Back

I'm back and slowly recharging. While I was studying for the exam, I got to thinking that we know so little about "fuzzy" neuroscience (though I can't really say why I call it that). For example, what neural circuits or neurotransmitters or anatomic structures play a role in things so diverse and wonderful as emotion, behavior, memory, or language? These abilities really make us us. They're central to our identities as human beings. Yet it seems grossly inaccurate and imprecise to say emotion is housed in the amygdala or language is defined by the connection between Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Lesion studies and, more recently, function studies like fMRI certainly implicate these parts of the brain in these multifaceted tasks. But the story is far more complicated than these approximations suggest. Sure, for an exam, we memorize that the frontal lobe has something to do with behavior. But what? And how? Tomorrow, I'll really get back to blogging, and I'll start with the philosophical idea of emergence.