Tag: Perception
-
Interpreting René Magritte’s The Rape
Mirjana Stojkovic-IvkovicBelgrade, Serbia When exhibited by René Magritte in Brussels in 1930, The Rape was covered with a curtain so as not to cause a scandal. It depicts a woman’s face which, instead of eyes, nose, and lips, has breasts, a navel, and pubic hair. Such was typical of the work of this great in…
-
Paul Pierre Broca
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded, “The cerebral cortex functions as an indivisible whole . . . an…
-
Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit was imprecisely thought to reside in the brain’s ventricles and pineal. In the second century…
-
Origin of the mind
Bhargavi BhattacharyyaKolkata, India How are the mind and brain related? The brain is a ball of nerve cells, or neurons. The mind, the functional unit of the brain, includes imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgment, language, memory, and emotions. How do these basic units, neurons, translate to mental faculty? Scientists wanted to look at the function…
-
Can the neuroaesthetics response unleash a path to psychosis?
C. Ann ConnCovington, Louisiana, United States How does the brain perceive beauty and what is the biology of transcendent artistic appreciation? Is this epiphanic reaction hijacked during delusional thinking and psychosis? Perhaps the emerging field of neuroaesthetics can offer clues. After I witnessed the transformation and fall of my two sons, Austin and Colin, into…