January 25, 2007
Steven Pinker on The Mystery of Consciousness
From Time Magazine:
The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.
So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 02:31 PM | Permalink
Comments
What's annoying about Pinker is his smiley-faced optimism. In fact, there is nowhere near the consenses he claims there is about the neural basis of consciouness. The hardness of the hard problem includes the question of whether the pretty colors on fmri scans actually tell us anything about mental content. You know this Abbas! When Pinker says "Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe" he is representing as a consensus something that is intensely debated among cognitive scientists. But saying something is difficult and that the answer may not lie in expensive equipment doesn't sell magazines, and so we have his kind of cheerleading instead.
Posted by: jonathan | Jan 26, 2007 1:33:40 PM
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