Find the ego

Modern neuroscience is still fumbling to find the answer to the old question: Who are we?

New corpse!

On September 13, 1848, a worker named Phineas Gage was participating in building a railroad in Cavendish, Vermont (USA). As a foreman of a group of craftsmen, his mission is to place explosive blocks to open a passage through the hills near a town called Cavendish. While he was stuffing a block of dynamite into the ground with an iron rod, it exploded early, and knocked the iron bar through his skull.

Accidents still occur in construction projects. But the reason why people still remember the Gage accident is because he still lives after the accident. Or rather, his body had survived the accident. In fact, the Gage returned to work not the Gage who brought the iron bar into the hole stuffed with explosives. Before the accident, Gage was a serious, non-addicted, diligent person who was highly respected and successful at every job. But after that, he was a drunken drunk and obscene, passive lazy and a loser. His identity has been changed in a special way by a special damage to a particular part of the brain.

The statue is cast from the true face of the Phineas Gage when he died in 1860, now
kept at Warren Anatomy Museum (USA). Phineas Gage is a variable case
The most famous personality change in the history of neuroscience (Photo: harvard.edu)

The Gage accident caused many surprises because it illuminated the question of dualism. This theory suggests that, although the mind is in the brain, it has an independent existence and therefore cannot equate it with the brain. What has suddenly changed humans Gage shows that the brain and mind are not independent. If the nature of human personality can be changed by a physical accident, then the brain is a mechanism that creates ego, not merely a place of its own. This observation leads to the question " Who are we? " From the philosophical category to the scientific category.

Mechanism of personality

Thirty years after the accident in Cavendish, a French neurologist named Paul Broca systematized a study of the impact of brain injury on the brain, with the discovery that some types of speech blemishes n

The Phineas Gage's skull was pierced by the iron bar from below the left cheekbones to the top of the head (Photo: sciencemuseum)

Certain vomiting is the result of damage to the part of the brain called the left temporal lobe. Local brain damage of this type is called a lesion by neuroscientists. Therefore the study of it is called the lesion method.

Broca's new method was quickly studied by many scientists. All kinds of strange neurological symptoms are now explained by specific brain damage. For example, an inability to perceive movements (although patients can see objects that are still and motionless) is caused by damage in the temporal lobes, and the inability to identify faces. is damaged in the rhombic brain roll. Currently, no one doubts whether the special parts of the brain are tasked with managing special activities.

However, Broca's revolution is incomplete. Some of the findings of Broca's studies may be the end of dualism, but the world is not really ready to accept mechanical explanations of the self that Broca's work and the the successor he gave. In most of the 20th century, another version of dualism based on the idea of ​​soul was very popular. The difference that psychiatrists make between neurological and mental illnesses implies that there is a mental (not soul) that can be damaged independently of physical symptoms. in the brain.

When that idea is verified by the effects of physical therapies, such as antidepressants, used in the treatment of mental illness, dualism returns to another form. There are many people - most of whom will not consider themselves dualism - that the brain is like a computer, and the mind is like a software that runs on that computer. . But this analogy spell also has shortcomings. You don't have to waste a lot of money to damage a computer so it can't run software programs. But in the case of Gage and many other cases, the body can still walk away, despite changes, after having damaged the brain quite severely.

The French neurologist Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880) took the system
a study of the impact of brain injury on the brain. (Photo: mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)

See . ego

You can use it to see how the ego is working if you put a person in an fMRI scanner

Even so, Broca's successors now have a new set of techniques to verify this question. The most famous technique is a way to scan the brain called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). What makes this method so popular is because it records activities and anatomical structures. In other words, you can use it to see how the ego is functioning! All you need to do is put someone in an fMRI machine, tell them to do something and see which brain parts light up.

This new technology has brought about revolution in neuroscience, however, it inevitably has criticism. It has been shown that large conclusions are often drawn from small sample examples, that the changes observed in action by fMRI are not direct (this technique measures blood pressure and oxygen consumption). not the electrical activity of nerve cells), and that this revolution is quite poor. Individual points in a photo taken by fMRI have two millimeters of cubic millimeter brain tissue, ie hundreds of thousands of nerve cells. All these criticisms are justified, proved to be true. But those were early periods. In science, time will tell many things. Quality studies are repeated and written into books. Poor studies cannot be repeated and will disappear from the memory gap.

In the 19th century, many scientists felt they were approaching big concepts such as the laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and the periodic table of elements but didn't really know what they were looking for. It was a very normal thing of that time. Today there seem to be fewer new concepts, and experiments are often done with the expectation of a specific outcome. But neuroscience is a field that is still waiting for big concepts. And when they are discovered, they will certainly help people understand themselves.

Activities of " ego " appear on the computer screen during fMRI scanning

It seems that the brain is a mechanism that creates ego, not merely a shelter of ego.

Dong Phong