CategoryNeuroscience
Neuroscientist: How the Brain-as-Computer Myth Led Science Astray
Michael Merzenich explains neuroplasticity — how the brain organizes itself in detail — to Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Closer to TruthNeuroscientist: Human Brain More Complex Than the Models Show
The weird “homunculus” — the way the brain maps the body — was pioneer neurosurgeons’ best guess nearly a century agoIs AI the Triumph of Left-Brained Thinking? What Follows?
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that it is and asks us to consider what its cultural lean toward the “left brain” is doing to usIain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Matter With Things (Perspectiva 2021), defends the left-brain/right-brain psychological distinction often made in psychology. But his view is far more careful and nuanced than what’s offered in the pop psych books on the flea market table. In an essay just published at First Things, which started out as a lecture delivered at the 2022 World Summit AI in Amsterdam, he warns against the growing AI dominance over our lives — which he interprets as left-brained: The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. They were: the natural world; the sense of a coherent shared culture; the sense of the body as something we live, Read More ›
Why Can’t Our Memories Be “Stored” in the Brain?
The image of storing and erasing memories is popular due to computer technology but it is not relevant to how the human mind worksA Philosopher Explains: How the Soul Relates to the Body
James Madden explains a philosophical approach to the soul called hylomorphism which, he argues, can benefit neuroscienceHall of Mirrors: The Many Ways Consciousness Baffles Researchers
Does consciousness have a seat at the table? Wait a minute. Isn’t consciousness the table? Or is it?How Neuroscience Disproved Free Will and Then Proved It Again
In this excerpt from Minding the Brain (2023), neuroscientist Cristi L. S. Cooper discusses the discovery of “free won’t” — the decision NOT to do somethingWill Neuralink’s Brain Implant Help Paralysis Victims?
Addressing disabilities like paralysis, limb loss, and blindness seems a more realistic goal than the hyped (and feared) human–machine hybridsCould Human Consciousness Be a Recent Historical Development?
Julian Jaynes’s bicameral mind theory, popular in the 1970s, stated that until about 3000 years ago, humans were not really consciousWhere, Exactly, Is Memory Stored in the Brain?
The hippocampus of the brain is important for memory formation but memories are immaterial and are not really “stored” anywhereWhat Christof Koch Misunderstands About the Mind and the Brain
In his revealing interview at Closer to Truth, the Allen Institute neuroscientist, though he doubts physicalism, attributed subjective experiences to “brains”As I noted earlier this week, neuroscientist Christof Koch, who is chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, seems to be having second thoughts about a purely physical view of consciousness. Koch has long been a proponent of a physicalist understanding of the mind-brain relationship—that the mind is in some sense reducible to the brain. He has proposed that consciousness arises as a product of brain-network complexity. But when he was interviewed a month ago on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s show Closer to Truth, he seemed to be reconsidering his physicalist perspective on the mind-brain relationship. He noted that experience—the first-person subjective character of consciousness—cannot be derived from matter by any mechanism we currently understand. He seems Read More ›
Leading Neuroscientist Wavers on Physical View of Consciousness
On Closer to Truth, Christof Koch said last month, “Consciousness cannot be explained only within the framework of space and time and energy, but we need to postulate something additional”Here’s a fascinating short video (9 minutes) of neuroscientist Christof Koch, interviewed on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s YouTube philosophy show, Closer to Truth: Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has long been a proponent of physicalism as an explanation for the mind. On that view, the mind is wholly a product of physical processes in the brain. But last month he explained that he is now coming around to an explanation for consciousness that transcends traditional physical theories: Koch: Consciousness cannot be explained only within the framework of space and time and energy, but we need to postulate something additional — experience.” He acknowledges that subjective experience — I am an ‘I’ and not just Read More ›
Are Researchers Taking Mystical Experiences More Seriously Now?
