Inläggav SpyTrap » 26 okt 2005 00:53
The Neurobiology of the Self
Biologists are beginning to tease out how the brain gives rise to a constant sense of being oneself
By Carl Zimmer
The most obvious thing about yourself is your self. "You look down at your body and know it's yours," says Todd Heatherton, a psychologist at Dartmouth University. "You know it's your hand you're controlling when you reach out. When you have memories, you know that they are yours and not someone else's. When you wake up in the morning, you don't have to interrogate yourself for a long time about who you are."
The self may be obvious, but it is also an enigma. Heatherton himself shied away from direct study of it for years, even though he had been exploring self-control, self-esteem and other related issues since graduate school. "My interests were all around the self but not around the philosophical issue of what is the self," he explains. "I avoided speculations about what it means. Or I tried to, anyway."...
Things have changed. Today Heatherton, along with a growing number of other scientists, is tackling this question head-on, seeking to figure out how the self emerges from the brain. In the past few years, they have begun to identify certain brain activities that may be essential for producing different aspects of self-awareness. They are now trying to determine how these activities gave rise to the unified feeling we each have of being a single entity. This research is yielding clues to how the self may have evolved in our hominid ancestors. It may even help scientists treat Alzheimer's disease and other disorders that erode the knowledge of self and, in some cases, destroy it altogether.
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Det var en bit jag tog från en tidning (Scientific American)... jag skulle jättegärna vilja skriva ut det hela, men just nu har jag inte tillräckligt med tid (det var bara en kort sida och det finns sex till som är mycket längre). Det gör jag sedan om ni är intresserade. Jag antar att de flesta av er läser engelska...? Annars skulle jag ha försökt att översätta det, men det behövs nog inte.
Devil's Advocate
