Word: braining
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Suppose Steve Pinker contracts a terrible progressive brain disease that destroys his nervous system from the outside in--he starts going numb and then deaf and blind and unable to control his muscles. But then neuroscience comes to the rescue, replacing each portion of his nervous system as it disintegrates with a suitably interfaced prosthesis made of silicon and wire...
Thanks to their success on the Easy Problems of consciousness, the scientists meticulously provide artificial substitutes for all Steve's brain processes, so to all outward appearances he is saved from terrible oblivion and death. Moreover, he expresses his satisfaction with his restored feeling and sight and continues speaking and writing with humor and eloquence, delighting his friends and frustrating his critics...
...astronauts, through launches from Sputnik to Apollo and far beyond. Humanity is on a similar quest now, inward rather than outward, and just as readers decades ago came to count on us for news from the cosmos, so can today's readers look to us for dispatches from the brain. We will be putting together a team of reporters, writers, and scientists--our own brain trust--to regularly explore this great inner horizon...
History has not been kind to brain science. From the bogus discipline of phrenology--which claimed that the quality of the mind was reflected in the bumps on the skull--to the ultimately racist field of craniometry, which asserted that intellect could be determined merely by measuring the head, much early work on the brain was nonsense or worse. But today's powerful scanners now allow us to see inside the head as never before. Detailed maps of thousands of genes reveal the DNA blueprint that allows the brain to exist at all. More powerful psychoactive drugs let us understand...
...along with a panel of philosophers and neuroscientists, explores how the jabbering of 100 billion neurons creates our sense that we exist at all. Sharon Begley, who writes the science column for the Wall Street Journal, offers an excerpt from her new book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, about how the brain rewires itself, sometimes just by thinking. Daniel Gilbert and Randy Buckner answer the intriguing question: What does the mind do when it's doing nothing at all? (Hint: think H.G. Wells.) Robert Wright, author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal, offers a Darwinian take...