Bøger i Contemporary Neuroscientists serien

"e;I'll bet it will tum out that brains use both mechanisms, in different centers. "e; Much of my waking life and that of many of my friends is spent racking our brains over how brains work. This book claims that good science is often a form of betting on the outcome of research-the stakes being time and reputation and someone's money. Some scientists, to be sure, claim they avoid leaning this way or that, in the name of keeping an open mind. I recommend making expectations explicit in order to design controls against unconscious influence, formulate alternative outcomes more clearly-and to add zest. Both the immediately upcoming experiment and the expected result of many long years of work by many people after one is gone are proper subjects for betting or the most informed and serious guessing. The working title for this collection of new and old papers was for some time "e;Betting on how brains work"e; and then "e;Betting on brains. "e; It goes without saying that the book will not answer the title question but will speak to it, in particular making a series of propositions that I think are more likely to be confirmed by future research than the alternatives we can presently recognize. It follows that a significant message, implied in many chapters of the book is this.

and made insignificant in practice, by selecting for study simple kinds of ex- periences which are devoid of emotional content and which can be tested for reliability. A simple somatosensory ''raw feel"e; fulfills these characteristics (see papers nos. 2,5). In any case, if we fail to find ways to use introspective reports in convincingly acceptable studies we would give up the ability to investigate the relation between conscious experience and neural activity, something warned against by William James (Krech, 1969). Another factor in the dearth of direct experimental studies is, of course, the comparative inaccessibility of the human brain for such purposes. Meaningful investigations of the issue in question requires simultaneous study of brain events and introspective reports of experiences in an awake, cooperative human subject. Analysis by neuropsychologists of pathological lesions in the brain and the related disturbances of conscious functions have contributed much to mapping the pos- sible representations of these functions. The non-invasive recording of electrical activity with electrodes on the scalp, starting from Berger's initial EEG record- ings in 1929, has contributed much to the problems of states of consciousness and to various cognitive features associated with sensory inputs, but not as much to the specific issue of conscious experience.

I received my first introduction to the brain sciences in 1936 and 1937, for me the second and third years of the 7-year medical school curriculum at the University of Leiden.

and made insignificant in practice, by selecting for study simple kinds of ex periences which are devoid of emotional content and which can be tested for reliability.