PSY 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Traumatic Brain Injury, Neurosurgery, Blood Vessel

• School: UCSB
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1
• Professor: Fridlund

Document Summary

Brains are very soft, and the living brain moves. Male brains are bigger than female brains (3 lbs. ) Monism - physical and mental are one. Neutral monists: what happens in the moment is what determines physical/mental. Everything in the physical moment is a mental simulation. Thoughts are just chemical reactions in the physical brain. Most scientists are implicitly materialists because they believe it will eventually be explained by the neurotransmitter functions. Dualism - physical and mental are different aspects of reality. Physical affects the mental and vice versa. The human body is a fluidic robot. Everything that happens in the body happens in the mind. At death the body is left behind but the mind remains. Your experience of the world is produced by the brain. Weighs about 1400 g (3 lbs. ) in avg adult. Across animal kingdom, brain size and weight are unrelated to intelligence. Within humans, brain size and weight are weakly related to intelligence.