INTRODUCTION PSYCHOLOGY

WEEK 1:
THE BRAIN

Hi, I'm Paul Bloom, and I'm delighted to welcome you to Introduction to Psychology. I've been
here at Yale for about 20 years, and just about every year, I teach intro psych. I teach it to hundreds
of undergraduates. It is one of my favorite courses to teach. But I'm particularly thrilled to be able
now to present the material of intro psych to a broader audience. Now, there's all different ways you
could take this course. Nobody would blame you if you decide to just dive in, look at electron
Freud, or about mistakes and memory, or about depression. Electrodes can be listened to or watched
out of order. But what I would suggest if you can is treat it like a course. Sit with your laptop in
front of you with a cup of strong coffee and a cigar, take notes, go through it bit by bit in order in
which it's given, take the exams. Exams are not meant to be difficult, but they are meant to sort of
tap your understanding of the material as you go through it. Once you've done that, you could be
said to have taken a course on intro psych. Then, if you want to move it up one level, you can do the
associated readings. The readings are online. They're from an excellent textbook. They're
free. They're written clearly. If you do lectures and you do the readings, then you can legitimately
say you took intro to psych and you'll have a tremendous background. The course covers every
important aspect of the science of the mind. I start off with the brain asking the question of how this
physical lump of me gives rise to mental life. We talk about Freud and Skinner looking at the
historical foundations of psychology. We talk about how children develop including some research
I've done on that building over there. We talk about how we learn to speak. We move to perception
how we see the world, how we remember the world, how we attend to the world. We target the
emotions, love, lust, anger, kindness, and hatred. We explore how we interact socially, how
prejudices form, what we like about one another. We'll talk about differences, how we're different,
why we're different, what this means for us, and we'll talk about clinical disorders like depression
and anxiety. What disorders many of you suffer from and what causes them and what can cure
them, and we'll end with an overview about happiness. What the scientific study of psychology tells
us about how to be happy. I'm admittedly biased, but I think psychology is most interesting topic
around. So, I'm delighted to have you take this course.
So here's where things begin for real. I want to welcome people to the course and I want to
welcome people to the first series of lectures, which is on the brain, on neuroscience. And I want to
begin this series of lectures and the course itself, with a story about a man named Phineas Gage,
and an event that happened to Gage in the summer of 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont.0:24So Gage
was a blasting foreman working on a railway construction project and his job, at that time, was to
clear away rock so that they could lay down tracks. And to do so, his routine during those days, was
that he would bore a hole in the rocks. Inside the hole, he put blasting powder and a fuse in. Then he
would cover that up with dirt and sand and take a tamping iron, which he carried with him. A big
piece of steel, looked like a javelin and use it to tamp down the sand and dirt, so that later they
could set the fuse and cause the explosions.1:03Well one day, something didn't work. Nobody's
exactly sure why, maybe he just forgot to put in the sand and the dirt. But regardless, he put the
tamping iron into the hole, the powder exploded. [SOUND] The tamping iron shot away from his
hand and went into his face. It entered the left side of Gage's jaw, moving in an upward direction, it
passed behind the left eye through the left side of the brain and it went out the top of his skull and
landed several feet away of the clutter. Now miraculously Gage wasn't killed on the spot. He lost
consciousness for a little bit, but then he staggered to his feet.1:45And in some regards, Gage was
very lucky. So he underwent a series of operations, he had infections, he got sick. At times, his life
was at risk. But months later, he was, in certain regards, pretty much recovered. He was able to
see, he wasn't deaf, he wasn't paralyzed, he didn't lose the ability to speak or understand language,
he didn't lose his intellectual capacities in any simple way.2:14But in another sense Gage was very
unlucky2:18because Gage has been transformed by this incident. Someone who knew Gage
describes the transformation like this. Before the accident Gage was, quote the most efficient and
capable man, a man of temperate habits, considerable energy of character, a sharp shrewd
businessman.2:36After the accident, Gage was no longer Gage. He was fitful, irreverent, indulging
at times in the grossest profanity manifesting but little deference for his fellows. He ended up losing
his job. He traveled through the states taking up different jobs, engaging in different
relationships. And ultimately ended up in an exhibit in a travelling circus, holding a tamping iron
and telling people about this terrible story about how it went through his head and went through his
brain, and changed his life.3:09So, why am I telling you this story? Well, as I said, I want to begin
the course by talking about the brain. And the story of Phineas Gage illustrates something which we
have abundant reason to believe, which is that the brain is the source of mental life. And so damage
to the brain can have profound effects on who we are and what we are.3:31An idea here is nicely
summarized by the Nobel prize winning biologist Francis Crick, he calls it the Astonishing
Hypothesis. As he writes, the Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your
memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.3:57Now this
assembly of nerve cells is of course the brain, the brain and parts of the spinal cord, but we're going
to talk about the brain here.4:05An the idea then, as sometimes people like to put it the mind is the
brain or that the mind is what the brain does or the mental life emerges from the brain.4:17The
official term for this is materialism that we are material beings. Everybody accepts that our arms
and legs and our heart and kidneys are made of the same sort of stuff as rabbits and automobiles and
cups. But the idea is that our mental life, what makes us special, our most intimate feelings and
thoughts also arise from these material things. And this the idea that makes possible the discipline
of neuroscience and much of psychology.
