Michael Gazzaniga - The Distributed Networks of Mind

The second in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 13 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Our brains are organised in such a fashion that very little of the processing, which is to say neural work, goes on in our conscious minds.

Any simple act, such as pointing to your nose, involves forming the desire to touch your nose, planning a motor response, gathering information about the location of your nose, calculating in a flash if you want to bring attention to your nose and so on.

All that information is gathered and processed and leads to the desired action, and yet little or none of it is done consciously.

Even more daunting is the fact that how the brain accomplishes such a simple task is utterly beyond scientific understanding at this point in time.

While textbooks are full of knowledge about the specific neurons involved—the areas in the brain that are active during such specific actions and even areas known to be active with intention to act—no one knows how it actually works.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• gifford
• lectures
• edinburgh
• university
• michael
• gazzaniga
• science
• mind
• constraining
• matter
• distributed
• networks
• Humanities
• Social
• Science
• HSS

[hyperbolaisagraph]

1:10:20

wat

[felpaluche]

Only few things remain in our brains.

[bcipolli]

Francis,

They heard "We All Live in a Yellow Submarine" because their electrode was picking up noise: radio waves. He assumed that people would know that it's impossible to hear anything like that when recording from an electrode. All you can record when doing that is hearing a sequence of "pop" sounds.

[Zareste]

university members sure are dumb

[francislaukh]

Also, I would really like to know if his team had discovered the secret codes of brain's signal. Woldn't that be a great finding of brain science? But no mention of such details....

[francislaukh]

I'd really like to hear the Beatles' song We All Live In A Yellow Submarine signalled inside the animal's brain cell (around 37:05), too bad it didn't work! My shot is this song is pretty repetitive and easily imitated by the random neural activations, by chance. How about more sophisticated song like We Are The World? And how were key tones represented? It wasn't explained clearly, and he didn't follow it up. It's a little let down, as I follow in great interest his astonishing discoveries.

[sasoon38]

@lingliu  Rad bro.......

[lingliu]

Haha! Just saw my cousin Molly Ying in the audience. Nice :-)