Lecture 1 Flashcards
Intro Qs
What is the mind? Memory, cognition, consciousness, subconscious, emotions, dreams. What is consciousness? Self-awareness for an academic definition, responsive to environment for hospital, different definitions in different settings. Why do we sleep? Memory consolidation and general health. What is morality? How the brain processes hot vs cold moral questions, disorders of morality. What is neuroplasticity? Brain’s ability to change itself in response to experience, e.g. repair or damage from depression, meditation repairing, can be good or bad, heightened other senses in blind people.
A Historical Perspective on the Brain
Study of mind is not new although neuroscience is, hard to know the historical moment when humans’ ancestors became self-aware. Egyptians - thought the mind resided in the heart, but they were interested in the mind. When mummifying organs, heart given primacy and brain discarded. Early theological - brain not mentioned in Koran or in the Bible, heart mentioned a lot. Soul was the fundamental thing and then heart was emotion. Buddhism - mind was front and center, reality is a transaction between what exists and your perception, reality’s interaction with the mind. Suffering is a mental process, attachment happens in the mind. Agnostic religion - all based on mind and relation to reality.
History part 2
Western philosophy - brain not given a lot of primacy, none in pre-Socractic society, not in Plato or Socratic lectures, or St. Augustine. Aristotle thought brain was a cooling system for the heart. Da Vinci - first Western philosopher to give primacy to the brain, Enlightenment, anatomical drawings, linked brain to cognitive processes. Descartes (1st Western neuroscientist): Cartesian dualism, I think therefore I am. Later considering the brain and tension between mind and behavior. Explained animal behavior as a machine (and that this occurs in humans too, animal drives and reflexes mediated through brain). Proposed the concept of spinal reflexes and their neural pathways. He also said free will though, moral choice, love etc. could not be mediated by the machine/biology/spinal reflexes – must be nonmaterial soul or spirit. He set up the tension of dualism: nonmaterial mind/soul that interacts with the body, the soul governs the more complex stuff, animals mediated more by biology, complex behavior in humans. How does the mind get into tissue? Pineal gland (midline in the brain), chose it based on anatomical location. Dualism pervades society, the brain is wired to think dualistically - Pascal Boyer.
History part 3
Mind now becomes a hot topic, Romantics, Rationalists 17th-19th C. Spinoza - said everything is God/spirit, even matter is spirit (non-dualist). Hume - Descartes couldn’t figure out what was real and not real, Hume spent a lot of time on dualism. Overall, philosophers started to think about the nature of mind during the Enlightenment, Hobbs said mind was biology.
Phrenology
Could feel different brain regions over course of skull. Different brain regions specialize in specific functions and types of processing. This introduced localization of function: different areas of the brain serve different purposes/solve different problems. In line with this is evidence that damage to specific brain regions cause predictable impairments. Ex: Broca showed that a specific aspect of language ability (speech production) is restricted to a small brain area based on patients with damage in that region. Damage to an area gets predictable impairments (i.e. neuropsych). Stroke in left lateral prefrontal cortex - can’t speak/deficits. You get very precise localization of function which emerges into a unified whole. Different parts perceive different visual cues.
More localization of function
Hearing vs. seeing vs. reading vs. generating words rely on different areas. BUT many functions may depend on one area (not a 1:1 ratio), and one function may rely on different areas. Example: insula - evolved to serve specific functions, involved in disgust, coupling to olfactory neurons, also involved in viscerotropic map (feeling what it’s like to have a body, also called somatic map) of body (gut response to seeing a disgusting thing). Same visceral response to morally disgusting things. Evolution - get more higher order cognition (prefrontal) but brain piggybacked on insula to serve moral disgust. Brain is pretty redundant, uses original things for new processes. New brain regions have deep paths to old ones.
A psychological perspective of the brain
William James - founder of Western psychology and Western pragmatism, emotion theory. Put brain front and center in the study of cognition, emotion, and consciousness. Philosophy predated psychology, James founds it. Viewing all behavior in the brain, focus on the brain. Freudianism - stimulus goes through tension of id/ego/superego, these were all in the brain. Behaviorism thought the brain was no studyable, black box, there was no way of studying it anyway in the 1950s, just study observable behavior. Then the cognitive revolution (mind is cognitive machine, happens in brain, but just output not the biological underpinnings), then behavioral and cognitive neuroscience (can we apply a biological perspective to emotion, cognition, etc.)
Neuroscience
The scientific study of the nervous system with the goal of understanding the biology underlying behavior and experience. Neuro comes from Greek word neuron meaning nerve or cord. a) It examines the ways in which the structures and actions of the brain and body produce mind and behavior. How does the brain generate experience? b) the ways in which behavior and the environment modify the structures and actions of the brain and body. Bidirectional. Neuroplasticity - from plassein - to mold or to form. Genetic plasticity - changes mediated by genetics, genes turned on and off. Everyday or developmental periods. Epigenetics - mechanism by which genes get turned on and off, gluccocorticoid genes in traumatic situations.
Monism
Brain produces everything - joys, laughter, jests, sorrows (Hippocrates). Everything is a product of the brain, predated by Hippocrates (4th C). Science’s goal of answering questions, even existential questions of morality are studied from neuroscientific perspectives. We are natural dualists: brain wired to create dual perspective, neuroscientific thinking is counterintuitive. We don’t experience everything that comes together to create reality. Galileo almost put to death for sun-centering theory, people put to death for monism in 16th C.
Neuroscience is Interdisciplinary
Neuroanatomy field, neuroeconomics, neuropolitics, biology, cognitive science, etc. Biological psychology = behavioral neuroscience. Neuromarketing. Neural law - fMRIs to detect lies.
Multiple levels of analysis
Social level: individuals behaving in a social interaction, organ level: brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, eyes, neural systems: eyes and brain regions, MRI, EEG, brain region level: visual cortex, circuit level: local neural circuit, cellular level: single neuron, staining, electromicroscopy. Synaptic level, then molecular level, genes. Reductionism: try to get into biological processes. Want to create consilience - take integration of multiple levels as a whole. Better understanding as a whole rather than parts.
Inner skeptic
System 1 (automatic) versus system 2 (slow, deliberate, manual mode/cognition). System 1: efficient but fallible - impressions, feelings, intutions, pleistocene in origin, evolved to answer simple approach/avoid questions, desires simplicity and cohesion, confident and surpresses doubt, generates causality from associated or random events, characterized by biases and logical fallacies. System 2 - deliberate but lazy: deliberate, slow, conscious, thoughtful. Effortful activities, including complex computations for complex problems. Associated with experience of agency, choice, and concentration. Involves pre-frontal executive control network. Lazy, doesn’t like to expend energy. Effort is cost, law of least effort. System 1 is more of the action than this. System 1 and 2 collisions - system 1 impressions and a lazy system 2 results in heuristical thinking and logical fallacies. Kahneman - we’re bad at probabalistic outcomes
Why should we care
future of treating brain-based disorders, prevalence rates of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Major depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide among persons 5 and older. Alzheimers/dementia is the most expensive disease in America. New/novel brain-based interventions greatest hope to address these challenges.
