Soul and brain as activity. "Brain and soul

The book was published by the Astrel publishing house in the Elements series of the Dynasty Foundation (this is such an inter-publishing series of scientific literature), a circulation of 5000 copies. Subtitled How Nervous Activity Shapes Our Inner World. (Chris Frith. Making Up the Mind. How the Brain Creates our Mental World.)

In the Dynasty series, I have not yet come across uninteresting books, and then there is also a popular science book on psychology, which is rare (after all, Carnegie and the like have nothing to do with psychology as a science).

I was not disappointed. In a sense, this book rehabilitated psychology for me as a science, and even as a natural science, analogous to physics, chemistry, and biology. And that psychology and Freudianism are different things. (" In order not to spoil my evening, I refrain from suggesting that Freud was an inventor, and that his discourses on the human psyche are of little relevance to the case."). Unfortunately, Freudianism and other “vulgar psychology” have become so ingrained in the public consciousness that the author himself prefers to present himself as a “cognitive neuroscientist.” This book is a story about what they really do.

It turns out that psychologists are actively using the latest tools - various tomographs - for an objective study of the processes occurring in the brain. And now on tomographs you can observe not only photographs of the brain, but also see the process of activation of various parts of the brain in dynamics. And thanks to this, you can, for example, see that if a person imagines a face in his head, then the same parts of the brain are activated, as if he saw this face in reality. However, tomographs are only one of the tools.

It turns out that our brain does not tell us anything about many things. For example, they studied a woman who had carbon monoxide poisoning, as a result of which the part of the brain responsible for the perception of form was damaged. She could dimly see light, color, and shadows, but she couldn't recognize anything. She was given a stick, and asked how she was given a stick - vertically or horizontally. The woman, of course, could not say this, she did not see it. But when she was asked to take a stick, she correctly extended her hand, depending on the horizontal or vertical position. It turns out that the brain saw the stick, but did not want to share this information with consciousness at all.

The book tells about a lot of experiments, including quite simple ones (for some reason, I didn’t know how to detect a blind spot, I was impressed by the loss of a finger). In general, we do not directly receive any information about the world around us. We communicate only with our brain, and it builds representations about the world around us, and it adds a lot, finishes drawing, the attempts of the brain to predict the world around us are very important. Hence, by the way, optical illusions, and hallucinations too. But from here comes the feeling of empathy, the ability to understand what another might feel.

Interestingly, the author very carefully avoids the issue of free will, about how much a person can rule over his brain. It seems that this question is still out of science. The key word is "yet". (By the way, there is no “soul” in the original English title of the book!)

As a summary: it's a pity that such few books on psychology. And what is the big difference between what psychology really studies and the ordinary idea of psychologists. I even have doubts that we really train psychologists at the psychology departments of universities. More books like this!

Chris Frith (Christopher Donald Frith, born in 1942 in England) is an eminent British neurophysiologist, working primarily in the field of neuroimaging.

Since 2007 - Distinguished Professor at the Center for Neurodiagnostics at University College London (Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London) and Visiting Professor at Aarhus University (University of Aarhus, Denmark). The main scientific interest is the use of functional neuroimaging in the study of higher human cognitive functions.

He studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, in 1969 he defended his thesis in experimental psychology.

Author of over 400 publications, including seminal books in neuroscience such as the classic The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (1992). The popular science book Making Up the Mind (2007) was longlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Award.

Books (2)

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia - a common mental illness - spoils the life of one in a hundred people, has a devastating effect on those who suffer from it and on their families.

This book tells what the disease really looks like, how it progresses and how it can be treated. The authors of the book summarized the latest research on the biological basis of schizophrenia.

Brain and soul

Brain and soul. How nervous activity shapes our inner world.

The famous British neuroscientist Chris Frith is well known for his ability to talk simply about very complex problems of psychology - such as mental activity, social behavior, autism and schizophrenia.

It is in this area, along with the study of how we perceive the world around us, act, make choices, remember and feel, that today there is a scientific revolution associated with the introduction of neuroimaging methods. In Brain and Soul, Chris Frith talks about all this in the most accessible and entertaining way.

Reader Comments

Gurka Lamov/ 11/10/2016 No matter how large the number of material (brain) correlates of the functioning of consciousness is, none of them explains the cause of these dependencies. For example, to explain the existence of such dependences by the origin of consciousness from the material activity of the brain is only one of the possible hypotheses. Other reasons can be imagined that are just as legitimate.

Alexei/ 06/30/2010 A good popular science book. How is disease defined? The history of the concept of schizophrenia. Causes of occurrence and scientific search for a solution to this problem. The book is small (200 pages) and will be useful and understandable to an unprepared reader.

G37gka3 02/11/2013

Making up the mind.

Absolutely crazy translation of the title of the book, has nothing to do with either the content or the title of the original.
But the book is wonderful - conveys the idea that psychology can also be a science. The author on a variety of experiments shows the need for a skeptical approach to the perception of the world and oneself.

Metmor 22.02.2011

13.02.2011

on page 33, figure 5, they mixed up all the parts of the brain, how can you continue to read this book?!??

ulanenko 08.02.2011

Experimental psychology, or where is the soul?

Initially, I was a little confused by the translation of the title ... when, after reading the book, I began to recommend it to others, many were alarmed by it. "The word 'soul' in a non-fiction book?". But let's leave the name ... as they called it, they called it, because the main thing is not the cover, right?
What I wanted to pay attention to ... after reading the first chapters, I stopped believing my brain. A magnificent illustration of his activities, mistakes and "thinking out" leads to the idea that the world is not the way we see it, feel it, know it. Particularly pleasing are the illustrations of the experiments of neurophysiologists - how sophisticated they are! What amazing conclusions can be reached by manipulating human attention and perception, putting it in a tomograph.
For those who want to forever change their picture of the world and themselves.

