Bow Roundabout

The People that Protest

   

Stalking

Brass Pipe

What a shame

V. S. Ramachandran is such a rockstar

...of neuroscience that is. I am writing an article on his work on phantom limbs and mirror neurons for QM Sci magazine.

 

His TED talk on "The Neurons that shaped Civilisation"

Where is my Mind?

We are a long way from understanding the how the mind and the brain are related. The brain weighs just less than 1.5kg, contains about 100 billion neurons, and each neuron forms between 500 and 2,000 connections. So how does this mass of jelly generate thought?

Discussion on how thought arises can be traced as far back as Aristotle, and several theories have been formed to answer the question since, but none have yet been proved. Although there have been advancements in techniques for studying the brain, the validity of them for studying higher cognition is under dispute. While this question is a branch of philosophical psychology, considering the problem from a neuroscience perspective can shed light on the old problem. The "Mind- Body" problem is significant for every individual, as it asks how we came to have reasoning and emotions beyond that of other animals, and could define to what degree our introspections are a subjective view of the world. Some of the theories on the Mind-Body problem: 

Monism
The brain creates the mind in an absolute sense.
Dualism
Mind and brain matter are two completely different things.
Substance Dualism
Takes dualism a step further in stating the mind and brain are fundamentally different things such that the mind does not occupy the same physical space as the brain.
Property dualism
Even if the mind comes from the brain, the mind and subjective experience has properties that cannot be explained by the brain.

Substance Dualism, does not account for the Cartesian gap, which asks how an immaterial mind can affect the physical matter of the brain.  

The structure of the brain can be described on various levels of organisation: molecules, synapses, neurones, networks, maps, systems, central nervous system. In the past, psychology was studied by working backwards from behaviour, without reference to the inner mental states; a approach pioneered by B. F. Skinner. Reductionism is a way of examining systems from macro to micro levels, from behaviour right down to molecules. Only by conducting research at all levels and allowing the findings of each to influence the others will understanding of how the brain works be achieved (Churchland and Sejnowski, 1990). This is called intertheoretical reductionism.

Common sense understanding of reality is often misguided; for example the Earth appears flat to us even though it is in reality curved, and an object appears solid despite the fact that the atoms it is comprised of are mostly space. Science has proven our conceptions of the world to be misguided. In the same way, folk psychology argues that what we consider the mind to be is based upon our common sense understanding of how we view the world, and therefore is incorrect. Perhaps one day it will replaced by "eliminative materialism", a scientific explanation of the mind in terms of neuroscience. This makes the assumption that behaviour can be fully explained on a biological level, in the same way that other systems with our body can be explained by science. 

The many techniques scientists have developed for brain imaging can show us where activity is taking place in the brain, but not how. To this end, data can be used to support theories on how the brain works. However, some scientists have called neuroimaging the new phrenology (a pseudoscience that uses the morphology of the skull to understand the brain) since higher cognition or thought cannot be localised to brain regions, but are a culmination of various areas of the cortex.