Developing a Theory of the Brain - David Eagleman and Henry Markram

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2011/11/02/David_Eagleman_Will_We_Ever_Understand_the_Brain

Neuroscientists David Eagleman and Henry Markram debate whether or not it's possible to ever fully understand the workings of the brain. While Eagleman is skeptical, Markram defends his work on the Human Brain Project, which aims to recreate the brain by assembling its individual parts.

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As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these question and more as we look into the neurology of the brain. - swissnex San Francisco and the California Academy of Sciences

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a fiction writer. During the day, he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.

Henry Markram is the Coordinator of the Human Brain Project, a proposed international effort to understand the human brain. His research career started in medicine and neuroscience in South Africa, then at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, at NIH and UCSF in the United States, and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany. In 2002, he joined the EPFL, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute. His career has spanned a wide spectrum of neuroscience research, from whole animal studies to gene expression in single cells.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• brain
• neurology
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• biology
• theory
• mind
• consciousness
• thought
• structure
• model
• modeling
• david
• eagleman
• henry
• markram
• cal
• academy
• sciences
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[Wrath0fKhan]

Markram is on a whole different level. Go Henry!

[yesanded]

Dude...he's the hipster of brain science.

[BoStevoD]

Yes, which is why "certainty" isn't really certain as it is practical.

[merdufer]

@BoStevoD But the judgment of any system, or a priori relationship or phenomenon exists in an irrational, or metaphysical, or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself.

[xknowledgeisfreex]

Henry Markram is brilliant.

[IamnotAhab]

Psychedelics and searching for meaning are catalysts for Brain development

[TylerThrashPeace]

I was actually just thinking about creating a business like that. But not just of the brain but of economics and many other fields.

[BoStevoD]

To the last problem posed, this was already tackled by Kant under a different light. He expanded Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" to include not only proof of the internal state but its external surroundings by noting that awareness must be awareness of something. This something of which the cogito thinks is as necessary to the subject's existence as the object of that subject, be it an internal or external state, thereby combining content and form into a seamless and yet contradictory whole.