Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Newsweek - Sad Brain, Happy Brain

Neuroscience claims to be able to tell us a lot about who we are simply by reading our brain scans and seeing which structures light up. They think we can reduce all human experience to the cellular level in the brain.

I don't think so, but I do enjoy reading their discoveries -- I just tend to translate them differently, through a distinctly different (and more expansive) view of the human being than they offer us.

This article from Newsweek
is interesting in just that way. The info is pretty basic, but it collects a lot of the current thinking in one article.

Sad Brain, Happy Brain

What cognitive neuroscience is uncovering about the fascinating biology behind our most complex feelings. As it turns out, love really is blind.

By Michael Craig Miller, M.D. | NEWSWEEK
Go read the rest of this article.


3 comments:

gregory said...

would love to have been a party to the editorial meeting about this article ... newsweek has susan begeley, who more than any science writer today understands the mind and consciousness from a higher plane ... but they gave the article to this guy, who is mechanistic in his understanding, and safe ...

gregory said...

sorry, sharon begley

Anonymous said...

As a human who is excruciatingly aware of the suffering of animals in society I read this article - especially the part about fear at the end - and see primate after primate caged, implanted, induced to fear, brain measured, tortured and not an iota of awareness or apology from the author and probably also not much from most readers. The mass denial of our dominance and enslavement and torture of non-humans is my greatest sadness in being here.