Brain/ The astonishing hypothesis

So here's where things begin for real. I want to welcome people to the course
and I want to welcome people to the first series of lectures, which is on the brain, on
neuroscience.And I want to begin this series of lectures and the course itself, with a
story about a man named Phineas Gage, and an event that happened to Gage in the
summer of 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont.
So Gage was a blasting foreman working on a railway construction project
and his job, at that time, was to clear away rock so that they could lay down
tracks. And to do so, his routine during those days, was that he would bore a hole in
the rocks. Inside the hole, he put blasting powder and a fuse in. Then he would cover
that up with dirt and sand andtake a tamping iron, which he carried with him. A big
piece of steel, looked like a javelin and use it to tamp down the sand and dirt, so that
later they could set the fuse and cause the explosions.
Well one day, something didn't work. Nobody's exactly sure why, maybe he
just forgot to put in the sand and the dirt. But regardless, he put the tamping iron into
the hole, the powder exploded. [SOUND] The tamping iron shot away from his hand
and went into his face. It entered the left side of Gage's jaw, moving in an upward
direction, it passed behind the left eye through the left side of the brain and it went
out the top of his skull and landed several feet away of the clutter. Now miraculously
Gage wasn't killed on the spot.He lost consciousness for a little bit, but then he
staggered to his feet.
And in some regards, Gage was very lucky. So he underwent a series of
operations, he had infections, he got sick. At times, his life was at risk. But months
later, he was, in certain regards, pretty much recovered. He was able to see, he wasn't
deaf, he wasn't paralyzed, he didn't lose the ability to speak or understand language,
he didn't lose his intellectual capacities in any simple way.
But in another sense Gage was very unlucky because Gage has been
transformed by this incident. Someone who knew Gage describes the transformation
like this. Before the accident Gage was, quote the most efficient and capable man, a
man of temperate habits, considerable energy of character, a sharp shrewd
businessman.
After the accident, Gage was no longer Gage. He was fitful, irreverent,
indulging at times in the grossest profanity manifesting but little deference for his
fellows. He ended up losing his job. He traveled through the states taking up different
jobs, engaging in different relationships. And ultimately ended up in an exhibit in a
travelling circus, holding a tamping iron and telling people about this terrible story
about how it went through his head and went through his brain, and changed his life.

So, why am I telling you this story? Well, as I said, I want to begin the
course by talking about the brain. And the story of Phineas Gage illustrates
something which we have abundant reason to believe, which is that the brain is
the source of mental life. And so damage to the brain can have profound effects
on who we are and what we are.
 An idea here is nicely summarized by the Nobel prize winning biologist
Francis Crick, he calls it the Astonishing Hypothesis. As he writes, the Astonishing
Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
Now this assembly of nerve cells is of course the brain, the brain and parts of
the spinal cord, but we're going to talk about the brain here.
An the idea then, as sometimes people like to put it the mind is the brain or that
the mind is what the brain does or the mental life emerges from the brain.

The official term for this is materialism that we are material beings. Everybody
accepts that our arms and legs and our heart and kidneys are made of the same sort of
stuff as rabbits and automobiles and cups. But the idea is that our mental life, what
makes us special, our most intimate feelings and thoughts also arise from these
material things. And this the idea that makes possible the discipline of neuroscience
and much of psychology.

