Sublime

The internal maps created by mirror neurons are automatic—they do not require consciousness or effort. We are hardwired from birth to detect sequences and make maps in our brains of the internal state—the intentional stance—of other people.

I’ve measured the electrical activity of people’s brains, but I can’t measure their experience in the same way. I can’t measure what’s in their minds. I can’t measure what it’s actually like to be you. Why not? Because the brain alone is not enough to explain the mind.”

It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.

The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.

Brains have a lot of common features; minds, less so, because minds depend in part on micro-wiring that is tuned and pruned by culture.

To illustrate, he uses the example of a tiny jellyfish-like animal called a sea squirt: Born with a simple spinal cord and a three hundred–neuron “brain,” the larva motors around in the shallows until it finds a nice patch of coral on which to put down its roots. It has about twelve hours to do so, or it will die. Once safely attached, however, the

Consequently, from a neuroscientific understanding, mind is the brain in action.