Searching Minds by Scanning Brains

Searching Minds by Scanning Brains PDF Author: Marc Jonathan Blitz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331950004X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book examines the ethical and legal challenges presented by modern techniques of memory retrieval, especially within the context of potential use by the US government in courts of law. Specifically, Marc Blitz discusses the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause. He also argues that we should pay close attention to another constitutional provision that individuals generally don’t think of as protecting their privacy: The First Amendment’s freedom of speech. First Amendment values also protect our freedom of thought, and this—not simply our privacy—is what is at stake if government engaged in excessive monitoring of our minds.

Searching Minds by Scanning Brains

Searching Minds by Scanning Brains PDF Author: Marc Jonathan Blitz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331950004X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the ethical and legal challenges presented by modern techniques of memory retrieval, especially within the context of potential use by the US government in courts of law. Specifically, Marc Blitz discusses the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause. He also argues that we should pay close attention to another constitutional provision that individuals generally don’t think of as protecting their privacy: The First Amendment’s freedom of speech. First Amendment values also protect our freedom of thought, and this—not simply our privacy—is what is at stake if government engaged in excessive monitoring of our minds.

Looking Inside the Brain

Looking Inside the Brain PDF Author: Denis Le Bihan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691160619
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The remarkable story of how today's brain scanning techniques were developed, told by one of the field's pioneers It is now possible to witness human brain activity while we are talking, reading, or thinking, thanks to revolutionary neuroimaging techniques like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These groundbreaking advances have opened infinite fields of investigation—into such areas as musical perception, brain development in utero, and faulty brain connections leading to psychiatric disorders—and have raised unprecedented ethical issues. In Looking Inside the Brain, one of the leading pioneers of the field, Denis Le Bihan, offers an engaging account of the sophisticated interdisciplinary research in physics, neuroscience, and medicine that have led to the remarkable neuroimaging methods that give us a detailed look into the human brain. Introducing neurological anatomy and physiology, Le Bihan walks readers through the historical evolution of imaging technology—from the x-ray and CT scan to the PET scan and MRI—and he explains how neuroimaging uncovers afflictions like stroke or cancer and the workings of higher-order brain activities, such as language skills. Le Bihan also takes readers on a behind-the-scenes journey through NeuroSpin, his state-of-the-art neuroimaging laboratory, and goes over the cutting-edge scanning devices currently being developed. Considering what we see when we look at brain images, Le Bihan weighs what might be revealed about our thoughts and unconscious, and discusses how far this technology might go in the future. Beautifully illustrated in color, Looking Inside the Brain presents the trailblazing story of the scanning techniques that provide keys to previously unimagined knowledge of our brains and our selves.

Murderous Minds

Murderous Minds PDF Author: Dean A. Haycock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1639360522
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Is there a biological basis for evil? From neurological imaging to behavioral studies, Dean Haycock's account of the groundbreaking research reveals what scientists are learning about the psychopaths living among us. How many times have you seen a murder on the news or on a TV show like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and said to yourself, "How could someone do something like that?" Today, neuroscientists are imaging, mapping, testing and dissecting the source of the worst behavior imaginable in the brains of the people who lack a conscience: psychopaths. Neuroscientist Dean Haycock examines the behavior of real life psychopaths and discusses how their actions can be explained in scientific terms, from research that literally looks inside their brains to understanding out psychopaths, without empathy but very goal-oriented, think and act the way they do. Some don’t commit crimes at all, but rather make use of their skills in the boardroom. But what does this mean for lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, victims and readers--for anyone who has ever wondered how some people can be so bad. Could your nine-year-old be a psychopath? What about your co-worker? The ability to recognize psychopaths using the scientific method has vast implications for society, and yet is still loaded with consequences.

Sex, Lies, & Brain Scans

Sex, Lies, & Brain Scans PDF Author: B. J. Sahakian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198752881
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book considers what the technique of fMRI entails, and what information it can give us, showing which applications are possible today, and which ones are science fiction. It also looks at the important ethical questions these techniques raise.