DUALISM
We're talking about materialism, the idea that our mental life emerges
from our physical brain. If you're listening closely, if you're thinking about
this, I hope you acknowledged that this is an odd and unnatural view. I don't expect
you to believe it, at least not at first. And in fact, for the most part, people are far
more attracted to the doctrine called "Dualism." 
Dualism is an idea that's been found in just about every religion and every
philosophy. It's made explicit in Plato, for instance. But I think the most thoughtful
and articulate defender of dualism was the philosopher, Rene Descartes. Descartes
believed that animals were material things. 
He thought that the doctrine of materialism was correct about non-human
animals. "But humans are different," Descartes argued. For humans, there's a
duality. We possess two sorts of things. We are composed of two sorts of
things. We are in part material, but we're also in part spiritual, separate, mental,
psychological. In some way that doesn't reduce to the material. He made two
arguments for this, and they're both reasonably good arguments, at least quite
persuasive at his time, and have persuaded many people and continue to persuade
many people. 
The first arguments for a non-material nature is that humans are capable
of doing things that no machine, no material entity ever could. So, it might
surprise you to hear this, but Descartes in the 17th century was familiar with
robots. He knew about the French Royal Gardens, which is like a 17th century
Disneyland or Euro Disney, which had robots that react when you approach them or
when you step on certain stones. For instance, you might approach Diana, and then
Neptune would jump out from the bushes holding a trident. This was done not of
electricity, but with water. So, Descartes knew about these robots, and Descartes
asked, "Well, maybe we're such things, maybe we're just machines responding to the
environment." And he said that we can't be. He said maybe animals, non-human
animals can be, but human behavior is far more complicated, and variegated, and
subtle to be explained in such simple ways. 
We'll return to this point later on in the course when we talk about Noam
Chomsky and Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism, which argued that basically
humans respond in a relatively reflexive way to environmental stimuli. Descartes
along with Chomsky said, "That can't be. Our behavior's far too complicated for
that. So, we can't be machines." 
His second argument is probably better now, and it's based on
intuition. And his claim was we don't feel like bodies. So, to put it more
technically, he applied what was called a method of doubt. He asked the
question, "What do we know for sure, and what can we question?" So, for
instance, you might believe you were born in such and so place. You could be
wrong. You could be deceived. You might believe that the Earth is thousands or
millions of years old. But maybe the Earth was created 100 years ago and all the
memories that your grandparents have of the past were just manufactured. You might
believe, said Descartes, that you live in a world of things, that you're sitting on a
chair or there's a wall in front of you or there's a computer near your hands. But
Descartes observe that we often believe such things when we're in dreams, but
weren't mistaken. He observed that people who are mentally ill, or were deranged in
some way, might have such beliefs, but don't be mistaken. So, you could be wrong
that there's a physical world around you. You could be wrong that there is a body that
you have. This is an ancient concern of course, but it's best articulated in the movie,
The Matrix, which maintains that we think we're running around in the physical
world, but actually, with the lucky exception of our heroes like Neo and Trinity, we're
actually just plugged into some sort of system. Another version of this is that we're
brains in a vat. If you were a brain, just the brain sitting in a vat with electrical
wires stimulating your experiences, you couldn't help. Maybe you are such
things. Modern-day philosophers for instance, will argue that there's an excellent
chance that we are simulations, we computer simulations. So, Descartes and people
following Descartes said, "There's a lot we can't be sure of. The things that we are
seemingly most confident about in real world can't be shaken." 
But Descartes said, "There's one thing you can't doubt. You can't doubt
your own consciousness. You can't doubt your own existence." The famous line
is, "I think, therefore I am." And spelling out this intuition, building from the fact
you could doubt that you have a body, but you can't doubt that you have a
mind. Descartes wrote, "I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of
which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it
dependent in a material thing.. that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is
entirely distinct from body." So, that's a philosophical case for dualism. But as I
said, dualism is also emerged out of common sense. Think about how you describe
your body. You describe your body's if you possess it. My arm, my heart, my
body, my brain, as if it's something separate from you that you have. Or consider your
intuitions about personal identity. 
So, typically, as people age, their consciousness follows their body. So, I get
10 years older, my mind 10 years older, my brain is 10 years older, it all connects
together, but we easily accept at least infection that people can hop from one body to
another. There are many comedies that involve body switching, body swamps. There
are movies that involve somebody going to sleep one morning as one person and
waking up as another. We understand they're fiction, they aren't real. But they make
sense to us. There's an intuitive rationale to this. We don't walk out of the theory and
say, "I am totally confused what happened there." Rather, at least with our naive
conception of the self, we accept that least of the possibility, that you can hop from
one body to another. None of this is limited to modern-day movies, the most famous
short story of history by Franz Kafka begins with the sentence, "As Gregor Samsa
awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed
into a gigantic insect." Metamorphosis involves that transformation and along
before that in Ulysses the characters are transformed. Some of the characters are
transformed by an evil witch into pigs. It's non of you took to people and turn them
into pigs rather it's much worse. They put them in the body of pigs. As the passage
goes, "They had the head and voice, and bristles, and body of swine; but their minds
remained unchanged as before. So they were penned there, weeping." 

