Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Neuroscience

Language: English Studies in English
University website: www.ed.ac.uk
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Neuroscience
Neuroscience (or neurobiology) is the scientific study of the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary branch of biology, that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, mathematical modeling and psychology to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception and consciousness has been defined as "the ultimate challenge of the biological sciences".
Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest gathering of scientists. It drew nearly 23,000 researchers to San Diego in late 1995, and it is almost impossible to cover single-handedly.
Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson (1998) Field Guide For Science Writers. p. 163
Neuroscience
There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters.
Michael Gazzaniga (2001) (12 April 2011). "Interview with Michael Gazzaniga". Annals of the New York Academy of Science. DOI:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.05998.x.
Neuroscience
As a brain researcher, I'd started out simply accepting the strictly objective principles of the behaviorist position. In the 1950s and early 1960s, all respectable neuroscientists thought in these terms. In those days, we wouldn't have been caught dead implying that consciousness or subjective experience can affect physical brain processing.
My first break with this thinking — although I certainly didn't see it that way at the time — came in a 1952 discussion of mind-brain theory in which I proposed a fundamentally new way of looking at consciousness. In it, I suggested that when we focus consciously on an object — and create a mental image for example — it's not because the brain pattern is a copy or neural representation of the perceived object, but because the brain experiences a special kind of interaction with that object, preparing the brain to deal with it.
I maintained that an identical feeling or thought on two separate occasions did not necessarily involve the identical nerve cells each time. Instead, it is the operational impact of the neural activity pattern as a whole that counts, and this depends on context — just as the word "lead" can mean different things, depending on the rest of the sentence.
Roger Wolcott Sperry (1987) New Mindset on Consciousness
Privacy Policy