We're talking about materialism, the idea that our mental life emerges from our physical
brain. If you're listening closely, if you're thinking about this, I hope you acknowledged that this is
an odd and unnatural view. I don't expect you to believe it, at least not at first. And in fact, for the
most part, people are far more attracted to the doctrine called "Dualism." Dualism is an idea that's
been found in just about every religion and every philosophy. It's made explicit in Plato, for
instance. But I think the most thoughtful and articulate defender of dualism was the philosopher,
Rene Descartes. Descartes believed that animals were material things. He thought that the doctrine
of materialism was correct about non-human animals. "But humans are different," Descartes
argued. For humans, there's a duality. We possess two sorts of things. We are composed of two sorts
of things. We are in part material, but we're also in part spiritual, separate, mental, psychological. In
some way that doesn't reduce to the material. He made two arguments for this, and they're both
reasonably good arguments, at least quite persuasive at his time, and have persuaded many people
and continue to persuade many people. The first arguments for a non-material nature is that humans
are capable of doing things that no machine, no material entity ever could. So, it might surprise you
to hear this, but Descartes in the 17th century was familiar with robots. He knew about the French
Royal Gardens, which is like a 17th century Disneyland or Euro Disney, which had robots that react
when you approach them or when you step on certain stones. For instance, you might approach
Diana, and then Neptune would jump out from the bushes holding a trident. This was done not of
electricity, but with water. So, Descartes knew about these robots, and Descartes asked,
"Well, maybe we're such things, maybe we're just machines responding to the environment." And
he said that we can't be. He said maybe animals, non-human animals can be, but human behavior is
far more complicated, and variegated, and subtle to be explained in such simple ways. We'll return
to this point later on in the course when we talk about Noam Chomsky and Noam Chomsky's
critique of behaviorism, which argued that basically humans respond in a relatively reflexive way to
environmental stimuli. Descartes along with Chomsky said, "That can't be. Our behavior's far too
complicated for that. So, we can't be machines." His second argument is probably better now, and
it's based on intuition. And his claim was we don't feel like bodies. So, to put it more technically, he
applied what was called a method of doubt. He asked the question, "What do we know for sure, and
what can we question?" So, for instance, you might believe you were born in such and so place. You
could be wrong. You could be deceived. You might believe that the Earth is thousands or millions of
years old. But maybe the Earth was created 100 years ago and all the memories that your
grandparents have of the past were just manufactured. You might believe, said Descartes, that you
live in a world of things, that you're sitting on a chair or there's a wall in front of you or there's a
computer near your hands. But Descartes observe that we often believe such things when we're in
dreams, but weren't mistaken. He observed that people who are mentally ill, or were deranged in
some way, might have such beliefs, but don't be mistaken. So, you could be wrong that there's a
physical world around you. You could be wrong that there is a body that you have. This is an
ancient concern of course, but it's best articulated in the movie, The Matrix, which maintains that
we think we're running around in the physical world, but actually, with the lucky exception of our
heroes like Neo and Trinity, we're actually just plugged into some sort of system. Another version
of this is that we're brains in a vat. If you were a brain, just the brain sitting in a vat with electrical
wires stimulating your experiences, you couldn't help. Maybe you are such things. Modern-day
philosophers for instance, will argue that there's an excellent chance that we are simulations, we
computer simulations. So, Descartes and people following Descartes said, "There's a lot we can't be
sure of. The things that we are seemingly most confident about in real world can't be shaken." But
Descartes said, "There's one thing you can't doubt. You can't doubt your own consciousness. You
can't doubt your own existence." The famous line is, "I think, therefore I am." And spelling out this
intuition, building from the fact you could doubt that you have a body, but you can't doubt that you
have a mind. Descartes wrote, "I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which
is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it dependent in a
material thing.. that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body." So,
that's a philosophical case for dualism. But as I said, dualism is also emerged out of common
sense. Think about how you describe your body. You describe your body's if you possess it. My
arm, my heart, my body, my brain, as if it's something separate from you that you have. Or consider
your intuitions about personal identity. So, typically, as people age, their consciousness follows
their body. So, I get 10 years older, my mind 10 years older, my brain is 10 years older, it all
connects together, but we easily accept at least infection that people can hop from one body to
another. There are many comedies that involve body switching, body swamps. There are movies
that involve somebody going to sleep one morning as one person and waking up as another. We
understand they're fiction, they aren't real. But they make sense to us. There's an intuitive rationale
to this. We don't walk out of the theory and say, "I am totally confused what happened
there." Rather, at least with our naive conception of the self, we accept that least of the
possibility, that you can hop from one body to another. None of this is limited to modern-day
movies, the most famous short story of history by Franz Kafka begins with the sentence, "As
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed
