201 results for the idea of the brain

Science has always created problems for traditional ways of seeing things, but now the very attributes that make us human -- free will, the permanence of personal identity, the existence of the soul -- are threatened by the science of the mind. If the mind is the brain, and therefore a physical object subject to…

In The True Path, Duke psychiatrist Roy J. Mathew draws on his own extensive knowledge of neuroscience as he looks at the centuries-old Indian idea that spirituality is a state of mind-a higher form of consciousness. Mathew shows how the latest brain research demonstrates that activities such as prayer, music, art, nature, intuitive knowledge, altruism,…

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the…

Do Animals have ideas? Do they experience pain like humans? Do they think about objects that they cannot see? About situations that have occurred in the past? Do they consciously make plans for the future or do they simply react unthinkingly to objects as they appear and situations as they arise? All of these questions…

If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions, you're "smart." But "intelligence" is what you need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never spoken before. As Jean Piaget said, intelligence…

For decades, health care providers have worked as though there were a monolithic wall dividing the ailments of the mind from those of the body. Theorists on either side developed separate languages and philosophies to explain symptoms. This distinction has left many clinicians unable to treat successfully patients whose symptoms—such as headaches, conversion paralysis, and…

We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the many current cognitive and behavioral approaches to the brain that leave biology out of the picture, and argues that the workings of…