Our conception that bodies and cells are separate, allows us to accept idea
you had many people inhabiting one body. This is how many people think about
multiple personality disorder, something we'll get to quite later on the course. It's
also at the root of a view that many people; both religious and non-religious
hold, which is the idea of demonic possession. Your body can be taken over by
somebody else. 
Another manifestation of dualism, is you could believe in intelligent beings
without bodies. If mind and body are separate it raises the possibility you could have
one without the other. Plainly you got to have bodies without minds. That's what a
corpse is. But the argument goes you could also have minds without bodies. This is
for instance what many people think about gods or angels. Which are the
immaterial beings that can think, that can observe, that can act, but they don't
have physical bodies in the same sense that we do. 
Finally, and maybe most important for people, the idea that of dualism, the idea
you are not your physical body, raises what must be for many and incredibly
appealing consequence, which is that you can survive the destruction of the body. 
In fact, if you ask most people; religious and non-religious, what will happen
after you body is destroyed? The answer is not well, I'm dead then, that's it. It's the
end of things. But rather the belief is that you can live on. Maybe you'll end up in
some spirit world, maybe you will ascend to heaven, if you're unlucky maybe will
descend to hell. Maybe you'll occupy some other body as an reincarnation. But the
idea is that the destruction of your body need not be the destruction of you
because you are not your body. 
All of these beliefs, the beliefs about personal identity, the beliefs about life
after death, about the existence of supernatural beings. About God. All rest at least to
some extent, on a dualist perspective. 
So, materialism, which says dualism is just playing wrong is an audacious
view, and should be treated as such. You shouldn't just shrug and write it down. You
should grapple with it, you should worry about it. You should either be grudgingly
accepted or fight against it. 
So, why are modern-day psychologists and neuroscientists so confident that
dualism is mistaken? Well, there are a few problems with it. One is that it simply
doesn't help us explain certain things that need to be explained. Appealing to an
immaterial world to an immaterial soul seems to dock certain questions that really do
deserve an answer. So, throughout this course we'll ask questions like, how do we
learn language? What do we find sexually attractive? How does memory
work? These are questions about ourselves, about our minds. To say, "Oh, it all
happens some immaterial realm", leaves us hopeless when it comes to answering
them. The second concern is that at the time, Descartes was correct, to infer from the
limitations of material things physical things, that we probably are not physical
things. But by now we have a much better understanding what physical things can do
which makes it entirely possible for many of us that we are set things. 
So, I'm thinking for instance of computers and robots. For Descartes, the idea
that a physical thing can do something as complicated as play a game of chess would
seem ludicrous. But now of course we know that physical things and if you're looking
at a computer you are looking at such a physical thing, can do exactly that. They can
understand language, they could recognize objects, they could store things in
memory, they can make inferences, and so on. Now, for some of these things, they
don't do it anywhere near as well as people do. So, when we talk about language
development for instance we see that, a two-year-old child uses and understands
language better than any computer around. So, we need to bear that in mind. 
 But still, it's no longer nuts to say that physical thing can do all of the rich and
psychologically diverse and psychologically complicated things that people
do. Which means that we have to take seriously the claim that we are in fact such
physical things. 
The final consideration is that there's tremendous evidence that the brain
is in fact the roots of mental life. So, put aside all that philosophical
abstract, arguments, there's just tons of direct evidence. To some extent that direct
evidence has always been there. You don't have to be born in the 20th or 21st century
to appreciate that getting hit in the head could affect your consciousness and your
memory. To appreciate that diseases like syphilis can lead to disruption of the will
and of consciousness. Alzheimer's can rob you of your rationality. That coffee and
alcohol can inflame the passions. It just is so evident in everyday life that
if physical events that affect the brain can affect ourselves, suggesting that at the
very least, our mental life is intimately connected to the brain. 
Over recent years something else has happened, which is we've developed
technologies that allow us to look directly into the brain. Look at the brains
activation, and infer from patterns of the brain activation what people are
thinking. So, very crudely, you can put somebody into a scanner, an fMRI
scanner, and you could tell whether or not are thinking about language, or music, or
sex. The technology is increasing. There is such a point that is not implausible that
for some of you by the time you're listening to this, we can put a sleeping person
under fMRI scanner, and know from neural patterns of neural firings, know what
they're dreaming. All of this I think it is very difficult to keep this in mind, and hold
on to the view of dualism. I think materialism however uncomfortable, however
unpalatable is a view that the science forces us to adopt.

NEURONS

So, what is the physical seed of thought? What is the source of our

emotions, or decision-making, our passions, or pains, and everything else? Well, it's
the brain, and it's set to be the most complex mechanism in the known universe. You
might expect, given all it is, and given all it does, that will look very pretty, Philips
shimmering lights and glass tubes, and mysterious colors. But in fact, it looks really
kind of gross, it looks a the three-day old meatloaf. It's gray when you take it out of
the head, and inside the head it's bright red because of all the blood. In fact, it turns
out very surprisingly that the source of our mental life, of our consciousness is
meat. In fact, you could eat it, people have eaten brains, I've had brain with cream
sauce, not human brain, mind you, but I've had brain with cream sauce. It's not
bad. But it makes the puzzle all the more harder, how can this fleshy thing give rise to
mental life? That's the question I want to explore in this lecture, and the rest of the
lectures. 
I want to do so by starting with the smallest relevant parts, different parts of
neurons. Then explore how the neurons are connected together, how they're wired
up, how they form different subparts of the brain, like the hypothalamus and the
frontal lobe. Finally, talking about the brain, and the larger perspective, looking at the
two halves of the brain, the left half and right half, and how they interact. 

