Start by going over the main ideas of the readings—I do hope you’re keeping up with them…it may seem like a lot of pages, but I thought I’d just go over what I’m hoping you’re getting out of them. I’ve chosen them for their readability and engagement.

• Bloom chapter: mind is what the brain does—historical context to the understanding of the brain’s function and relationship to mind functions—we are not going to spend much time on this in class because we’re a little behind, but the information in this chapter is important

• Pinker 30-40: Universal Human Psychology—relationship between biology and culture—some points we’ve covered already, some we’ll cover in the days to come.

• Pinker 41-45: mind-brain issues…part of today’s discussion

• McEwen Ch 9: particular mind function—memory, grounding it in the activity of the brain through case studies, neuropsychology studies, brain stimulation, and brain imaging techniques.

• Pinker Chapter 10: why a grounding of mind functions in brain activity shouldn’t cause us too much concern about the loss of free will.

So today, what I’d like to do is to draw your attention to a set of dichotomies…if you have ever contemplated the human condition, you are likely to have posed certain kinds of questions to yourself, that may have come in the form of the dichotomies I’ve listed here:

Is it “physiological” or “psychological”…we may ask this question about a range of behaviors, often abnormal behaviors—that is, it is something in the person’s brain that caused the behavior, or something in the person’s mind. I hope by the end of today’s lecture (and of course after having done the assigned readings) that you will be able to see through this dichotomy as a false one

But there are I think, 3 related dichotomies that are often posed in order to explain behavior in general, and these are represented in issues that we will be returning to later this week:

Biology vs. culture

Nature vs. nurture

Innate vs. learned

Let’s turn to our first dichotomy—is it physiological or psychological?

To somehow separate mind from brain—to locate the mind as something that is outside of the brain related to, but not caused by the brain—is an overwhelming feeling that we all have—in fact, the brain works hard to create this overwhelming sense of subjective first person conscious experiences, and we’ll talk more about the evidence and adaptiveness of this function later. But the idea that these are separate entities was first formalized by Descartes, the 17^th C. philosopher and mathematician. Descartes proposed the theory of dualism to describe the relationship between mind and brain. He proposed 2 kinds of matter (dualism)—physical matter which obeyed natural laws and was a subject suitable for scientific study and non-physical matter—which consisted of solely one entity—the human mind, or soul…this was a God-given property that only humans had. The brain is part of the body, made up of physical matter and worked like a machine, just as all animals did. The mind was separate, and communicated with the brain. Special role for the pineal body—located on the midline of the brain..direct fluid mechanical functions of the nervous system—muscular system.

Difficulties with this idea:

From the clinic: Gage, asomatognosia patient in Sacks book.

Converging evidence: substitute for “proof”

Host of other observations that mind functions arise from brain activity Multiple observations that lead to the conclusion that the mind is not separate from the brain, but emerges from brain activity.

Other converging lines of evidence that complex mind functions are a result of brain activity:

-split-brain patients—severing the corpus callosum results in a split consciousness that is detectable under controlled laboratory experiments (normally conscious experience even in split brain patients is unified by compensation that the patients makes to provide input to both hemispheres (such as turning the head to move the visual field between hemispheres). When limiting input to one hemisphere (through restricted visual field presentations) each hemisphere has a different conscious experience of the input, due to brain lateralization (specialization between the hemispheres) .