Mr. Lundahl, Those MRI Studies Have Already Been Done. Why Don’t You Look Them Up for Yourself?
Kevin R. Henke
October 15, 2022
In Henke (2022ax), I made the following statements:
“All of the evidence indicates that the great discoveries that humans have made is solely due to the biochemical activity in our brains despite the groundless claims from Lewis (1960) and Mr. Lundahl that desperately want to believe otherwise. If Mr. Lundahl wants us to recognize that there’s “something beyond nature” before we can even make “a completely naturalistic explanation”, he again has the burden of evidence. While we can measure electrical activity in the human brain as it thinks (e.g., Goodenough et al. 1998, p. 202), there’s not a shred of evidence that anything supernatural or “beyond nature” is required before we can adequately understand human consciousness (Dennett 2006; Dennett 2018; Harris 2010). There’s no evidence that physicists needed any participation from a god or heaven to discover that E=mc2 or F=ma, and to confirm the reliability of those equations. Until Mr. Lundahl or another individual demonstrates otherwise, claims about the supernatural are completely superfluous when effectively doing science and other reasoning.”
Lundahl (2022s) comments on my bolded section:
“And how about checking with J. Goodenough, R.A. Wallace, and B. McGuire what difference it makes in the measures of electric brain activity whether the thinker is making a logical mistake or reasoning coherently in full observance of all the rules of formal logic?”
There are detectable differences in human brain activities depending on what the subjects are thinking about. If he’s really interested in this, why doesn’t Mr. Lundahl do some legwork for once and check the peer-reviewed studies where this has already been done with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (e.g., Belekou et al. 2022; Rhein et al. 2020; Jolly et al. 2020; Modroño et al. 2019; Schwartz et al. 2017; Fiddick et al. 2005; Goto et al. 2011)? Once Mr. Lundahl demonstrates that he’s actually accessed at least some of these articles and read them, then we can discuss them further.
References:
Belekou, A., C. Papageorgiou, E. Karavasilis, E. Tsaltras, N. Kelekis, C. Klein, and N. Smymis. 2022. “Paradoxical Reasoning: An fMRI Study” Frontiers in Psychology, 13:850491. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.850491.
Fiddick, L., M.V. Spampinato and J. Grafman. 2005. “Social Contracts and Precautions Activate Different Neurological Systems: An fMRI Investigation of Deontic Reasoning” NeuroImage, v. 28, pp. 778-786.
Dennett, D.C. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon: Viking Penguin: London, UK, 448pp.
Dennett, D.C. 2018. “Facing Up to the Hard Question of Consciousness”: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, v. 373, 20170342.
Goodenough, J., R.A. Wallace, and B. McGuire. 1998. Human Biology: Personal, Environmental, and Social Concerns: Saunders College Publishing: Harcourt Brace College Publishers: Fort Worth, TX, USA.
Goto, M., O. Abe, T. Miyati, et al. 2011. “Entorhinal Cortex Volume Measured with 3T MRI is Positively Correlated with the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised Logical/Verbal Memory Score for Healthy Subjects”: Neuroradiology, v. 53, pp. 617-622.
Harris, S. 2010. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Hunan Values: Free Press: New York, N.Y., USA, 291pp.
Jolly, A.E., G.T. Scott, D.J. Sharp and A.H. Hampshire. 2020. “Distinct Patterns of Structural Damage Underlie Working Memory and Reasoning Deficits after Traumatic Brain Injury”, Brain, v. 143, pp. 1158-1176.
Modroño, C., G. Navarrete, A. Nicolle, J.L. González-Mora, K.W. Smith, M. Marling and V. Goel. 2019. “Developmental Grey Matter Changes in Superior Parietal Cortex Accompany Improved Transitive Reasoning”, Thinking and Reasoning, v. 25, n. 2, pp. 151-170.
Rhein, C., C. Mühle, B. Lenz, et al. 2020. “Association of a CAMK2A Genetic Variant with Logical Memory Performance and Hippocampal Volume in the Elderly” Brain Research Bulletin, v. 161, pp. 13-20.
Schwartz, F., J. Epinat-Duclos, J. Léone, and J. Prado. 2017. “The Neural Development of Conditional Reasoning in Children: Different Mechanisms for Assessing the Logical Validity and Likelihood of Conclusions”, NeuroImage, v. 163, pp. 264-275.