into a gigantic insect." Metamorphosis involves that transformation and along before that in Ulysses
the characters are transformed. Some of the characters are transformed by an evil witch into
pigs. It's non of you took to people and turn them into pigs rather it's much worse. They put them in
the body of pigs. As the passage goes, "They had the head and voice, and bristles, and body of
swine; but their minds remained unchanged as before. So they were penned there, weeping." Our
conception that bodies and cells are separate, allows us to accept idea you had many people
inhabiting one body. This is how many people think about multiple personality disorder, something
we'll get to quite later on the course. It's also at the root of a view that many people; both religious
and non-religious hold, which is the idea of demonic possession. Your body can be taken over by
somebody else. Another manifestation of dualism, is you could believe in intelligent beings without
bodies. If mind and body are separate it raises the possibility you could have one without the
other. Plainly you got to have bodies without minds. That's what a corpse is. But the argument goes
you could also have minds without bodies. This is for instance what many people think about gods
or angels. Which are the immaterial beings that can think, that can observe, that can act, but they
don't have physical bodies in the same sense that we do. Finally, and maybe most important for
people, the idea that of dualism, the idea you are not your physical body, raises what must be for
many and incredibly appealing consequence, which is that you can survive the destruction of the
body. In fact, if you ask most people; religious and non-religious, what will happen after you body
is destroyed? The answer is not well, I'm dead then, that's it. It's the end of things. But rather the
belief is that you can live on. Maybe you'll end up in some spirit world, maybe you will ascend to
heaven, if you're unlucky maybe will descend to hell. Maybe you'll occupy some other body as an
reincarnation. But the idea is that the destruction of your body need not be the destruction of you
because you are not your body. All of these beliefs, the beliefs about personal identity, the beliefs
about life after death, about the existence of supernatural beings. About God. All rest at least to
some extent, on a dualist perspective. So, materialism, which says dualism is just playing wrong is
an audacious view, and should be treated as such. You shouldn't just shrug and write it down. You
should grapple with it, you should worry about it. You should either be grudgingly accepted or fight
against it. So, why are modern-day psychologists and neuroscientists so confident that dualism is
mistaken? Well, there are a few problems with it. One is that it simply doesn't help us explain
certain things that need to be explained. Appealing to an immaterial world to an immaterial soul
seems to dock certain questions that really do deserve an answer. So, throughout this course we'll
ask questions like, how do we learn language? What do we find sexually attractive? How does
memory work? These are questions about ourselves, about our minds. To say, "Oh, it all happens
some immaterial realm", leaves us hopeless when it comes to answering them. The second concern
is that at the time, Descartes was correct, to infer from the limitations of material things physical
things, that we probably are not physical things. But by now we have a much better understanding
what physical things can do which makes it entirely possible for many of us that we are set
things. So, I'm thinking for instance of computers and robots. For Descartes, the idea that a physical
thing can do something as complicated as play a game of chess would seem ludicrous. But now of
course we know that physical things and if you're looking at a computer you are looking at such a
physical thing, can do exactly that. They can understand language, they could recognize
objects, they could store things in memory, they can make inferences, and so on. Now, for some of
these things, they don't do it anywhere near as well as people do. So, when we talk about language
development for instance we see that, a two-year-old child uses and understands language better
than any computer around. So, we need to bear that in mind. But still, it's no longer nuts to say that
physical thing can do all of the rich and psychologically diverse and psychologically complicated
things that people do. Which means that we have to take seriously the claim that we are in fact such
physical things. The final consideration is that there's tremendous evidence that the brain is in fact
the roots of mental life. So, put aside all that philosophical abstract, arguments, there's just tons of
direct evidence. To some extent that direct evidence has always been there. You don't have to be
born in the 20th or 21st century to appreciate that getting hit in the head could affect your
consciousness and your memory. To appreciate that diseases like syphilis can lead to disruption of
the will and of consciousness. Alzheimer's can rob you of your rationality. That coffee and alcohol
can inflame the passions. It just is so evident in everyday life that if physical events that affect the
brain can affect ourselves, suggesting that at the very least, our mental life is intimately connected
to the brain. Over recent years something else has happened, which is we've developed technologies
that allow us to look directly into the brain. Look at the brains activation, and infer from patterns of
the brain activation what people are thinking. So, very crudely, you can put somebody into a
scanner, an fMRI scanner, and you could tell whether or not are thinking about language, or music,
or sex. The technology is increasing. There is such a point that is not implausible that for some of
you by the time you're listening to this, we can put a sleeping person under fMRI scanner, and know
from neural patterns of neural firings, know what they're dreaming. All of this I think it is very
difficult to keep this in mind, and hold on to the view of dualism. I think materialism however
uncomfortable, however unpalatable is a view that the science forces us to adopt.
