scholarly journals Soul searching: a brief history of the mind/body debate in the neurosciences

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Way

✓Anatomical and physiological understandings of the structure and function of the brain have worked to establish it as the “seat of the soul.” As an organ of reflection, meditation, and memory, the brain becomes synonymous with what defines the “self” through the existence of consciousness—of mind. Thus, the brain has been associated with a range of transcendent concepts—the soul, spirit, mind, and consciousness—that all relate in fundamental ways to each other both in terms of their perceived location within the brain and because of the way each works ultimately to define the person to whom the brain belongs. In this article, the author provides a brief exploration of how interrelated these categories have been when seen in the context of ancient, Renaissance, early modern, and modern philosophical and medical concerns; how the brain has variously been perceived as home to these intimate states of being; and how practitioners from the neurosciences have reflected on these questions. The author provides novel insights into the interrelationships of philosophy, theology, and medicine by examining these issues through the lens of the history of neuroscience.

scholarly journals Mapping Meditative States and Stages with Electrophysiology: Concepts, Classifications, and Methods

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Poppy Schoenberg ◽  
David R Vago
Keyword(s):  
Structure And Function ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Biological Structure ◽  
Contemplative Practices ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Neurobiological Substrates ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Exploration of human consciousness remains a final frontier within basic neuroscience; that is, how the finite biological structure and function of the brain gives rise to the seemingly infinite expanse that encompasses the terrain of the mind. Contemporary mindfulness and other contemplative practices across historical and post-modern traditions involve systematic forms of mental training that allow the practitioner to develop the mind in very specific and quantifiable ways. Some fundamental questions pertain to this scientific enquiry; (1) how to concisely classify discrete and developmentally-specific “mind states” of consciousness that are in line with the subtle complex phenomenology of experience so to yield ontological quantifications? (2) what measures best represent such classification/quantification systems? (3) can the present electrophysiological purview map developmentally-specified mind states and stages to neurobiological substrates, based on extant contention (i.e. discrete EEG band functionality, phenomenological significance, and underlying mechanisms) regarding the interpretation of EEG physiology?

scholarly journals A short history of studies on intelligence and brain in honeybees

Apidologie ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolf Menzel
Keyword(s):  
Structure And Function ◽  
Behavioral Biology ◽  
Short History ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain

AbstractReflections about the historical roots of our current scientific endeavors are useful from time to time as they help us to acknowledge the ideas, concepts, methodological approaches, and idiosyncrasies of the researchers that paved the ground we stand on right now. The 50-year anniversary of Apidologie offers the opportunity to refresh our knowledge about the history of bee research. I take the liberty of putting the founding year of Apidologie in the middle of the period I cover here. The nascent period of behavioral biology around the late 19th to the early twentieth century was intimately connected with a loss of concepts related to the mental functions of the brain, concepts that were rooted in Darwin’s theory of gradualism in the living world including cognition in animals. This loss was celebrated both in ethology and behaviorism as the gateway to scientific impartiality. Using this apparently strict scientific approach, impressive discoveries were made by observing and strictly quantifying the behavior of bees. The first forays into the brain, however, uncovered a richness of structure and function that reached far beyond stereotypical input/output connections and opened the way to compensating the conceptual restrictions imposed on us by traditional ethology. Honeybee research provides us with a particularly exciting story in this context. The cognitive turn in behavioral biology is intimately connected to the increasing knowledge of how the brain works, also in honeybee research. What has been achieved so far is just the beginning, but it gives us a glimpse of a promising future. Teamwork between neuroscientists and behavioral biologists is needed to elucidate brain functions such as the expectation of future outcomes and intentionality as an entry to animal intelligence reflecting the flexibility and adaptability in behavior also seen in honeybees.

The Brain and Higher Mental Function

1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorder ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Mental Function ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Core Set ◽  
Reticular System ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Critical evaluation of biological theories of psychiatric disorder requires an understanding of current concepts of higher mental function and its related biology. Both the nature of the topic and the rapidity of advances in the field make it difficult to obtain an updated synthesis. Part I of this paper attempts to provide that by reviewing current concepts of the mind/body relationship, emotion, arousal, attention, consciousness and motivation. Part II considers those concepts in relation to recent work on the structure and function of the reticular, limbic and anterior cerebral systems. It is concluded that the model of the limbic system as subserving emotional life could now perhaps be set aside in favour of the model of a core set of chemically identified neurons in the reticular system being necessary but not sufficient to subserve higher mental function whilst also subserving other integrating functions for which no mental terminology is required. The problem of developing an eclectic theory of higher mental function that will embrace these concepts is discussed.

