Why and how behavioural adaptation is connected with the mind?
Answers
You've seen the headlines: This is your brain on love. Or God. Or envy. Or happiness. And they're reliably accompanied by pictures of colour-drenched brains – scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and students choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media – and even some neuroscientists, it seems – love to invoke the neural foundations of human behaviour to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff financial fiasco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the sexual indiscretions of politicians, conservatives' dismissal of global warming, and an obsession with self-tanning.
Brains are big on campus, too. Take a map of any major university and you can trace the march of neuroscience from research labs and medical centres into schools of law and business and departments of economics and philosophy. In recent years, neuroscience has merged with a host of other disciplines, spawning such new areas of study as neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing and neurofinance. The brain has wandered into such unlikely redoubts as English departments, where professors debate whether scanning subjects' brains as they read passages from Jane Austen novels represents: a) a fertile inquiry into the power of literature, or b) a desperate attempt to inject novelty into a field that has exhausted its romance with psychoanalysis and postmodernism. As a newly minted cultural artefact, the brain is portrayed in paintings, sculptures and tapestries and put on display in museums and galleries. As one science pundit noted, "if Warhol were around today, he'd have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe".
A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast
Clearly, brains are hot. The prospect of solving the deepest riddle humanity has ever contemplated – itself – by studying the brain has captivated scholars and scientists for centuries. But never before has the brain so vigorously engaged the public imagination. The prime impetus behind this enthusiasm is a form of brain imaging called fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, an instrument that measures brain activity and converts it into the now iconic vibrant images one sees in the science pages of the daily newspaper.
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As a tool for exploring the biology of the mind, neuroimaging has given brain science a strong cultural presence. As one scientist remarked, brain images are now "replacing Bohr's planetary atom as the symbol of science". With its implied promise of decoding the brain, it is easy to see why brain imaging would beguile almost anyone interested in pulling back the curtain on the mental lives of others: politicians hoping to manipulate voter attitudes, agents of the law seeking an infallible lie detector, marketers tapping the brain to learn what consumers really want to buy, addiction researchers trying to gauge the pull of temptations, and defence attorneys fighting to prove that their clients lack malign intent or even free will.
The problem is that brain imaging cannot do any of these things – at least not yet.
Author Tom Wolfe was characteristically prescient in when he wrote of fMRI in 1996, just a few years after its introduction: "Anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding 21st-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it." Now, we can't look away.
Why the fixation? First, of course, there is the very subject of the scans: the brain itself, the organ of our deepest self. More complex than any structure in the known cosmos, the brain is a masterwork of nature endowed with cognitive powers that far outstrip the capacity of any silicon machine built to emulate it. Containing roughly 80bn brain cells, or neurons, each of which communicates with thousands of other neurons, the 3lb universe cradled between our ears has more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. How this enormous neural edifice gives rise to subjective feelings is one of the greatest mysteries of science and philosophy.
Brain scan images are not what they seem. They are not photographs of the brain in action in real time. Scientists can't just look "in" the brain and see what it does. Those beautiful colour-dappled images are actually representations of particular areas in the brain that are working the hardest – as measured by increased oxygen consumption – when a subject performs a task such as reading a passage or reacting to stimuli, such as pictures of faces. The powerful computer located within the scanning machine transforms changes in oxygen levels into the familiar candy-coloured splotches indicating the brain regions that become especially active during the subject's performance. Despite well-informed inferences, the greatest challenge of imaging is that it is very difficult for scientists to look at a fiery spot on a brain scan and conclude with accuracy what is going on in the mind of the person.
Answer:
give reason
behavioural adaptation is connected with the mind
Explanation:
behavioural adaptation is connected with the mind because an animal or a species is reacting or acting in a particular manner to ward of danger (to pervent harm from). Since this is closely connected with the thinking power in a species, more active the brain, better is the species' behavioural adaptation skills