Neural overlap

I continue with excerpts from the quanta magazine article:

“no one disputes that the visual cortex enables sight, that the auditory cortex enables hearing, or that the hippocampus is essential for memory. . . . but memory, for example, also requires brain networks other than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is turning out to be key to a growing number of cognitive processes other than memory. sometimes the degree of overlap is so great that the labels start to lose their meaning. . . . when functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) and other powerful technologies made it possible to examine living brains in increasingly sophisticated ways, neuroscientists enthusiastically started searching for the physical basis of our mental faculties [material reductionism]. they made great strides in understANDING THE NEURAL FOUNDations of perception, attention, learning, memory, decision-making, motor control and other classic categories of mental activity. but they also found unsettling evidence that those categories and the neural networks that support them don’t work as expected. it’s not just that the architecture of the brain disrespects the boundaries between the established mental categories. it’s that there’s so much overlap. . . . [gyorgy buzsaki, a neuroscientist at the NYU School of Medicine believes] recent findings . . . highlight a deeper conceptual problem in neuroscience. ‘we divide the real estate of the brain according to our preconceived ideas, assuming - wrongly, as far as i’m concerned - that those preconceived ideas have boundaries, and the same boundaries exist in brain function,’ buzsakio said.”

excerpts will be continued in subsequent blog posts. Please note that the writers fail to identify the specific role of an immaterial cognitive mind that would have the capacity to interpret overlapping neural codes that convey specified information drawing upon memory.

Stan Lennard