Word: brained
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This natural knowledge amounts to the emergence of a basic self, and its presence changes the status of the brain's sensorimotor maps from nonconscious mental patterns to that of conscious mental images. Constructed knowledge is a solution to the problem of consciousness. It does not require a homunculus in the control room of the mind and is not scientifically harder to imagine than the long march from genes to culture...
Damasio is director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles
...Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, is a treatment given to Parkinson's patients who don't respond to medication. A neurosurgeon implants a set ofelectrodes deep into the victim's brain, where they give off little jolts of electricity to disrupt the involuntary tremors and other symptoms of the disease. But according to Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, at least one patient routinely chooses which electrical contact to activate depending on how she wants to feel: calm for every day, more "revved up" for a party...
Devices like DBS and psychoactive drugs like Ritalin and Prozac are already manipulating brain function in millions of people. And future pharmaceuticals, Farah says, targeting very specific parts of the brain, will be even more effective and will have fewer side effects. These new brain-control tools open a Pandora's box of ethical and philosophical dilemmas, including what kind of society--and what kinds of selves--we want...
...depressed people took antidepressants. But I'm sitting in a coffee shop now where probably half the people have taken them." Some ethicists argue that unless you're ill, you're not really yourself when you're on these drugs. On the other hand, says Farah, we change our brain chemistry no more with Prozac than with coffee...