Order, chaos, or something inbetween

I came across an excellent article about epilepsy recently. There’s a common belief that a seizure is a kind of chaos of the brain. In fact, it’s the opposite. A seizure is where the complex patterns of electrical activity in the brain break down and are replaced temporarily with a single big co-ordinated pattern.
A normal [...]

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Supersizing the Mind. Andy Clark

Where does your mind exist? There’s a longstanding “common sense” view that it’s inside your skull. But, it’s becoming apparent, that is far from the whole story. Yes, of course a lot of what we call the mind is related to brain activity and the brain is indeed inside the skull, but many researchers are [...]

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Storytelling and the science of the mind

Because I deal with stories every day, I decided to learn more about the place of narrative in human experience, but coming from a medical perspective I couldn’t find much about narrative, even though there are emerging disciplines of “narrative-based medicine” and “narrative-based research”. Instead, I found the best thinking on storytelling lay in the [...]

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Is reality a series of events?

I’ve just embarked upon a study of the Abhidamma – it’s a Buddhist text which is referred to as THE main text on Buddhist psychology. Buddhist psychology is becoming more prominent in recent times because those who write about neuroscientific approaches to the Mind, researchers and philosophers interested in phenomena like consciousness and perception are [...]

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Mind-bending Movies

I love movies. I’m an addict. I think it’s my insatiable thirst for stories which hooks me. I’m not a fan of the blockbuster kind of movie that’s all special effects though. I like a movie which draws me in and absorbs me in the characters and the story. Of course, that fits with my [...]

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Figuring out how your brain handles the meanings of words

fMRI is definitely the “in” tool in neuroscience. It allows a scientist to see what areas of the brain light up while a person is doing something. A study I recently came across is using this technique to work out how the brain deals with words. More specifically they are mapping the areas of the [...]

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4 verbs which make us human?

Let’s consider four verbs which highlight essential characteristics of human beings.
SENSING
All living creatures are sensate. All have sensory organs to pick up stimuli from the environment – light, sound, odours, temperature and so on. As human beings we have a particularly elaborate sensory system, possibly THE most elaborate of all creatures, however, being sensate is [...]

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How we figure out what other people think

How we figure out what other people think or how they are likely to act is a complex phenomenon, but here’s one interesting aspect of it. There’s a technique being used quite a lot these days to try and understand how our brains work. It’s called fMRI – which stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. [...]

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Are we born empathic?

A colleague at work read my post on mirroring.
She said, if it’s true that different people have different scan findings in the areas of the brain associated with mirroring neurones (which, it is hypothesised, are responsible for empathic ability), then does that mean that some people are born with greater empathic potential than others? And [...]

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Being There

Being There, by Andy Clark (ISBN 0-262-53156-9) is one of the most interestingly challenging books I’ve read for a long time. Let me say first that it’s taken me longer to read than I’d have expected it to. There are whole swathes of it which just didn’t engage me easily. In fact, a few times [...]

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