Please use the form below to submit comments. Also provide an e-mail address and name. Your e-mail address and/or name will be used only to communicate with you about this or future comments you may submit. I am particularly keen to receive references to published material that contradicts the assertions and arguments I have made.
By submitting the above comment, I grant to Ross Alan Hangartner the right to incorporate the comment in full or in part, literally, paraphrased, or conceptually, as he sees fit, into State of Pain or other writings that he may create in the future. However, I don't grant permission to include my name or e-mail address, or to use them in any other way than to contact me for follow-up. I understand that by submitting the comment I acquire no right of any kind in State of Pain or other writings of Ross Alan Hangartner.
This page is incomplete. It displays memoes and/or notes.
The case of Phineas Gage revealed the modular nature of the brain. The behaviorist view of psychology is being superceded by a neurophysiological view based on advances in neuroscience since the 1990s. This change of views affects understandings of pain.
The modularity of the brain is illustrated by the Phineas Gage episode. The triune brain model. Brain stem, limbic system, neocortex. The roles of each. "Mood" or "phase-controlling" neurotransmitter systems centered in the limbic system, NE, DA, etc. Emotion as understood in affective neuroscience. The general structure of the basic emotional systems, connections up and down the brain. Evidence for their existence and examples of behavior.
[Phineas Gage was a railroad worker in 1848, polite, hardworking, pleasant and responsible, until the explosive charge which he’d been tamping exploded prematurely. His tamping iron penetrated his cheek and emerged from the other side of his skull. Rather than dying, he soon recovered consciousness and went on to lead a....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 10
Gage’s example indicated that something in the brain was concerned specifically with unique human properties, among them the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and others; and the ability to orchestrate one’s survival....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 10
Another important aspect of Gage’s story is the discrepancy between the degenerated character and the apparent intactness of the several instruments of mind—attention, perception, memory, language, intelligence.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 11
The study of brains and behaviors finds itself in the middle of a conceptual shift. Historically, clinicians and lawyers have agreed on an intuitive distinction between neurological disorders ("brain problems") and psychiatric disorders ("mind problems"). As recently as a century ago, the prevailing attitude was to get....
Pinker, Steven, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", Viking, 2002, 172
…two camps were beginning to form. One held that psychological functions such as language or memory could never be traced to a particular region of the brain. If one had to accept, reluctantly, that the brain did produce the mind, it did so as a whole and not as a collection of parts with special functions. The other ca....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 12
[At the time of the Gage incident,] It was acceptable that the brain sectors whose damage would have caused Gage’s heart to stop pumping and his lungs to stop breathing had not been touched by the iron rod. It was also acceptable that the brain sectors which control wakefulness were far from the iron’s course and were t....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 12-13
[The structure of key brain subsystems, however, is determined genetically. This likely applies to the brain stem, hypothalamus, and basal forebrain, and the amygdala and cingulate cortex, which are highly preserved among mammalian species.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 109-10
[Those innate, genetically organized structures shape the development of the more-modern cortex that provides the ability to visualize and reason.] … (1) the innate regulatory circuits are involved in the business of organism survival and because of that they are privy to what is happening in the more modern sectors of....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 111
End of included memoes/notes