William R. Uttal: Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience

摘要

The relation between mind and brain is one of the big scientific questions that has attracted scientists' attention for centuries but also eluded their understanding. In this book, William Uttal provides a critical review of cognitive neuroscience, focusing on a specific question: What do the brain-imaging techniques developed in the last two decades or so-mostly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET)-tell us about the brain-mind problem? His unambiguous and abrasive answer is: nothing. The book is organized in nine chapters. The introductory chapter provides historical, methodological, and philosophical background. Importantly, it highlights a shift in the way neuroscientists think about modularity and localization. Traditionally, researchers using brain imaging have tended to subscribe to a strong view of modularity and localization, where distinct cognitive modules are assumed to be localized in well-defined regions of the brain. In the last decade, however, there has been a trend towards considering widely distributed networks of modules rather than isolated modules, as was the case earlier.