Does the Brain Explain Your Mind?

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes.
13 March, 2011

Brain psychologist V.S. Ramachandran believes the mysterious phenomena we call the mind, the location of our consciousness, is directly accessible through study of the brain. "The consensus today is that there is a good deal of specialization in the brain, even down to very fine-grained capacities, such as our ability to detect color, shape, and motion—though there is also a degree of plasticity. The way a neurologist like Ramachandran investigates the anatomy–psychology connection is mainly to consider abnormal cases: patients with brain damage due to stroke, trauma, genetic abnormality, etc."

3 philosophers set up a booth on a street corner – here’s what people asked

"I should be as happy as I'm ever going to be right now, but I'm not. Is this it?"

Personal Growth

The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher" – at the entrance to the New York City subway at 57th and 8th – were perhaps random but inevitable.

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philosophy happiness life personal growth morality

For thousands of years, humans slept in two shifts. Should we do it again?

Researchers believe that the practice of sleeping through the whole night didn’t really take hold until just a few hundred years ago.

The Bed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Surprising Science

She was wide awake and it was nearly two in the morning. When asked if everything was alright, she said, “Yes.” Asked why she couldn’t get to sleep she said, “I don’t know.” Neuroscientist Russell Foster of Oxford might suggest she was exhibiting “a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern." Research suggests we used to sleep in two segments with a period of wakefulness in-between.

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'Self is not entirely lost in dementia,' argues new review

The assumption "that without memory, there can be no self" is wrong, say researchers.

Photo credit: Darren Hauck / Getty Images
Mind & Brain

In the past when scholars have reflected on the psychological impact of dementia they have frequently referred to the loss of the "self" in dramatic and devastating terms, using language such as the "unbecoming of the self" or the "disintegration" of the self. In a new review released as a preprint at PsyArXiv, an international team of psychologists led by Muireann Irish at the University of Sydney challenge this bleak picture which they attribute to the common, but mistaken, assumption "that without memory, there can be no self" (as encapsulated by the line from Hume: "Memory alone… 'tis to be considered… as the source of personal identity").

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medical research medicine alzheimer's brain memory identity dementia