Neuroscience's Influence On Philosophy

Going back to the gray matter, the outer layer of gray matter is the frontal cortex. This is where we make decisions and where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking. Phineas Gage, a renowned neuroscience patient in the 1800, was hit with a iron rod to the head, yet minutes after he was still able to move and act normal (Fleischman 6). The only thing was that he could not make decisions. When given a $1000 for the pebbles he collected, he angrily refused the deal( 19). He was not able to make the decision of  getting the money or not. Neuroscientists have learned so much of the brain that has helped us understand our own brains and the people around us. From this scientist learned that the sections of the brain had parts and functions such as language and comprehension(65). Lastly they learned about germs and that you need to make sure to disinfect your tools(17). Without this our technology that is here would not be as progressed if we did not know this.  All of these components helped us understand the teen brain just a little bit

I read the article, “Secrets of the Brain”, found in the February 2014 issue of National Geographic written by Carl Zimmer. I chose this subject because I have been fascinated with the brain and how it works. The research of the brain has been ongoing for many centuries now. The history in this article is interesting. It explained how scientists used to understand the brain and its inner workings. For example, “in the ancient world physicians believed that the brain was made of phlegm. Aristotle looked on it as a refrigerator, cooling of the fiery heart. From his time through the Renaissance, anatomists declared with great authority that our perceptions, emotions, reasoning, and actions were all the result of “animal spirits”—mysterious, unknowable vapors that swirled through cavities in our head and traveled through our bodies.” (Zimmer, p. 38)

Intro: Behavioral Neuroscience is a beginner’s course that will introduce you to the basic overarching concepts where neuroscience and psychology intersect. We will cover a broad range of topics, in the hopes of gaining some understanding and appreciation for how the processes within the brain ultimately lead to our behaviors. Everything we do, think, say, feel, dream, desire, despise, and question, is a function of the chemical and electrical balance within our brain tissue. This class is the first step down the path of learning what we

When people generally discuss the Buddhist principals or the life of Buddha, the subjects of the anatomy or evolution of probably rarely arise. However in this book, “Buddha 's Brain – the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, & wisdom”, many of the tenets of Buddhist teachings are backed by the latest research and well established scientific theory. The author, Dr. Rick Hanson and his collaborator, Dr. Richard Mendius, are both scientist themselves with Dr. Hanson being a neuropsychologist and Dr. Mendius being a neurologist. While someone might infer from the title that the book is focused on the connection between science and Buddhism, that is not the case. The weight of the book actually deals with the various states of the mind associated with suffering and the ways we can overcome them in psychological growth, spiritual practice, and positive well-being.

A Brief Foray Into Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences Modern physics is divided by two descriptions of the universe: the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Many physicists have faith that at some point a "Grand Unified Theory" will be developed which will provide a unified description of the universe from subatomic particles to the movement of the planets. Like in physics, the cognitive sciences can describe the brain at different levels of abstraction. For example, neurobiologists study brain function at the level of neurons while psychologists look for the laws describing behavior and cognitive mechanisms. Also like in physics, many in these fields believe that it is possible that one day we will be able to understand complicated behaviors in terms of neuronal mechanisms. Others believe that this unification isn't possible even in theory because there is some metaphysical quality to consciousness that transcends neural firing patterns. Even if consciousness can't be described by a "Grand Unified Theory" of the cognitive sciences, it is apparent that many of our cognitive mechanisms and behaviors can. While research on the level of neurons and psychological mechanisms is fairly well developed, the area in between these is rather murky. Some progress has been made however. Cognitive scientists have been able to associate

This essay will look at how knowledge about the brain in natural sciences and human sciences describes and transforms the world,.

