Sublime

The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain:

Criminal lawyers, not surprisingly, are increasingly drawing on brain images supposedly showing a biological defect that “made” their clients commit murder.

Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, thinks of the brain as a society—a society of subassemblies cooperating to learn about the world.251 The image can easily be reversed. A society is a brain, a learning device that works according to the principles that drive a neural net.

In December 2011, Professor John Stein, a leading Oxford neuroscientist, wrote, “Claims are being made about brain research that just aren’t true, and they are being accepted

CyberPsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; Cyberpsychology: The Journal of Psychosocial Research; and the International Journal of Cyberbehavior.

cognitive scientist Don Norman. According to his conceptual model, the brain has three major parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes conflict. The “reactive” component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic functions, concentrates on stuff that elicits biologically determined responses, such as dizzying heights and sweet t

Many neuroscientists are empiricists: together, with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), they presume that the brain simply draws its

If the amygdala is the smoke detector in the brain, think of the frontal lobes—and specifically the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC),12 located directly above our eyes—as the watchtower, offering a view of the scene from on high.