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

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Predictions about future computer and human interaction. Kinda pointless and shallow. It’s the typical floofy guesswork that doesn’t really explain much. 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. Neurons and how the brain supposedly worked with signals. People just discovered neurons and imagined how it worked, but no one knew for sure.

Shen HH. Inner workings: Discovering the split mind. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2014;111(51):18097. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1422335112 What will be the next grand metaphor about the brain? Impossible to say, because we need to wait for the next world-changing technology. But in the mean time, Cobb suggests, the computer metaphor might be doing more harm than good. After all, he notes rightly: “Metaphors shape our ideas in ways that are not always helpful.” Neurons are information messengers which use electrical and chemical impulses to transmit information around the central nervous system (CNS). Nielsen, J. A., et al. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. The experiment we described here is useful as a benchmark for theories of consciousness, revealing hidden incoherences and ambiguities [ 58]. Specifically, for a given theory of consciousness, we ask in which step (i.e., Steps 1 to 3) and why we would reject the working hypothesis and claim that the participant loses consciousness.

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In the “Future” section Cobb describes where brain science might be going, and which new metaphors and technologies may help. This was the most exciting part of the book. But to say too much would spoil the journey for you, dear reader. And this review is long enough already. It’s a fine enough intro for beginners. A book about how various generations understood the brain. It’s largely loose philosophy with hundreds of names and mini stories about people focusing on how they felt and thought about the world. It’s all focused on personal ideas, but most didn’t stand the test of time and even the modern ones are not as scientific as most other research fields. 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. Animals are not robots piloted by brains, we are all, whether maggots or humans, individuals with agency and a developmental and evolutionary history". It is history, but it’s modern “we don’t know” science history. It’s about brain connections and how we actually still don’t know anything about them.

https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiver-education/brain-basics-know-your-brain 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.Sha, Z., et al. (2021). Handedness and its genetic influences are associated with structural asymmetries of the cerebral cortex in 31,864 individuals. We tend to assume that our models of the brain are correct. For example, we “instinctively” think of the brain as separate from the body, the seat of consciousness, as a computer, and as a collection of neurons; we “instinctively” think that what the brain does is think (Cobb’s argument), or remember, or create consciousness. Cobb documents that each of these ways of understanding the brain are relatively modern and incomplete—not instinctive or obvious at all. Liederman J. The dynamics of interhemispheric collaboration and hemispheric control. Brain Cogn. 1998;36(2):193-208. doi: 10.1006/brcg.1997.0952 About modern drugs and how we don't know how they work. Kinda boring to be fair even though it's full of info.

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