The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

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Of course in a work such as this there is a section on consciousness. And once again, I am glad to see that no one has a coherent definition of this, studies of the brain's relation to consciousness are thus fraught with issues based purely on arbitrary definitions (mostly from non-scientists), and as a result, providing any satisfactory universal answer to this question is like trying to hit a bullet, with another bullet, fired from two passing trains so that each bullet deflects onto a nail and piece of jello, respectively, and nails them to a wall on a third passing train. I tend to the materialist side of things here and think that woo-woo idiots keep making the definition more mysterious in the face of mounting physical evidence, just my two cents, and Cobb does everything he can to make this Mississippi mud pie of an issue as intellectually healthy as possible. And although the advances we have seen in the past 50 years have been breathtaking to put it mildly. It’s not the glorious old super theories explaining everything and using the very little old research they have. Now philosophers are afraid of making huge claims as we know how the brain DOESN’T work. Of course we still even now, in 2021, don’t understand how the brain works. So these bigshot philosophers trying to sound clever just sound like noise making machines. They also promise that brains will be recreated via programming. About modern drugs and how we don't know how they work. Kinda boring to be fair even though it's full of info. In the ancient western world the seat of emotion, perception, consciousness, and thought was the heart, not the brain. If you think of it, with whatever organ you choose, this makes sense. The brain just sits there. But the heart is always moving. You can’t ignore the heart. But you can’t feel the brain at all.

main job is to process information. But some experts argue that because brains are biological — they evolved within the vagaries of a body — they operate in ways that a machine doesn’t ( SN: 8/23/16). According to Zeki and colleagues [ 74], consciousness comprises nodes of micro-consciousnesses in different brain regions. Interestingly, in contrast to other theories, Zeki argues that consciousness is not unified [ 75]. Therefore, color and motion, for example, are consciously perceived in different parts of the cortex and only then bind together with other nodes to form a macro-consciousness. A micro-consciousness is autonomous [ 76] and does not require further processing. Therefore, the resected visual cortex in Step 3 may become micro-conscious of the green light during the replay. We could not find a direct reason as to why, according to Zeki, scattered brains during replay cannot bind together into a macro-consciousness. Electricity is seen as the force of life. As electricity experiments are popular it makes sense to make these conclusions. Then as we experiment on animals and see muscles move via electricity it makes sense to conclude that this is the power of the soul. Memory. Very basic stuff. A bit of a letdown, it's this basic. He goes over some of the big new experiments, but we don’t learn much about what memory is or how it works.Anand KS, Dhikav V. Hippocampus in health and disease: An overview. Ann Indian Acad Neurol. 2012;15(4):239-46. doi:10.4103/0972-2327.104323 The chapter feels like a summary of a ton of docs and ideas I've read before. Yet it's kinda dry. I rather read a more fun intro to this stuff. And if you watch docs on brain studies you already know most of this. We may not answer very basic questions regarding brain function until a new organizing principal emerges. Regarding the thought experiment presented here, however, placing an electrode at the cell body to generate the cellular output effectively bypasses the critical nexus point in the apical dendrite. We, therefore, predict that the replay of activity at the cell bodies of pyramidal cells would, in this case, completely entail the former influence of the apical dendrite. Furthermore, DIT is agnostic about the intrinsic necessity of apical causality, per se, versus the resultant firing activity at the cell body. In this respect, DIT does not inform us whether the brain is conscious under replay or whether scattered brains are conscious. Medical News Today has strict sourcing guidelines and draws only from peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical journals and associations. We avoid using tertiary references. We link primary sources — including studies, scientific references, and statistics — within each article and also list them in the resources section at the bottom of our articles. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy.