We are always curious to understand the world we live in, and what happens around us and we often believe explanations of psychological phenomena that contains neuroscientific information without any doubt. The neuroscience information includes experiments, databases, and genetic resources. It is apparent that people seem to be more interested in explanations of psychological phenomena when it is enclosed with neuroscientific information. The study conducts experiments on whether people accepted explanations about psychological phenomena with neuroscientific information more satisfying than explanation without any neuroscientific information. The goal of this experiment was to see if neuroscience explanations have any effects on people’s rating of how satisfying they found good and bad explanations in general and those with or without neuroscientific information. The board question is why is cognitive neuroscience information so interesting to the public? Are people capable of judging good explanations from bad explanations of psychological phenomena? The specific question is that, is people 's fascination with cognitive neuroscience associated with explanations that involve neuropsychological component? Does the addition of neuroscience information to phenomena affect people 's judgment of good and bad explanations?

This, I led me too a love of psychology. How wonderful was it that there was a whole science devoted just to that one mystical organ? Studying the brain, we can unlock the doors to human

Thus, brain and behavior is worth exploring to

These two instances, the guinea pig and sex reassignment studies, lend credence to the idea that biology influences our sexual orientation. To bolster these findings Bailey et al. (2000) cite researchers who have explored regions of the brain that are sexually dimorphic (areas that are notably different in men and women). Bailey et al. (2000) cites that in 1976 Dorner identified two brain regions in rats that he implicated in sexual behavior for rats. In males he credited the medial pre-optic anterior hypothalamus (mPOA) and in female rats the area he believed to be responsible for normal sexual behavior was the ventromedial nucleus (Bailey et al., 2000). This led to others exploring the areas of the hypothalamus thought to contribute to sexual functioning. Ultimately it was found that several areas in and around the mPOA appear to be sexually dimorphic. Bailey et al. (2000) mention that upon comparisons of what is expected when looking at these areas in gay men there is a difference in size. An area near/in the mPOA called INAH-3 is found to be smaller and contain fewer cells in women compared to men. Gay men showed size and levels higher than women but less than men. Also findings have shown that the anterior commissure (AC) that connects the right and left hemispheres is significantly

Developmental molecular biologist John Medina attempts to examine how society and the current world we live in has obscured the brain’s natural sense in his book, Brain Rule. Medina processes this examination by investigating twelve specific “rules” of the brain, and how to maximize their efficiency while still operating in the present. He studies how the brain has changed and evolved, the differences of other persons’ brains, and what affects the brain. Almost immediately in the book, Medina states the fact that he will be using anecdotes and interesting emotional appeals to keep the reader interested because he himself knows that is how the brains of the readers work.

In this article, the author argues that psychology is reasonably unified in its methods and explanations. The author suggests that one reason psychology is considered as “not unified” is because it has shifted from one project to another, never entirely abandoning what went before but attempting each time (e.g. behaviorism, introspection etc). However, psychology has all the things needed for a successful discipline such as a marketplace, an acceptable manner of producing knowledge including methods and interpretation, as well as way for training and reproducing members of the discipline. Therefore, psychology is much more unified than it seems at the surface. The author suggests a way to capture the neuroscience influence – by conceptualizing

Victorian Thomas Brown proposed the study of the mind as the basic framework for most scientific efforts. He believed that before any science could be taken seriously, the brain must be studied. Not only the physicality of the brain, but also the workings of the mind and how it thinks (Wee, 2005). With Brown’s proposal, the majority of serious psychologists would no longer ignore the real world implications of human experience and action when dealing with the functioning of the mind.

Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst.[17] Helen

For the last few years, with this significant progress in the field of neuroscience and the researches on brain’s study, there has been a huge modification of some statement that were considered as relevant in the past such “our brain controls our mind” but, nowadays it’s quite clear that science agrees the contrary , which is “our mind controls our brain” and this can be elucidated by the fact that statistics confirm that 75-98 % of physical, mental and behavior illnesses come from our thought life; 350 million worldwide people suffer from depression;40 million people in the U.S. suffer from anxiety and disorders and there are more deaths from suicides than from car accidents. The interesting part of such study is when the neuroplasticity