Robert A. Burton | |
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Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Notable works | Doc-In-A-Box (1991) Final Therapy (1994) Cellmates (1997) On Being Certain (2008) A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind (2013) |
Website | |
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Robert A. Burton is an American physician, novelist, nonfiction author and columnist. He has written three novels, as well as the nonfiction books On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not and A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Aeon, and Nautilus, among other others. His medical career includes being the chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion UCSF, and Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. [1]
Burton graduated from Yale University and the University of California, San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. He is a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. [2]
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
An out-of-body experience is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy, although this term is more commonly used to refer to the pathological condition of seeing a second self, or doppelgänger.
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
Salon is an American politically progressive and liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events.
Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American author, new age guru, and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. In the 1990s, Chopra, a physician by education, became a popular proponent of holistic approach to well-being that includes yoga, meditation, and nutrition, among other new-age therapies.
Phineas P. Gage (1823–1860) was an American railroad construction foreman remembered for his improbable[B1] survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life—effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him as "no longer Gage".
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. He is known for his wide-ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. Ramachandran is a distinguished professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.
The neuroscience of religion, also known as neurotheology and as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms. It is the study of correlations of neural phenomena with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. This contrasts with the psychology of religion which studies mental, rather than neural states.
In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".
David Talbot is an American journalist, author, activist and independent historian. Talbot is known for his books about the "hidden history" of U.S. power and the liberal movements to change America, as well as his public advocacy. He was also the founder and former editor-in-chief of the early web magazine Salon.
Neuropsychiatry is a branch of medicine that deals with psychiatry as it relates to neurology, in an effort to understand and attribute behavior to the interaction of neurobiology and social psychology factors. Within neuropsychiatry, the mind is considered "as an emergent property of the brain", whereas other behavioral and neurological specialties might consider the two as separate entities. Those disciplines are typically practiced separately.
The Decade of the Brain was a designation for 1990–1999 by U.S. president George H. W. Bush as part of a larger effort involving the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health "to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research".
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Brian T. Andrews is a neurosurgeon specializing in pediatric neurosurgery, minimally invasive spinal surgery, brain tumors, neuro-oncology, neurotrauma, spinal stenosis and general neurosurgery. He is chairman of the Department of Neurosciences at California Pacific Medical Center and a founder of the California Pacific Neuroscience Institute.
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to "a sensation of 'eternity'", a feeling of "being one with the external world as a whole", inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics. According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion. Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated itself from other people and things.
Consciousness after death is a common theme in society and culture, and the belief in some form of life after death is a feature of many religions. However, scientific research has established that the physiological functioning of the brain, the cessation of which defines brain death, is closely connected to mental states.
Indre Viskontas is a Lithuanian-Canadian neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA she was a member of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab and Cogfog. and a M.M. in opera. She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera.
When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.
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