Neuroscience
There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived at any great insight or understanding. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of brain, mind and selfhood that first drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift – let’s imagine a neural switch somewhere in the frontolimbic circuitry - from one preoccupying question, What am I? to another, What should I do? It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding than to consider the value of things, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star?
Dr Paul Broks is a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Plymouth and a popular science writer. "On Emotion", the first of a planned trilogy of plays by Broks and Mick Gordon, about emotion and magical thinking, was shown in the West End last December.
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Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Sue Blackmore: Coping With Demented Patients
When my mother began a vendetta against next door’s dustbins and conceived a hatred of seagulls, we thought it was just Mum at her worst and even found it quite funny, but when she began getting lost and demanding to move to a cottage in the middle...
- Susan Blackmore: My Own Consciousness
I believe (although I’ve never seen it for myself) that inside my skull is a brain containing billions of neurons connected to each other in trillions of ways, with signals zooming about, setting off other signals, and generally creating massively complicated...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- Paul Rozin: Time Management
I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new...
- Norbert Schwarz: Incidental Feelings
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes...
Neuroscience
Paul Broks: What should I do?
There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived at any great insight or understanding. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of brain, mind and selfhood that first drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift – let’s imagine a neural switch somewhere in the frontolimbic circuitry - from one preoccupying question, What am I? to another, What should I do? It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding than to consider the value of things, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star?
Dr Paul Broks is a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Plymouth and a popular science writer. "On Emotion", the first of a planned trilogy of plays by Broks and Mick Gordon, about emotion and magical thinking, was shown in the West End last December.
--
Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Sue Blackmore: Coping With Demented Patients
When my mother began a vendetta against next door’s dustbins and conceived a hatred of seagulls, we thought it was just Mum at her worst and even found it quite funny, but when she began getting lost and demanding to move to a cottage in the middle...
- Susan Blackmore: My Own Consciousness
I believe (although I’ve never seen it for myself) that inside my skull is a brain containing billions of neurons connected to each other in trillions of ways, with signals zooming about, setting off other signals, and generally creating massively complicated...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- Paul Rozin: Time Management
I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new...
- Norbert Schwarz: Incidental Feelings
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes...