Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006
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Denyse, unlike the president, doesn't make efforts to know what she is talking about before she talks: Quote | Phineas Gage: Evolution of a lecture room psychopath O'Leary
I was at dinner the other week with a voluble atheist religion professor who, in defense of a materialist view of the human mind, raised the subject of Phineas Gage (1823-1860). Ah yes, the man whose personality changed completely after a horrific accident, a staple of Introductory Psychology... |
What Denyse fails to note, and apparently fails to know, is that there is a huge and incontrovertible clinical and research literature, accumulated over the last 100 years, documenting the superficially subtle but often pragmatically devastating impact of frontal lobe and pre-frontal brain injury. Gage's injury made clear that the frontal lobes are not "silent" areas of the brain (as was often asserted at the time), but rather are crucially important to governance of executive functioning, planning, and self and social awareness. Persons with frontal lobe damage are often unable to organize and prioritize their actions, becoming bogged down in irrelevancies, perseverate inappropriately, and display terrible interpersonal and business judgement, reflecting permanent personality changes. Injury to the frontal lobes can result in complete disability even when IQ is largely intact due to disruption in these crucial metacognitive skills. Neuropsychological testing is very sensitive to these forms of impairment.
Indeed, Denyse and Mario, in The Spatula Brain, explicitly acknowledge the importance of these structures. From my AtBC/Amazon review (which is now rated the most helpful critical review of the book posted on Amazon): Quote | Most damaging to the aims of this book are the "own goals" that Beauregard and O'Leary inadvertently score. Indeed, they repeatedly score "own goals" with respect to the central, dualistic thesis of the book: that mind and brain differ, and that mind controls and modifies brain. Beauregard and O'Leary cite the example of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). "My friend an colleague Jeffrey Schwartz, a nonmaterialist UCLA neuropsychiatrist, started working with OCD sufferers in the 1980s because he sensed that OCD was a clear case of an intact mind troubled by a malfunctioning brain." Schwartz determined by means of scans the cortical and subcortical brain circuitry that appears to underlie OCD, and devised a "mindfulness" treatment protocol that draws upon cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy to treat the disorder. When treatment succeeded, "he was not simply getting patients to change their opinions, but rather to actually change their brains. He wanted them to substitute a useful neural circuit for a useless one....in this therapy, the patient is entirely in control. Both the existence and the role of the mind as independent of the brain are accepted; indeed, that is the basis of the therapy's success" (p. 130). Further neuroimaging disclosed areas of patients' brains that displayed modified activity following treatment.
The problem with all this is that the imaging in fact disclosed something quite other than minds operating independently of brains. By means of imaging, "Schwartz noted that the most recent (and thus most sophisticated) prefrontal parts of the human brain, in evolutionary terms, are almost entirely unaffected by OCD. That is why patients perceive compulsions as alien. They are alien to the most characteristically human parts of the brain. To the extend that the patient's reasoning power and sense of identity remain largely intact, they can actively cooperate with their therapy" (p. 128).
There you have it. Reasoning power and sense of identity are hosted by recently evolved prefrontal areas of the human brain, those areas that render us most characteristically human. We know that the human brain is organized hierarchically, with loops of regulation culminating in highly abstract frontal modeling and monitoring of self relative to one's physical and social environment and related goals, and we know that prefrontal areas of the brain are crucial to these high level representational and planning activities. Schwartz's imaging again confirms this view. The upshot of this research is not that a mind independent of brain monitors and modifies that brain; rather, this imaging confirms once again that the brain regulates and modifies itself by means of these neurally instantiated high level representations of self. Own goal. Similar own goals are evident in Beauregard's description of his scans of subjects asked to "down regulate" emotions, sexual arousal, etc., all of which demonstrate the marshaling of highly specific frontal areas to accomplish the tasks that Beauregard insists upon interpreting as mind acting upon brain. And, because we note that the cortical areas that host these crucially human functions are recently evolved, *some version of evolutionary psychology must in fact be correct*, Beauregard and O'Leary's repeated dismissals of this new discipline notwithstanding. |
Denyse herself has become bogged down in irrelevancies, apparently asserting that because Gage's life may be become embroidered over the years that there is reason to doubt that human cognition and human personality are somehow only tangential to the human brain.
She's wrong.
-------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington
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