Now, there's a lot of stuff in the brain, a lot of chemical stuff, a lot of different
parts, but where the action is, the part that does the thinking, the part that is the focus
of most of our research, is the neurons. It's not an accident they call the study of the
biological basis of thought neuroscience, because it all comes from the
neurons. So, you can see here pictures of neurons interacting together. Here's a
diagram that depicts a typical neuron. So, what you see is the dendrites, and
dendrites receive signals from other neurons. Either excitatory, like pluses,
or inhibitory, minuses. Then they get to the cell body, which sums up these
pluses and minuses. When you reach a certain threshold, a certain amount of pluses,
there's neural firing. Firing takes place through the axon, and the axon is much longer
than the dendrites. In fact, for some motor neurons, it's very long indeed. There's
axons running from your spinal cord, all the way to your big toe. You could think of
it of the relative sizes of things in terms of a basketball, and a 40-mile garden
hose. Surrounding the axon is what's called a myelin sheath. The myelin
sheath is- you can think of it as insulation, as fatty tissue like insulation on a
wire. So, the information comes through the dendrites, and summed up in
the cell body, and it's transmitted through the axon. So, what neurons do, is
they sum up and transmit information, and we know that there's a lot of them. By
some estimates, it's 100 billion, or the estimates tend to be very different and very
rough, but there's billions upon billions of neurons, and each connect to
thousands, maybe tens of thousands of other neurons. So, the fact that you have
something of this degree of complexity, this degree of structure, structure which
there's no way to replicate in any machine, the numbers are just too big is why people
might describe the brain as the most complicated machine in the universe. At least
this is fitting, it's made of meat maybe. Which is kind of disappointing, but at least it
shows its incredible internal structure. 
 So, neurons come in three flavors. There are sensory neurons, which take
in information from the environment, from the external world. There's motor
neurons, which go from the brain out to your motor control. So, if you touch
something hot, and you feel the pain, that is sensory neurons, if you rent your hand
back, or you reach for something, that's motor neurons. Finally, there's
interneurons, which connect different neurons without making contact with
external world. Either through sensation, or through motor action. 

Now, the main thing to think about for neurons and neuron firing is that it's all
or nothing. It's like firing a gun, or sneezing. Neurons either fire, or they don't. Now,
you might think that's a little bit strange, particularly, when you think about sensory
neurons, because your experience seems to be a continuum. So, you have sensory
neurons in your eyes, and you can distinguish from a very dim light, and a very bright
light. You have sensory neurons in your fingers, and you could distinguish between
gently touching something, versus being stabbed on the tip of your finger, or
something. 
But still the neurons are all or nothing, the way we get to this continuity
of experience is that neurons can code for intensity in different ways. So, one way is
in terms of the number of neurons that fire. If x neurons corresponds to a mild
experience, x times 10 neurons may correspond to an intense experience. 
Another factor is the impulse frequency of individual neurons, an individual
neuron might denote a mild sensation by doing fire, fire, fire, fire. Well, it might
denote an intense situation with fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. 
So, you have neurons, and the neurons talk to each other, they talk to each
other because axons, an axon of one neuron will communicate with the dendrites
of another neuron. A long time ago, people used to think that neurons were wired up
together like a computer, but in fact, neurons don't actually touch one
another. There is a gap between the axon terminal of one neuron, and the
dendrite of another one. A very tiny gap, typically of like 1/110,000 of a meter
wide. This gap is known as a synapse. When one neuron fires, the axon releases
neurotransmitters, these are chemicals that shoot out over that gap, and affect
dendrites and other neurons. As I said before, the effect of these neurotransmitters
could be excitatory, which is that they raise the energy, so they increase the likelihood
of a neuron firing, or inhibitory. So that they bring down the likelihood of a neuron
firing. 
What's interesting is that different neurons shoot out different
neurotransmitters. So, they have different effects on other neurons that they made
contact with. In fact, a lot of psychopharmacology, both attempts to cure various
psychological or physical diseases by giving medicines, or recreational
psychopharmacology designed to increase pleasure of different forms, or sometimes
help people work, or help people focus. Works by fiddling with the neurotransmitters
and this can be either antagonists, they lower down intensity of things by binding
to the dendrites, making it hard to create more neurotransmitters, or they can
increase the amount of neurotransmitters available in different ways agonists. 
So, you're either pumping up the volume or turning down the volume. 

