Mind-Brain Lecture & Inaugural: The Mesocosmos of the Mind
Speaker Henrik Walter (Berlin)
Date 18 November 2010, 18:30
Location
Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Luisenstraße 56, Haus 1
Festsaal
10117 Berlin
The ability to non-invasively measure human brain structure and function has profoundly changed research in psychology, psychiatry and philosophy. After the first wave of enthusiasm, followed by extended critics of “blobology”, imaging neuroscience is now firmly established as part of the larger endeavor to understand the human mind and its dysfunctions by understanding the human brain. However, often it is criticized as providing nothing more than “mere correlations” in colorful pictures. I will argue that in fact neuroimaging, understood as a mesolevel approach to the mind, does much better and will illustrate this by examples from imaging genetics and social cognition. Furthermore, I will argue that human neuroscience will continue to challenge our traditional western self-understanding precisely because there is no one-to-one correlation between mental and neural states. Finally, I will introduce the concept of neuroexistentialism as an adequate attitude towards the new insights into the nature of the human mind.