Some scientists believe it has to do with a kind of neural map that the brain has of the body, which sends information to the rest of the brain about limbs regardless of their existence.

Even if the technology to map out every neuron in the brain in real-time were available, and it were known when each neuron was firing, it would still be impossible to know how a particular firing of neurons translates into the observed behavior.

* Cortical map, collections ( areas ) of minicolumns in the brain cortex that have been identified as performing a specific information processing function ( texture maps, color maps, contour maps, etc.

However, he also justified the expression he coined — " the map is not the territory " — by saying that " the denial of identification ( as in ' is not ') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity ( as in ' is ').

Gall's list of the " brain organs " was lengthy and specific, as he believed that each bump or indentation in a patient's skull corresponded to his " brain map ".

PET is also an important research tool to map normal human brain and heart function.

The currently used Talairach and Tournoux atlas projects Brodmann's cytoarchitectonic map onto a template brain.

The " cognitive map hypothesis " has been further advanced by recent discoveries of head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells in several parts of the rodent brain that are strongly connected to the hippocampus.

This technique has also been used to map learning activity in animal brain.

Experiential selection generates dynamic systems that can ' map ' complex spatio-temporal events from the sensory organs, body systems and other neuronal groups in the brain onto other selected neuronal groups.

This is a type of specialized brain and body scan used to map neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or animals by imaging the change in blood flow ( hemodynamic response ) related to energy use by brain cells.

As this proportion fell, a map of blood flow in the brain was seen in the MRI.

They map the brain with fMRI to identify regions linked to critical functions such as speaking, moving, sensing, or planning.

Clinicians also use fMRI to anatomically map the brain and detect the effects of tumors, stroke, head and brain injury, or diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Despite these difficulties, fMRI has been used clinically to map functional areas, check left-right hemispherical asymmetry in language and memory regions, check the neural correlates of a seizure, study how the brain recovers partially from a stroke, test how well a drug or behavioral therapy works, detect the onset of Alzheimer's, and note the presence of disorders like depression.

Smoothing, or spatial filtering, is the idea of averaging the intensities of nearby voxels to produce a smooth spatial map of intensity change across the brain or region of interest.

A map of gene expression in the brain allows researchers to correlate forms and functions.

The Allen Mouse Brain Atlas is a comprehensive genome-wide map of the adult mouse brain that reveals where each gene is expressed.

MacLean stressed correctly the importance of the visceral brain for preservation of the individual and the species, as evidenced by the influence of the limbic brain ( including the hypothalamus ) on emotions related to fight and flight and also on sexual functions.

It has been hypothesized that the portion of the brain responsible for processing stimulation from amputated limbs, being deprived of input, expands into the surrounding brain, ( Phantoms in the Brain: V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee ) such that an individual who has had an arm amputated will experience unexplained pressure or movement on his face or head.

The operations of individual brain cells are now understood in considerable detail, but the way they cooperate in ensembles of millions has been very difficult to decipher.

Society places a lot of importance on the idea of “ brain death ” because most “ industrialized countries have equated this with death of the individual ”.

By constraining an individual to use only speech, it is believed that the brain can reestablish old neural pathways and recruit new neural pathways to compensate for lost function.

While all vertebrates have a brain, most invertebrates have either a centralized brain or collections of individual ganglia.

The silver impregnation stains are an extremely useful method for neuroanatomical investigations because, for reasons unknown, it stains a very small percentage of cells in a tissue, so one is able to see the complete micro structure of individual neurons without much overlap from other cells in the densely packed brain.

The techniques used by neuroscientists have also expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual nerve cells to imaging of sensory and motor tasks in the brain.

The thesis of type physicalism consists in the idea that mental event types ( e. g., pain in all individual organisms of all species at all times ) are, at least contingently, identical with specific event types in the brain ( e. g., C-fibre firings in all individual organisms of all species and at all times ).

The distinguishing feature of phrenology is the idea that the sizes of brain areas were meaningful and could be inferred by examining the skull of an individual.

Franz Joseph Gall first believed that the brain was made up of 27 individual ' organs ' that determined personality, with the first 19 of these ' organs ' believed to exist in other animal species.

Persinger's case studies have also shown a complex interaction between geomagnetism, household electrical equipment and the brain physiology of the individual.

The first brain image of an individual with psychosis was completed as far back as 1935 using a technique called pneumoencephalography ( a painful and now obsolete procedure where cerebrospinal fluid is drained from around the brain and replaced with air to allow the structure of the brain to show up more clearly on an X-ray picture ).

