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Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets
By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.
To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if one hunter shoots another while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the shooter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his fellow hunter for an animal?
MIT neuroscientists have now shown they can influence those judgments by interfering with activity in a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.
Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
Where is your mind? I don't mean your brain, i mean your mind.
Often, we have humans blurring the line between the two. But this is a false assumption. Of course, you have a dig a little deeper and think on the matter...but it is obvious that the mind and the brain are not the same thing.
But they are related. This is likely the point at which people make the erroneous distinction.
Consider the case of people who recieve radical hemispherectomies, yet are able to continue with life and do things like graduate college? How do we reconcile their ability to maintain memory, reasoning, and logic while missing half of their brain?
Consider the following article:
www.articlealley.com...
On Jun 2, 2005, NBC Philadelphia had an interesting report. Christina Santhouse had caught a virus that caused a rare brain disorder known as Rasmussen's Syndrome at an age of 8. And her doctor had to perform hemispherectomy, removal of half of the brain, on her. After 10 years, Christina was about to graduate from high school with honors. After the surgery, she had a slight limp and her left hand didn't work at all. She had also lost her peripheral vision, but otherwise, she was an ordinary teen. A similar case was reported on Telegraph (UK) on May 29, 2002, a girl named Bursa had the same disorder and her left brain was removed when she was 3, she became fluent in Dutch and Turkish when she was 7. In 1987, A. Smith reported that one patient with hemispherectomy had completed college, attended graduate school and scored above average on intelligence tests. Studies have found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality, or humor after the procedure, and minimal changes in cognitive function overall.
The outcome of hemispherectomy is surprising. Neuroscience tends to suggest memory is stored in the neurons in the brain. If that premise stands true, removing half of the brain would destroy one's memory if memory is stored in the network structure of neurons as one school of cognitive physiology suggests, or at least destroy half of the memory if bits of memory information are stored in individual neurons in the brain as suggested by another school of cognitive neuroscience. But it is apparent that the results disagree with either of the explanations. Removing part of the brain has been one of the standard surgical operations for severe epilepsy and has been performed thousands of times. Many of the results are quite similar to those of hemispherectomy. The orthodox explanation for the observation is that information stored in the infected brain areas is duplicated in the health part of the brain prior to the surgery. This rationalization is still inadequate when you take into account how a brain surgery is performed. Surgeon has to remove the infected area and some surrounding health tissue, sometimes a much larger tissue than the infected area, to make sure infection does not spread. If the information stored in the infected areas is reproduced somewhere in the brain before surgical procedure, some information is still lost when surrounding health brain tissue is removed, consequently the memory would suffer. This is not observed after the surgery. So it is necessary to assume that the memory stored in the neighboring health tissue is also replicated in other parts of the brain. This raises a question: how does the brain know how much health tissue is going to be taken out? If the brain does not know, surgeries will inevitable destruct part of the memory. The belief that memory is stored in the brain (in neurons or in the network of neurons) apparently contradicts with findings in brain surgeries.
The article goes on to show that the same can be said in animals like rats, but that is for a whole 'nuther subject.
What this shows is that not only is MEMORY stored in a higher place, but so is the ability to reason and logic. Logic supersedes man. Man merely taps into logic for his own use. His ability to tap into this logic must then dictate his perceived "intellect".
So what/who is the logical force that man is able to utilize? It is a force that also contains the elements of memory (which harkens to concepts such as an Akashic Record).
When i am challenged by someone who claims that there is no God, no creative force, this is my evidence. My shield. It is proof that there is a higher mind than me, than all of us. We are all connected into it. Our brains are merely the "modem".