Episodes
Monday Jan 28, 2019
Episode 044 - The Brain and The Pain of Being Human
Monday Jan 28, 2019
Monday Jan 28, 2019
In this episode, we expand on our introduction to the brain by discussing some theories - ranging from well-documented to rather speculative - about the specific structures of the brain that are active (or less active) in situations ranging from autism to depression, stress, and trauma.
At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Episode 043 - Introduction to the Brain
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Monday Jan 21, 2019
In this episode, we lay out the basic groundwork for future discussions of the human brain.
The brain we humans have apparently evolved in three stages. This can't help but be a tremendous simplification, but it's a commonly encountered statement and seems to have considerable explanatory power.
The lowest part of the brain, the brain stem (the medulla, etc.) and the cerebellum, control unconscious processes, most of which we cannot take into conscious control even if we want to. Often this is called the "lizard" or "reptile brain."
A series of little suborgans, the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalae (a - myg ' - da - la, the good Latin pronunciation, for the singular apparently; and my Webster's unabridged also informs me that it just means "almond shaped thing"), putamen (that habit-storing part I could not remember during the episode), and a few other parts form the limbic system, that communicates between the senses and the body, and that serves critical functions for things like emotion and memory that we share with mammals.
The upper part of the brain, the big part in human brains, is the cerebrum. Its regions are referred to as cortex / cortices or lobes. We have large volumes of the brain dedicated to visual and auditory processing, motor skills, and the whole front of the brain is where the neural work of our most human capabilities occurs: judgment, reasoning, wondering, creativity, consciousness.
The following two books informed the discussion today:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter
I cannot recommend The Body Keeps the Score highly enough. It starts out as a discussion of PTSD, but it grows organically into a discussion of problems that all children, and therefore all of us, are liable to have, and ways that are being discovered to bring both brain and body to peace.
On the other hand, Mapping the Mind is only intermittently good. The first hundred pages I found rough sledding, with little sense the author understood the facts being hauled out and stacked up. It got better. The last few chapters betray the common, poorly thought through materialist reductionism common in the field, no surprise, but the content of the final 200+ pages is mostly good. Autism, depression, and addiction come up, although the stock in trade is discussion people with bizarre, tragic, but fascinatingly specific brain damage and what those episodes suggest about how all the different mental aspects of being human are spread about the brain.
Monday Jan 14, 2019
Episode 042 - TSSM in 2019, part 2
Monday Jan 14, 2019
Monday Jan 14, 2019
What sense can we make of the ancient and medieval idea that "the soul is the form of the body" in the light of contemporary neuroscience and psychology?
Highlight this idea's differences from Platonic and Cartesian dualism.
History of psychology as a discipline. Psychology has not evolved (a) master paradigm(s) that compel the bulk of the field to adhere to them the way that plate tectonics did for geology, Newtonian classical physics and then quantum and relativity did for physics, etc.
Peace of Soul (Fulton Sheen) remark that psychology has been furtively recycling Christian ideas and passing them off as new for a long time
Examining the convergence points of the advice for living from the Bible and Tradition, modern psychology, and the contemporary self-help / New Age-y movement that continues to spread and adapt through large sectors of modern culture.
Self-esteem, humility...
Confidence, faith, negative tapes...
Twelve Step spirituality (Richard Rohr and the intense overlap between 12 Step and Catholic spirituality)
Even many of us who are explicitly Christian have internalized a kind of Lutheran / Jansenist belief that we are so terrible that, in essence, God made a mistake in going to all this effort to save us, because we're not worth it. This is one of a number of areas in contemporary Catholic and Christian culture where we have let our understanding of Scripture and Tradition get very warped and imbalanced.
Issues surrounding how the Christian and scientific understanding of universal history could fit together.
What will "the end of the world" look like? Will it be the end of the whole universe or not? Will there be human colonies on other planets, orbiting other stars? How would the Apocalypse play out then?
You can find That's So Second Millennium at all of these places:
tssm.podbean.com
paggeology.net/blog
@infamousDrG on Twitter
That's So Second Millennium page on Facebook
giesting -at- alumni.nd.edu is Paul's email address
Please be in touch with your feedback, ideas for new episodes, and conversation of any kind!
Monday Jan 07, 2019
Episode 041 - TSSM in 2019
Monday Jan 07, 2019
Monday Jan 07, 2019
Themes we'd like to grapple with in the Year of Our Lord, 2019, and beyond:
Last year was largely about the intellectual challenge leveled by many against religion, and we will continue talking about that as the podcast moves forward.
Paul's mission this year to work through Road to Reality
This year we also want to broaden the scope to include places where religion and faith converge, which means we're going to discuss psychology.
Looking forward to the SCS conference topic for this coming year: what it is, and has been, to be human. Neuroscience and what it implies for anthropology, and where it meets Catholic Christian anthropology coming the other way.
What is consciousness, anyway? What parts of the brain seem to be involved, and what do they do?
What is free will, anyway? Where are those breakpoints where the soul would have to affect the body in order for that to even work?
Crisis points in the way people in the post-Christian West approach the world.
Center for Ethics & Culture annual conference in 2018: Wilfred McClay & John Waters
"we care about everything, but without God... we have responsibility for everything, but we know that we are flawed and unable to provide solutions"
Post-Christian in this context includes both people who have explicitly renounced the Christian faith of the West and those who have a Christian identity in their back pocket somewhere but in reality are not relying on Jesus Christ or his teachings to guide their lives in any conscious way.
Christianity is a demanding religion. If you suck away all the grace and help it promises, but leave some of its demands for social justice or purity of intention, you have a recipe for constant internal condemnation.
Link:
Wilfred McClay (University of Oklahoma) on “Guilt in the Immanent Frame”, and John Waters on “The Importance of Not Being God: A Higher Power Is Indispensable for Human Beings and Human Societies”
No, not THAT John Waters.