Neuroscientist Marc Wittmann, Research Fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, has noticed a trend: Scientists are beginning to view altered states of consciousness — including mystical experiences, meditative states, and near-death experiences — with interest. That is, they are studying them, not just trying to explain them away. As he writes at MIT Reader, “for a long time extraordinary consciousness experiences have either been ignored by the mainstream natural sciences or have been explicitly denigrated as nonexistent — as the fantasies of cranks.” Perhaps enough evidence has accumulated of, for example, neurological or metabolic changes from meditation and verified information from near-death experiences, that study would make more sense now than Read More ›
How Quantum Theory Relates To Consciousness
Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon explains the background to Hameroff and Penrose’s contested quantum consciousness theory, which is beginning to be testedYesterday, we ran a piece, “The theory that consciousness is a quantum system gains support,” which details a new interest in testing Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose’s quantum theory of consciousness (Orch OR theory). Many of us are unclear just how quantum theory relates to consciousness. Available evidence has amounted to saying that some phenomena are best explained that way. A faithful reader, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon, has offered to help with the background to quantum theories of consciousness. Here’s what he writes to say: — I’ll try a stab at explaining what quantum mechanics (QM) has to do with consciousness. The key document is prominent mathematical physicist Roger Penrose’s book, The Emperor’s New Mind: (Oxford, 1989). Here’s the first Read More ›
The Theory That Consciousness Is a Quantum System Gains Support
Hameroff and Penrose’s Orch Or Theory sees consciousness as the outcome of a quantum collapse of a wave functionAt New Scientist last week, science writer and editor George Musser talked about the way a theory of consciousness that sees the brain as a quantum system is now under reluctant consideration. Musser, author of Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) went to visit anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, who — with theoretical physicist Roger Penrose — advances the quantum-based Orch Or Theory (orchestrated objective reduction of the quantum state). Do quantum phenomena create conscious experience? Musser explains the basic idea of the Orch Or Theory (OOT), that conscious experience arises from quantum phenomena in the brain. The theory gained little traction in the past because it was difficult to test but Musser thinks that the use Read More ›
Forget Stuff? Relax. Your Mind Is Likely Functioning As It Should
Recent research suggests that memories can sometimes be in a “dormant” stage due to interferenceIn recent years, a significant amount of research has been done on memory, including research on how we forget and why. A memory is stored as an engram, a physical trace of memory in the brain. Forgetting means losing or losing track of that trace. A great deal of the research on engrams has been done on mice because their memories, whether retrieved, forgotten, or erased, tend to be simple and easy to interpret. A recent article in The Scientist looked at some new mouse research on forgetting, which provides some reassuring results. University of Alberta neurobiologist Jacob Berry explained that a 2023 open-access study is actually still there, even when it can’t be retrieved due to some interference: “It’s Read More ›
New Studies Point to Ways We Might Reduce the Effects of Dementia
A recent study of the relationship between personality type and the impairments of dementia has produced some intriguing findings. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Northwestern University analyzed data from eight studies in the literature comprising over 44,000 people. Of these, 1,703 developed dementia. They were trying to find out what effect the Big Five personality traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness — had on the progress of dementia. They studied both performance on cognitive tests and brain autopsies: The researchers found that high scores on negative traits (neuroticism, negative affect) and low scores on positive traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, positive affect) were associated with a higher risk of a dementia diagnosis. High scores on Read More ›
Consciousness Wars Still Simmer, Despite Peacekeeping Efforts
The field of consciousness studies has been in turmoil since over 100 researchers signed a letter last September, attacking neuroscientist Christof Koch’s leading Integrated Information Theory (IIT) theory of consciousness. Among other things, the theory’s panpsychist leanings could lead to a perception that unborn children have some sort of consciousness, which, to put it mildly, is an unpopular point of view in that field. In June of that year, Koch had also famously lost a 25-year wager (1998–2023) with philosopher of mind David Chalmers that a signature of consciousness would be found in the human brain. It wasn’t. A bit of background An article by Mariana Lenharo at Nature earlier this week provides some background and assesses the damage. In Read More ›
New Findings About Our Mysterious “Second Brain”
It wasn’t long ago that researchers were hardly aware of the way the digestive system functions as a second brain. The big focus was neurons. But, along with neurons, both the central nervous system and the digestive system make extensive use of glial cells, whose function has not been as well understood. Glial cells, which do not produce electrical impulses, were considered “electrophysiologically boring.” We now know that they support neurons in both physical and chemical ways. In the gut, they co-ordinate immune responses From the Francis Crick Institute, we learn: … the enteric nervous system is remarkably independent: Intestines could carry out many of their regular duties even if they somehow became disconnected from the central nervous system. And Read More ›