How ‘bizarre’ behaviors made this scientist appreciate what the brain can do | 24CA News

Marc Dingman could be very keen about neuroscience. He teaches a course on mind and conduct to college students at Pennsylvania State University. He has a YouTube channel and a web site devoted to easy explanations of frequent neuroscience matters. And when he isn’t doing all that, he is writing books concerning the mind. 

His curiosity in neuroscience was first sparked after studying about an uncommon behavioral situation known as alien hand syndrome, a situation the place an individual’s limb performs actions with out the proprietor’s acutely aware intent. “When I read about this, I was just kind of blown away that this type of behavior can emerge from the brain,” Dingman stated. Wishing to study extra, he finally pursued a doctorate on this subject. 

Now he needs to share the forms of circumstances that bought him within the interior workings of the human mind. His new guide is Bizarre: The most peculiar circumstances of human conduct and what they inform us about how the mind works.

Dingman spoke with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald concerning the tales he shares within the guide. Here’s a part of their dialog.

You divide your guide into themed chapters which can be based mostly on totally different classes of bizarre conduct. My favourite is absence. Break that one down for me. 

So in that chapter, I discuss issues which can be a part of our regular experiences that folks can lose. And so, for instance, I began the chapter out speaking about a person who, after studying for 50 years of his life, sits all the way down to learn the newspaper and instantly realizes that he does not keep in mind methods to learn. 

And there’s different circumstances of people, for instance, that lose their skill to understand faces, to allow them to’t register after they’re taking a look at a face that it is truly a face. So I sort of use these circumstances as an indication of how crucial many of those capabilities are as a part of our each day lives. But we regularly do not respect them. 

Many sufferers you talked about within the guide expertise adjustments to their identification due to adjustments of their mind. Can you give me an instance of a kind of? 

The one which stands out probably the most to me is a situation known as medical lycanthropy. This is a situation the place sufferers … consider they’ve skilled or can expertise turning into one other animal. The phrase lycanthropy refers to werewolves, and so some folks consider that they’ll flip into wolves. But [it’s] additionally a basic perception within the skill to show into one other animal. So within the guide, I discuss a person who believes he is a cat and has for over a decade. There’s circumstances that I discovered in doing analysis for the guide of individuals believing they’ll flip into a wide range of animals, starting from a snake to a gerbil. And so that is clearly a really drastic change in identification. 

So what does it inform us concerning the function of our mind and our sense of self? 

Lots. Our sense of self is tied tightly to our mind. And, you understand, my perception as a neuroscientist is that our mind creates that sense of self. And so one of many issues that penning this guide actually impressed upon me is that the sense of self – that we really feel is immutable and is a part of us all through our whole lives – could be modified fairly simply via an occasion like a traumatic mind damage or a stroke. Many of the sufferers I discuss within the guide had one occasion and the subsequent day they had been fully totally different for the remainder of their lives. 

Now, one other frequent theme in your guide is that some ways by which we thought the mind works have been confirmed flawed. Can you give me an instance of that? 

Initially, we thought that complicated capabilities within the mind is perhaps linked again to 1 particular space of the mind. And so whereas there are some extra complicated capabilities that is perhaps localized in a sure space of the mind, we now know that actually complicated cognition includes massive networks which can be unfold all through the mind. And so that is one thing that’s sort of an evolving thought in neuroscience, and it has made issues extra sophisticated once we’re attempting to know complicated cognition. We now know that we will not simply look to 1 a part of the mind – we now have to know a community that is perhaps unfold all through the mind, which is tougher to untangle. 

So what would you determine as the most important thriller in neuroscience now? 

Well, there’s rather a lot. But I feel if I had been to select one, it is perhaps simply the thriller of what causes consciousness. So we will work out easy processes within the mind, like how a motion is generated or how a visible picture is perceived. And we will even get a way of a few of the extra complicated capabilities, like how we attend to particular stimuli in our surroundings. But we now have little or no understanding of how consciousness is produced: how and why we now have a state of consciousness of what is going on on in our minds and throughout us; how that is built-in with the passage of time, the reminiscence of previous occasions, anticipation of future occasions. It’s one thing that we will not hint again to 1 mind area and even one community.

Well, you additionally finish on a really constructive word that when you’ve got one and it is working effectively, respect it now. 

Yeah, as a result of we take it without any consideration too usually. And I feel that the circumstances in my guide actually display that we will have these adjustments to the way in which our mind works with none warning. One day we could be very totally different from the subsequent if we now have a stroke or we now have a traumatic mind damage. So I do assume it is actually essential if we now have a functioning mind, a functioning physique, to understand that and benefit from it. 

This Q&A has been condensed for size and readability.