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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We Can’t Let “Experts” Decide the Morality of Making “Humanized Animals”

animals, bioethicists, brains, Culture & Ethics, doctors, experts, human life, humanized animals, humans, International Society for Stem Cell Research, Journal of Medical Ethics, lawyers, Medicine, mental capacities, neural function, organoids, personalized animals, personhood theory, philosophers, pig, rats, Research, Sergiu Paşca, speciesism, unborn humans
Bioethics is a utilitarianish social-political movement whose primary advocates are usually philosophers, lawyers, and/or doctors. Source
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At What Point In Its Development Can a Human Being Feel Pain?

abortion, abortion pill, Albert Olszewski, Alberto Giubilini, Ana Rosa Rodriguez, Animal Liberation, aversive action, babies, birth canal, blood samples, brain, Culture & Ethics, curette, developmental biology, dilatation and curettage, dilatation and evacuation, distress, fetal age, feticide, fetuses, Food and Drug Administration, Francesca Minervage, gestational age, Guttmacher Institute, Indiana, injury, Jenny Eckmifepristone, Medicine, Montana, New York City, newborns, Nik Hoot, pain, Peter Singer, petri dish, phenylalanine, phenylketonuria, Planned Parenthood, pregnancy, prosthetic legs, Roman Catholicism, Russia, Should the Baby Live?, Sopher clamp, station, tissue, United States, Washington Post
Logic isn’t a sufficient answer to the question I raised, however. For a scientific answer, we need evidence. Source
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My Briar Patch: Notes of a Country Doctor 

Biologic Revolution, Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, briar patch, cancer, Daniel Witt, Francis Crick, geocentrism, heliocentrism, Intelligent Design, Jacques Monod, James Watson, John Searle, mechanistic consensus, Medicine, painting, piano, planets, René Descartes, science of purpose, scientific atheism, Stuart Kauffman, telos, The Song of the South, The Undying Soul, UC Berkeley, University of California at San Francisco
It took me about twenty years after medical school to break free of the intellectual "comfort" afforded by the mechanistic consensus. Source
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The Technocratic Authoritarians Still Want Their “Pandemic Treaty”

authoritarianism, COVID-19, Culture & Ethics, demonization, dissenters, Donald Trump, fearmongering, free assembly, free speech, health, International Court of Justice, lockdowns, masks, media, Medicine, misinformation, national sovereignty, Nature (journal), pandemic treaty, pandemics, schools, shaming, technocracy, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Wesley Smith, World Health Assembly, World Health Organization
Wouldn’t it all have gone a lot better if, instead of our fellow Americans doing it to us, we’d handed over national sovereignty to an international body? Source
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