Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are
Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald
Language: English
Pages: 180
ISBN: B01K0V37LM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Neuroscientists once believed your brain was essentially "locked down" by adulthood. No new cells. No major changes. If you grew up depressed, angry, sad, aggressive, or nasty, you'd be that way for life. And, as you grew older, there'd be nowhere to go but down, as disease, age, or injury wiped out precious, irreplaceable brain cells. But over the past five, ten, twenty years, all that's changed. Using fMRI and PET scanning technology, neuroscientists can now look deep inside the human brain and they've discovered that it's amazingly flexible, resilient, and plastic.
Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are shows you what they've discovered and what it means to all of us. Through author Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald’s masterfully written narrative and use stunning imagery, you'll watch human brains healing, growing, and adapting to challenges. You'll gain powerful new insights into the interplay between environment and genetics, begin understanding how people can influence their own intellectual abilities and emotional makeup, and understand the latest stunning discoveries about coma and "locked-in" syndrome. You'll learn about the tantalizing discoveries that may lead to cures for traumatic brain injury, stroke, emotional disorders, PTSD, drug addiction, chronic pain, maybe even Alzheimer's. Boleyn-Fitzgerald shows how these discoveries are transforming our very understanding of the "self", from an essentially static entity to one that can learn and change throughout life and even master the art of happiness.
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
Computational Neuroscience: A First Course (Springer Series in Bio-/Neuroinformatics)
Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self
After Cognitivism: A Reassessment of Cognitive Science and Philosophy
Switch in order to avoid four more deaths? Most people with “normal” brains answer no to the first dilemma and yes to the second, despite the fact that both scenarios boil down to a choice between causing the death of one person and allowing the deaths of several. People with damage to a particular part of the brain, on the other hand—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)—are much more likely to answer yes to both.1 Why? What is going on in the brains of people with this kind of injury that.
Studied at the University of Liége.”7 Dr. Laureys coauthored the imaging studies with the young English patient, and he notes that even for experts in impaired consciousness, “the vegetative state is a very disturbing condition. It illustrates how the two main components of consciousness can become completely dissociated: wakefulness remains intact, but awareness—encompassing all thoughts and feelings—is abolished.”8 The chance of recovery is greater for victims of a traumatic brain injury like.
Development when a perceived separation between the physical body and the outside world becomes salient. With time and lots of practice, the concepts of “me” and “mine” start to stick, and they color our ever-widening circle of experience. My cookie, my side of the backseat in childhood becomes my intellectual property, my stock portfolio in adulthood. In a letter to a friend who had lost a young son, Albert Einstein described the experience of self as somehow separate from the rest of reality.
Greely on the Law & Neuroscience Project, video recording for the MacArthur Foundation, 12 June 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveqkgYNIZs&feature=related. 33John Tierney, “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Altruism Researchers Reply to Your Posts,” New York Times, 26 June 2007. 34John Tierney, “Taxes a Pleasure? Check the Brain Scan,” New York Times, 19 June 2007. 35William T. Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for.
Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (October 2003): 849. 41Ibid. Chapter 6 1Lumosity website homepage, www.lumosity.com/. 2Nintendo’s Brain Age website homepage, www.brainage.com/launch/index.jsp. 3R. Brookmeyer, E. Johnson, K. Ziegler-Graham, MH Arrighi, “Forecasting the Global Burden of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Alzheimer’s and Dementia 3, no. 3 (July 2007): 186–91. 4Timothy Salthouse, “When Does Age-Related Cognitive Decline.