Neuroscience Flashcards
Warren Susman: modal selfs
The self is largely historically determined.
‘As cultures change, so do the moral types of persons who are their bearers’
What is Neural Darwinism (Edelman)
Were born with brain cells organised into groups which compete fiercely for survival. Those not stimulated atrophy and die.
Gerald M Edelman
‘Through an extraordinary instance of the Darwinian principle of adaptation, our brains have become matched to the world’
Marian Diamond (leading neurobiologist)
‘There is absolutely no doubt that culture changes brains’
Dr Tadanobu Tsunoda’s study
If you are raised in Japanese culture the part of the brain governing emotional perception and sexual function is in the LEFT cerebral hemisphere. Whereas for Occidental it’s the RIGHT. the switching is cultural only - a Japanese child raises as an American until the age of 9 will henceforth perceive his emotions like a non-Japanese.
Mirror neurones
Neutrons that feel in the mind what we see others feel with their fingers - frontal lobes of macaque monkeys: fire not just when it performs actions but when it perceives the same actions
Semir zeki (conflicting meanings in same text)
‘The neurobiology of ambiguity’
Brain translates phonetically and graphically linked units (phonemes and graphemes) into…
Formal structures (morphemes) w semantic significance
Hebb’s law
‘Neurones that fire together wire together’
Kierkegaard quote
‘We live forward, but we understand backward’
Antonio Damaso
‘We are probably late for consciousness by about five hundred milliseconds’
Narrative form is based on brain’s non-simultaneity…
Gap between story and discourse (the events of the tale and how they are told) is a manifestation of temporal disjunctions at a neuronal level which make life a perpetual process of catch up
Why do we get an endorphin rush at the end of poems / undoing a Donnean knot
Product of our propensity to solve puzzles which served our Neolithic ancestors, filling ‘cognitive niche’ by learning how to survive in hostile environments
