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Neuroscience

Mirror neurons: Solving a problem that doesn’t exist?

There is a large range of questions that mechanism and reductionism not only don't answer but where they actually create just these sorts of meaningless problems. In this case, the resolution is quite simple: Perception is a form of action - it is a mental action - the act of perceiving. Read More ›

Atheist doctor: “Darwinitis” and “neuromania” are dangerous, rather than merely irritating

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 ›

Out of body experiences as “neural confusion”

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.

Mind: Put “neuro” in front of an abstract discipline and poof! – it becomes nonsense

Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

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 ›

Extrapolation studies discover single gene that creates human brain

normal vs. microcephalic brain/Yale School of Medicine

In “Mutations in Single Gene May Have Shaped Human Cerebral Cortex” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 28, 2011), we encounter a surprising claim:

The size and shape of the human cerebral cortex, an evolutionary marvel responsible for everything from Shakespeare’s poetry to the atomic bomb, are largely influenced by mutations in a single gene, according to a team of researchers led by the Yale School of Medicine and three other universities. Read More ›

Design: A road wreck on the way to complete understanding of (control of) the brain?

Jonah crab/Fisheries and Oceans Canada

In “Robustness and fault tolerance make brains harder to study,” Shyam Srinivasan and Charles F Stevens (BMC Biology 2011, 9:46 | doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-46) explain the impediments to complete understanding of what is going on in a brain, examining a recent study of a crab neural network (Jomah crab or Cancer borrealis):

Abstract: Brains increase the survival value of organisms by being robust and fault tolerant. That is, brain circuits continue to operate as the organism needs, even when the circuit properties are significantly perturbed. Kispersky and colleagues, in a recent paper in Neural Systems & Circuits, have found that Granger Causality analysis, an important method used to infer circuit connections from the behavior of neurons within the circuit, is defeated by the mechanisms that give rise to this robustness and fault tolerance.

Nonmaterialist neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity – brains are always reorganizing themselves.

The authors conclude, Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscience: “You can’t fire your brain but you can retrain it.”

Non-materialist neuroscience: “You can’t fire your brain but you can retrain it.” Here’s an interview with a non-materialist neuroscientist, Jeffrey Schwartz, who is friendly to ID covers what’s wrong with materialism in neuroscience, and introduces a non-materialist approach to the treatment of phobias, compulsions, and addictions, as used in his new book, You arenot your brain.: For the past six years, Schwartz has worked with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by bad brain wiring. Just like with the compulsions of OCD patients, they discovered that bad habits, social anxieties, self-deprecating thoughts, and compulsive overindulgence are all rooted in overactive brain circuits. The key to making Read More ›

Can people with cognitive problems have spiritual lives?

In “A Testimony of Grace and the Plasticity of the Brain” (Trinity International University, July 2, 2011), Heather Zeiger reflects on one striking case: We never know how God is working in someone’s life, even as they are in the twilight of their lives or in a coma or navigating through the fog of Alzheimer’s. We know so little about how the brain actually works, and to say that someone is as good as dead when he or she is in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s or in a coma is short-sighted. There are still many mysteries about the mind/brain connection and just how plastic the brain is. The mind makes up its mysteries as it goes along, and the brain Read More ›

Here’s a first: A reviewer skeptical of airhead neuroscience claims

The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good

That’s Adam Hanft on the recent The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden, who writes at Barnes & Noble Reviews (June 27, 2011):

Disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral psychology to evolutionary biology have created a new cranial transparency that’s unleashed a gush of books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman; Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein; and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic and Work and at Home by Dan Ariely. (I interviewed Dan about his book for the Barnes & Noble Review.)David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, and the author of The Accidental Mind, adds to this emerging, solipsistic genre with The Compass of Pleasure, a book that focuses entirely on how our brains pursue and process pleasure.

That one word “solipsistic” is  a bullet through the forehead of a writer. More telling: Read More ›

How do people understand algebra if they never encounter it?

File:Image-Al-Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa-l-muqābala.jpg
early Arabic treatise on algebra, 8th c AD

In “Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds” (Wired Science, May 24, 2011) , Bruce Bower reflects on the fact that research among peoples who do not even count suggests that abstract geometric principles are probably innate in humans:

If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates abstract notions about phenomena such as infinite surfaces and why this system doesn’t fully kick in until age 7. If geometry depends on years of spatial learning, it’s not known how people transform real-world experience into abstract geometric concepts — such as lines that extend forever or perfect right angles — that a forest dweller never encounters in the natural world.

As always, we needn’t wait long for a Darwin answer: Read More ›

Templeton prize-winning Darwinist Francisco Ayala offers to explain, “Am I a Monkey?”

Am I a Monkey?: Six Big Questions about Evolution
Given the use of the "banana" in certain current health contexts, was it a wise cover choice?

Francisco Ayala, the 2010 Templeton winner known for the view that intelligent design is blasphemy and an “atrocity”*, has a new book out, Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Here’s an excerpt.

Defending the view that you are something along the same lines as a monkey but not to worry, he writes, curiously,

Those things that count most remain shrouded in mystery: How physical phenomena become mental experiences (the feelings and sensations called “qualia” by philosophers, that contribute the elements of consciousness) and how out of the diversity of these experiences emerges the mind, a reality with unitary properties such as free will and the awareness of the self that persist throughout an individual’s life. (P. 11)Ayala sounds here as if he believes the mind exists, but he goes on to say Read More ›

Is human intelligence “close to its evolutionary limit”?

1950s sci fi "Attack of the Brain Monster" figurine gives a sense of the pop culture view. (For price and availability, click the image.)

At Scientific American, Douglas Fox reports on “The Limits of Intelligence,” where  we learn that “The laws of physics may well prevent the human brain from evolving into an ever more powerful thinking machine” (June 14, 2011):

Summary

Human intelligence may be close to its evolutionary limit. Various lines of research suggest that most of the tweaks that could make us smarter would hit limits set by the laws of physics. Read More ›