So, what is the physical seed of thought? What is the source of our emotions, or decision-
making, our passions, or pains, and everything else? Well, it's the brain, and it's set to be the most
complex mechanism in the known universe. You might expect, given all it is, and given all it
does, that will look very pretty, Philips shimmering lights and glass tubes, and mysterious
colors. But in fact, it looks really kind of gross, it looks a the three-day old meatloaf. It's gray when
you take it out of the head, and inside the head it's bright red because of all the blood. In fact, it
turns out very surprisingly that the source of our mental life, of our consciousness is meat. In fact,
you could eat it, people have eaten brains, I've had brain with cream sauce, not human brain, mind
you, but I've had brain with cream sauce. It's not bad. But it makes the puzzle all the more
harder, how can this fleshy thing give rise to mental life? That's the question I want to explore in
this lecture, and the rest of the lectures. I want to do so by starting with the smallest relevant
parts, different parts of neurons. Then explore how the neurons are connected together, how they're
wired up, how they form different subparts of the brain, like the hypothalamus and the frontal
lobe. Finally, talking about the brain, and the larger perspective, looking at the two halves of the
brain, the left half and right half, and how they interact. Now, there's a lot of stuff in the brain, a lot
of chemical stuff, a lot of different parts, but where the action is, the part that does the thinking, the
part that is the focus of most of our research, is the neurons. It's not an accident they call the study
of the biological basis of thought neuroscience, because it all comes from the neurons. So, you can
see here pictures of neurons interacting together. Here's a diagram that depicts a typical neuron. So,
what you see is the dendrites, and dendrites receive signals from other neurons. Either excitatory,
like pluses, or inhibitory, minuses. Then they get to the cell body, which sums up these pluses and
minuses. When you reach a certain threshold, a certain amount of pluses, there's neural
firing. Firing takes place through the axon, and the axon is much longer than the dendrites. In fact,
for some motor neurons, it's very long indeed. There's axons running from your spinal cord, all the
way to your big toe. You could think of it of the relative sizes of things in terms of a basketball, and
a 40-mile garden hose. Surrounding the axon is what's called a myelin sheath. The myelin sheath is-
you can think of it as insulation, as fatty tissue like insulation on a wire. So, the information comes
through the dendrites, and summed up in the cell body, and it's transmitted through the axon. So,
what neurons do, is they sum up and transmit information, and we know that there's a lot of
them. By some estimates, it's 100 billion, or the estimates tend to be very different and very
rough, but there's billions upon billions of neurons, and each connect to thousands, maybe tens of
thousands of other neurons. So, the fact that you have something of this degree of complexity, this
degree of structure, structure which there's no way to replicate in any machine, the numbers are just
too big is why people might describe the brain as the most complicated machine in the universe. At
least this is fitting, it's made of meat maybe. Which is kind of disappointing, but at least it shows its
incredible internal structure. So, neurons come in three flavors. There are sensory neurons, which
take in information from the environment, from the external world. There's motor neurons, which
go from the brain out to your motor control. So, if you touch something hot, and you feel the
pain, that is sensory neurons, if you rent your hand back, or you reach for something, that's motor
neurons. Finally, there's interneurons, which connect different neurons without making contact with
external world. Either through sensation, or through motor action. Now, the main thing to think
about for neurons and neuron firing is that it's all or nothing. It's like firing a gun, or
sneezing. Neurons either fire, or they don't. Now, you might think that's a little bit strange,
particularly, when you think about sensory neurons, because your experience seems to be a
continuum. So, you have sensory neurons in your eyes, and you can distinguish from a very dim
light, and a very bright light. You have sensory neurons in your fingers, and you could distinguish
between gently touching something, versus being stabbed on the tip of your finger, or
something. But still the neurons are all or nothing, the way we get to this continuity of experience is
that neurons can code for intensity in different ways. So, one way is in terms of the number of
neurons that fire. If x neurons corresponds to a mild experience, x times 10 neurons may correspond
to an intense experience. Another factor is the impulse frequency of individual neurons, an
individual neuron might denote a mild sensation by doing fire, fire, fire, fire. Well, it might denote
an intense situation with fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. So, you have neurons, and the neurons talk to
each other, they talk to each other because axons, an axon of one neuron will communicate with the
dendrites of another neuron. A long time ago, people used to think that neurons were wired up
together like a computer, but in fact, neurons don't actually touch one another. There is a gap
between the axon terminal of one neuron, and the dendrite of another one. A very tiny gap, typically
of like 1/110,000 of a meter wide. This gap is known as a synapse. When one neuron fires, the axon
releases neurotransmitters, these are chemicals that shoot out over that gap, and affect dendrites and
other neurons. As I said before, the effect of these neurotransmitters could be excitatory, which is
that they raise the energy, so they increase the likelihood of a neuron firing, or inhibitory. So that
they bring down the likelihood of a neuron firing. What's interesting is that different neurons shoot
