Nobody’s Quite Right

Everyone is leaving tomorrow and nobody feels quite right. Even William is crying his head off, instead of going to sleep. Sidra was feeling really badly because she will miss everyone. I will miss them both, as well as their parents, who seem to center us as much as they do their kids. Go figure. […]

Digestion Revisited

I was greatly impressed by a recent book, Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë, who presents a different way to look at consciousness. He believes that current approaches to the question of consciousness are wrongheaded: instead of looking for consciousness as arising inside a person’s head, it is a result of interaction of with […]

Emotion & Expression Part 1

My brother is nonverbal, autistic and very low functioning. I don’t know if I will ever be able to communicate with him on any level but the most basic, i.e., Food=Good, No Food=Not Good. Thought Experiment If it is true that every person has a mental state of some kind, and that mental states are reflected in […]

My Favorite Part of the Brain

It’s the Limbic System! What is the limbic system? I mentioned this in another post, but it bears repeating. Limbus means ‘border’. What is the limbic system the border of? It is the edge of the cortex, a mostly 6-layered sheet of cells that covers the wrinkly mass of the brain. The cortex is the […]

Mental Blindness

I just finished The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. R.E. Cytowic[1], about synesthesia. He raised some extremely interesting topics. Although the primary focus of the book is about synesthesia, he mentions the importance of the ‘emotional brain’ – physically embodied by the limbic system – in all aspects of human life and experience.  One […]

Synesthesia

This is the neuroscience part of the blog I’m reading The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic, M.D.[1] This book is about the phenomenon of synesthesia, where a sensory stimulus triggers sensations by several senses, such as a visual stimulus producing a sound. Dr. Cytowic describes an encounter with one of his friends who, […]

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