The Indirectness of Studies of Mind and Brain
Many of the methods and techniques central to neuroscientific discovery rely on assumptions that can limit the interpretation of the data. Philosophers of Neuroscience have discussed such assumptions in the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Dissociation in Cognitive Neuropsychology, single unit recording, and computational neuroscience. Following are descriptions of many of the current controversies and debates about the methods employed in neuroscience.
Read more about this topic: Neurophilosophy
Famous quotes containing the words studies, mind and/or brain:
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all thats made
To a green thought in a green shade,”
—Andrew Marvell (16211678)
“To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime. To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasnt.”
—Primo Levi (19191987)