Brain complexity: how the brain helps us (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 01, 2015, 15:46 (3555 days ago) @ David Turell

This interview with Bradley Voytek, a cognitive neuroscientist, (also quoted in my book downgrading fMRI's) discusses how love, a part of consciousness cannot be studied in brain structure. Also demonstrates developmental plasticity, and fills gaps in our knowledge of what we are experiencing externally. Romansh will seize on this to claim we don't have free will, but my view is our brain is built to help us understand reality and make decisions. That is freewill.-http://fivebooks.com/interviews/bradley-voytek-on-surrealism-and-brain-1-:As a scientist, I really do believe the scientific method is quite powerful for explaining the world but — at least for the foreseeable future — it is not very good at discussing the human condition. So I think the strength of the arts and the humanities is its ways of discussing the human experience and I hoped to pick up on this in my book choices. The Master and Margarita ?isn't exactly a scientific book. When you're looking at how people interact, the suffering, the pain, strife, love and all those crazy things, neuroscience doesn't really have answers about that. That's what we're getting at in the introduction to our book. A neuroscience of love, for example, what does that even mean? Can you really reduce something as complex as love — about which untold numbers of stories and poems and songs and music have been written — to the density of some neurotransmitter in a brain region? Personal experience tells me, no. And from a scientific perspective it also doesn't really make sense, because we don't really have a good definition of what love is. And so, if you can't operationalise things in a scientific way, if you can't come up with a solid strong definition for the thing you're studying, then you're not really studying a thing."