It seems that we need a Newton, Darwin or Einstein to come into brain and cognition research. We need new ideas and new metaphors. We probably need more advanced technology. This is a book where the author goes through a historical arc of how humans have understood the brain; how that thinking evolved, dependent on the prevailing paradigm, and shaped the current understanding. This book is very much built on an understanding that humans think through metaphors, as explained by George Lakoff's famous book Metaphors we live by, and how that impacts the contemporary scientific paradigm and thus the understanding and thinking behind how the brain functions. For most of history up until recently, the prominent view about where thought originates from was the heart and not the brain. This was logically consistent with experience by nature of the fact the heart reacts physically to many situations where thought is required such as decision making, reflexive actions or emotion. This still pervades our language today particularly with the common phrase "think through your head, not your heart". Then at the start of the renaissance, the brain was determined to hold the seat of thought and since then this assumption has held up until recently. Scientists are now saying we can’t just study the brain independently but have to take into account it's interaction with the environment and other parts of the body. The main thing about the book, and why I think it’s a bit weak, is that it’s made up of two different books. One is a historical intro to brain ideas. Then the second half is about modern perception of the brain. While the history of course is interesting to understand, the modern research chapters are a step down in entertainment and you read about small studies explaining minor details. It’s also just too long all combined. I would have enjoyed a book about only modern research. But reading 2 books in one is too much. In many parts I just couldn’t keep focus on the audiobook. Another key problem facing the scientific community in trying to understand the brain is that there is no viable theoretical framework in which they can frame their problems. The approach currently is just to collect a deluge of big data which some neuroscientists are very dismissive of because there is no overarching goal or hypothesis in which to guide this collection of experimental data. One major crux of this issue is whether the mind is material and thus the provenance/origin of consciousness. Like most debates within this space materialism is often taken as an implicit assumption and thereby slanting the debate. The author also makes the erroneous statement that no empirical evidence collected so far gives us a non-material explanation. Well duh that's the whole point of it being immaterial and so one needs a framework which can take into this account but obviously that is not possible in the current prevailing paradigm. Brooker, H., et al. (2019). The relationship between the frequency of number-puzzle use and baseline cognitive function in a large online sample of adults aged 50 and over.Answering “no” after the resective surgery ( Fig 3A and 3B) challenges the reader to explain why, although the synaptic disconnection at a molecular scale in Step 2 ( Fig 2) does not change the conscious perception, the physical disconnection with a surgical scalpel nevertheless changes the participant’s conscious perception. Answering “yes” after surgically cutting the visual cortex ( Fig 3A) but “no” after its removal ( Fig 3B) implies that the distance of the resected neurons from the rest of the brain is vital for conscious perception. The distinction between surgery with ( Fig 3A) and without the removal ( Fig 3B) of the visual cortex raises interesting questions regarding the effect of the distance between brain regions on consciousness. For example, does the brain’s size (between species and even within the same species) affect consciousness due to the distance between brain regions? Goldie J. The implications of brain lateralisation for modern general practice. Br J Gen Pract. 2016;66(642):44-5. doi: 10.3399/bjgp16X683341 Es hat mich sehr oft zum Nachdenken gebracht weil der Autor in vielen Aspekten was die Vergangenheit, das Jetzt und der Zukunft valide Kritik äußert. This morning I read an op-ed in the New York Times by Lisa Feldman Barrett titled “Your Brain is Not for Thinking”. Her argument was that the primary function of the brain is to keep the body going, not to think. From an evolutionary perspective this is obviously true, however surprising we find it. Throughout most of evolutionary history the brain’s only function was to monitor and control the body. Thinking is a relatively recent thing that humans do, and humans are a very young species. Most brains in the world, of course are non-human, and we hesitate to say they “think” in the same way humans do. This reminded me that I hadn’t yet written a review of Matthew Cobb’s splendid “The Idea of the Brain”. Let’s remedy that.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. To underscore the usefulness of replay as a potential experimental strategy, let us compare the replay of brain activity to a detailed simulation of the brain. A frequent objection to the view that a detailed simulation of the human brain can become conscious is that it merely manipulates symbols whose meaning depends on external interpretation, whereas neural activity is intrinsically meaningful to the brain [ 88]. In contrast to a simulation, the artificial neuronal firing induced by the replay is intrinsically meaningful to the brain/participant because it is an identical copy of intrinsically meaningful activity (i.e., an experience of green light). John Searle famously explained that “you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion” [ 89]. Unlike biologically detailed simulations running on a computer, the replay is recorded and activated on the same substrate. Therefore, in contrast to a simulation of the stomach, recording and then replaying smooth muscle contraction and enzyme secretion would result in digestion. What would it imply about the nature of consciousness if replay would work for stomach digestion or the heart pumping blood but not for the brain and consciousness?In the working hypothesis, we only considered whether action potentials cause consciousness. Performing our experiments for other neuronal processes might be more difficult than for action potentials and, in some cases, even impossible. However, conceptually, it is straightforward to include them in the hypothesis and even include combinations of multiple processes; for example, membrane potential fluctuations, calcium ion concentrations [ 53, 54], the release of neurotransmitters from the presynaptic terminals, or activity in glial cells [ 55, 56]. To consider multiple biological processes, we first need to record these processes and then test the hypothesis against Steps 1 to 3 by asking in each step whether the participant’s conscious perception changed when the respective cellular processes remained exactly the same. All of that is from the “Past” section of the book. In the “Present” section Cobb describes our current understanding of how memory works, how circuits have limited explanatory power, and how brains are similar to but different from digital computers. He describes the chemical basis for neural and mental phenomena. He describes the current view, that mental functions are both local and global; though some regions must be present for specific functions, those function may still require the whole brain. I was surprised to learn that fMRI “brain scans” are misleading, and that results from fMRI data are often over-hyped.

We are getting into the actual science and not just loose philosophy. Now people are looking into animal brains and even studying people who have brain injuries in certain parts of the brain. Which makes scientists like Broca find brain areas responsible for certain instincts like the language center. This enthralling book starts at the earliest points of the halting journey to an experimental science of the brain and moves forward to the present era, where we simultaneously have a surfeit of data and a poverty of far-reaching, intellectually satisfying theories of brain function. A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking. Macdonald K, Germine L, Anderson A, Christodoulou J, Mcgrath LM. Dispelling the Myth: Training in Education or Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths. Front Psychol. 2017;8:1314. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01314 Finally, Cobb postulates that there may not in fact be any real organizing principle to brain function, because it is a messy, evolved, pragmatic and embodied system.

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The ancients believed the heart was the anatomical seat of thought and consciousness and considered the brain to be of relative little import. Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge. Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the brain of a mouse, and to build AI programmes capable of extraordinary cognitive feats. A complete understanding seems within our grasp. Baxter MG, Croxson PL. Facing the role of the amygdala in emotional information processing. Proc Nat Acad Sci. 2012;109(52):21180-21181. doi:10.1073/pnas.1219167110 Even on the purely scientific side, I felt that big chunks of neuroscience were missing, conveniently left out when they didn't suit. For example, reducing the whole idea of brain chemistry to a big, biased rant about psychedelics and later mental health made me want to throw the book at a wall. Another one was using the chapter on localization to discuss the mistakes in fMRI research, while at the same time using it to make an entirely unnecessary and random stab at the debate around gender differences in the brain. While also conveniently forgetting there's more to human neuroscience than fMRI and PET.