OUT OF OUR HEADS: WHY YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE BIOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Cognitive neuroscience is the discipline that merges two influential ideas: 1) The mind is an information-processing engine that builds representations of the world and 2) The brain is the locus of all mental activity. Scientists in this field expect to obtain a comprehensive account of our cognitive capacities through the use of imaging techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The idea is to take advantage of such resources in order to understand how the brain implements mental functions. It is thought that each cognitive ability, understood abstractly or psychologically, has a correlate in neurophysiology.