Burton - On being certain: believing you are right even when youre not

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Table of Contents

It is impossible to trace the origins of a book that has percolated for so many years. There are, needless to say, many people who inspired and helped me with this project whom I would like to thank. They include my colleagues at the San Francisco Philosophical Society as well as Jonathon Keats, Kevin Berger, Peter Robinson, David Steinsaltz, Richard Segal, and Herbert Gold.

I am extremely fortunate to have Jeff Kellogg as my literary agent; he has been a source of constant encouragement and instrumental in converting scribbles in a personal journal into the books present structure. Nichole Argyres, my editor, and her assistant, Kylah McNeill, have provided enthusiastic support and have greatly improved my original manuscript.

Unfortunately, I cannot directly thank the many patients who have prompted me to ask the questions at the heart of this book. For those patients who might be reading it, please know that I am forever indebted.

Above all, I express my deepest thanks to my wife, Adrianne, who has been my continuing inspiration, staunchest supporter, and level-headed critic. It is impossible for me to adequately express the depth of my gratitude and appreciation. So, thanks, Adrianne.

Doc-in-a-Box
Cellmates

Preface

The Phineas Gage information page is maintained by Malcolm Macmillan, School of Psychology at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, www.deakin.edu.au/hbs/GAGEPAGE .

Chapter 2: How Do We Know What We Know?

Neurologically injured patients with an inability to form long-term memories can learn new tasks (such as games, or musical tunes) without any awareness of having previously performed the tasks. With such procedural memory, the patients remember without knowing that theyve remembered. Ambulatory patients with advanced Alzheimers disease can still play golf; their implicit motor skills remain long after they have forgotten their handicap. For an excellent concise categorization of memory see, Budson, A. E., and Price, B., Memory Dysfunction, New England Journal of Medicine , 352, no. 7 (2005). Weiskrantz, L., Blindsight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), is a valuable monograph by one of the pioneer investigators of the phenomenon. Stoerig, P., Varieties of Vision: From Blind Responses to Conscious Recognition, Trends in Neuroscience, 19 (1996): 4016, provides an in-depth discussion of blindsight as one of several demonstrable dissociations in human visual processing.

Neisser, U., and Harsch, N., Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News About Challenger, in Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of Flashbulb Memories , Winograd, E., and Neisser, U., eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 931. In Neisser and Harschs test of the students accuracy of their subsequent recollections of the Challenger explosion, a perfect score was 7. In the students tested, the mean score was 2.95. Less than 10 percent got a perfect 7, and over half got less than 2.

Festinger, L., A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University, 1957).

Festinger, L., Riecken, H., and Schachter, S., When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

Weiss, K., In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation (Australia: New Holland Publishers, 1999). A fascinating summary of Wises conversion to creationism is provided in a Richard Dawkins commentary at www.beliefnet.com/story/203/story_20334_2.html .

Moseley, B., et al., A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee, New England Journal of Medicine , 347, no. 2 (2002): 8188.

Talbot, M., The Placebo Prescription, The New York Times , January 9, 2000. Also available at www.nytimes.com .

A fascinating overview of misidentification syndromes is provided in Hirstein, W., Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

Chapter 3: Conviction Isnt a Choice

James, W, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), 295.

Ibid., 292-93.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience , James quotes Walt Whitmans extraordinary description of a mystical state of knowing in the absence of any conscious reasoning. There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is callededucation, an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world . [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface (304).

Ibid., 311.

Saver, J. L., and Rabin, J., The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences , 9 (1997): 498510.

Alajouanine, F., Dostoyevskys Epilepsy, Brain, 86 (1963): 20918.

James, 300.

Ibid., 302.

www.iands.org/nde.html .

www.nida.nih.gov/ResearchReports/Hallucinogens/halluc4.html . Jansen, K., Using Ketamine to Induce the Near-Death Experience: Mechanism of Action and Therapeutic Potential, Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness , 4 (1995): 5581.

wwv.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/652/odd.htm#top .

LeDoux,, J., Synaptic Self (New York: Viking, 2002), 210. Blakeslee, S., Using Rats to Trace Anatomy of Fear, Biology of Emotion, The New York Times , November 5, 1996. Also available at www.cns.nyu.edu .

Damasio, A., Descartes Error (New York: Avon Books, 1994), 118.

Phan, L., et al., Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Human Emotions, CNS Spectrums, 9, no. 4 (2004): 258-66.

LeDoux, J., Emotion, Memory and the Brain, Scientific American , 270 (1994): 34.

LeDoux, J., The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

LeDoux, J., quoted in Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 27. Anatomically the emotional system can act independently of the neocortex. Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all.

Bechara, A., et al., Double Dissociation of Conditioning and Declarative Knowledge Relative to the Amygdala and Hippocampus in Humans, Science , 269 (1995): 111518.

Damasio, A., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 66.

Penfield, W., and Perot, P., The Brains Record of Auditory and Visual Experience, Brain, 86 (1963): 595-696. Bancaud, J., et al., Anatomical Origin of Dj Vu and Vivid Memories in Human Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Brain , 117 (1994): 71-90; Sengoku, A., Toichi, M., and Murai, T., Dreamy States and Psychoses in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Mediating Role of Affect, Psychiatry Clinical Neuroscience, 51, no. 1 (1997): 2326.

Ibid., Sengoku.

Note the similarity to Mr. Cs complaint that his antique desk has been replaced by a cheap imitation.

Chapter 4: The Classification of Mental States

Damasio, A., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 340.

Ortony A., and Turner, T. J., Whats Basic About Basic Emotions? Psychological Review , 97 (1990): 315-31. Plutchik, R., A General Psycho-evolutionary Theory of Emotion, in Plutchik, R., and Kellerman, H., eds., Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, vol. 1, Theories of Emotion (New York: Academic, 1980): 3-33. Ekman, P., Expression and Nature of Emotion, in Approaches to Emotion , Scherer, K., and Ekman, P., eds. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1984), 1943.

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