Inquiring_Minds at Everywhere have been asking:
>What is all this about Francis Crick's new book? What's it called? Etc.
>and so forth?
I haven't read the book, but I did get a short advertisement for it from the
Book of the Month Club. Either that, or the Library of Science, I can't
remember exactly. It came with a short and extraordinarily general interview
of Francis Crick himself--- come to think of it, it was so uninformative that
it must have been the Book of the Month Club that did the interview...
Anyway, the title of the book is _The Astonishing Hypothesis_ and, quite
astonishingly, advances the idea that the soul is nothing more than an
epiphenomenon of complex neural activity. Or some such--- as I said, I haven't
read the book.
I suppose it's a tad more astonishing than I'm implying: according to the Book
of the Month Club review, Crick does identify the anatomical location for the
soul. Can't remember where exactly he said it was, now... an area that has
been shown by PET scan to be differentially active when a person thinks about
moving but doesn't actually move. Sounds like supplementary motor cortex to
me, but I'm pretty sure that's not what he said. Inferior frontal cortex?
something like that. Anybody out there in 'net-land remember?
-- yh.
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Yukiharu "Yuki" Hadeishi - <yhadeish at biomed.med.yale.edu>
The Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program will have
absolutely nothing to do with any of my opinions...