out different neurotransmitters. So, they have different effects on other neurons that they made
contact with. In fact, a lot of psychopharmacology, both attempts to cure various psychological or
physical diseases by giving medicines, or recreational psychopharmacology designed to increase
pleasure of different forms, or sometimes help people work, or help people focus. Works by fiddling
with the neurotransmitters and this can be either antagonists, they lower down intensity of things by
binding to the dendrites, making it hard to create more neurotransmitters, or they can increase the
amount of neurotransmitters available in different ways agonists. So, you're either pumping up the
volume or turning down the volume. So, you think about different drugs and their effects. There's a
curare. Curare, is a drug that used by South American Indians. It's a antagonist. It blocks motor
neurons from affecting their muscle fibers. It keeps your motor neurons from working, and what it
does is it paralyzes you, and in large enough doses, it kills you, because motor neurons also keep
your heart beating. So, shut that down and you die. There's alcohol. Now, alcohol also has an
inhibitory effect. You might think that's strange because when I drink alcohol I get all excited and
happy and goofy. But you have to keep this in mind here, the way alcohol works is, it inhibits part
of your brain that does the inhibition. So, you have part of your brain that says, don't say that to the
other person, keep your pants on, stop yelling, and alcohol basically inhibits that part of the
brain, making you more exuberant. Then, over the course of things, in the course of drinking too
much, it also inhibits other parts of the brain. So, you could pass out and fall on the floor, and in
large enough doses, die. So, both curare and alcohol, in different ways bring things down. Other
drugs bring things up. So, amphetamines, for instance, increase the amount of
norepinephrine, which is another neurotransmitter, that's responsible for genetic general
arousal, and this is how drugs like speed or cocaine work. Other drugs like Prozac or L-
Dopa, influence neurotransmitters in ways that they increase, for instance, the supply of dopamine
or serotonin. Which can be relevant for issues like parkinsons, which seems to be related to too little
dopamine, and depression, which is related to too little serotonin. So, these drugs work by
influencing neurotransmitters, either by directly pumping in more neurotransmitters, or increasing
the supply in different ways, or stopping them from having effects by binding them or sucking them
up in different ways, but they work through their effects on neurotransmitters. So, the more general
idea is, the way neurons lead to thinking, is that they form clusters or networks. These clusters and
networks, are computational devices that do interesting things like recognizing faces, or walking up
right, or understanding sentences, or doing math, or experiencing great sadness, or falling in love,
and so on. We now know that, that's possible, because we create computing machines that work in
certain ways. That if you wire up a computing machine in certain complicated ways, it can do
mathematics, play chess, do flight simulator, and so on. So, you may be interested in the project
of computational neuroscience which tries to ask the question, how are neurons wired up to do
interesting things, and uses our own success at computational theory as a model. Then, sometimes
takes the inference the other way around, which is you can see how people do it, and then use this
knowledge of how people do it, to create computational systems that can do it as well. So, how is
the brain wired up? Well, you might imagine that it's wired up like a portable computer, like a
laptop, like the sort of computer you're looking at now. Into some regards it is, but there's a couple
of reasons why it can't be, and both of them have to do with how well the brain works. So, first, the
brain is highly resistant to damage. If you get a knife to the brain, if you get damage to the brain, it
won't typically shut down the whole system. The information and capacitors somehow distributed
across neurons in such a way that makes them extremely resilient to damage. While in contrast,
somebody could open up the back of your laptop, pull out a chip and the whole thing is ruined, the
whole thing will stop working. But the brain is wired up in a certain way that makes it highly
resilient. The second thing is, the brain is wired up in such a way that makes it work very fast. So,
computers can do millions of operations per second, because they're purely electrical, but brain
tissue is much slower and can spend the time to do many steps. So, to put it a different way, if your
brain was wired up like a computer, it would be so slow, as to be entirely unusable. It has to be
wired up in a way that's more efficient, that allows for the slowness of brain tissues and
neurotransmitters, and can still compute things at a level, at a human level, which is often
blindingly fast. Because of this, there has been a huge interest in massively parallel systems and
complicated neural networks, which are wired up as we believe the brain does, and as such, we are
helping computers to do things based on our understanding of the brain that they could never do
before. The details of this is something we're going to talk about through the course. We're not
actually going to end up explaining different capacities directly in terms of neurons, because we
can't, and because we want it to have higher level explanation. So, when I talk about how people
learn language, or how do they recognize faces, we're not going to talk much about neurons in
particular, but we will talk about different brain areas and how they work. Then the assumption is,
the bet is, that everything we talk about in more functional ways, can ultimately reduce down to
large networks of neural systems, and that in turn will ultimately reduce down to the specific
behaviors of the specific neurons that we're looking at.
