The Subfield Of Psychology Known As Physiological Psychology

Mind-body dualism is usually seen as the central issue in philosophy of the mind. The problem with mind-body dualism is that it is unknown whether the mind really is a separate entity from the human body as Descartes states in his argument, or whether the mind is the brain itself. Descartes believed that in a person existed two major components, the physical body and the nonphysical body which was called the mind or soul. As a scientist, Descartes believed in mechanical theories of matter, however, he was also very religious and did not believe people could merely be mechanical creatures that ran like “clockwork.” And so, it was Descartes who argued that the mind directed thoughts. To account for this, he split the world into two parts,

The human brain is an amazing device. It controls everything we do. It controls our bodies, how we communicate, how we function. Our brains our

Your brain is a very powerful thing. It controls everything about you. Your thoughts, your actions, your emotions. Everything we see, feel and do are actions of our brain. Our brains are the most complex things in this world. They start to develop at just 4 weeks in the womb. They form more connections then stars in the sky. In the Pbs series “The Secret life of the Brain” they divide your brains life into 5 parts, the babies brain, the child’s brain, the teenage brain, the adult brain and the aging brain.

Brain injuries, though more common than one might think, don’t always lead to serious damage for a lifetime. Even less likely was Henry Molaison, who became one of the world’s most famous brain patients after the removal of his hippocampi in order to stop his constant and severe seizures destroyed his ability to create memories.

Descartes had a very mechanistic view of the brain. He believed the body works similar to machines as it is material and follows laws of physics. He suggests that mind and body interact at the pineal gland. He predicted that there are tube-like structures inside our bodies that tighten under

Dualism, a philosophy most defended by Rene Descartes, Believed that there are two concepts to philosophy, regarding the mind and the body. Dualism, is possibly the oldest and the most intuitive of the philosophies of mind, however within the modern psychology, this philosophy is a minority view among psychologists. This theory states that the mental cannot exist outside of the body, and the body is unable to think. It refers to reality as two distinct kind of things - Mental and material things. Dualists often believe in different concepts regarding how these would relate to each other. Dualists fall into a variety of camps depending on how they would believe the mind and the body is related. Interactionists see that the mental events have effects or can cause the physical effects. Epiphenomena believe in a compromise

Up until H.M. had this happen, we did not know the hippocampus was a necessity for making memories. Also, that if we get rid of both of our hippocampi, we will experience not only a loss of our short-term memory, but also some memories prior to the brain damage. This discovery declared the removing of the hippocampi never to be done again. Some things learned from the experiments H.M. was subject of were if his attention was focused on one subject and rehearsed, he could retain the information for a period of time, but once distracted or introduced to a new thing, he would then forget it all. Things that were not easy to rehearse, were forgotten a lot sooner. He also traced a star ten different times, and though he didn't remember doing the task, his hand remembered how to draw it. This helped us make the discovery that there are other areas where we have memory such as motor skills, and they were not damaged in his

It’s interesting to find out that the things we eat and drink are more so identified by our senses of sight and smell and not just taste. This is because food can be identified by just sight alone, and same thing goes for smell as well! Our brains actually view taste as a combination of the senses smell and touch at the same time. So really all sensory information is gathered from the actual substance we a consuming. The way we get this information through sent is located in the back of our mouths and called the “retronasal olfaction. The way we gather this similar same information through smell is located in the nose and called the “orthonasal olfaction”. These methods both influence the perception of flavor, so

The theory fails to adequately address the interaction of the mind and body thus, exposing the theory to criticism from various scholars. However, the study reveals the mind-body interaction proposed by Descartes is probable. According to Descartes dualism theory, the mind and body are defined as substances. In this sense, substances are complex in nature and have the ability to relate to other elements (Descartes & Cottingham, 2013). The mind and the body are seen as intimately connected.

In this paper I will argue for Cartesian dualism to be the most plausible solution to the mind-body problem. Cartesian dualism argues that there is a two-way interaction between mental and physical substances. Renee Descartes, the creator of the theory, believed that a man consisted of matter, the physical things that walk and talk etc., and mind, the nonphysical substance (often correlated with the soul) that thinks, doubts, remembers, etc.

In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes introduces the dualistic idea of a sharp split between mind and body. This mind-body split is a Western secular idea and discounts many important aspects of the human experience. Descartes argues that, “…a body, by its very nature, is always divisible. On the other hand, the mind is utterly indivisible” (Descartes, 56). This idea that there is a distinct difference between the mind and the body is nonsensical from both a phenomenological and a scientific perspective. Furthermore, it is a very privileged point of view. Descartes was first and foremost a scholar. Before dedicating his life to philosophy, he worked with analytic geometry and analytics. In many ways, Descartes was spared experiences that might have caused him to reassess his thoughts on the split between mind and body. Unlike the example of the man with an amputated foot that Descartes uses in Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes did not lose a limb. If he had, he may have realized that the mind is just as divisible as the body, as is the case with traumatic experiences. Based on the theoretical possibility that Descartes is wrong, it follows that mind and body are essentially the same. This can be seen through a cognitive perspective of human experience, and in particular, the application of modern neuroscience.

Rene Descartes dualism states that the mind and body are separate entities. The mind is a nonphysical, non-spatial substance; the mind and brain are separate existences, the brain is a part of the physical body and serves as a connection between the body and mind. Dualism is a hot topic of argument on whether the theory holds any validity or if it holds any truth. However, Cartesian dualism is a credible theory and has a lot of support to verify it.

Another issue Cartesian dualism faces in the mind-body problem. This is how the soul and the body are integrated, and considers how they affect one another. Descartes’ solution is that the body and the mind is separate. Idealists’ solution is that there is only mind, explaining the body as only being an extension of the mind. However as technology has advanced and neuroscience developed, processes such as emotions, memory and perceptions have all been shown to have a neurological basis, refuting the dualism theory of consciousness. PET, MRI, EEG and MEG are all ways of measuring electric and magnetic neural activity, gradually allowing the pathways and areas of the brain to be understood (Taylor 2013.) The mind is no longer such a mystery. A physical reductive approach could be taken to this mind-body problem, where our consciousness is purely generated from matter, and there is no “mind” in the way

In Descartes theory, known as Cartesian Dualism, states that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. He believed that while two separate entities, the mind controlled the body but they could interact with one another. According to Crane T. and Patterson, S. (2001) “Descartes’ suggestive characterization of a human being as a res cogitans. If I am first and foremost a ‘thinking thing,’ an individual whose mind is an immaterial and non-extended substance, then I need to explain those relations which might be said to exist between my mind, so understood, and my body, when that is defined as a material, physical thing.” Other philosophers believed in another theory called monism. Monism is basically the belief that mind and matter are made up of the same thing.

Without the hippocampus, the information from the short-term memory (STM) cannot be stored in long term memory (LTM). The hippocampus is a very important part of the human brain to store our memories. If we lost it, we will lose all our conscious memories. From Henry’s case, it also discovered that there are multiple memory storage areas located at different parts of the brain while the hippocampus is important to consolidate short-term memory to long-term memory. The removal of hippocampus caused Henry to suffer until he died as he lost the ability to make new conscious