As one discussion leader this week, along with Lauren Dahlke, I am posting some links to content related to this week's article in ways that I find very interesting.
For the purpose of discussion, it would be great if you read the two abstracts for the studies I am including, and just a few paragraphs of the wikipedia article ("Libet Experiment").
Of course, you are in no way responsible for doing so, but it is all very, very quick and minimal, and I think would really help facilitate discussion. I value your opinions on these things, not only as fellow persons, but also since I am by no means an expert in cognitive science!
If you read nothing else, and if you're not familiar with it already, please read the three short paragraphs on "Libet Experiments" I am linking to on wikipedia. The criticism section is also very interesting, but more lengthy, and I don't want to ask you to spend your time on that. I emphasize this content over the others because of how brief and easy to digest it is. But, I also think it's really interesting.
So:
The Libet Experiments utilized
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#The_Libet_experiment
The following two persons had severely limited brain mass - they were just missing massive portions of their brains (well, at least one of them was; I'm a bit confused by the technical language in the other). Still, they were both seemingly normal people who could do normal things and live normal lives; one even had a math degree! These two studies, along with the notion of "neuroplasticity," may challenge Menon and Kim's supposition that the brain is "functionally segmented," or that certain areas are responsible (or even "are substrata") for certain cognitive functions.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext
http://rifters.com/real/articles/Oliveira-et-al-2012-RevisitingHydrocephalus.pdf
I look forward to an enlightening discussion on Wednesday!
*I was informed by Lauren that the Libet cases were performed with EEG not fMRI. The article, as I read it, is essentially about chronometry and fMRI. Chronometry is the central theme of the Libet experiments, but, since they do not utilize fMRI, a lot of the relevance to this article may be lost. Still, though, this difference in tech may be relevant to Lauren's point in her discussion post about fMRI just not being great at temporal resolution.
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