Brain Science by Jim Buckheit on April 30, 2017
Jim recommends these reference materials related to his talk:
BBC Brain Documentary Series with David Eagleman (YouTube)
PBS report re. Nuns and Alzheimers
(actually excerpted from the BBC series above)
TED Talk re. David Eagleman's "deaf vest"
Patricia Churchland's web site
(Neurophilosopher at UC San Diego. These are links to articles and videos of public lectures.)
Also, check out panel discussions
at the "World Science Festival" from the past several years
available as a YouTube Playlist.
Jim's recommended TED talks in preparation for our April 30 discussion:
Nancy Kanwisher, Brain researcher, MIT: "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind"
Using fMRI imaging to watch the human brain at work, Nancy Kanwisher's team has discovered
cortical regions responsible for some surprisingly specific elements of cognition.
Donald Hoffman, Cognitive Scientist, UC Irvine:"Do We See Reality As It Is?"
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.
Uri Hasson, Neuroscientist, Princeton: "This Is Your Brain on Communication"
Neuroscientist Uri Hasson researches the basis of human communication, and experiments from his lab reveal that even across different languages, our brains show similar activity, or become "aligned," when we hear the same idea or story. This amazing neural mechanism allows us to transmit brain patterns, sharing memories and knowledge. "We can communicate because we have a common code that presents meaning," Hasson says.
Jim's on-line course recommendation:
The Brain and Space (Coursera) - Duke University
Taught by Dr. Jennifer Groh, author of Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are (Harvard University Press, 2014)
This course is about how the brain creates our sense of spatial location from a variety of sensory and motor sources, and how this spatial sense in turn shapes our cognitive abilities.
Knowing where things are is effortless. But "under the hood," your brain must figure out even the simplest of details about the world around you and your position in it. Recognizing your mother, finding your phone, going to the grocery store, playing the banjo - these require careful sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. This course traces the brainbrs detective work to create this sense of space and argues that the brain's spatial focus permeates our cognitive abilities, affecting the way we think and remember.
(Note: short, entertaining video lectures with good visual aids and supplementary readings; if you don't care about earning a certificate, you can go through the course material at your own pace)
Jim's book recommendation:
Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain by Patricia S. Churchland (U.C. San Diego) -- available through MARINA
Accessible and philosophically provocative review of recent neuroscience research related to the experience of consciousness and free agency.
Short review from Publishers Weekly:
That the human mind is an entirely material entity has implications both unsettling and rich, according to this fascinating excursion into neuroscience and philosophy. Churchland (Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality), a U.C. San Diego "neurophilosopher" and MacArthur Fellow, presents a tour of cutting-edge brain research that grounds consciousness, personality, thoughts and feelings in neural structures, electrochemical signaling, hormones, and unconscious information processing. She applies these findings to some of philosophy's great moral, ontological, and metaphysical questions, asking how genetic and environmental influences affect violence and criminality, how altruism evolved in our mammalian forebears, how hormones and brain structure might determine sexuality, and how our sense of self and not-self emerges from the brain's internal communications; most subversively, she rejects the existence of the soul and insists that the brain's material mechanisms are the only valid explanations for mental phenomena. Writing in a lively, down-to-earth style, the author interweaves an accessible, engrossing exposition of neuroscience with a primer on philosophical debates from Aristotle to Freud and Daniel Dennett, illustrating it with episodes from her girlhood in a Canadian farming village, which seems to have nurtured in her a pitiless yet folksy atheism. Gently but firmly brushing aside pious mumbo jumbo, Churchland embraces a scientific worldview that consoles less but illuminates more.