Summary
Brain research has made astonishing progress in the last few years in such diverse fields as neuroscience, physics, computer science and cognitive psychology. However, new findings are often erroneously reported in the press to conform to preexisting folk wisdom about how the brain operates.
See the full content of this document
Extract
Brain research and folk psychology.
there is good news for intellectual romantics--those people who look back longingly, even enviously, to historical periods when significant intellectual revolutions were blossoming. How fascinating, how exciting it must have been to be a part of the great paradigm shifts in our conception of the world that we associate with such influential thinkers as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein. It is easy to get the feeling that our current understandings are essentially complete, that all major revolutions in our view of the universe have passed us by, and that we in the contemporary world must be satisfied with the vicarious joys and excitement of intellectual awakenings provided by history books, since we will never experience them personally. But in fact--and here is the good news--we are now at the beginning of what may be the most exciting, the most dramatic intellectual revolution of them all: a revolution in our understanding of that most salient part of our universe, the human mind.
A confluence of disciplines today is forming a science of the mind that promises a major advance in our understanding of behavior and mented phenomena. What is emerging from this effort is a conception of the mind so foreign to common notions, so at odds with the view of the average person, that this idea has been called "the astonishing hypothesis" by Nobel laureate Francis Grick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Research and theory from such fields as neuroscience, philosphy, cognitive psychol...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
