Philosophy of mind: Coming to terms with traumatic brain injury

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Patients and their families struggle with accepting changes in personality after traumatic brain injury (TBI). A neuroanatomic understanding may assist with this process. OBJECTIVES: We briefly review the history of the Western conceptualization of the Self, and discuss how neuroscience and changes in personality wrought by brain injuries modify and enrich our understanding of our selves and our patients. CONCLUSION: The sense of self, while conflated with the concept of a "soul" in Western thinking, is more rationally considered a construct derived from neurophysiologic structures. The self or personality therefore often changes when the brain changes. A neuroanatomic perspective can help patients, families, and clinicians accept and cope with the sequellae of TBI. bases of affect, morality, empathy, and sense of self. We discuss embodiment theory and briefly describe an exocentric model as one possible way to reframe our understanding of "mind" and "body". Rethinking these issues -modifying and expanding one's "philosophy of mind" -can help patients, family members, and clinicians accept and more effectively respond to brain injury. A brief historical review of the early western theory of mind: The struggle toward a physical systemAs stated in one text on Philosophy of Mind, this branch of philosophy explores the relationship between mind, brain, and body and between the mental and the physical (Chalmers, 2002, p. xi). Philosophers attempt

Investigating real-time social interaction in pairs of adolescents with the Perceptual Crossing Experiment

“…As the three items assessing subjective experience formed one single factor, this indicated that participants were particularly aware of the other participant via the other's interactional directedness toward themselves. Taken together, these results demonstrate the importance of studying social interactive capacity for social contingency detection that is associated with the experience of interaction, rather than studying cognitive processes internal to the individual's brain (Buzan, Kupfer, Eastridge, & Lema-Hincapie, 2014).…”