Maybe young Mrs. Brooks is spending Thanksgiving with her family and Mr. Brooks is on his own in Capitol Hill, because today's column ("The Wisdom Your Body Knows"), which looks like outtakes on the book Brooks had a contract to write before he discovered humility and decided to write something different, has a ton of references to work on neuroscience and none of those helpful links that somebody's been inserting for him recently.
This has been a golden age for brain research. We now have amazing brain scans that show which networks in the brain ramp up during different activities. But this emphasis on the brain has subtly fed the illusion that thinking happens only from the neck up. It’s fed the illusion that the advanced parts of our thinking are the “rational” parts up top that try to control the more “primitive” parts down below.
So it’s interesting how many scientists are now focusing on the thinking that happens not in your brain but in your gut. You have neurons spread through your innards, and there’s increasing attention on the vagus nerve, which emerges from the brain stem and wanders across the heart, lungs, kidney and gut.Which made me wonder if he was finally starting to discard his traditional Cartesian dualism and accept that the mind is a function of the body rather than a distinct aetherial thing. Which I can't say he doesn't do, since he doesn't use the word "mind" anywhere in the column, or "cognition/cognitive" either, though he does talk pretty freely about the brain doing or sharing the doing of the "thinking". He mainly seems to have temporarily displaced the discussion of mind-body into an alternative discussion of brain-gut and an interest in who, brain or gut, is in control here, which may amount to the same thing.
