The Mind Quotes

“The discovery of mirror neurons was made by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallase, and Marco Iaccoboni while recording from the brains of monkeys that performed certain goal-directed voluntary actions. For instance, when the monkey reached for a peanut, a certain neuron in its premotor cortex (in the frontal lobes) would fire. Another neuron would fire when the monkey pushed a button, a third neuron when he pulled a lever. The existence of such command neurons that control voluntary movements has been known for decades. Amazingly, a subset of these neurons had an additional peculiar property. The neuron fired not only (say) when the monkey reached for a peanut, but also when it watched another monkey reach for a peanut! These were dubbed “mirror neurons” or “monkey-see-monkey-do” neurons.”
― John Brockman, The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness – A Consciousness-Expanding Anthology of Scientific Essays

“Fourth, we’re able to create treatments—drugs, psychotherapy—and do random-assignment placebo-control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert.”
― John Brockman, The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness – A Consciousness-Expanding Anthology of Scientific Essays

“Third, we are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies—the same people over time—or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables.”
― John Brockman, The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness – A Consciousness-Expanding Anthology of Scientific Essays

“The second thing, which is even better from where I sit, is that a science of mental illness developed such that we found that we could measure fuzzy states like sadness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia with psychometric precision. We developed a classification, a DSM, so that people in London and in Philadelphia can agree that they’re both seeing a bipolar depressive.”
― John Brockman, The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness – A Consciousness-Expanding Anthology of Scientific Essays

“The first is that fourteen major mental illnesses are now treatable. Two of them are curable, either by specific forms of psychotherapy or specific drugs. The two curable ones—people always ask—are probably panic disorder and blood and injury phobia. So the first great thing that psychology and psychiatry did in our lifetime was to be able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering.”
― John Brockman, The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness – A Consciousness-Expanding Anthology of Scientific Essays