Introduction:
- What is consciousness? Are machines expanding consciousness or restricting it?
Lecture 1
- Artists have always been fascinated with consciousness and the mind-body separation? How do dreams play into this whole realm? A huge mystery to this day.
- Consciousness: when was consciousness developed, acknowledged? Question that crosses many fields but finds lots of ends in neuroscience.
- Brain has only been seriously studied for about a century
- Ramon Ikahal, Franz Joseph Gall -- critical in showing brain anatomy.
- Phrenology from Greek "mind" -- concept of localized knowledge in the brain
- Ramon y Cajal -- study of neurons and their branching nature/connections between neurons
Suzanne Anker
- Neuroculture project which aims to examine how modern brain science permeates popular culture
- fMRI butterfly - brains superimposed with a butterfly and inkblots. Nuanced notion where butterflies are the same in each print but look different (slight optical illusion)
- Sea sponges have signature proteins that function similarly to synapses, are good indicators of the origins of brains and neurons
Brainbow
- Term used to describe the process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins.
- Neurons can be flagged with distinctive colors
- Drawing comparisons between mechanics (freeway extended exposure) and life (brainbow)
Lecture 2
- 95% of what we dream is forgotten. What about REM?
- Unconsciousness brought in by Friedrich Schelling, Freud, Jung
- Jung thought that Freud's view of unconsciousness was too negative and focused on sex as a primary motivator
- Freud felt religion was an escape and a prophecy not to be believed
- Jung felt religion was an important factor for individuality
- Jung's collective unconscious -- every human is endowed with this archetypal layer, not acquired by education, but instead innate.
- "A Dangerous Method" - Cronenberg, traces relationships around Jung
Lecture 3: Culture of Neurochemicals
- Freud & Cocaine -- in the early 1880s, cocaine was seen as a cure for almost everything
- LSD: hallucinogenic effects
- Aldous Huxley & Humphry Osmund -- psychedelic drugs --> "The Doors of Perception"
- Timothy Leary - LSD research - 90% success rate in preventing re-offense in prisons
- No bad trips/negative results from his studies, but people began complaining about his distribution of drugs to undergraduates.
- Gov't MKULTRA - use of psychedelic agents as a form of mind control
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