So, let's talk about the different parts of the brain and what they do. Parts of the brain are
functionalized for different purposes, they do different things. Which is why damage to different
parts of the brain has different effects. It's why when you look at an fMRI scan or PET scan or some
something that records neural activity, you could figure out based on the location of the activity
what's going on. So, the first thing to realize is I'm talking about the brain, but I'd be more precise
and more inclusive if I talked about the brain and parts of the spinal cord. So, you don't need your
brain for everything. There're certain activities we do that can happen without a brain. Like sucking
in newborns or pulling your limb back to withdraw from pain or vomiting. But for everything else
we talk about in this course, we'll really be talking about the brain. So, some of the structures of the
brain that are highly relevant are called subcortical, which means they're below the cortex, which
means they're in the center of the brain. This includes part of the brain like the medulla, which
control certain automatic function like your heart rate, your blood pressure, swallowing, and so
on. It includes the cerebellum, which is involved in body balance and muscle coordination. It
contains about 30 billion neurons. So, this isn't small potatoes. The hypothalamus, which is
involved in feeding and sex and thirst and different appetites. We're going to talk about emotions or
visceral desires, we'll return to those parts of the brain. But for the aspects of psychology that are
distinctive for us, that make us human, we're mostly focused on the outer layer, the cerebral
cortex. So, the cerebral cortex it is all crumpled up. If you were to take a brain, pull out the cortex
and straighten it out, like you're removing a rug you got from the trunk of your car and you have to
straighten it out, it's about two feet square. So, it's lot of crumpling to get it in. It's about three
millimeters thick. This is where the action is. This is where at least for the things I'm interested
in, this is where it takes place. Is where reasoning and language and complex perception comes
from. Fish don't have any cerebral cortex, reptiles and birds have a little bit, but primates, including
humans, have a lot. When you look at the cortex, you'll see it has two halves. It has a left half and a
right half. For each of these halves, when you look at it, you can demarcate the brain, the cortex into
different lobes. There's going from your forehead and swooping to the back. You have the frontal
lobe conveniently enough on the front. The parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the temporal
lobe. Each of these lobes, there's different things, which we'll talk about in a bit. Another thing
about the cortex though which is super interesting, is that it includes maps. What I mean by this is it
includes topographical maps where two things that are close together in the brain are similarly close
together in the body. So, there is a motor area where if you were to shock, parts of that brain, parts
of the body would twitch accordingly. Just like you'd expect, the middle finger is close to the thumb
which is closer to elbow. If it's close in the real-world and your body it's close to the brain and there
is a primary somatosensory area, which is the sense organs. There if you have somebody in the
operating table and you shocked people, they would experience things, they might experience a
sound or a flash of light or a touch. In fact, in the occipital lobe, you have a map for vision and in
the temporal lobe, you have a map for sound. What's really cool is, I said the map is
topographical, but the size of the brain areas don't correspond to the size of the actual body
areas, but rather to the extent to which there's motor or sensory function. So, artists have drawn
pictures of people if their body was proportioned to the extent that their brain was. You'd see the
trunk of the body is relatively small, but their hands are enormous and the face is enormous because
there's a whole lot of sensation. There is much more sensation going on in your hand than in your
whole back even though the back is physically apart. So, part of the cortex is these projection
areas. But less than a quarter of the cortex contains projection areas. As I said, the rest is involved
with the cool stuff. With language, with reasoning, with moral thoughts, and so on. Then the
question comes in, how do we know this? How do we know what parts of the brain do what, what
parts of the brain are involved, and why? There's different answers. So, one answer is we can scan
the brain. We can use MRI, which is a high frequency magnetic field, to look at the activity of the
brain, what parts are active when people do different things. We can also look at so-called natural
experiments when people have tumors or strokes or motorcycle accidents. In damaged part of your
brain and we can ask the question, what damage to which parts of the brain correspond to damage
to which functions? Through these different methods, we've learned about the different parts of the
brain and what they do. We could talk about some certain specific things that can go wrong due to
brain damage or stroke or trauma. So, for instance, there's Apraxia. Apraxia is problems of
actions. So, you're unable to do an action like waving goodbye or picking up before or can bring
some food to your mouth. You're not paralyze. You can make the movements if you have to, but
you can't coordinate these basic movements into complex actions. There's Agnosia. Agnosia is a
disorders of perception. And they're not like you can't see, but you can't recognize. Some is called
psychic blindness. People of various forms of Agnosia can describe a picture in terms of it's
part, but can't recognize the objects that are being depicted. That's a form of visual Agnosia There's
also a specific Prosopagnosia, where you can't recognize faces. Oliver Sacks wrote a wonderful
book many years ago called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. This was a series of
profiles of people who had surprising neurological disorders and the title case of the book was a
man who actually had such an inability to recognize faces, he couldn't distinguishes his wife's face
from that of a hat. Milder forms of Prosopagnosia, which some people suffer from and to be
honest, I got a little bit of some terrible faces. Is that you could recognize faces as faces, but you
can't recognize whose face they are and it's very hard for you to recognize people. There's problems
of sensory neglect. You get disorders that block out one part of the world. You might have damage
to parts of your brain that would block out the left side of the world. It's not just the sort of physical
