The other day I had a light-hearted post entitled "Empty Your Brain." The brain, however, is no light-hearted matter (or light-hearted gray matter for that matter). Hardly, a day goes by without some new finding emerging from the rapidly accelerating field of neuroscience that challenges our understanding of what we think we know about everything from our emotions and economics to psychology and politics.
As exciting as many of these developments are, it is important to understand that we are still in the early stages of our understanding of how the human brain operates and functions. To this end, I’d encourage you to read this recent article from Technology Review entitled "First Detailed Map of the Human Cortex."
If you don’t have the time or desire, here’s the operative section:
"The brain we’ve been looking at with conventional MRI or CT scans all these years is not the real brain," says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, who was also involved in the study. "We’re just seeing a shadow of its surfaces."
As we learn ever more about the "real" human brain you can be guaranteed that we will also need to unlearn just as much — if not more — about a great many other aspects of our lives that the brain controls.
