So recently I’ve been interested in the topic of what a conscious, living creature really is. To quote myself… If I’m right, living people are sort of like a computer with the power on. Our brains have an architecture which is the arrangement of our neurons (the connectome.) When that architecture has “juice” running through […]
I have been talking here, of late, about how computers and brains process information and know things. And the gist of my observations is that only conscious beings (e.g. humans and other living creatures) can “know” anything, or derive meaning from the world. Computers can process information, in a sense, but they don’t know the […]
I’ve been reading a book I’ve been interested in for some time: “The Mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul.” The subject is probably obvious from the title. Within its pages I came across an very thought provoking line of inquiry. First, let’s consider the “conventional” view of consciousness. The idea is that […]
The premise of this “Connectome” book I’ve been reading is that we can get to the very essence of a person by mapping the specific way their neurons connect within their brain. Neurons connect with each other, as you probably know, via points called synapses. At a synapse, one neuron fires a blast of chemicals […]
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a book called “Connectome” which argues that the essence of a human being can be understood to be the way their billions of neurons hook up to each other. The idea presumes that if you can map someone’s neural structure and recreate it (in a biological or electronic model), […]
The neuroscience book I’m currently reading, “Connectome,” makes an interesting point about scientific discovery. Technology is just as much a driver of discovery as the scientists themselves. Without microscopes, telescopes, MRIs etc. none of the discoveries about the brain (and others areas of scientific study) we’ve made would have been possible. That speaks to, I […]
Though I spend a lot of time following brain news, I somehow missed this announcement when it first went around. Scientists have discovered a neuron that fires when a person sees pictures of Jennifer Aniston! In brain surgery, patients are often kept fully conscious, even when they have a probe implanted in their heads. Brains […]
Discover magazine states what might seem rather obvious: Brain Connections Contribute to Our Unique Personalities. Each human brain has a unique connectome—the network of neural pathways that tie all of its parts together. Like a fingerprint, every person’s connectome is unique. To find out where these individual connectomes differed the most, researchers used an MRI […]
In the Steven Pinker book, “How the Mind Works,” he describes the following thought experiment (not his own): presume it is possible, in a person’s brain, to replace a single neuron with some kind of technological equivalent — a special wire that passes signals exactly the way a neuron would. Now replace not a single […]