Wednesday, September 14, 2011

What I've Been Reading

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. Most of us are oblivious to the new Copernican Revolution of neuroscience. Yet another eloquently written book to enlighten the masses on the unconscious mind - David Eagleman and Johan Lehrer are the best in the business, period. 
Having said that if one happened to regularly follow the neuroscience blogs and books, at times it gets boring since the same characters and studies seemed be reiterated (albeit their importance) -  Damosio's card game, Phineas Gage, Parkinson's/dopamine/gambling, trolley-ology et al. - get the point, right?
Of-course, the most important chapter of the book is on the field pioneered by Eagleman - Neuroethics. This will be a game changer and it's only a matter of time before neuroethics will force Roe vs Wade debate into the abyss. Given that nature has abstained from defining uniqueness to our neural network and gifted it with perpetual neural plasticity, a neural history probably would be the only hope to vindicate or convict at-least during the nascency of neuroethics. It would make immense sense to start a yearly neural checkup akin to physical and dental checkups. Ironically, the dissonance of Cartesian dualism has deluded us for centuries by branding anything neural as taboo. A neural history will also be the seminal force behind a minority report vigilance and would only help bring down the medical costs. The question is, are we as a civilization ready to shed our preconceived notions on mental health? So much for neural plasticity!!


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commemorated the immensity of Galileo's discovery:
"Of all the discoveries and opinions… none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit.. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it is was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind-for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What become of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of senses; the conviction of a poetic religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go an offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of."-

Darwin foresaw the neuroscience revolution when wrote the following lines in Origin of Species:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement's for each mental power and capacity by gradation.


Eagleman offer's a new perspective on non-human animal consciousness:
"So are other animals conscious? Science currently has no meaningful way to make a measurement to answer that question - but I offer two intuitions. First, consciousness is probably not an all-or-nothing quality, but comes in degrees. Second, I suggest that an animal's degree of consciousness will parallel its intellectual flexibility. The more subroutines an animal possesses, the more it will require a CEO to lead the organization. The CEO keeps the subroutines unified; it is the warden of the zombies. To put this another way, a small corporation does not require a CEO who earns three million dollars a year, but a large corporation does. The only difference is the number of workers the CEO has to keep track of, allocate among, and set goals for."



Speaker Series: David Eagleman, Neuroscientist / Author from Digital Science on Vimeo.

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