Month: February 2005

Philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker are continuing their tussle over the structure of the mind in a recently published exchange.

Pinker wrote a book in 1999 entitled ‘How the Mind Works‘ which argues that the mind can be understood as a computational or information processing device. This, he says, consists mostly of independent but co-operating mental modules that can be inherited and selected for by evolution. An approach strongly linked to the new discipline of evolutionary psychology.

Fodor dismissed most of these ideas in 2000 with a book entitled ‘The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way‘ and the two have carried on their dispute in a recent edition of the journal Mind and Language.

Pinker argues his latest case in an article entitled ‘So How Does the Mind Work?’.

The subsequent commentaries get quite lively with Fodor starting with “If you really must have a defense mechanism, I recommend denial. It’s special charm is that it applies to itself, so if it doesn‚Äôt work, you can deny that too.”

Earning the comeback from Pinker “This kind of language can be paraphrased as, ‘I really don’t have an argument here, but if I dismiss the opposition with enough confidence, perhaps readers will assume that I’m right'”.

Meow!

Link to PDF of Pinker’s article ‘So How Does the Mind Work?’.
Wikipedia entries for Jerry Fodor and Stephen Pinker.

A gentleman from Utah has a condition which is baffling brain scientists. The left side of his brain is shrinking, although the right-hand side seems fine.

He is currently being investigated by neurologists at the University of Utah, Brain Institute.

His brain scan is shown in the picture on the left.

NB: brain scans done by radiologists have left and right reversed, as they label their scans as if they were looking at the patient as they lie on their backs in the scanner, so the patient’s left is on the viewer’s right.

Link to news story from ksl.com
Link to coverage from Daily Times.

A research team led by neurologist Nicholas Schiff has recently published a brain scanning study on two patients who may show evidence of an internal mental life, despite being in a coma-like “minimally conscious state”.

MCS usually occurs after severe brain damage and is a condition where patients seem to be unconscious, but show intermittent awareness of the self or the environment, although they are not able to communicate or maintain this awareness for pronlonged periods of time.

It is thought to be ‘less severe’ than coma, where patients are entirely unresposive, or persistent vegetative state, where patients are unconscious but may show simple automatic functions such as the sleep-wake cycle or eye-tracking.

Schiff’s study found that an area of the temporal lobe, known to be involved in language comprehension, was activated when the two unconscious patients were played recordings of a friend or relative recounting a familiar event.

These responses were remarkably similar to the responses recorded from healthy participants used as controls. This surprised the researchers, who expected far less brain activity in the MCS patients.

One further result they describe as “haunting” was finding activity in the patients’ occipital lobe. The researchers speculate that activity in these areas may reflect memories and mental images triggered by the recordings and the sound of their family member’s voice.

Little is known about the functioning of the brain during these coma-like or miminally conscious states, and medical science is often surprised by the recovery of function even after prolonged periods of unconsciousness.

Terry Wallis, the subject of a recent Channel 4 documentary, regained consciousness after a record 19 years in a coma.

Link to abstract of Schiff study.
Link to news story about the study from Yahoo News.
Link to information on Terry Wallis, his recovery and the documentary about him (“The Man Who Slept for 19 Years”).

A news story about a recent meeting on bioethics in neuroscience reports that brain abnormalities are, well, not that abnormal:

Judy Illes, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that she and others have found that 18 percent of healthy volunteers had some kind of brain anamoly. While only 2 percent to 8 percent have required clinical follow-up, these incidental findings have raised concerns among scientists who are using the newest technology to unravel the mysteries of the brain.

Ethical issues in neuroscience and neuroimaging research (often called ‘neuroethics’) are becoming increasingly important as previously expensive and exclusive scientific tools (such as fMRI) are becoming widely used.

One important issue of debate is the ethics of informing someone if a brain abnormality is detected, when they have volunteered to take part in a research study as a healthy participant.

Link to story from newsday.com
Link to recent article on neuroethics from Trends in Cognitive Sciences.