thing, when you ask somebody with such a disorder to draw clock for instance, they'll put all the
numbers from one to 12 on the right side of the clock. Is as if they don't think of the left side of the
world again. So, maybe it's not even a sensory problem, but an attentional problem. There's
Aphasia, which refers to disorders of language. Some forms of aphasia are expressive like a Broca's
Aphasia, where you can't really speak. A famous case of somebody who can only use the word
tan, would say tan, tan, tan, but couldn't say anything else. Or then there's something that's called
Receptive Aphasia, where you can speak although what you say doesn't make much sense, but also
you have a terrible time understanding other people. Then there's all sorts of other disorders. There's
the disorder which we talked about with regard to Phineas Gage and various forms of it. Where
damage to your brain, it's debatable whether this is true Phineas Gage, but there are other cases
where it's much more clear. Cause you to lose your moral sense, your sense of right and
wrong, your ability to control yourself, to restrain yourself perhaps your conscience. Now, we're
going to talk about all of these things through the course but the moral here is that, a, there's some
localization of function. There's some sense in which it correspond to different brain areas. B, again,
this is an argument against dualism. We can see that in that anyone who argued that the mind isn't
the brain would be hard-pressed to explain why damage to the brain seems to affect some very
intimate and very important aspects of ourselves.
 We've talked now about the parts of the brain, a little bit about what the different parts do, and
let's end by talking about the brain as a whole. So, if you just look at the brain, if you remove it
from somebody's head and put it on your table, it looks symmetrical, but it's actually not. So, this
final topic is about what's called lateralization, which is about the difference between the two halves
of the brain; the right half and the left half. It's long been known that there's a difference between
right and left. We're not symmetrical creatures. Most people are right-handed, meaning that they do
a lot of their motor control and they are most fluid and capable like right hand writing with their
right hand and as minority people are left-handed. And then, some people are evenly
mixed, ambidextrous, right and left. People who are right-handed for the most part have language in
the left half of their brain, and people who are left-handed are more evenly mixed. Some people
have in the right side of brain, others in the left side of the brain. So the cool thing is that, most
functions of your brain are duplicated. So, a lot of times when you hear somebody say on the right
side of the brain, the left side of their brain, and right brain and left brain, a lot of what people say
about that is total nonsense. Most of the functions of the brain are on both sides and to a large
extent, it's sort of more of an issue of dominance or greater potential on one side to another than an
absolute difference. But as sort of common wisdom goes, the left brain is more associated with a
written language, and spoken language, with a reasoning, and logic, and science, and the right brain
is more associated with insight, and imagination, and music. So, we have these two halves of the
brain and normally they're in coordination, but they deal with the world in different ways. So, one
thing worth noting in any discussion of the halves of the brain is that it works on a principle of
contralateral organization, which is an awful technical term, but what it means is that your right
brain sees the left side of the world, the left visual field, and the left brain sees the right side of the
world. It just works out that the brain has this crossover effect where each half of the brain is
looking towards the opposite half of the world. And similarly for motor control, your right
hemisphere controls the left side of body, your left hemisphere controls the right side of the
body. Now, you might say, "Well, this is ridiculous because I am one person and not two people. I
can understand language and appreciate art. I see the world as a coherent scene. I don't see the
world with half of me and see the other half of the world with the other half of me." But that's
because the two halves of the brain are in constant immediate conversation. It's through the corpus
callosum, and the corpus callosum is a network of neurons that connect one half of the brain with
the other half. And this is what allows sensory information that's received on the left side of the
brain for instance, to be perceived in the right side of the brain. It's what allows the left side of the
brain to control the motor actions on the right side of the body because it could send instructions
over to the right side of the brain to do it. In fact, you can see in some clever experiments the
strange organization of the brain. So for instance, if you flash on the screen very quickly something
on the right side of the body, you're quicker to name it than if it's flash on the left side of the
body. Why would that be? Well, think about. If it's flash on the right side of the body, it's
immediately perceived by the left hemisphere. The left hemispheres were spoken languages so you
say, "Oh it's a cup, it's an apple." If it's flash on the left side of the body, for a fraction of an instance
delay, it has to crossover to the left side of the brain. And you'll never see this in everyday life, the
time differences are just too small. But in a psychology lab, you can see this. Now, what becomes
really interesting is that for almost everybody, the two halves of the brain are in constant
conversation, but not everybody. So, a while ago, people with severe epilepsy, they would cut the
corpus callosum. Epilepsy could be viewed as an electrical storm in the brain, the corpus callosum
causes the brain to communicate from one half to another. So cutting the corpus callosum in some
way, the idea would be to isolate and shrink the electrical storms. And so, people did work on. What
they did is this very severe form of surgery and people with terrible cases of epilepsy. And the
consequence which they didn't anticipate is all of a sudden you break one person off into two to
some extent. You have a left side of the brain which does the talking and the right side of the brain
which does a lot of other things, which appreciates music, and space, and so on. And the idea is that
in some sense, you've taken a person and now you have two, one half of them who can speak and
articulate their wishes, the other that can't. And making sense of this, what this means, what this
does to a person leads to philosophical questions that fall outside the scope of this course.
