Brains: How They Seem to Work

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More About This Book

Overview

For 50 years, the world’s most brilliant neuroscientists have struggled to understand how human brains really work. Today, says Dale Purves, the dominant research agenda may have taken us as far as it can--and neuroscientists may be approaching a paradigm shift.

In this highly personal book, Purves reveals how we got to this point and offers his notion of where neuroscience may be headed next. Purves guides you through a half-century of the most influential ideas in neuroscience and introduces the extraordinary scientists and physicians who created and tested them.

Purves offers a critical assessment of the paths that neuroscience research has taken, their successes and their limitations, and then introduces an alternative approach for thinking about brains. Building on new research on visual perception, he shows why common ideas about brain networks can’t be right and uncovers the factors that determine our subjective experience. The resulting insights offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

• Why we need a better conception of what brains are trying to do and how they do it
Approaches to understanding the brain over the past several decades may be at an impasse

• The surprising lessons that can be learned from what we see
How complex neural processes owe more to trial-and-error experience than to logical principles

• Brains--and the people who think about them
Meet some of the extraordinary individuals who’ve shaped neuroscience

• The “ghost in the machine” problem
The ideas presented further undermine the concept of free will

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780137055098
  • Publisher: FT Press
  • Publication date: 4/23/2010
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 485,063
  • Series: FT Press Science Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Dale Purves is Professor of Neurobiology, Psychology and Neuroscience, and Philosophy at Duke University. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School. Upon completion of an internship and assistant residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Purves was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and subsequently in the Department of Biophysics at University College London. He joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in 1973 where he was Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, and came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the School of Medicine. From 2003 to 2009 he was Director of Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and is now Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine.

Read an Excerpt

BrainsBrainsPreface

This book is about the ongoing effort to understand how brains work. Given the way events determine what any scientist does and thinks, an account of this sort must inevitably be personal (and, to a greater or lesser degree, biased). What follows is a narrative about the ideas that have seemed to me especially pertinent to this hard problem over the last 50 years. And although this book is about brains as such, it is also about individuals who, from my perspective, have significantly influenced how neuroscientists think about brains. The ambiguity of the title is intentional.

The idiosyncrasies of my own trajectory notwithstanding, the story reflects what I take to be the experience of many neuroscientists in my generation. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, famously distinguished the pursuit of what he called “normal science” from the more substantial course corrections that occur periodically. In normal science, Kuhn argued, scientists proceed by filling in details within a broadly agreed-upon scheme about how some aspect of nature works. At some point, however, the scheme begins to show flaws. When the flaws can no longer be patched over, the interested parties begin to consider other ways of looking at the problem. This seems to me an apt description of what has been happening in brain science over the last couple decades; in Kuhn’s terms, this might be thought of as a period of grappling with an incipient paradigm shift. Whether this turns out to be so is for future historians of science to decide, but there is not much doubt that those of us interested in the brain and how it works have been struggling with the conventional wisdom of the mid- to late twentieth century. We are looking hard for a better conception of what brains are trying to do and how they do it.

I was lucky enough to have arrived as a student at Harvard Medical School in 1960, when the first department of neurobiology in the United States was beginning to take shape. Although I had no way of knowing then, this contingent of neuroscientists, their mentors, the colleagues they interacted with, and their intellectual progeny provided much of the driving force for the rapid advance of neuroscience over this period and for many of the key ideas about the brain that are now being questioned. My interactions with these people as a neophyte physician convinced me that trying to understand what makes us tick by studying the nervous system was a better intellectual fit than pursuing clinical medicine. Like every other neuroscientist of my era, I set out learning the established facts in neuroscience, getting to know the major figures in the field, and eventually extending an understanding of the nervous system in modest ways within the accepted framework. Of course, all this is essential to getting a job, winning financial support, publishing papers, and attaining some standing in the community. But as time went by, the ideas and theories I was taught about how brains work began to seem less coherent, leading me and others to begin exploring alternatives.

