LCD 105 - Fall 2018 - Professor Nathacia Ribeiro

1. The talking Brain
LCD 105 - Class 9 & 10 - Professor Nathacia

2. MIDTERM
October 11th - 5:00pm
DON’T BE LATE!
No extra time!

3. Ok.. we now have a (partial)
definition for Language
• Abstract reality that is socially-based, individually-based
AND specifically-based;
• It is a Faculty of the mind;
• It is a cognition.

4. Cognition?
• Oxford: the mental action or process of acquiring
knowledge and understanding through thought,
experience, and the senses
• Psychological Glossary: All the mental activities
associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering. As
you can tell, any of your ideas, thoughts, memories, etc.,
are all types of cognitive processes. What you are doing
(reading and learning this explanation) is a type of
cognition.

5. Houston, we have a problem…

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjfaoe847qQ&feature=youtu.be

7. Houston, we have a problem…

8. Dualism
Mind and Body are to completely
independent things.
Descartes: Mind is non-physical - and
therefore, non-spacial - substance.
The mental can exist outside the body.

9. Dualism
Mind and Body are to completely
independent things.
Descartes: Mind is non-physical - and
therefore, non-spacial - substance.
The mental can exist outside the body.
Problem: How to explain non-physical
substance causing physical events?

10. Materialism
There is no mind actually. Everything is physical.
What we call mind is actually an epiphenomenon of physical
interactions.
Radical Behaviorism: mind is an epiphenomenon of stimuli-
response relations.
Problem: It doesn't explain mental causes as knowledge,
expectation and beliefs.
Logical Behaviorism: mind is an epiphenomenon of logical
relations between a stimulus and a response.
Problem: it just explain mental causes in a event-event relation.
What happens if there’s no reason for a change of mind?
Central-State Identity: mind is an epiphenomenon of neurons
arrangement / circuits.

12. By Rama, CC BY-SA 3.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58036467
The interest for what is inside the head
goes back many thousands years BC
Trepanning or Trepanation
Surgical intervention
(alive people) in which a
hole was drilled or
scraped into a skull

13. Hippocrates
Actually the brain is the
organ of the mind (major
controlling center)

14. Hippocrates and Galenus
Actually the brain is the
organ of the mind (major
controlling center)
Mental activity occurs in
the brain.

15. Franz Joseph Gall
Organology: the isolation of mental faculties.
Cranioscopy: reading the skull's shape.
Phrenology

17. Phrenology
Problems:

18. Phrenology
Problems:

19. Phrenology
Positive aspects:
Localization
Hypothesis
Isolation of
mental faculties

20. Phineas Gage and the
Localization Hypothesis

26. Back to relating anatomy
and cognition
Pierre Paul Broca 1860

27. Back to relating anatomy
and cognition
Pierre Paul Broca 1860

28. Back to relating anatomy
and cognition
Pierre Paul Broca 1860

30. https://youtu.be/6CJWo5TDHLE

31. Broca’s aphasia
Pierre Paul Broca
Problems with production of closed class words
No problems of comprehension
Prosody not affected (or most part of it)
Principal conclusion:
Language Production and Language
Comprehension are (anatomically and
physiologically) distinct.

32. A different type of disorder
Karl Wernicke

34. https://youtu.be/3oef68YabD0

35. Wernicke’s aphasia
Karl Wernicke
Problems with comprehension
Problems in making sense (semantics)
No problems of articulation or speech production
(in the matter of Phonetics, phonology,
morphology or syntax - in certain extent)
Principal conclusion (confirmed):
Language Production and Language
Comprehension are (anatomically and
physiologically) distinct.