So, you think about different drugs and their effects. There's a curare. Curare,
is a drug that used by South American Indians. It's a antagonist. It blocks motor
neurons from affecting their muscle fibers. It keeps your motor neurons from
working, and what it does is it paralyzes you, and in large enough doses, it kills
you, because motor neurons also keep your heart beating. So, shut that down and
you die. There's alcohol. 

Now, alcohol also has an inhibitory effect. You might think that's strange
because when I drink alcohol I get all excited and happy and goofy. But you have to
keep this in mind here, the way alcohol works is, it inhibits part of your brain that
does the inhibition. So, you have part of your brain that says, don't say that to the
other person, keep your pants on, stop yelling, and alcohol basically inhibits that
part of the brain, making you more exuberant. Then, over the course of things, in
the course of drinking too much, it also inhibits other parts of the brain. So, you could
pass out and fall on the floor, and in large enough doses, die. 
So, both curare and alcohol, in different ways bring things down. Other drugs
bring things up. So, amphetamines, for instance, increase the amount of
norepinephrine, which is another neurotransmitter, that's responsible for genetic
general arousal, and this is how drugs like speed or cocaine work. Other drugs
like Prozac or L-Dopa, influence neurotransmitters in ways that they
increase, for instance, the supply of dopamine or serotonin. Which can be relevant
for issues like parkinsons, which seems to be related to too little dopamine, and
depression, which is related to too little serotonin. 
So, these drugs work by influencing neurotransmitters, either by directly
pumping in more neurotransmitters, or increasing the supply in different ways, or
stopping them from having effects by binding them or sucking them up in different
ways, but they work through their effects on neurotransmitters. 

So, the more general idea is, the way neurons lead to thinking, is that they
form clusters or networks. These clusters and networks, are computational
devices that do interesting things like recognizing faces, or walking up right, or
understanding sentences, or doing math, or experiencing great sadness, or falling in
love, and so on. We now know that, that's possible, because we create computing
machines that work in certain ways. That if you wire up a computing machine in
certain complicated ways, it can do mathematics, play chess, do flight simulator, and
so on. So, you may be interested in the project of computational neuroscience which
tries to ask the question, how are neurons wired up to do interesting things, and uses
our own success at computational theory as a model. Then, sometimes takes the
inference the other way around, which is you can see how people do it, and then use
this knowledge of how people do it, to create computational systems that can do it as
well. 
So, how is the brain wired up? Well, you might imagine that it's wired up
like a portable computer, like a laptop, like the sort of computer you're looking at
now. Into some regards it is, but there's a couple of reasons why it can't be, and both
of them have to do with how well the brain works. 
So, first, the brain is highly resistant to damage. If you get a knife to the
brain, if you get damage to the brain, it won't typically shut down the whole
system. The information and capacitors somehow distributed across neurons in such a
way that makes them extremely resilient to damage. While in contrast, somebody
could open up the back of your laptop, pull out a chip and the whole thing is
ruined, the whole thing will stop working. But the brain is wired up in a certain way
that makes it highly resilient. 
The second thing is, the brain is wired up in such a way that makes it work
very fast. So, computers can do millions of operations per second, because they're
purely electrical, but brain tissue is much slower and can spend the time to do many
steps. So, to put it a different way, if your brain was wired up like a computer, it
would be so slow, as to be entirely unusable. It has to be wired up in a way that's
more efficient, that allows for the slowness of brain tissues and neurotransmitters, and
can still compute things at a level, at a human level, which is often blindingly fast. 
Because of this, there has been a huge interest in massively parallel systems
and complicated neural networks, which are wired up as we believe the brain does,
and as such, we are helping computers to do things based on our understanding of the
brain that they could never do before. The details of this is something we're going to
talk about through the course. We're not actually going to end up explaining different
capacities directly in terms of neurons, because we can't, and because we want it to
have higher level explanation. 
So, when I talk about how people learn language, or how do they recognize
faces, we're not going to talk much about neurons in particular, but we will talk about
different brain areas and how they work. Then the assumption is, the bet is, that
everything we talk about in more functional ways, can ultimately reduce down to
large networks of neural systems, and that in turn will ultimately reduce down to the
specific behaviors of the specific neurons that we're looking at.
PARTS OF THE BRAIN
So, let's talk about the different parts of the brain and what they do. Parts of the
brain are functionalized for different purposes, they do different things. Which is why
damage to different parts of the brain has different effects. It's why when you look at
an fMRI scan or PET scan or some something that records neural activity, you could
figure out based on the location of the activity what's going on. 
So, the first thing to realize is I'm talking about the brain, but I'd be more
precise and more inclusive if I talked about the brain and parts of the spinal
cord. So, you don't need your brain for everything. There're certain activities we do
that can happen without a brain. Like sucking in newborns or pulling your limb back
to withdraw from pain or vomiting. But for everything else we talk about in this
course, we'll really be talking about the brain. 

