Popular familiarity with brain facts does not yield self-knowledge

Evidence

In this sense, we are still foreign to ourselves, at the threshold of this ”new world,” which we fail to realize makes up our very intimacy itself. ”We” have no idea who ”we” are, no idea what is inside ”us.” Of course, we have all heard people talk about neurons, synapses, connections, networks, different types of memory. Everyone knows about neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Many of us have seen, in hospitals, the output screen of a functional neural-imaging machine. Some of us know that today it is possible, thanks to new MRI and PET technologies, to observe the brain in vivo, in real time. Everyone says that psychoanalysis is losing importance, and everyone hears talk, right or wrong, about how the only effective cure for nervous depression is the chemical kind. We all know about MAOIs or SSRIs; we are vaguely familiar with the words serotonin, noradrenalin, and neurotransmitter, and we all know about the neuronal origin of tobacco or drug addiction. We know that it is now possible to successfully transplant a hand and that the brain can reconstitute its bodily schema to include foreign members. We have heard about a certain ability on the part of the nervous system to repair, at least partially, some of the damage it sustains. The word resilience is not unknown to us. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 33

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The disconnect between accumulated facts and unified consciousness parallels the reader’s concern that a memo can list neuroscience vocabulary while substituting flexibility for plasticity.

Related

• Neuroscientific findings remain inert without a new understanding of self (similarity 0.82)
• Neuroscience progress has spread knowledge without producing self-consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Humans unknowingly make their own brain through experience (similarity 0.81)
• Ignorance of brain plasticity stems from consciousness, not information shortage (similarity 0.80)
• The brain’s plasticity would scatter the mind without a self to unify its networks (similarity 0.79)
• Recent neuroscience findings refute persistent but erroneous images of the brain (similarity 0.78)
• The self is posited to unify otherwise divergent plastic brain processes (similarity 0.78)