Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...questions: Michael Lemonick discusses why memories can remain so vivid and visceral; Christine Gorman investigates how we can avoid burnout; J. Madeleine Nash exposes the wondrous world of mirror neurons, which play a key role in the development of language, empathy and human society; while Alice Park learns how brain science is contributing to marketing and advertising campaigns. In Manchester, Michael Brunton visits the Babylab, a research facility in England whose sole mission is to understand how babies' brains develop. TIME's talented graphics director, Jackson Dykman, managed to squeeze more than 7,000 years of fascination with the brain...
Philosophers have argued over this claim for a quarter of a millennium without resolution. Time's up! Now scientists armed with brain scanners are stepping in to settle the matter. So far it looks like Hume was onto something; though reason can shape moral judgment, emotion is often decisive, and that explains some strange quirks in our moralizing...
Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene does brain scans of people as they ponder the so-called trolley problem. Suppose a trolley is rolling down the track toward five people who will die unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto another track--where, unfortunately, lies one person who will die instead. An easy call, most people say: minimizing the loss of life--a "utilitarian" goal, as philosophers put it--is the right thing...
...halt before it hits the others. It's still a one-for-five swap, and you still initiate the action that dooms the one--but now you are more directly implicated; most people say it would be wrong to do this deal. Why? According to Greene's brain scans, the second scenario--the "up close and personal" intervention, he calls it--more thoroughly excites parts of the brain linked to emotion than does the lever-pulling scenario. Apparently the intuitive aversion to giving someone a lethal push is stronger than the aversion to a lethal lever pull...
Further studies suggest that in both cases the emotional aversion competes for control with more rational parts of the brain that take a utilitarian view, emphasizing the net savings of four lives. In the up-close-and-personal scenario the emotions are usually strong enough...