So, some of the structures of the brain that are highly relevant are called
subcortical, which means they're below the cortex, which means they're in
the center of the brain. This includes part of the brain like the medulla, which
control certain automatic function like your heart rate, your blood
pressure, swallowing, and so on. It includes the cerebellum, which is involved in
body balance and muscle coordination. It contains about 30 billion neurons. So,
this isn't small potatoes. The hypothalamus, which is involved in feeding and
sex and thirst and different appetites. We're going to talk about emotions or
visceral desires, we'll return to those parts of the brain. 

But for the aspects of psychology that are distinctive for us, that make us
human, we're mostly focused on the outer layer, the cerebral cortex. So, the cerebral
cortex it is all crumpled up. If you were to take a brain, pull out the cortex and
straighten it out, like you're removing a rug you got from the trunk of your car and
you have to straighten it out, it's about two feet square. So, it's lot of crumpling to get
it in. It's about three millimeters thick. This is where the action is. This is where at
least for the things I'm interested in, this is where it takes place. Is where reasoning
and language and complex perception comes from. Fish don't have any
cerebral cortex, reptiles and birds have a little bit, but primates, including humans,
have a lot. 

When you look at the cortex, you'll see it has two halves. It has a left half and
a right half. For each of these halves, when you look at it, you can demarcate the
brain, the cortex into different lobes. There's going from your forehead and
swooping to the back. You have the frontal lobe conveniently enough on the
front.The parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe. Each of
these lobes, there's different things, which we'll talk about in a bit. 

Another thing about the cortex though which is super interesting, is that it
includes maps. What I mean by this is it includes topographical maps where two
things that are close together in the brain are similarly close together in the
body. So, there is a motor area where if you were to shock, parts of that brain, parts
of the body would twitch accordingly. Just like you'd expect, the middle finger is
close to the thumb which is closer to elbow. If it's close in the real-world and your
body it's close to the brain and there is a primary somatosensory area, which is the
sense organs. There if you have somebody in the operating table and you shocked
people, they would experience things, they might experience a sound or a flash of
light or a touch. 
In fact, in the occipital lobe, you have a map for vision and in the temporal
lobe, you have a map for sound. What's really cool is, I said the map is
topographical, but the size of the brain areas don't correspond to the size of the
actual body areas, but rather to the extent to which there's motor or sensory
function. So, artists have drawn pictures of people if their body was proportioned to
the extent that their brain was. You'd see the trunk of the body is relatively small, but
their hands are enormous and the face is enormous because there's a whole lot of
sensation. There is much more sensation going on in your hand than in your whole
back even though the back is physically apart. 

So, part of the cortex is these projection areas. But less than a quarter of the
cortex contains projection areas. As I said, the rest is involved with the cool
stuff. With language, with reasoning, with moral thoughts, and so on. Then the
question comes in, how do we know this? How do we know what parts of the brain
do what, what parts of the brain are involved, and why? There's different answers. So,
one answer is we can scan the brain. 
We can use MRI, which is a high frequency magnetic field, to look at the
activity of the brain, what parts are active when people do different things. 

We can also look at so-called natural experiments when people have tumors

or strokes or motorcycle accidents. In damaged part of your brain and we can ask
the question, what damage to which parts of the brain correspond to damage to which
functions? Through these different methods, we've learned about the different parts of
the brain and what they do. We could talk about some certain specific things that can
go wrong due to brain damage or stroke or trauma. 
 So, for instance, there's Apraxia. Apraxia is problems of actions. So, you're
unable to do an action like waving goodbye or picking up before or can bring some
food to your mouth. You're not paralyze. You can make the movements if you have
to, but you can't coordinate these basic movements into complex actions. There's

