61–70 of 80 posts
I love articles like this. But I have NO facility or background to evaluate them. Given their premise is "everything you've been told is wrong", how do I know that this one is right? :-/ I just finished Blindsight, which is a SciFi novel but written by PhD Biologist and highly respected in Neurological circles... which pretty much commits to every.single.one. of these 'myths'. Note, this is not an issue of "it's a yo…
This article bothers me a little bit. It makes it sound like the brain is completely structureless, and that the division of brain into "parts" is a myth. I'm not a neurologist but this seems a disingenuous. Surely we know that the limbic system serves a major role in emotions. We know that the hippocampus serves a major role in long term memory formation. The amygdala controls the fear response. Plenty of other exam…
I think this article focuses on too much on some nuances of neuroscience, that in the end it becomes misleading. I guess a similar example would be making a statement like, all programming languages are equally useful since they are all Turing complete. It has some basis of truth, but is very misleading as in the real world, Javascript and QBasic are used in radically different ways. Though I no longer am practicing…
This article bothers me a little bit. It makes it sound like the brain is completely structureless, and that the division of brain into "parts" is a myth. I'm not a neurologist but this seems a disingenuous. Surely we know that the limbic system serves a major role in emotions. We know that the hippocampus serves a major role in long term memory formation. The amygdala controls the fear response. Plenty of other exam…
My feeling is that the "myth" they're trying to debunk is that there are rigid, "bright-line" separations between different brain regions, and that specifics regions are completely and uniquely responsible, for now and forevermore, for some specific "thing". Where the reality is that there is structure, but the lines are fuzzier, functionality overlaps, and neural plasticity allows for brain region to alter their fun…
I suppose one should also account for a sort of neurological "noise floor" where noise means general background predictive activity. Your brain is always (trying to be) doing something all over, independent of sensory input, which becomes really apparent with the Ganzfeld experiment [1] without the bunk about "psi" and that esoteric BS.
Supposedly hippocampus stores memories, but people with operated hippocampus still keep their memories? Psychodelic or meditative states being associated with significant reduction of all brain activity, what conflicts with the subjective experience.
Now, for example there are 12 medical cases described where blind people approaching death regained left their body and described visual information in the operating room, what was corroborated by impartial skeptic medical professionals: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Mindsight:+N... . There is very sizable amount of evidence that something is going on in conciousness than just purely material. Read this article before you make the final judgement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/ . I am not implying any magic - maybe quantum computations like in Penrose/Hammerhof theory? Maybe material world is an "icon" of more complex reality underneath like in Donald Hoffman's model?
I'm looking for a scientific discussion here, not just "someone who thinks that materialism is not all that describes reality is surely crazy".
I love articles like this. But I have NO facility or background to evaluate them. Given their premise is "everything you've been told is wrong", how do I know that this one is right? :-/ I just finished Blindsight, which is a SciFi novel but written by PhD Biologist and highly respected in Neurological circles... which pretty much commits to every.single.one. of these 'myths'. Note, this is not an issue of "it's a yo…
> Most neurons have multiple jobs, not a single psychological purpose. For example, neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy. One possible answer here is that these things (e.g., memory, emotion, decision-making, and pain) actually have more in common than we perceive. It's poss…
This is definitely true. A high adrenaline state (imagine the emotion of being on a roller coaster ride, being in a fight, etc) reduces pain.
Took a good few seconds to load what is essentially a few paragraphs of text and an image. How can people accept 21mb websites? Perhaps they're just eager to play their part in global warming.