Although I have written the book for a general audience, it is nonetheless a serious treatment of a complex subject, and getting the gist of it entails some work. The justification for making the effort is that what neuroscientists eventually conclude about how brains work will determine how we humans understand ourselves. The questions being asked—and the answers that are gradually emerging—should be of interest to anyone inclined to think about our place in the natural order of things.

Dale Purves
Durham, NC July 2009

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Chapter 1 Neuroscience circa 1960 1

Chapter 2 Neurobiology at Harvard 17

Chapter 3 Biophysics at University College 37

Chapter 4 Nerve cells versus brain systems 51

Chapter 5 Neural development 69

Chapter 6 Exploring brain systems 87

Chapter 7 The visual system: Hubel and Wiesel redux 105

Chapter 8 Visual perception 123

Chapter 9 Perceiving color 143

Chapter 10 Theorganization of perceptual qualities 161

Chapter 11 Perceiving geometry 179

Chapter 12 Perceiving motion 201

Chapter 13 How brains seem to work 219

Suggested reading 235

Glossary 241

Illustration credits 275

Acknowledgments 281

About the author 283

Index 285

Preface

Brains

Preface

This book is about the ongoing effort to understand how brains work. Given the way events determine what any scientist does and thinks, an account of this sort must inevitably be personal (and, to a greater or lesser degree, biased). What follows is a narrative about the ideas that have seemed to me especially pertinent to this hard problem over the last 50 years. And although this book is about brains as such, it is also about individuals who, from my perspective, have significantly influenced how neuroscientists think about brains. The ambiguity of the title is intentional.

The idiosyncrasies of my own trajectory notwithstanding, the story reflects what I take to be the experience of many neuroscientists in my generation. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, famously distinguished the pursuit of what he called “normal science” from the more substantial course corrections that occur periodically. In normal science, Kuhn argued, scientists proceed by filling in details within a broadly agreed-upon scheme about how some aspect of nature works. At some point, however, the scheme begins to show flaws. When the flaws can no longer be patched over, the interested parties begin to consider other ways of looking at the problem. This seems to me an apt description of what has been happening in brain science over the last couple decades; in Kuhn’s terms, this might be thought of as a period of grappling with an incipient paradigm shift. Whether this turns out to be so is for future historians of science to decide, but there is not much doubt that those of us interested in the brain and how it works have been struggling with the conventional wisdom of the mid- to late twentieth century. We are looking hard for a better conception of what brains are trying to do and how they do it.

I was lucky enough to have arrived as a student at Harvard Medical School in 1960, when the first department of neurobiology in the United States was beginning to take shape. Although I had no way of knowing then, this contingent of neuroscientists, their mentors, the colleagues they interacted with, and their intellectual progeny provided much of the driving force for the rapid advance of neuroscience over this period and for many of the key ideas about the brain that are now being questioned. My interactions with these people as a neophyte physician convinced me that trying to understand what makes us tick by studying the nervous system was a better intellectual fit than pursuing clinical medicine. Like every other neuroscientist of my era, I set out learning the established facts in neuroscience, getting to know the major figures in the field, and eventually extending an understanding of the nervous system in modest ways within the accepted framework. Of course, all this is essential to getting a job, winning financial support, publishing papers, and attaining some standing in the community. But as time went by, the ideas and theories I was taught about how brains work began to seem less coherent, leading me and others to begin exploring alternatives.

Although I have written the book for a general audience, it is nonetheless a serious treatment of a complex subject, and getting the gist of it entails some work. The justification for making the effort is that what neuroscientists eventually conclude about how brains work will determine how we humans understand ourselves. The questions being asked—and the answers that are gradually emerging—should be of interest to anyone inclined to think about our place in the natural order of things.

Dale Purves
Durham, NC July 2009

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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  • Posted October 10, 2011

    Mixed reaction

    I found this book very inconsistent from beginning to end. The first few chapters are a history of brain research, much of it in first person, and reading more like a bio of the author and his career (with both positive and negative comments on his colleagues). The next several chapters become far more technical than I had expected, explaining graduate-level experiments in painful detail. The final summary chapter was rather an anti-climax. Overall, interesting, informative, sometimes tedious, sometimes enjoyable.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

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