Neuroscience - In Our Time review

The exciting part about In Our Time's issue about neuroscience is the Columbus or the Mercator feeling. As of the moment Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, map makers like Mercator started charting the world and getting it right within a life time. Maps before show how ignorant we were about our world and a hundred years later we had maps that resembles maps today.

Neuroscience is developing at this speed right now and maps our brain with an accuracy that not long ago was inconceivable and shoves us into an era of profoundly deeper, better and also different understanding about our brain, our mind, our soul possibly and all in all about ourselves. The watershed mark, as it is given in the series is 1997, showing we are a mere decade into this adventure. Although, the roots go back as far as Sigmund Freud. Freud's problem and that of generations of the successors was the technical problem of observing the brain. It is the new technologies that allow the enhanced insight and rush of new knowledge today.

The new insights bring about a revolution in our concept of human beings. There are so many layers of awareness and there is so much more unaware than we had anticipated. The profound changes this is having on our thinking has been noted also in other podcasts. Psychology podcaster David van Nuys (Shrink Rap Radio and Wise Counsel) keeps pointing this out. The philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites had a special issue dedicated to neuroscience.

More In Our Time:
Simon Bolivar,
The Translation Movement,
Miracles,
Tacitus,
John Donne (The Metaphysical Poets).