All Rights Reserved. Authorized translation from the English language edition published by Blackwell Publishing Limited. Responsibility for the accuracy of the translation rests solely with The Dynasty Foundation and is not the responsibility of John Blackwell Publishing Limited. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the original copyright holder, Blackwell Publishing Limited.

CORPUS® Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Dedicated to Uta

List of abbreviations

ACT - axial computed tomography

MRI - magnetic resonance imaging

PET - positron emission tomography

fMRI - functional magnetic resonance imaging

EEG - electroencephalogram

BOLD (blood oxygenation level dependent)

Foreword

I have an amazing labor-saving device in my head. My brain - better than a dishwasher or a calculator - frees me from the boring, repetitive work of recognizing things around me and even saves me from having to think about how to control the movements of my body. This gives me the opportunity to focus on what is really important to me: friendship and the exchange of ideas. But, of course, my brain doesn't just save me from tedious daily work. It is he who forms me who lives in the company of other people. In addition, it is my brain that allows me to share with my friends the fruits of my inner world. So the brain makes us capable of something more than what each of us is capable of individually. This book is about how the brain performs these miracles.

Thanks

My work on the mind and brain was made possible by funding from the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The Medical Research Council gave me the opportunity to work in the neurophysiology of schizophrenia through financial support from the Tim Crow Psychiatric Unit at the Northwick Park Hospital Clinical Research Center in London, Harrow, Middlesex. At that time, we could judge the relationship between the psyche and the brain only on the basis of indirect data, but everything changed in the eighties, when tomographs were invented to scan the working brain. The Wellcome Trust enabled Richard Frackowiak to set up the Functional Imaging Laboratory and financially supported my work in that laboratory on the neurophysiological basis of consciousness and social interactions. The study of mind and brain is at the intersection of many traditional disciplines, from anatomy and computational neuroscience to philosophy and anthropology. I have been very fortunate to have always worked in interdisciplinary – and multinational – research groups.

I have benefited a lot from my colleagues and friends at University College London, especially Ray Dolan, Dick Passingham, Daniel Wolpert, Tim Shallis, John Driver, Paul Burgess and Patrick Haggard. In the early stages of writing this book, I was aided by many fruitful discussions about the brain and psyche with my friends in Aarhus, Jakob Howu and Andreas Röpstorff, and in Salzburg with Josef Perner and Heinz Wimmer. Martin Frith and John Law have been arguing with me for as long as I can remember about everything in this book. Eva Johnstone and Sean Spence generously shared with me their professional knowledge of psychiatric phenomena and their implications for brain science.

Perhaps the most important impetus for writing this book came from my weekly conversations with past and present breakfast parties. Sarah-Jane Blakemore, Davina Bristow Thierry Chaminade, Jenny Kull, Andrew Duggins, Chloe Farrer, Helen Gallagher, Tony Jack, James Kilner, Haguan Lau, Emiliano Macaluso, Eleanor Maguire, Pierre Macke, Jen Marchant, Dean Mobbs, Matthias Pessilone, Chiara Portas, Geraint Rees, Johannes Schultz, Suchy Shergill, and Tanya Singer helped shape this book. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

To Karl Friston and Richard Gregory, who have read portions of this book, I am grateful for their invaluable help and valuable advice. I am also grateful to Paul Fletcher for supporting the idea of introducing an English professor and other characters who argue with the narrator early on in the book.

Philip Carpenter selflessly contributed to the improvement of this book with his critical remarks.

I am especially grateful to those who read all the chapters and commented in detail on my manuscript. Sean Gallagher and two anonymous readers have made many valuable suggestions for improving the text of this book. Rosalind Ridley made me think carefully about my statements and be careful with terminology. Alex Frith helped me get rid of professional jargon and lack of coherence.

Uta Frith actively participated in this project at all its stages. If she had not set an example and guided me, this book would never have seen the light of day.

Prologue: Real Scientists Don't Study Consciousness

Why psychologists are afraid of parties

Like any other tribe, scientists have their own hierarchy. The place of psychologists in this hierarchy is at the very bottom. I discovered this in my freshman year at university where I was studying science. We were told that college students would, for the first time, have the opportunity to study psychology in the first part of the science course. Encouraged by this news, I went to our group leader to ask him what he knew about this new opportunity. “Yes,” he replied. “But it never crossed my mind that one of my students would be so dumb as to want to study psychology.” He himself was a physicist.

Because, probably, that I was not quite sure what "stupid" meant, this remark did not stop me. I left physics and took up psychology. From then until now, I have continued to study psychology, but I have not forgotten my place in the scientific hierarchy. At parties where scientists gather, from time to time the question inevitably pops up: “What do you do?” - and I tend to think twice before answering, "I'm a psychologist."

Of course, much has changed in psychology in the last 30 years. We borrowed a lot of methods and concepts from other disciplines. We study not only behavior, but also the brain. We use computers to analyze our data and model mental processes. My university badge doesn't say "psychologist" but "cognitive neuroscientist."

Rice. item 1. General view and section of the human brain

Human brain, side view (top). The arrow marks the place where the cut shown in the bottom photo passed. The outer layer of the brain (cortex) is composed of gray matter and forms many folds to fit a large surface area into a small volume. The cortex contains about 10 billion nerve cells.