Modern brain imaging studies show that very often they can. And, with help from new technology, they can answer us too. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor explains.
Tag: human brain
Michael Egnor: If your brain were cut in half, would you still be one person?
Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning split-brain research convinced him that the mind and free will are real.
Michael Egnor:Why the human mind is the opposite of a computer
Egnor: Mental activity always has meaning—every thought is about something. Computation always lacks meaning in itself. A word processing program doesn’t care about the opinion that you’re expressing when you use it.
The “connectome” means we may never “understand” the brain
In the sense of “There. That’s that.” It’s just too big. Machine learning might help but machines don’t explain their decisions very well. If the brain is immensely complex, it may elude complete understanding in detail. Deep Learning may survey it but that won’t convey understanding to us. We may need to look at more comprehensive ways of knowing
Michael Egnor: Why the mind cannot just emerge from the brain
Egnor: Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter. So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.
The scientific revolution depended in part on disproven theories
Many true tales of science are not the subjects of lectern oratory. Here’s one: brain localization. How did the idea develop? Originally via phrenology.
Researchers: We process information from sight outside our visual cortex
At Mind Matters News: A major consequence of the advance of modern neuroscience is that we now “know” so much less than we used to. But what we do know points us in promising research directions.
Did you know that much of the diversity of the human brain results from epigenetics
Not from Darwinism? A technique to reveal cells’ epigenetic features is detailed
Parasites as “invisible designers” of the human brain
Apparently, design is okay if microbes do it: It seems so obvious that someone should have thought of it decades ago: Since parasites have plagued eukaryotic life for millions of years, their prevalence likely affected evolution. Psychologist Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico is not the first researcher to suggest that the Read More…
J.P. Moreland on the reality of the mind tested by psychiatric disorder
Moreland: We are a unity of body, mind, spirit, emotions, and will and they all affect one another. And so, if my brain is damaged and it’s not producing the kinds of chemicals that it needs to help me have a good mood, then medication feels like oiling the engine or vitamins for your brain.
Researchers: Bonobos eating swamp greens help explain human brain development
Given how little substance there is to all this, they could at least have included some cute bonobo pix.
How the human brain works is actually quite controversial
If the AI boosters really knew how the human brain functions, they’d be getting the Nobel for Medicine instead of some geek prize.
At Inference Review: Human language is much more than a system of signals
University of maryland linguist: The formal structures of linguistics and neurophysiology are disjoint, a point emphasized by Poeppel and David Embick in a widely cited study. There is an incommensurability between theories of the brain and theories of the mind…
Human brains have grown smaller since the Stone Age
The trouble is, it’s not clear what the impact of the size of a human brain really is, vs. its organization. Then there’s the question of what opportunities a brain has to develop and what type of difference that makes.
Researchers: Complex tools don’t show ancient humans were smart
Experience from recorded history is clearly of humans getting just such ideas as the authors claim to be impossible in remote antiquity — and to make their point, they use modern students! Most likely, the felt need to identify a subhuman state of mind lies behind such a claim. Unlike the claim that the Neanderthals never produced art, this one can’t just be exploded. It can never be demonstrated either but in the present environment, that doesn’t matter. If the claim is made enough times, it will become orthodoxy.