Sensory cortex and the mind-brain problem

1978 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Puccetti ◽  
Robert W. Dykes
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Physical Structure ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Eliminative Materialism ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Rule Out

AbstractOne of the implicit, and sometimes explicit, objectives of modern neuroscience is to find neural correlates of subjective experience so that different qualities of that experience might be explained in detail by reference to the physical structure and processes of the brain. It is generally assumed that such explanations will make unnecessary or rule out any reference to conscious mental agents. This is the classic mind-brain reductivist program. We have chosen to challenge the optimism underlying such an approach in the context of sensory neurophysiology and sensory experience. Specifically, we ask if it is possible to explain the subjective differences among seeing, hearing, and feeling something by inspecting the structure and function of primary visual, auditory, and somesthetic cortex.After reviewing the progress in localization of sensory functions over the past two centuries and examining some aspects of the structure and function of somesthetic, auditory, and visual cortex, we infer that one cannot explain the subjective differences between sensory modalities in terms of present day neuroscientific knowledge. Nor do present trends in research provide grounds for optimism.At this point we turn to three philosophical theories to see what promise they hold of explaining these differences. A brief discussion of each – identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism – suggests that none adequately accounts for the facts of the situation, and we tentatively conclude that some form of dualism is still a tenable hypothesis.

The history of the brain and mind sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Alfred Freeborn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The Neurosciences ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Brain ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

This review article critically surveys the following literature by placing it under the historiographical banner of ‘the history of the brain and mind sciences’: Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis & the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (eds), The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017); Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Neurotechnologies of the Self: Mind, Brain and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This framework highlights contemporary attempts to historicize the integrative project of neuroscience and set the correct limits to interdisciplinary collaboration. While attempts to critically engage with the ‘neuro’ rhetoric of contemporary neuroscientists can seem at odds with historians seeking to write the history of neuroscience from the margins, it is argued that together these two projects represent a positive historiographical direction for the history of the neurosciences after the decade of the brain.

Phantasmatic Shakespeare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Scientific Fields

The book argues that Shakespeare’s representations of imagination—the many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams in his works—draw their complexity from the interdiscursive confrontations between early modern faculty psychology and the history of science. During the Renaissance, imagination (also called the fantasy or fancy) was understood as a faculty of the soul, that which creates the phantasms or images needed by the mind to perceive, reason, and recall. The book explores how this psychology of imagination, developed by ancient and medieval philosophers, was disrupted in the sixteenth century by developments in proto-scientific fields such as anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history. Guided by Shakespeare’s plays and poems, different chapters consider different aspects of imagination destabilized during this time—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature. In giving aesthetic expression to the epistemological problems surrounding the idea of imagination, Shakespeare made this element of cognitive theory the property of literary art.

MARKETS AND CULTURES: MEDICAL SPECIFICS AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE BODY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Body Perceptions ◽  
Do So

ABSTRACTThe history of the body is of course contested territory. Postmodern interpretations in particular have moved it from a history of scientific knowledge of its structure and function toward histories of the various meanings, identities and experiences constructed about it. Underlying such interpretations have been large and important claims about the unfortunate consequences of the rise of a political economy associated with capitalism and medicalisation. In contradistinction, this paper offers a view of that historical process in a manner in keeping with materialism rather than in opposition to it. To do so, it examines a general change in body perceptions common to most of the literature: a shift from the body as a highly individualistic and variable subject to a more universal object, so that alterations in one person's body could be understood to represent how alterations in other human bodies occurred. It then suggests that one of the chief causes of that change was the growing vigour of the market for remedies that could be given to anyone, without discrimination according to temperament, gender, ethnicity, social status or other variables in the belief that they would cure quietly and effectively. One of the most visible remedies of this kind was a ‘specific’, the Peruvian, or Jesuits’ bark. While views about specific drugs were contested, the development of a market for medicinals that worked universally helped to promote the view that human bodies are physiologically alike.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

The role of GABAA receptor biogenesis, structure and function in epilepsy

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 863-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Mizielinska ◽  
S. Greenwood ◽  
C.N. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Gabaa Receptor ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Inhibitory Synapses ◽  
Normal Brain ◽  
Synaptic Targeting ◽  
Acid Type ◽  
Normal Brain Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain

Maintaining the correct balance in neuronal activation is of paramount importance to normal brain function. Imbalances due to changes in excitation or inhibition can lead to a variety of disorders ranging from the clinically extreme (e.g. epilepsy) to the more subtle (e.g. anxiety). In the brain, the most common inhibitory synapses are regulated by GABAA (γ-aminobutyric acid type A) receptors, a role commensurate with their importance as therapeutic targets. Remarkably, we still know relatively little about GABAA receptor biogenesis. Receptors are constructed as pentameric ion channels, with α and β subunits being the minimal requirement, and the incorporation of a γ subunit being necessary for benzodiazepine modulation and synaptic targeting. Insights have been provided by the discovery of several specific assembly signals within different GABAA receptor subunits. Moreover, a number of recent studies on GABAA receptor mutations associated with epilepsy have further enhanced our understanding of GABAA receptor biogenesis, structure and function.

scholarly journals Current advances in nanomaterials affecting morphology, structure, and function of erythrocytes

RSC Advances ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 6958-6971
Author(s):  
Yaxian Tian ◽  
Zhaoju Tian ◽  
Yanrong Dong ◽  
Xiaohui Wang ◽  
Linsheng Zhan
Keyword(s):  
Structure And Function ◽  
Erythrocyte Membranes ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Way

This review focuses on the way how nanoparticles affect the structure and function of erythrocyte membranes, and is expected to pave the way for development of new nanodrugs.

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