Mind, a source of our every actions, feelings and thoughts, have remained a mystery since the ancient time. There is a saying "Eyes are the window to our minds". If this quote is true, then we can actually do mind reading by looking into people's eyes or by looking at people's brain activities, considering the fact that our brain generates our thoughts ?
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| fMRI( functional magnetic resonance imaging ) scan |
I do believe that we can actually tell someone's feeling by interpreting his brain activities and, also, by his eyes too. I'm sure that most people used to look into someone's eyes and sensed one's emotion or feeling. Especially anger and sadness can be seen easily from our eyes, in my opinion. However, being able to tell one's feeling isn't actually mind reading. I think the reason why we can do that has something to do with our nervous system. In theory, when we feel angry or exciting, this feeling will trigger a system called sympathetic nervous system following by many physiological changes of our body, for example, increased heart rate, increased heart rate, increased energy usage and dilated iris. But when we feel sad or unhappy, the result will become on the other hand, which include contracted iris. That's how our eyes respond to our feeling and I think we, human, can sense this minor change, probably by our instinct. |
| Model pictures comparing to patient's copy |
There are more interesting examples which I had learned from my neuroscience class but I can't tell you all of them. There are still so many mysteries about our brain that wait to be found. Mind reading is interesting especially when we want to be sure whether someone's lying or not. It should be useful for interrogation. The study, this article talks about is just a small step, but this small step might, one day, leads to a major discovery that can solve the mysteries of our brains. Probably, our brain might tell us more than just feelings, emotions or even thoughts. How complicated our brain is !
Hogenboom, M. (2014, May 5). The difficult task of reading the brain. BBC News Science and Environment. Retrieved May 5, 2014 from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27221632
I'm also interested in neuroscience, and like Pop, I think that some brain disorders can help us to understand how the brain works when we examine the results of a malfunction.
ReplyDeletePop's example of neglect syndrome reminded me a couple of books by Oliver Sacks, in which this neurologist discusses some of the cases that he has dealt with in his professional life, for example a man who, after suffering damage to a specific part of his brain, lost the ability to recognise, or even to see, faces: he could describe the details of, for example, the object in front of him, such two blue roughly circular object with dark lines curved over them, and separated by a protruding object. But he could not recognise that this was his wife. The title of the book containing this famous case is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Do you love watching movies? I have watched some great movies about neuroscience such as Transcendence and Momento. The latter was directed by Christopher Nolan, who also directed great movies like The Dark Knight and Inception. It's very fascinating.
DeleteIn my faculty, we also have a class that is similar to neuroscience, too. But the subject is called "Human Brain and Function." I love learning about human's brain so much because it's so fantastic and, in the same time, mysterious. But I also hate it because it's the "all-you-grade-depends-on-your-memory" subject.
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