Brain Science
Three Major Questions
•	Where (how) are psychological functions located in brain? (focus in this lecture)
•	How are ideas and represented at the level of neurons and neural networks?
•	How does learning take place in terms of neural change?
Dramatic New Interest in Localization
•	Localization historically important issue
•	Fueled by new technologies
•	Modularization emphasis
The History of Localization
•	Localization in the brain
•	The rise of faculty psychology
•	Locke
•	Scottish school
•	Phrenology
Phrenology
Later Localization
Studying Localization
•	Electrical and chemical stimulation
•	Often diffuse
•	Single neurons?
•	Deactivation
•	Techniques
•	Stroke and injury
•	Ablation
•	Chemical
•	Usually diffuse
Modern Technologies
•	Evoked Brain Potential (EEG)
•	Can be fairly precise
•	Stile diffuse
•	Imagining
•	Structure (CAT)
•	Function (blood flow)
•	PET
•	fMRI
Why Study Localization?
•	Therapy and treatment for disorders
•	Reductionism
•	Silly if seen as ultimate reality (“nothing but”)
•	Silly if seen as direct cause – right brain/left brain
•	Getting around self-report?
•	Prejudice?
•	What is the cause?
•	Conscious
•	Non-conscious
•	Parsing
Parsing the Mind
•	Nature doesn’t parse the mind as psychologists do
•	Localization hand-in-hand with psychological function
•	Help identify fundamental process and function
•	Does not mean that brain localization trumps psychology -- examples
•	Depression
•	Aggression and violence
Modularity Arguments
•	Chomsky and language
•	Evolution and the Swiss pocket-knife analogy
•	How many modules?
•	Modularization run amok – phrenology déjà vu?
•	Arguments based on reasoning
Ways of Studying Modularity
•	Abnormal conditions – autism as one example
•	Patients with known conditions
•	Developmental maturation
•	Drugs – depression as one example
•	Brain scans
Problems with Localization
•	Not all processes or content well localized
•	Localization and units of experience not well coordinated
•	Parsing mental process is difficult
•	Correlation not useful
Not All Processes Localized
•	Classical conditioning often spread across association areas
•	Memories reside in different areas
•	And retrieval may involve different functions
Parsing mental Function Difficult
•	What can it mean to “see” something
•	Visual areas
•	Interpretation in terms of past experiences
•	Often integration with language
•	Language use involves several areas
•	Thus sometimes (often?) not sure what is being localized
Localization and Unified Experience
•	Experiences recruit different modalities
•	And hence involve different part of the brain
•	Little knowledge about how integration takes part
•	But makes no sense to privilege some parts over others
Correlation not useful
•	Finding “site” of some experience tells us little
•	The prejudice study
•	Language use
•	Need better knowledge of relationships with other functions and experiences