All the weirdness of the mind-body nexus is apparent here. The patient doesn’t feel an itch every time the Monroe neuron fires; she doesn’t think, “Inhibition, inhibition, inhibition,” to banish Brolin from the screen. She has absolutely no idea whatsoever what goes on inside her head. Yet the thought of Monroe translates into a particular pattern of neuronal activity. Events in her phenomenal mind find their parallel in her material brain. A mind-quake occurs simultaneously with a brain-quake.
This article was originally published with the title Being John Malkovich.
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2 Comments
Add CommentAmazing! Beautiful experiment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, I suggest that the definition 'mind is what brain does' will help to remove some of the artificial distinctions between 'brain' and 'mind', so confusing to people who imagine themselves as a sort of homunculus sitting behind their eyes.
In my opinion, the article goes further in its conclusions than the experiment allows, the latter being: (a) that some neurons fire in correlation with some set of related images, and (b) that concentrating on some superimposed image correlates with increased activity of some neurons (although it's not clear whether the corresponding image reinforcement was made after some significant delay in order to verify causality), and (c) that neurons at (a) and (b) are the same (or in the same group, it's not clear).
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