We've talked a little bit about materialism. Why psychologists believe and then some of the
evidence for it, and then we've taken a quick tour of the brain, but the broader gist of things is what
I want to return to and this is that the current view by psychologists, and neuroscientists, and other
scientists bolstered by a lot of evidence is that dualism is wrong. The mind is the brain. There's not
two substances, there is one, and I want to remind you how radical this is because I want people to
worry about it. I worry about it and I want people to worry along with me. So, for instance, you
might believe in spiritual beings and supernatural beings with consciousness but no bodies, like
gods. If materialism is right, not only don't we have souls but maybe there's no such thing as
souls, or to put it differently there's no such thing as mental life separate from the body. More to the
point, maybe you were hoping that when your body dies, when you get very older, or you get hit by
a bus, or whatever, you'll live on. You'll go to heaven. You'll go to a spirit world, or get
reincarnated, or whatever, and psychologists and neuroscientists that they speak honestly would say,
"That's crazy." You, your memories, your will, whatever makes you you is your physical brain and
when your physical brain goes away so do you. So, people have to figure out what to make of
it. What I want to close with though, since this all sounds not only disturbing but extremely
arrogant, the idea that scientists are dictating the answer to the most deep questions of all, is I want
to end with two notes of humility: the first is, the conception of the mind that fits very well with the
materialist view I presented is that the mind is an information processor, it's a computer, and we
treat the brain as the physical aspect of the hardware and our mental lives, the ideas, our processes,
our heuristics, our algorithms as the software, as the programs that this hardware runs. This way of
looking at things, I think works extremely well when it comes to activities like face recognition,
language, motor control, logic and so on, but there still remains what the philosopher David
Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. The feeling of what it is to slamming your
hand in a car door, or eat scrambled eggs with hot sauce, or have an orgasm, or grieve for the death
of your friend, or et cetera., et cetera., et cetera. These feelings, the feeling of what it's like, the
qualia that many people believe can't be simulated on a computer, and many people wonder whether
this could be truly the activity of the brain. If it's true, as I think it is true, that even these most
qualitative experiences are the product of brain activities, I think we should admit that we don't
exactly know how this happens. There's a quote by Thomas Huxley: "How is it that anything so
remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue. That
question is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his
lamp." Huxley is saying it seems like magic. How a physical structure irritated by neurotransmitters
swooshing back and forth and electrical signals running across neurons, how that gives rise to
feelings is a mystery, it seems like magic, and I think he's right. I think we know that as the product
of the brain, but to be honest we don't know how. The second bit of humility involves the fact that
materialism poses a mechanistic conception of mental life, but a lot of us, both as scholars but also
as people, are concerned with what you could call humanist values. Values like the notion of moral
responsibility: the idea we have free will, that the idea that we're responsible for our actions, the
idea that there's such a thing in the world has intrinsic value, the idea that there's such a thing in the
world perhaps as spiritual value. For some people it's very hard to reconcile this with the idea that
we're merely brains, and there's two ways to react: one can simply reject humanist values, and I
know philosophers and psychologists who confidently assert there's no such thing as free
will, there's no such thing as morality, there's no such thing as anything higher or spiritual. I know
many more people who reject the science, who say that, "Look, if neuroscience is going to tell me
that my decisions, my activities are nothing more than neural firings, then to hell with
neuroscience." My own view is that these two things can be reconciled. I don't think it's easy, but I
think that is possible to reconcile a mechanistic conception of human life with humanist values, and
I'll return to this issue over and over again in the course, and in my final lecture I want to go back to
it and try to present a little bit more detail what I mean and how this reconciliation can be defended.
FREUD