Word: neuroscientist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...here the arguments will break out. Goleman's highly popularized conclusions, says McHugh, "will chill any veteran scholar of psychotherapy and any neuroscientist who worries about how his research may come to be applied." While many researchers in this relatively new field are glad to see emotional issues finally taken seriously, they fear that a notion as handy as EQ invites misuse. Goleman admits the danger of suggesting that you can assign a numerical yardstick to a person's character as well as his intellect; Goleman never even uses the phrase EQ in his book. But he (begrudgingly) approved...
...quote neuroscientist Dr. Rodolfo Llinas as saying colors and sound don't exist outside our brains, concluding that if a brain doesn't perceive color and sound, then they don't exist. He was using the famous metaphor of a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it. I couldn't disagree more with Llinas' conclusion. Light is the energy given off by a heated or excited object in the form of photons. Sound is the vibration of molecules in a medium caused by an object. Just because there may not be receivers around to pick...
Indeed, the brain abhors a vacuum, observes neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego; it craves information, and when it can't come by the data honestly, it does the best it can with what it has. One of his patients, for instance, a physical-therapy professor from San Antonio, Texas, suffered a brain hemorrhage that left a huge blank spot in her otherwise normal field of vision-or, rather, it would be blank if her brain allowed it. First, she saw a drawing of a cat, presumably supplied by her visual memory. "Then," says...
...York University Medical School neuroscientist Dr. Rodolfo Llins also thinks coordinated electrical signals give rise to consciousness, though his idea is subtly different from Crick and Koch's. Llinas believes that the firing of neurons is not just simultaneous but also coordinated. Using a highly sensitive device called a magnetoencephalograph, which indirectly measures the electric currents within the brain, Llinas measured the electrical response to external stimuli (he used musical tones). What he observed was a series of perfectly timed oscillations. Says Llinas: "The electrical signal says that a whole lot of cells must be jumping up and down...
Llinas' and Crick and Koch's concepts, speculative though they may be, are at least firmly rooted in biology. But you don't have to be a biologist or a neuroscientist to play the consciousness game: the mystery is intriguing enough so that researchers from a wide variety of scientific disciplines have jumped in with their own ideas. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, argues that consciousness may arise from quantum mechanics, of all things, the same process that governs the behavior of subatomic particles...