Who first identified the brain as the location of the mind?
4794482#2
During the second half of the first millennium BC, the Ancient Greeks developed differing views on the function of the brain. However, due to the fact that Hippocratic doctors did not practice dissection, because the human body was considered sacred, Greek views of brain function were generally uninformed by anatomical study. It is said that it was the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Croton (6th and 5th centuries BC) who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient authorities, "he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain; consequently they are incapable of action if the brain is disturbed...the power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought: The storing up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge." In the 4th century BC Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence (based, among others before him, on Alcmaeon's work). During the 4th century BC Aristotle thought that, while the heart was the seat of intelligence, the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.
History of neuroscience
184016#0
Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (13 April 1794 – 6 December 1867), father of Gustave Flourens, was a French physiologist, the founder of experimental brain science and a pioneer in anesthesia. Through the study of ablations on animals, he was the first to prove that the mind was located in the brain, not the heart.
Jean Pierre Flourens
6880483#8
In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who maintained that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body. However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans". Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today.
Philosophy of mind
50326#8
Philosophers have always been interested in the mind: "the idea that explaining a phenomenon involves understanding the mechanism responsible for it has deep roots in the History of Philosophy from atomic theories in 5th century B.C. to its rebirth in the 17th and 18th century in the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Boyle. Among others, it’s Descartes’ idea that machines humans build could work as models of scientific explanation."
For example, Aristotle thought the brain was the body’s cooling system and the capacity for intelligence was located in the heart. It has been suggested that the first person to believe otherwise was the Roman physician Galen in the second century AD, who declared that the brain was the source of mental activity, although this has also been accredited to Alcmaeon. However, Galen believed that personality and emotion were not generated by the brain, but rather by other organs. Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist and physician, was the first to believe that the brain and the nervous system are the center of the mind and emotion. Psychology, a major contributing field to cognitive neuroscience, emerged from philosophical reasoning about the mind.
Cognitive neuroscience
175456#2
Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today. Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of emergent materialism or non-reductive physicalism in some sense.
Mind–body dualism
488083#51
Neuroimaging research has supported this view, demonstrating specific brain regions consistently engaged during theory of mind tasks. PET research on theory of mind, using verbal and pictorial story comprehension tasks, has identified a set of brain regions including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and area around posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), and sometimes precuneus and amygdala/temporopolar cortex. Subsequently, research on the neural basis of theory of mind has diversified, with separate lines of research focused on the understanding of beliefs, intentions, and more complex properties of minds such as psychological traits.
Theory of mind
488083#58
In a recent paper, Keren Haroush and Ziv Williams outlined the case for a group of neurons in primates' brains that uniquely predicted the choice selection of their interacting partner. These primates' neurons, located in the anterior cingulate cortex of rhesus monkeys, were observed using single-unit recording while the monkeys played a variant of the iterative prisoner's dilemma game. By identifying cells that represent the yet unknown intentions of a game partner, Haroush & Williams' study supports the idea that theory of mind may be a fundamental and generalized process, and suggests that "anterior cingulate cortex" neurons may potentially act to complement the function of mirror neurons during social interchange.
Theory of mind
4244428#1
An early story featuring technological transfer of memories and personality from one brain to another is "Intelligence Undying" by Edmond Hamilton, first published in the April 1936 issue of "Amazing Stories". In this story, an elderly scientist named John Hanley explains that when humans are first born, "our minds are a blank sheet except for certain reflexes which we all inherit. But from our birth onward, our minds are affected by all about us, our reflexes are conditioned, as the behaviorists say. All we experience is printed on the sheet of our minds. ... Everything a human being learns, therefore, simply establishes new connections between the nerve-cells of the brain. ... As I said, a newborn child has no such knowledge-connections in his cortex at all—he has not yet formed any. Now if I take that child immediately after birth and establish in his brain exactly the same web of intricate neurone-connections I have built up in my own brain, he will have exactly the same mind, memories, knowledge, as I have ... his mind will be exactly identical with my mind!" He then explains he has developed a technique to do just this, saying "I've devised a way to "scan" my brain's intricate web of neurone connections by electrical impulses, and by means of those impulses to build up an exactly identical web of neurone connections in the infant's brain. Just as a television scanning-disk can break down a complicated picture into impulses that reproduce the picture elsewhere." He adds that the impulses scanning his brain will kill him, but the "counter-impulses" imprinting the same pattern on the baby's brain will not harm him. The story shows the successful transfer of John Hanley's mind to the baby, who he describes as "John Hanley 2nd", and then skips forward to the year 3144 to depict "John Hanley, 21st" using his advanced technology to become the ruler of the Earth in order to end a war between the two great political powers of the time, and then further ahead to "John Hanley, 416th" helping to evacuate humanity to the planet Mercury in response to the Sun shrinking into a white dwarf. He chooses to remain on Earth awaiting death, so that people would "learn once more to do for themselves, would become again a strong a self-reliant race", with Hanley concluding that he "had been wrong in living as a single super-mind down through the ages. He saw that now, and now he was undoing that wrong."
Mind uploading in fiction
6331719#4
The history of mind-wandering research dates back to 18th century England. British philosophers struggled to determine whether mind-wandering occurred in the mind or if an outside source caused it. In 1921, Varendonck published "The Psychology of Day-Dreams", in which he traced his "'trains of thoughts' to identify their origins, most often irrelevant external influences". Wallas (1926) considered mind-wandering as an important aspect of his second stage of creative thought – incubation. It wasn't until the 1960s that the first documented studies were conducted on mind-wandering. John Antrobus and Jerome Singer developed a questionnaire and discussed the experience of mind-wandering. This questionnaire, known as the Imaginal Processes Inventory (IPI), provides a trait measure of mind-wandering and it assesses the experience on three dimensions: how vivid the person's thoughts are, how many of those thoughts are guilt- or fear-based, and how deep into the thought a person goes. As technology continues to develop, psychologists are starting to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe mind-wandering in the brain and reduce psychologists' reliance on verbal reports.
Mind-wandering
17643920#2
Dennett reposes the question of consciousness addressed in his 1991 book "Consciousness Explained". In "Consciousness Explained", Dennett established what he called the "multiple drafts model" of consciousness, which suggested that there was no singular space in the conscious mind. In other words, there is no special location in the brain that can be seen as the qualia-containing "consciousness module". Instead, he states that consciousness is smeared throughout the brain. He extends the model by creating a similar figure that he calls "Fame in the Brain" and suggests that the mind acts, to some degree, as an echo chamber, as well as the "bundle of semi-independent agencies" that he suggested in "Consciousness Explained".
Sweet Dreams (book)