach from Beethoven.
NARRATOR: Dr. Sacks clearly favors Bach over Beethoven. Even when he couldn't tell them apart, the brain scan on the left still shows increased activity. So, in fact, his brain recognizes the difference and makes its preference clear.
Patricia S. Churchland, the philosopher and neuroscientist, is sitting at a cafe on the Upper West Side, explaining the vacuousness, as she sees it, of a vast swath of contemporary moral philosophy. "I have long been interested in the origins of values," she says, the day after lecturing on that topic at the nearby American Museum of Natural History. "But I would read contemporary ethicists and just feel very unsatisfied. It was like I couldn't see how to tether any of it to the hard and fast. I couldn't see how it had anything to do with evolutionary biology, which it has to do, and I couldn't see how to attach it to the brain."
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While Churchland's intellectual opponents over the years have suggested that you can understand the "software" of thinking, independently of the "hardware"—the brain structure and neuronal firings—that produced it, she has responded that this metaphor doesn't work with the brain: Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be "neurophilosophy."
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the story she tells about morality is, as you'd expect, heavily biological, emphasizing the role of the peptide oxytocin, as well as related neurochemicals.
Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group. (Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)
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