David Breeden is speaking all week about “Story Science”.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom Summer Edition. A.M. Central Time Live. And then it goes to our channel, Din of Conversation. This week, I want to look at “Fire Together, Wire Together,” a rather famous now little phrase that’s coming out of neuroscience. You’ve read at this point about neural pathways. It’s quite the cutting edge of science these days, although it’s not as new as sometimes we might think. Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field studying the nervous system. And, just to remind you from high school, a neuron is a specialized cell transmitting nerve impulses; a nerve cell. That’s the Oxford Dictionary. Now, the multidisciplinary field of neuroscience is the reason it is so cutting edge these days. The idea of neuroscience is very old (fairly old), but the technology we use to do brain imaging continues to improve over time. The originator of neuroscience is Santiago Ramon y Cajale, 1852 – 1934. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in Physiology back in 1906, a Spanish scientist. So it is a fairly old field, but again it’s the technology that is now making these things new. These are drawings that Cajale made all those years ago. Some of these are still used in textbooks today. He had a very firm idea of what was going on, even though he did not have any way of doing the brain imaging that we are able to do with the machinery that we nowadays have.

But an amazing guy, and a Nobel Prize for his work in 1906. You’ve seen the pictures at this point. They’re in all the glossy magazines and online. Neuroscience taking brain imaging, and finding out where these neuron pathways fire. Where in the brain does this come from and that come from? You can have a little neuron that tells you who Marilyn Monroe is, for example, and they can find that by triggering it in and experimentation. It’s pretty amazing work, and it is all very recent due to all of this wonderful color technology that we now have. If you want to read up on neuroscience and a little bit – a popularizer of neuroscience (although he is a neuroscientist, a serious one) – but he does try to write to people like me who are interested but don’t know science all that well. It’s Christof Koch. Here he is interviewing the Dalai Lama, and he’s very famous at this point for his experimental work with Buddhist monks. And a couple of his books, an older one, “The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed” and “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.” That’s his newest book. I’m reading that one now, and it’s a fascinating book – “Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist,” because he believes “reductionists” in this terminology are those who think that the brain function is completely materialistic.

There is no spirit world. There’s no extra sensory anything at all. Is this mass that we do see the brain? And the mind is a creation of the brain through neural neurons and through chemical reactions. So he’s a reductionist, but he is a romantic reductionist. And we will talk a little bit more about that on Thursday. So one of the questions that neuroscience is finally getting at is a question that’s been going on for many years, and becomes more important as we get more and more data out there. And that is, “what is information?” This particular book was written by a scientist,