Discover, October 24, 2012

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Ian Reid, a psychiatrist at the Royal Cornhill Hospital in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, has treated people with severe depression for 25 years. “It’s a very nasty illness, depression,” he says. “I have worked with people who have cancer and depression, and more than one of them has said, ‘If I had to choose one of those two diseases, I’d go for the cancer.’ ”

When patients come to Royal Cornhill with major depression, they’re first treated with psychotherapy and antidepressants. Only about 40 percent respond to their first medication. Sometimes a different one will do the trick, but in Reid’s experience, about 10 to 20 percent of depressed people respond to no drug at all.

Continue reading “An Electric Cure for the Mind” →

Being Human, October 10, 2012

Hilary Putnam is not a household name. The Harvard philosopher’s work on the nature of reality, meaning, and language may be required reading in graduate school, but Putnam’s fame hasn’t extended far beyond the academy. But one of Putnam’s thought experiments is familiar to millions of people: what it would be like to be a brain in a vat?

Here’s how Putnam presented the idea in his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History:

Imagine that a human being…has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain…has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person…is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. Continue reading “From Cooling System to Thinking Machine” →