Week 1 - The Brain

Question 1

Who’s Phineas Gage?

Answer 1

A survivor who ended up in an exhibit in a travelling circus, holding a tamping iron and telling people about his catastrophic experience.

• Changes in head, brain, life
• In the summer of 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont.
• Tamping iron entered the left side of Gage’s jaw, moving in an upward direction, it passed behind the left eye through the left side of the brain and it went out the top of his skull and landed several feet away of the clutter.

Question 2

Phineas Gage’s story illustrates?

Answer 2

• Brain is the source of mental life.
• Damage to the brain can have profound effects on who we are and what we are.

Question 3

Astonishing Hypothesis

Answer 3

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Question 4

The biologist who wrote Astonishing Hypothesis?

Answer 4

Francis Crick

Question 5

Assembly of nerve cells?

Answer 5

Brain and parts of the spinal cord

Question 6

Materialism

Answer 6

• The brain or that the mind is what the brain does
• The mental life emerges from the brain.

Question 7

Everybody accepts that our arms and legs and our heart and kidneys are made of the same sort of stuff as rabbits and automobiles and cups.

Answer 7

Materialism

Question 8

“We are material beings”

Answer 8

Materialism

Question 9

Our mental life, what makes us special, our most intimate feelings and thoughts also arise from these material things.

Answer 9

True

*Materialism