Agnosia. Agnosia is a disorders of perception. And they're not like you

can't see, but you can't recognize. Some is called psychic blindness. People of
various forms of Agnosia can describe a picture in terms of it's part, but can't
recognize the objects that are being depicted. That's a form of visual Agnosia There's
also a specific Prosopagnosia, where you can't recognize faces. Oliver Sacks wrote
a wonderful book many years ago called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a
Hat. This was a series of profiles of people who had surprising neurological disorders
and the title case of the book was a man who actually had such an inability to
recognize faces, he couldn't distinguishes his wife's face from that of a hat. Milder
forms of Prosopagnosia, which some people suffer from and to be honest, I got a little
bit of some terrible faces. Is that you could recognize faces as faces, but you can't
recognize whose face they are and it's very hard for you to recognize people. 
There's problems of sensory neglect. You get disorders that block out one part
of the world. You might have damage to parts of your brain that would block out the
left side of the world. It's not just the sort of physical thing, when you ask somebody
with such a disorder to draw clock for instance, they'll put all the numbers from one
to 12 on the right side of the clock. Is as if they don't think of the left side of the
world again. So, maybe it's not even a sensory problem, but an attentional problem. 
There's Aphasia, which refers to disorders of language. Some forms of
aphasia are expressive like a Broca's Aphasia, where you can't really speak. A
famous case of somebody who can only use the word tan, would say tan, tan, tan,
but couldn't say anything else. Or then there's something that's called Receptive
Aphasia, where you can speak although what you say doesn't make much sense, but
also you have a terrible time understanding other people. Then there's all sorts of
other disorders. 
There's the disorder which we talked about with regard to Phineas Gage and
various forms of it. Where damage to your brain, it's debatable whether this is true
Phineas Gage, but there are other cases where it's much more clear. Cause you to lose
your moral sense, your sense of right and wrong, your ability to control yourself, to
restrain yourself perhaps your conscience. 
Now, we're going to talk about all of these things through the course but the
moral here is that, a, there's some localization of function. There's some sense in
which it correspond to different brain areas. B, again, this is an argument against
dualism. We can see that in that anyone who argued that the mind isn't the brain
would be hard-pressed to explain why damage to the brain seems to affect some very
intimate and very important aspects of ourselves.

OUR Two BRAINS

We've talked now about the parts of the brain, a little bit about what the
different parts do, and let's end by talking about the brain as a whole. So, if you just
look at the brain, if you remove it from somebody's head and put it on your table, it
looks symmetrical, but it's actually not. So, this final topic is about what's called
lateralization, which is about the difference between the two halves of
the brain; the right half and the left half. 
It's long been known that there's a difference between right and left. We're not
symmetrical creatures. Most people are right-handed, meaning that they do a lot
of their motor control and they are most fluid and capable like right hand writing with
their right hand and as minority people are left-handed. And then, some people are
evenly mixed, ambidextrous, right and left. People who are right-handed for the most
part have language in the left half of their brain, and people who are left-handed are
more evenly mixed. Some people have in the right side of brain, others in the left side
of the brain. 
So the cool thing is that, most functions of your brain are duplicated. So, a
lot of times when you hear somebody say on the right side of the brain, the left side
of their brain, and right brain and left brain, a lot of what people say about that is total
nonsense. Most of the functions of the brain are on both sides and to a large
extent, it's sort of more of an issue of dominance or greater potential on one side to
another than an absolute difference. 
But as sort of common wisdom goes, the left brain is more associated with a
written language, and spoken language, with a reasoning, and logic, and
science, and the right brain is more associated with insight, and imagination,
and music. 
So, we have these two halves of the brain and normally they're in
coordination, but they deal with the world in different ways. So, one thing worth
noting in any discussion of the halves of the brain is that it works on a
principle of contralateral organization, which is an awful technical term, but
what it means is that your right brain sees the left side of the world, the left visual
field, and the left brain sees the right side of the world. It just works out that the brain
has this crossover effect where each half of the brain is looking towards the opposite
half of the world. And similarly for motor control, your right hemisphere controls the
left side of body, your left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. 
 Now, you might say, "Well, this is ridiculous because I am one person and not
two people. I can understand language and appreciate art. I see the world as a
coherent scene. I don't see the world with half of me and see the other half of the
world with the other half of me." 
But that's because the two halves of the brain are in constant immediate
conversation. It's through the corpus callosum, and the corpus callosum is a
network of neurons that connect one half of the brain with the other half. And
this is what allows sensory information that's received on the left side of the
brain for instance, to be perceived in the right side of the brain. It's what allows
the left side of the brain to control the motor actions on the right side of the body
because it could send instructions over to the right side of the brain to do it. 
In fact, you can see in some clever experiments the strange organization of the
brain. So for instance, if you flash on the screen very quickly something on the right
side of the body, you're quicker to name it than if it's flash on the left side of the
body. Why would that be? Well, think about. If it's flash on the right side of the
body, it's immediately perceived by the left hemisphere. The left hemispheres were
spoken languages so you say, "Oh it's a cup, it's an apple." If it's flash on the left side
of the body, for a fraction of an instance delay, it has to crossover to the left side of
the brain. And you'll never see this in everyday life, the time differences are just too
small. But in a psychology lab, you can see this. 
Now, what becomes really interesting is that for almost everybody, the two
halves of the brain are in constant conversation, but not everybody. So, a while
ago, people with severe epilepsy, they would cut the corpus callosum. Epilepsy could
be viewed as an electrical storm in the brain, the corpus callosum causes the brain to
communicate from one half to another. So cutting the corpus callosum in some
way, the idea would be to isolate and shrink the electrical storms. And so, people did
work on. What they did is this very severe form of surgery and people with terrible
cases of epilepsy. 
And the consequence which they didn't anticipate is all of a sudden you break
one person off into two to some extent. You have a left side of the brain which
does the talking and the right side of the brain which does a lot of other things, which
appreciates music, and space, and so on. And the idea is that in some sense, you've
taken a person and now you have two, one half of them who can speak and articulate
their wishes, the other that can't. And making sense of this, what this means, what
this does to a person leads to philosophical questions that fall outside the scope of this
course.
A bit of humility

