The Accidental Mind Summary

Mel Levine’s book, A Mind at a Time, describes many aspects of cognitive psychology and attempts to apply them to the educational system for young children. This book also makes suggestions for parents that have children with cognitive difficulties. The chapters in this book are designated to various aspects of cognitive psychology as they pertain to children. This paper focuses on chapter six in A Mind at a Time, which is titled “Making Arrangements: Our Spatial and Sequential Ordering Systems.” This is a very interesting chapter because it incorporates many aspects of cognitive psychology. In this chapter, Levine focuses on how children organize their world in terms of learning, thinking,

The PBS special "The Secret Life of the Brain" took us through all different aspects of the brain and its formation through life. These five movies taught us that the brain is plastic and is always changing, cutting unused neurons and filling with different ideas and thoughts that you learn from your environment. The five videos go through the five stages of life; baby, child, teenager, adult and finally the aging brain.

The human brain is a mystery that has been studied for centuries in attempt to understand how it functions. Scientists first thought that the brain was a structure that functioned a whole. It was in the early 1600’s where the first ideas of localisation of function in the brain started. At this time Rene Descartes discovered a tiny structure called the pineal

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)

The nineteenth century saw an explosion in knowledge regarding the brain unlike any before. For centuries, the brain had been considered the seat of human intelligence. However, the brain of the classics was a singular organ of

According to Drugabuse.gov, Drug addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. Addiction is viewed as brain disease due to the changes that are going on in the brain due to the usage of the drugs, so it alters the structure and how it regularly functions. However, after reading Maia Szalavitz book, “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary new way of understanding addiction (2016)”, she has a unique view of what brain addiction is and her experience with addiction. In her novel, she views addiction as a learning disorder, like in her case it started early on in her as a child learning to be addicted to other things that develop habits of pleasure, reaction that makes up their addiction. Her memoir is her personal experience with addiction with using reputable journals and study to convey her point on what her rollercoaster with addictions has been starting early on in early childhood.

Nothing in the world is more mysterious than the human mind but without the brain how do you have a mind? The brain sends and receives information by electrical impulses around the human body allowing us to see, move, feel, hear and think. If the brain is removed from the human body these impulses will cease, thus there will be no mind. Philosophers like Place, Smart, and Armstrong support this claim through the notion of identify theory and type physicalism. Brain and mind identity is a very controversial topic with some philosophers arguing that because people can have knowledge of a specific mental state without being affected in the physical state, mind and the brain may well be different. However with significant breakthroughs in neuroscience in the last century, such as Dr. Penfield’s Montreal procedure it is safe to say that the brain has direct control over the mind thus the two being in/distinguishable.

The human brain is a feat of evolution: it has allowed humans to have complex thoughts, conscience, build tools, create fires, and much more. Humans did not acquire this simply by chance. Evolution throughout our ancestral past has shaped and moulded the human mind to its state. The earliest of ancestors, including apes, had very small brains, but as evolution progressed, so too did the human brain. The rapid progression of human intelligence has been attributed to environmental changes causing humans to change with their surroundings for survival. This lead to the expansion of specific areas of the brain, vastly differing maturation of humans compared to our

This video is about The Behaving Brain; it explains how the brain and amnesia work. According to the video, neurons duties are to receive information from other cells, process this information, and transmitting it to the rest of the body. This is done by traveling through dendrites, to the soma, to the axon, to the terminal buttons. Constant nerve flow helps regulate our metabolism, temperature, and respiration. It also enables learning and the ability to comprehend. The brain is connected to the brain stem, which is connected to the cerebellum, which is connected to the limbic system. The limbic system is made up of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and thalamus. The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, where things are

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Print.

“Left Neglect…is a real neurological syndrome that occurs due to damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, such as might follow a right-hemisphere stroke” (Genova 323). Lisa Genova, author of “Left Neglected”, explores the bewildering neurological disorder of Left Neglect through the eyes of Sarah Nickerson. Sarah is a multi-tasking champion who holds a prestigious position as the vice president of human resources at Berkley Consulting, is a mother of three kids, and a wife to her husband Bob Nickerson, who also holds a prestigious position at another company. Life for Sarah is hectic, fast paced, and constantly moving. If it isn’t something regarding work, then it’s her children, or other priorities that seem to pile up as Sarah moves

Puissant, complex, sinister, twisted, is the human mind. The human mind is that without a moon, dark and warped. The human mind is that without the stars, sinful and impure thus corrupting others. The human mind even considered ‘sane’ is in contrast unconscious. This depiction of the human mind is depicted through the governess, who has hallucinations of ghosts, in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. The governess, the young protagonist of this novella, moved to Bly to be a governess of two children, Miles and Flora, whom are strangers to her. Also, upon her interviewing to be governess she fell madly in love with her potential employer. Due to the governess’ job and her sexual repression, the governess’ mind is unconscious due to Freud’s theory which thus enables the diagnostic of the governess to be that she has schizophrenia.

After conducting a close reading of Victor Davis Hanson’s article, Monasteries of the Mind, I came to the consensus that he provided many plausible and thought-provoking arguments regarding the political climate in the United States right now. He asserts in the article that in recent months there has been a double standard from what was accepted and praised during the Obama administration and and what is looked down upon in the Trump administration. In fact, Hanson accentuated that, “There is now something called the ‘Resistance,’ which by its nomenclature poses that its opposition to Trump is reminiscent of European partisan resistance to Hitler” [1]. I find this accusation to be a bit extreme, because while many of his policies anger and offend

In David Armstrong’s thought-provoking work titled, The Nature of Mind, he explains that the most convincing way to make sense of the mind-body problem is to approach it in a materialistic way. Specifically, Armstrong shows that the science of physico-chemical processes of the brain is the best way to explain the nature of our mind. He goes on to explain traditional and dispositional behaviorism, and states his own materialistic take on behaviorism. His arguments throughout his paper are very logical, and though there have been arguments against his explanations, he effectively justifies the materialistic view of the mind.

Firstly, it is important to understand the evolution and development of human brain. An interesting idea is that our human brains are becoming smaller in size through evolution of time. It is commonly believed that more content requires bigger space. Let 's take an example. A bowl that needs to fit ten identical objects needs to be bigger to a bowl that only needs to fit five identical objects. Likewise, our human brain has continued to develop through evolution and has much more complex capabilities as well as content to carry since the birth of our species in the Stone Age. Now