After phrenology : neural reuse and the interactive brain by Michael L. Anderson

By Michael L. Anderson

The laptop analogy of the brain has been as greatly followed in modern cognitive neuroscience as used to be the analogy of the mind as a set of organs in phrenology. simply because the phrenologist could insist that every organ needs to have its specific functionality, so modern cognitive neuroscience is devoted to the idea that every mind sector should have its primary computation. In After Phrenology, Michael Anderson argues that to accomplish a completely post-phrenological technology of the mind, we have to re-examine this dedication and devise an alternative, neuroscientifically grounded taxonomy of psychological functionality.

Anderson contends that the cognitive roles performed through every one zone of the mind are hugely a variety of, reflecting various neural partnerships verified less than diversified situations. He proposes quantifying the sensible homes of neural assemblies by way of their dispositional developments quite than their computational or information-processing operations. Exploring larger-scale matters, and drawing on facts from embodied cognition, Anderson develops an image of considering rooted within the exploitation and extension of our early-evolving ability for iterated interplay with the area. He argues that the multidimensional method of the mind he describes deals an improved healthy for those findings, and a extra promising highway towards a unified technology of minded organisms.

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Similarly, the Life Is a Journey mapping allows people to leverage their extensive experience and competence in navigating the physical world in order to facilitate planning for life more generally: we plan a route, overcome obstacles, set goals, and reach milestones. The theory has been widely discussed and tested and enjoys a raft of supporting evidence in linguistics and cognitive psychology. A natural question that arises for such theories, however, is how the structured inheritance from one domain to another is actually achieved by the brain.

2013). Indeed, my collaborators and I have investigated diversity in the brain using multiple metrics and ways of carving up the brain; no matter what we try, we cannot seem to disconfirm the finding. The upshot: local neural structures are not highly selective and typically contribute to multiple tasks across domain boundaries. Because the domains are highly varied, the observations cannot be explained by the similarity of the task domains. , viewing stimuli, recalling information, making responses).

2 Task diversity of brain regions. 11 12 Chapter 1 To examine the second prediction we performed a functional coactivation analysis of 1,127 experimental tasks from the data set (Anderson & Penner-Wilger 2013), falling into 10 of the BrainMap task domains (Fox et al. 2005; for this study we excluded action inhibition, as it contained too few experiments for this approach). In a functional connectivity analysis (Anderson, Brumbaugh, & Şuben 2010), one looks to see how often regions of the brain coactivate under various task conditions.

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