We've talked a little bit about materialism. Why psychologists believe and

then some of the evidence for it, and then we've taken a quick tour of the brain, but
the broader gist of things is what I want to return to and this is that the current view
by psychologists, and neuroscientists, and other scientists bolstered by a lot of
evidence is that dualism is wrong. The mind is the brain. There's not two
substances, there is one, and I want to remind you how radical this is because I want
people to worry about it. I worry about it and I want people to worry along with
me. 
So, for instance, you might believe in spiritual beings and supernatural beings
with consciousness but no bodies, like gods. If materialism is right, not only don't we
have souls but maybe there's no such thing as souls, or to put it differently there's no
such thing as mental life separate from the body. More to the point, maybe you were
hoping that when your body dies, when you get very older, or you get hit by a bus, or
whatever, you'll live on. You'll go to heaven. You'll go to a spirit world, or get
reincarnated, or whatever, and psychologists and neuroscientists that they speak
honestly would say, "That's crazy." You, your memories, your will, whatever makes
you you is your physical brain and when your physical brain goes away so do you.
So, people have to figure out what to make of it. What I want to close with
though, since this all sounds not only disturbing but extremely arrogant, the idea that
scientists are dictating the answer to the most deep questions of all, is I want to end
with two notes of humility: the first is, the conception of the mind that fits very well
with the materialist view I presented is that the mind is an information processor, it's
a computer, and we treat the brain as the physical aspect of the hardware and our
mental lives, the ideas, our processes, our heuristics, our algorithms as the
software, as the programs that this hardware runs. This way of looking at things, I
think works extremely well when it comes to activities like face recognition,
language, motor control, logic and so on, but there still remains what the
philosopher David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. 
The feeling of what it is to slamming your hand in a car door, or eat scrambled eggs
with hot sauce, or have an orgasm, or grieve for the death of your friend, or et cetera.,
et cetera., et cetera. These feelings, the feeling of what it's like, the qualia that many
people believe can't be simulated on a computer, and many people wonder whether
this could be truly the activity of the brain. If it's true, as I think it is true, that even
these most qualitative experiences are the product of brain activities, I think we
should admit that we don't exactly know how this happens. There's a quote by
Thomas Huxley: "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness
comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue. That question is just as
unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his
lamp." Huxley is saying it seems like magic. How a physical structure irritated
by neurotransmitters swooshing back and forth and electrical signals running across
neurons, how that gives rise to feelings is a mystery, it seems like magic, and I think
he's right. I think we know that as the product of the brain, but to be honest we don't
know how. 

The second bit of humility involves the fact that materialism poses a

mechanistic conception of mental life, but a lot of us, both as scholars but also as
people, are concerned with what you could call humanist values. Values like the
notion of moral responsibility: the idea we have free will, that the idea that we're
responsible for our actions, the idea that there's such a thing in the world has intrinsic
value, the idea that there's such a thing in the world perhaps as spiritual value. For
some people it's very hard to reconcile this with the idea that we're merely brains, and
there's two ways to react: one can simply reject humanist values, and I know
philosophers and psychologists who confidently assert there's no such thing as free
will, there's no such thing as morality, there's no such thing as anything higher or
spiritual. I know many more people who reject the science, who say that, "Look, if
neuroscience is going to tell me that my decisions, my activities are nothing more
than neural firings, then to hell with neuroscience." 
My own view is that these two things can be reconciled. I don't think it's
easy, but I think that is possible to reconcile a mechanistic conception of human life
with humanist values, and I'll return to this issue over and over again in the
course, and in my final lecture I want to go back to it and try to present a little bit
more detail what I mean and how this reconciliation can be defended.