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As we have discussed in class, the brain is continuously evolving and creating new connections between neurons. These connections make everyday life possible. If humans, or animals in general, were incapable of creating outputs without inputs, they would not be able to creatively solve problems and adapt to new environments. Clearly, this is not the case given that modern homo sapiens have survived approximately 60,000 years of life on Earth (ScienceDaily, 2004). Thus, it is a fact that human brains have evolved to enable neural plasticity, or the ability to reorganize neuronal structures and create new connections between neurons. The question remains as to how the plasticity of the brain is maintained. How is it that neurons can create these new connections?

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Colette Young                                                                                                                   6 April 2010

                                                                                                                        Rama Kirloskar

“From the very start, the brain’s capacity for making new connections shows itself… as regions originally designed for other functions – particularly vision, motor, and multiple aspects of language – learn to interact with increasing speed. By the time a child is seven or eight, the beginning decoding brain illustrates both how much the young brain accomplishes and how far we have evolved… These three major distribution regions will be the foundation across all phases of reading for basic decoding, even though an increasing fluency… adds an interesting caveat to the unfolding portrait of the reading brain.” (1)

-Maryanne Wolf

 Dreams: Seeing without Seeing

Notes House of Wits 4/5/10
Professor Jefferson, Day II

Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark: A brief for close reading

James [empiricist psychologist and philosopher] mis[?] “reads” Peirce [Logician and “scholastic realist”]
Sequence of texts [reculer pour mieux sauter= back up in order to gather haunches so as to leap more effectively forward]:

I.      Peirce “Fixation of Belief” [1877] only p. 4-8
Doubt-belief theory of inquiry: 3-4,
4 methods of “fixing belief”: “method of tenacity” 4-5, 7-8.
“Method of authority”: 5,7
“A priori method” : 5-6, 7
“method of science [Peirce as “scholastic realist”]: 6-7, 8

Sociologist Marvin Bressler said that the “dogged preservation of age-old religious belief systems ‘encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of ‘inconvenient’ findings that may emerge in future scientific research. This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary’” (Ellerman). The majority of religions or organized spiritual systems have had to fight against the findings of science, but the most Buddhists have embraced new research; the methods and modes of Buddhist practice are even shown to have a very firm neurological effect.

 Eve Gleichman

Neurobiology 202

Web Paper 2

Paul Grobstein

Traumatic Stress: A Chemical Approach