Picturing Personhood

Picturing Personhood PDF Author: Joseph Dumit
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236623
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods

Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods PDF Author: Malcolm Jeeves
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830895620
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In this hypothetical correspondence, Malcolm Jeeves urges Christian students to enter the brave new world of neuroscience ready to have their faith examined and their experiences of God put to the test. When we do this, he argues, being mindful of oversimplifications as we go, the integration of Christianity and psychology becomes possible.

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind PDF Author: Eric R. Kandel
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070514
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
“A stunning book.”—Oliver Sacks Memory binds our mental life together. We are who we are in large part because of what we learn and remember. But how does the brain create memories? Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel intertwines the intellectual history of the powerful new science of the mind—a combination of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology—with his own personal quest to understand memory. A deft mixture of memoir and history, modern biology and behavior, In Search of Memory brings readers from Kandel's childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna to the forefront of one of the great scientific endeavors of the twentieth century: the search for the biological basis of memory.

Mind Shift

Mind Shift PDF Author: John Parrington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192521640
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
John Parrington argues that social interaction and culture have deeply shaped the exceptional nature of human consciousness. The mental capacities of the human mind far outstrip those of other animals. Our imaginations and creativity have produced art, music, and literature; built bridges and cathedrals; enabled us to probe distant galaxies, and to ponder the meaning of our existence. When our minds become disordered, they can also take us to the depths of despair. What makes the human brain unique, and able to generate such a rich mental life? In this book, John Parrington draws on the latest research on the human brain to show how it differs strikingly from those of other animals in its structure and function at a molecular and cellular level. And he argues that this 'shift', enlarging the brain, giving it greater flexibility and enabling higher functions such as imagination, was driven by tool use, but especially by the development of one remarkable tool - language. The complex social interaction brought by language opened up the possibility of shared conceptual worlds, enriched with rhythmic sounds, and images that could be drawn on cave walls. This transformation enabled modern humans to leap rapidly beyond all other species, and generated an exceptional human consciousness, a sense of self that arises as a product of our brain biology and the social interactions we experience. Our minds, even those of identical twins, are unique because they are the result of this extraordinarily plastic brain, exquisitely shaped and tuned by the social and cultural environment in which we grew up and to which we continue to respond through life. Linking early work by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to the findings of modern neuroscience, Parrington explores how language, culture, and society mediate brain function, and what this view of the human mind may bring to our understanding and treatment of mental illness.

The Psychopath Inside

The Psychopath Inside PDF Author: James Fallon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101603925
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
“Compelling, essential reading for understanding the underpinnings of psychopathy.” — M. E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath For his first fifty-eight years, James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and professor, he’d been raised in a loving family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity. While researching serial killers, he uncovered a pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. Astonishingly, his own scan matched that pattern. And a few months later he learned that he was descended from a long line of murderers. Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his own brain with everything he knew as a scientist about the mind, behavior, and personality.

Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain

Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain PDF Author: Patrick McGeer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461574919
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
The human brain is the inner universe through which all external events are perceived. That fact alone should ensure that neuroscience will eventually receive top priority in the list of human endeavors. The brain represents the pinnacle of sophistication in the realm of living systems. Yet it is an imperfect organ, whose failures in disease processes lead to the occupation of more than half of all hospital beds and whose variable performance in the healthy state contributes in undetermined degree to the world's social problems. Every significant advance in our understanding of the brain has yielded enormous practical dividends. There is every reason to believe the future holds even greater promise. It can be said that brain research took root near the end of the last century when Ram6n y Cajal proved beyond doubt that the neuron is the basic functioning unit of the brain and Sherrington revealed its method of transmitting impulses. But it is only in the past two decades that neuroscience has been established as a recognized discipline where the anatomical, physiological, and chemical aspects of neuronal function are treated in a unified fashion. It can be anticipated that this logical advance'will allow brain research to reach new levels of sophistication. Already it has resulted in the establishment of graduate programs at dozens of universities, and the found ing of numerous journals devoted to reports of interdisciplinary research on the brain.