Mind

This Spiked interview by Tim Black with Raymond Tallis might be useful reading: This sense that our minds are not what we thought they were, that it’s our brains, and the natural-physical causal network of which they are part, that is really calling the shots has been lovingly embraced by politicos on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a development that worries Tallis: ‘That’s when [neuromania] gets dangerous rather than merely irritating – when people start invoking brain science as a guide to social policy, as a guide to understanding criminal behaviour and so on. You’re then in the same territory as Cesare Lombroso [a nineteenth-century criminologist who believed criminality was physically inherited] and other characters who have since been Read More ›

Although I may be struck by a thought, or moved by a memory, or distracted by a craving, these familiar descriptions suggest an effect with no obvious physical cause. Thoughts, memories, cravings—they are what? Crossing space and time effortlessly, the human mind deliberates, reckons, assesses, and totes things up; it reacts, registers, reflects, and responds. In some cases, like inattention or carelessness, it invites censure by doing nothing at all or doing something in the wrong way; in other cases, like vision, it acts unhesitatingly and without reflection; and in still other cases, the human mind manages both to slip itself into and stay aloof from the great causal stream that makes the real world boom, so that when it Read More ›

In “‘Man is more than an overdeveloped monkey’: Raymond Tallis explains why he has declared a war of words on the trendy ideas that underpin ‘neuromania’ and ‘Darwinitis’” ( Spiked, Tim Black writes,

There is a chill to Tallis’s lament. Whether in the form of neuromania or its close relative Darwinitis, we stand reduced, degraded. We are no longer being seen as the source of our actions; we are no longer understood as creatures of reason; we are no longer being deemed capable of making decisions rationally, let alone striving idealistically. Instead we are deemed subject to forces beyond our control, mere organic matter caught on the wind of physical laws. Of course, we may think we’re acting rationally, we may believe that we freely choose to follow a particular course of action. But that is an illusion. In the words of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s masterpiece of pseudoscience Nudge, we are not the rational Homo Economicus of Scottish Enlightenment myth, we are the non-rational Homo Sapiens of contemporary reality. Or worse still, we are what the glib misanthrope John Gray called Homo Rapiens, a ‘serv[ant] to evolutionary success, not truth’.   Read More ›

Here.

Atheist neuroscientist Raymond Tallis assails the cult of the neuron. A non-materialist psychiatrist comments, Read More ›

At the Journal of Neural Engineering (Eurekalert, 28-Jul-2011), we are advised to “Put the brakes on using your brain power”:

German researchers have used drivers’ brain signals, for the first time, to assist in braking, providing much quicker reaction times and a potential solution to the thousands of car accidents that are caused by human error.

The critical question is, why don’t drivers get the memo? Quit yakking, texting, fighting with the back seat. Just drive the bus/car. Read More ›

Or so we learn from “Out-Of-Body Experiences Linked to Neural Instability and Biases in Body Representation” (ScienceDaily, July 11, 2011) The way Mario and I told it in The The Spiritual Brain, OBEs simply show that the mind is not as tied to the brain as is commonly supposed. There is a huge move to discredit them for that reason, not because they underscore a specific religious doctrine. (They don’t, actually. Consider the case of lifelong atheist Freddie Ayer. ) These researchers are not really demonstrating much, except for one thing: If OBEs are associated with neural confusion, it’s interesting indeed, because the actual content is surprisingly lucid, and OBE’s often have a life-changing effect. – d.

… a theme on which psychology lecturers and pundits preached for decades, about how humans can easily be led to violate their moral standards if authorities tell them to? Maybe it’s so, but apparently the evidence, looked at in a fresh light, is much more equivocal. For one thing, the guard who took the led in creating the much-lectured situation was well aware he was playing a role, not “acting naturally”: Read More ›

In a recent review of Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, by MD neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, British journalist Robert McLuhan quotes Tallis on the current fad for identifying changes in brain function that are associated with thoughts and feelings as the explanation for those feelings.

There are repeated references to new disciplines with the prefix ‘neuro-‘ or ‘evolutionary’: neuro-jurisprudence, evolutionary economics, evolutionary aesthetics, neuro-theology, neuro-architecture, neuro-archeology and so on. Even philsophers – who should know better, being trained, one hopes, in scepticism – have entered the field with the discipline of ‘X-phi’, or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages, for example, have invented ‘neuro-ethics’, in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people’s intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classical dilemmas.

It is somewhat as if blushing was thought to be the cause of embarrassment. Yet … that is exactly what many such researchers believe: Read More ›