How do neurons know?

Daedalus

Volumn 133, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 42-50

  Churchland, Patricia Smith ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950415039     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/001152604772746684     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Portions of this paper are drawn from my book Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
2. See Patricia Smith Churchland and Paul M. Churchland, "Neural Worlds and Real Worlds," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3(11) (November 2002): 903-907.
3. In this discussion, I am greatly indebted to Barbara Finlay, Richard Darlington, and Nicholas Nicastro, "Developmental Structure in Brain Evolution," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2) (April 2001): 263-278.
4. See John Gerhart and Marc Kirschner, Cells, Embryos, and Evolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
5. See also Steven Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes (New York: William Morrow, 2002).
6. See Alvaro Pascual-Leone et al., "Study and Modulation of Human Cortical Excitability with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation," Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology 15 (1998): 333-343.
7. John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999).
8. This experiment was done by Leslie Real, "Animal Choice Behavior and the Evolution of Cognitive Architecture," Science (1991): 980-986.
9. See Read Montague and Peter Dayan, "Neurobiological Modeling," in William Bechtel, George Graham, and D. A. Balota, eds., A Companion to Cognitive Science (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998).
10. Clark N. Glymour, The Mind's Arrows (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
11. See also Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1999).
12. See Paul W. Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
13. I am grateful to Roger Guillemain for discussing this point with me.
14. I take it as a sign of the backwardness of academic philosophy that one of its most esteemed living practitioners, Jerry Fodor, is widely supported for the following conviction: "If you want to know about the mind, study the mind - not the brain, and certainly not the genes" (Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 2003, 1 - 2). If philosophy is to have a future, it will have to do better than that.
15. Many thanks to Ed McAmis and Paul Churchland for their ideas and revisions.