David Brooks in The New York Times:
Who are you? What’s going on deep inside yourself? How do you understand your own mind? The ancient sages had big debates about this, and now modern neuroscience is helping us sort it all out. When my amateur fascination with neuroscience began, roughly two decades ago, the scientists seemed to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where in the brain different functions were happening. That led to a lot of simplistic shorthand in the popular conversation: Emotion is in the amygdala. Motivation is in the nucleus accumbens. Back in those days management consultants could make a good living by giving presentations with slides of brain scans while uttering sentences like: “You can see that the parietal lobe is all lit up. This proves that …”
But over the past several years the field of neuroscience seems to have moved away from this modular approach (each brain region has its own job). Researchers are more likely to believe that the brain is a network of interconnected regions. They are more likely to talk about vast and dynamic webs of neurons whose connections link disparate parts of the brain.
More here.
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