The revised and expanded, second edition of the Mismeasure of Man ( 1996 ) analyzes and challenges the methodological accuracy of The Bell Curve ( 1994 ), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which re-presented the arguments of what Gould terms biological determinism, which he defines as " the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups — races, classes, or sexes — are innately inferior and deserve their status.

MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs ( especially LSD ) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

African nations have invoked this argument with respect to slavery, other colonized peoples have invoked it with respect to the " brain drain " or " human capital flight " which occurs when the most talented individuals ( those with the most individual capital ) depart for education or opportunity to the colonizing country ( historically, Britain and France and the U. S .).

In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

The " imprinted brain theory " argues that unbalanced imprinting may be a cause of autism and psychosis.

Rushton argues that East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants, who average higher scores on these dimensions than Africans and their descendants.

Just as he argues that there is no particular reason why particular macroscopic physical features in the brain should give rise to consciousness, he also thinks that there is no particular reason why a particular quantum feature, such as the electromagnetic field in the brain, should give rise to consciousness, either.

However, the view that mental illness is purely a physical illness reflects a school of thought known as epiphenomenalism, which argues that the mind has no causal effect at all, and is just the subjective experience of our brain at work.

For example, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that while the brain is " programmed " to pick up spoken language easily, it is not programmed to learn to read and write, and a human generally will not spontaneously learn to do so.

Moreover, Joel Braslow argues that from malarial therapy onward to lobotomy, physical psychiatric therapies " spiral closer and closer to the interior of the brain " with this organ increasingly taking " centre stage as a source of disease and site of cure.

Harris then argues that we are also the victims of such unpredictable desires ( but due to the unconscious machinations of our brain, rather than those of a mad scientist ).

In The Symbolic Species, Terrance Deacon argues that the emanation of symbolic capacities unique to language was a critical factor in the evolution of the human brain, and that these symbolic capacities are vital to differentiating animal from human forms of communication, processes of learning, and brain anatomy.

Further, by allowing the brain to freely pulsate Huges argues that a number of benefits will accrue.

Edelman argues that the mind and consciousness are wholly material and purely biological phenomena, arising from highly complex cellular processes within the brain, and that the development of consciousness and intelligence can be satisfactorily explained by Darwinian theory.

The young brain contains many more neurons than will ultimately survive to maturity and Edelman argues that this great redundant capacity is needed because neurons are the only cells in the body that cannot be renewed and because only those cells and networks best adapted to their ultimate purpose will be selected as they organise into neuronal groups.

Edelman argues that this dynamic selective process is directly analogous to the processes of selection that act on populations of individuals in species, and he also points out that this functional plasticity is imperative, since not even the vast coding capability of entire human genome is sufficient to explicitly specify the astronomically complex synaptic structures of the developing brain.

A Critique of the paper: " Do fish have nociceptors: Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system "</</ ref > Rose argues that since the fish brain is rather different from ours, fish are not conscious, whence reactions similar to human reactions to pain instead have other causes.

However, animal behaviorist Temple Grandin argues that fish could still have consciousness without a neocortex because " different species can use different brain structures and systems to handle the same functions.

Richard Webster writes that The Language Instinct argues cogently that the human capacity for language is part of the genetic endowment associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised neural networks within the brain, and that its attack on the ' Standard Social Science Model ' of human nature is effective.

A staunch defender of this view is William Uttal, who argues in The New Phrenology ( 2003 ) that there are serious philosophical, theoretical, and methodological problems with the entire enterprise of trying to localise cognitive processes in the brain.

Bjorn Merker, an independent neuroscientist in Stockholm, Sweden, argues that the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in infants with hydranencephaly.

Also, he argues that, " the demand for an account of how mental states necessarily appear in physical organisms cannot be satisfied by the discovery of uniform correlations between mental states and physical brain states.

However, Dartmouth College Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Michael Gazzaniga argues that definitions such as Safire's are inadequate, since knowledge of brain mechanisms can illuminate a broad range of ethical questions.

W. Teed Rockwell, claiming to be a Deweyan pragmatist, argues that instead of being dualists or Cartesians, " philosophers should realize that the human conscious self is not reducible to the brain, nor to the nervous system, nor even to the human body.

" Both thought experiments are supposed to show us that human consciousness is plausible even though there might be no world in which consciousness exists ," but Rockwell argues " that even in a vat the brain would have to be stimulated by some world, if only a world of electronic gizmos, and that such a world would have to produce a continuous experience.