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2000-8-01 How Does the Brain Generate Consciousness?
I had a chance to hear very nice lecture(How Does the Brain Generate Consciousness?) by Prof.Susan Greenfield of Oxford University, on July,31,2000.
She is currently, Director of The Royal Institute of Great Britain.
My memo is attached here.
Her lecture was about 60 minutes, and then followed by 30 minutes of QA.
The content of her talk was marvelous, but she defines only relationship between input to brain and output from it.
Therefore, I asked her a question as follows;
Your lecture was provocative and excellent, but your definition "The mind is personalization of brain" is too simple. I read a book "The Undiscovered Mind" by John Horgan,year 1999, and He said no brain scientist nor neuron-scientist explained about mind. Today I couldn't understand meaning of mind from your lecture.
Her answered my question looks like as follows;
Someone lose consciousness but not mind. If one lose mind it results in madness.

I think she defined mind and consciousness clearly but very narrowly. Anyway, she is wonderful scientist with original idea, and replied many questions from audience with detail and laboriously.

my memo
Introduction ;
She is the Director of Royal Institution of Great Britain. The content of today's lecture is shown "Private Life of Brain" (he showed it)
Keywords of lecture; This lecture is not intended to philosopher.
Subjective consciousness states are; 1) Spatially multiple, but temporally unity (showing tricky art of disguising faces);
2) Continuously variable
3) Derives from stimulant (epicenter)
Rat is conscious, dog is conscious inside and Chimpanzee is conscious. But we can't dine with them. This is based on different level of consciousness. Is fetus consciousness? Not as conscious as ours.
To define the consciousness, analogy of thrown stone in a pond, making ripple in a transient status will be applicable.
Neuron networks is one answer;
From consciousness-synapses-molecules-genes will be reduced gradually, but from genes we could not construct consciousness. By rat experiment, rat with toys had more complicated neuron network than isolated rat.
Taxi drivers of London have larger hippocampi than regular people, because taxi drivers have to memorize detailed map, but this does not mean they are all clever.
What is a mind? conscious?
The mind is personalization of brain.
At this point size of neuron assembly becomes very important.
1)Pleasure, fear, raves related small neuron assembly;
2)large neuron circuits related with more fundamental things like painting of Mona Lisa.
Diagram with vertical axis as brain response time, and horizontal axis as Brain to molecules, plotting measurement system such as PET, MRI, etc. is very original.

http://www.sirc.org/about/susan_greenfield.html
Professor Susan Greenfield CBE
She became Director of The Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1998. She has been profiled in most of the broadsheets and was included as one of the 50 most powerful women in Britain by the Guardian and ranked number 14 in the "50 Most Inspirational Women in the World" by Harpers and Queen. In January 2000 Susan Greenfield was awarded the CBE for her services to the public understanding of science.

http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/science/people/green.htm
Spotlight on Oxford Scientists
Explaining the Brain
Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology
Greenfield points out that acetylcholinesterase helps developing nerve cells to grow, and that may be the clue to its role in these diseases.
`It says a lot for the college system', Greenfield points out. `Normally our paths would never have crossed-Vaux is a molecular biologist who, although medically trained, had no current research interest in the brain'.