the brain that changes itself sparknotes

This view has influenced thinking in Christian and Persian philosophies, British empiricism and Marxist doctrine. Ever since the time of Aristotle, thinkers have assumed that the soul or the mind is initially a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which experiences are painted. The challenge for me and other neuroscientists involves the weighty question of what, exactly, is the mind. They nudged me over the years to develop a perspective that provides an alternative description of how the brain interacts with the outside world. There was a bright side, though, because these frustrations energized my career. Many of my colleagues, whether they admitted it or not, felt the same way. Over the years I realized that this frustration was not uniquely my own. I had to wrestle with the difficulty of trying to explain something that I didn't really understand. I was happy for many years with my own progress and the spectacular discoveries that gradually evolved into what became known in the 1960s as the field of “neuroscience.” Yet my inability to give satisfactory answers to the legitimate questions of my smartest students has haunted me ever since. Like other young researchers, I began my investigation of the brain without worrying much whether this perception-action theoretical framework was right or wrong. “Where in the brain does perception occur?” “What initiates a finger movement before cells in the motor cortex fire?” I would always dispatch their queries with a simple answer: “That all happens in the neocortex.” Then I would skillfully change the subject or use a few obscure Latin terms that my students did not really understand but that seemed scientific enough so that my authoritative-sounding accounts temporarily satisfied them.

Yet a minority-the clever ones-always asked a series of awkward questions.

Most students were happy with my textbook explanations of the brain's input-output mechanisms. To initiate a movement, impulses from the motor cortex instruct the spinal cord neurons to produce muscular contraction. Sensory stimuli from the eyes, ears, and such are converted to electrical signals and then transmitted to the relevant parts of the sensory cortex that process these inputs and induce perception. As a young course instructor in seminars for medical students, I faithfully taught neurophysiology by the book, enthusiastically explaining how the brain perceives the world and controls the body.

The brain that changes itself sparknotes