What Does Your Brain Do? And What Can It Not Do?

Aristotle, augustine, blood, brains, carbon dioxide, Denyse O'Leary, emotions, free will, heart, Intellect, kidneys, mathematics, Medicine, memories, Montreal Neurological Institute, muscles, Mystery of the Mind, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, oxygen, pain, philosophy, Plato, The Immortal Mind, Thomas Aquinas, urine, Wilder Penfield
A surprising result of pioneering neurosurgery was the discovery that some mental processes could be stimulated in the brain but others could not be. Source
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Brain Imaging Shows Intelligence Uses the Whole Brain

brain, brain imaging, cerebellum, coordination, fMRI, Kirsten Hilger, Medicine, Michael Egnor, mind, movement, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, neurosurgeons, PNAS Nexus, strokes, textbooks, The Immortal Mind, thinking, tumors
A focus on specific regions like the prefrontal cortex can mislead. When we are thinking, we use brain-wide connections between many parts of the brain at once. Source
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Design, Engineering, Specified Complexity: Appreciating the Fruit Fly Brain

brains, C. elegans, coherence, Complexity, cortex, crystals, Drosphila melanogaster, efficiency, flight control, fruit flies, Intelligent Design, mating courtship, morphology, mouse, navigation, neural network, neurons, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, optimization, pheromones, Research, snowflake, specified complexity, subnetworks, swarming
Groundbreaking new research has documented the complexity and design of the brains of fruit flies. Source
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A Quarter of Comatose Patients May Be Aware But Unable to Communicate

brain activity, brain responses, brain scans, cognitive motor dissociation, comatose, communication technologies, consciousness, Elon Musk, fMRI, Julian Nowogrodzki, Medicine, Neuralink, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Noland Arbaugh, patient assessment, patients, Technology
“Covertly” means that the patients were not able to respond directly but brain activity showed that they understood what was asked of them. Source
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Biophysicist Proposes “Spiritual Particle”

beetroots, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, Darwinian evolution theory, Darwinism, Douglas Youvan, eliminationism, Energy, Evolution, Galen Strawson, illusion, matter, natural selection, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, panpsychism, Physics, Earth & Space, psychology, random mutation, snakes, spiritual particle, universe
It has, Douglas Youvan suggests, a dual nature, interacting with both matter and consciousness. Source
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What 1,000+ Brain Surgeries Taught About the Mind

brain, Christof Koch, consciousness circuit, David Chalmers, epilepsy, materialism, mathematics, Medicine, Michael Egnor, mind, music, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, neurosurgery, Pat Flynn, philosophy, promissory materialism, seizures, Stony Brook University, Wilder Penfield
Michael Egnor continues his discussion with Pat Flynn, noting that neither seizures nor Penfield’s brain stimulation provoked abstract thought. Source
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Research with Mice May Explain How the Placebo Effect Works

Adam Kovac, animals, brain, brain circuits, cruelty to animals, expectation, Gizmodo, humans, illness, imagination, medication, Medicine, mice, neurons, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, pain, pain control, placebo effect, researchers, sugar pill, University of North Carolina
The mice had to be placed in a painful situation in order to trigger a placebo effect. With humans, it is often just a matter of communicating orally. Source
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Pig Brains Thought Dead May Be Revived

Andre Sousa, bioethics, brain damage, brains, circulation, death, emergency room, Lucid Dying, Medicine, Nature (journal), Nenad Sestan, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, nutrients, oxygen, oxygenation, pigs, resuscitation, Sam Parnia, Scientific American, Yale University
Pigs are considered useful biomedical models for humans so the implications of such studies sent waves through the field of resuscitation — and bioethics. Source
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