The Idea of the Brain: A History: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020

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The chapter is a bit weaker than the last one. I feel even more confused. The author often talks about how people overall were thinking or what a certain person was thinking. Yet it’s hard to understand who thought what and who these writers were. I guess I should assume they were popular people and that most people had the same ideas? I’m not sure that’s the case. Gerade das Kapitel mit Bewusstsein fand ich besonders gut weil er deutlich hervorbringt, dass NIEMAND Ahnung darüber hat, wie es funktioniert und wo es im Gehirn verankert ist. Und überhaupt ob es wichtig ist, dass wir das wissen müssen. Und ob es nicht besser ist diese Debatte wichtigerer Themen gegenüber zu opfern. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain.

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.

The idea of stimulating the brain to evoke conscious experiences has a long history in neuroscience [ 1– 4]. Nowadays, brain–machine interfaces [ 5] encode and decode neuronal activity [ 6– 8] and are routinely used to control neuroprosthetics [ 9]. Electrical stimulation of sensory brain areas is becoming sufficiently precise to deliver specific content, bypassing sensory organs [ 10] or diseased brain tissue [ 11]. Furthermore, it is now possible to evoke a memory by selectively reactivating ensembles of neurons (i.e., the engram) that were naturally active in the animal’s brain in a previous event [ 12, 13] (for review, see [ 14]). Although brain activity can take many forms, it is almost always associated with the neuronal firing of action potentials. Moreover, the effective use of action potentials in brain–machine interfaces with neuroprosthetics and rehabilitation of neural function [ 5] suggests that action potentials are the fundamental unit of information in the brain.

Cobb runs though the history of certain concepts used to explain how the brain works, including electricity, evolution and If the reader answers “yes” in Step 3, then a second resection or any number of additional resections should not change the reader’s answer. Iteratively resecting and re-resecting eventually leaves us with a brain in the form of geographically scattered individual neurons. Therefore, accepting the hypothesis in Step 3 results in a conscious scattered brain. The alternative, namely, arguing that scattered brains cannot be conscious, leads to rejecting the hypothesis that the firing of the neurons causes our conscious experience. Malinowski, P., et al. (2017). Meditation and cognitive ageing: The role of mindfulness meditation in building cognitive reserve.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.

Cobb dates a change in attitude to the late Middle Ages, and to the investigatory willingness of certain Italian academics. One important figure was Mondino de Luzzi, professor of medicine and anatomy at the University of Bologna. Writing of the preparations for a human dissection, Mondino stated simply that “the human corpse, killed through decapitation or hanging, is placed in the supine position” – words conveying an utter indifference to the dignity of the body in death which we assume today. A later Italian, Andreas Vesalius, enjoined his students to attend autopsies, observe and have less faith in anatomy textbooks. He was to produce anatomical drawings of the utmost precision and beauty – ones that have stood the test of time. More radical, however, than his accurate renderings of precise dissections, was the conclusion Vesalius drew from his dissections of the brains of the sheep, goat, cow, monkey, dog and birds: that “there is no difference at all in the structure of the brain” of these animals compared to the human brain – an early dethroning of human specialness, which Darwin would go on to complete. 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. 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?

The first part, "Past", is the longest and covers history from the period when the heart was considered to be behind thought and emotion, through to early neurosurgery and anatomy, right through to the discovery of neurons and electricity and many concepts which are still at the heart of neuroscience today. It contained a great deal that I didn't know alongside some that I did, and it was fascinating seeing how many fortuitous discoveries were made entirely by accident, or were made in error yet today would be seen as correct. There are many names, and to those totally unfamiliar with those mentioned the volume could be overwhelming, but it wouldn't be a complete history without them. There were also names you might not expect - amongst them Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein was influential in popularising the idea that the nervous system uses electricity, and Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory but not a man typically linked to neuroscience. 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. Nielsen, J. A., et al. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging.

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. Matthew Cobb covered each era and discovery with as little bias as he could, and clearly attempted to make each section accessible. I'm not usually much of a historian, but the sections on theology and cultural influences were just as interesting as those which directly pertained to neuroscience or psychology.Shen HH. Inner workings: Discovering the split mind. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2014;111(51):18097. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1422335112 As a neuroscientist myself I found it frustrating to be reading the same old selection of stories. At some point I even thought about giving up and questioned why was this book even written. The history chapters didn't add anything new. Moreover, it seemed to strengthen the view that the only opinions worth talking about are those of white rich men from the West. Sure, we'll briefly mention other cultures but only to say that they were wrong. And yeah let's add a female voice, some rich lady at a dinner party who agreed with one of the big men, as a "yes, women did have thoughts, but we're only going to talk about the acceptable ones". Also, no mention of the contributions of early brain studies on the biological basis of racism, the consequences of which we are still seeing today. Cobb’s greater lesson is straightforward, but difficult: we should spend more time trying to understand the brain as it is, and as it functions in a comparative context, rather than through the lens of whatever metaphor or analogy happens to be handy or fashionable. His last paragraph is instructive, for it offers a series of scenarios based on connectomes, semiotics, semantics, cybernetics, control theory and so on. Each sentence begins with the word “Or”, although the last one is just followed by a dash, creating a blank screen like the final episode of The Sopranos, on to which we can write anything we please, or hope, or fear, or understand. As of now, we understand so little of the entity that allows us to understand. looking ahead to what the future might hold. The possibilities include the creation of conscious machines, or even having to A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.