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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0b7pEuE-eg&t=12s    Bill Newsome January 31 @ UBC

This is where the fulcrum of our fears lie: that humans as a species and we as thinking people, will be shown to be no more than a machinery of atoms. The crisis of our confidence springs from each person’s wish to be a mind and a person in the face of the nagging fear that one is only a mechanism. ~Jacob Bronowski, Mathematician, Biologist and Historian of Science

“In my lifetime, there has never been a moment like this one… in terms of the speed and acceleration of discovery.” William Newsome, director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, says new technologies are allowing researchers to make significant progress in understanding the brain.

 

Co-sponsored with the Canadian Science & Christian Affiliation and UBC Graduate & Faculty Christian Forum. Other lectures in the series at  csca.ca/van 

Supported financially by the UBC Murrin Fund and Oikodome Foundation

What about our brains allows us be one person at the office and a very different person at home? Professor William Newsome explains how a constant rewiring of neural connectivity enables the “socially sensitive” production of behavior.

See also the January 6-12 Issue of the Economist.

Read: Explaining the Brain: mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience by Carl F. Craver

Compare post on Ghost in the Machine.

Further Reading on neuroscience and faith, the body-soul question:

Nagel, T.,  What is it like to be a bat?; (2012) Mind and Cosmos.

Brown, W.S. & Strawn, B.D. (2012). The physical nature of Christian life: Neuroscience, psychology and the church. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Jeeves, M. & Brown, W.S. (2009). Neuroscience, psychology, and religion: illusions, delusions, and realities about human nature. West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press.

Brown, W.S. and Murphy, N. (2007). Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: philosophical, and neurobiological perspectives on moral responsibility and free will. Oxford Clarendon.

Markham, Paul N. (2007). Rewired: Exploring Religious Conversion. Eugene, OR: Pickwick

Murphey, Nancey. (2006). Bodies and souls, or spirited bodies? New York, NY: Cambridge

Green, Joel & Palmer, Stuart. (2005). In search of the soul: four views of the mind-body problem. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Jeeves, Malcolm, ed. (2004). From cells to souls–and beyond: changing portraits of human nature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Jeeves, Malcolm. (2006). Human nature: reflections on the integration of psychology and Christianity. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.

Swinburne, R. (2007). The Evolution of the Soul. Oxford.