From Smithsonian:
A Neuroscientist Tells You What’s Wrong With Your Brain
Dean Burnett’s new book, Idiot Brain, explains why your mind evolved to thwart you
People should be free to write what they want, including idiocy, but these neurosciencey claims about how our brains are constantly fooled and our minds do not really grasp anything undermine the idea that adults, citizens, voters, can make valid decisions. And that has been going on for decades.
Good news for long-running corrupt rackets of every kind. Less good news for responsible government.
That said, Burnett notes, in response to a question,
Research seems to show that more intelligent people use less brain power. Why?
[Researchers were] putting people into fMRI machines and giving them intelligence tests—deductions and puzzles. It turns out the people who are better at doing the tests, who can solve them faster and more efficiently, were showing less activity in the intelligence part of the brain. Which is obviously puzzling—if that’s the intelligence part of the brain, why are people who are more intelligent not using it? The main theory now is that it means this area is more efficient. It doesn’t need to work as hard to do the same effort as one who is less intelligent because it’s better connected, it’s more integrated. More.
Or maybe the main point is that no one should take this updated phrenology seriously in the age of information.
See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away
Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
Follow UD News at Twitter!
As to
Perhaps the material brain gets in the way of the spiritual mind to a certain extent? And people who use more of their mind and less of their brain to solve a problem will ‘naturally’ do so more intelligently?
Of related note:
Also of related interest, although the girl in the following videos was written off as hopelessly retarded by everyone who saw her, eventually a breakthrough was made that gave her the ability to communicate with the outside world. A breakthough that revealed there was/is indeed a gentle intelligence, a “me”, a “soul”, a “person”, within the girl that was and still is trapped within her body. And that that “me” was not able to express herself properly to others simply because of the neurological disorder of her brain.
Also of related note: One of the more fascinating branches of Near Death Studies have been the studies of people who were born blind who have had NDE’s, who could see for the first time in their life during their NDE. This simply has no explanation within the materialistic framework, whereas, in the theistic framework, this is expected:
Moreover, if the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before. But that is not the case, the ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
Amen and well put. phrenology is all this mind stuff and thats all. intelligence in humans is more then wiring and indeed is found in the soul.
Folks,
I must repeat and slightly adjust a comment just made regarding Coyne:
I think this point needs to be hammered home again and again until it breaks through the armour-belt of psycho-social and institutional defenses. Evolutionary materialistic scientism — in all its guises — is irretrievably false, due to refuting itself.
That has to be acknowledged before we can progress.
Like unto it, it must be recognised that we are inescapably morally governed, even in our rationality; that sense of urgency to truth and right tells a long tale. So, schemes of thought that lead to amorality are inescapably absurd. For, they would tell us that so central a faculty of mind is delusional, that this taints all of our inner life.
Again, the snake attacks itself and begins to swallow itself tail-first.
If it does not wake up and stop in time, the result is fatal.
KF
Another great post, bornagain77. I value your thoroughness.
Carl Grant