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According to Cohen, the brain is organized in a much more democratic manner. There are unique functions for separate regions of our brains, and these all cooperate to create what we experience as consciousness. But how can this be proved? Imagine a machine that could peer into your brain, with a millimeter spatial resolution and control, that could tell you what part was doing the work whenever you were thinking, dreaming, feeling pain, falling in love, imagining the future or anything else your brain might do. It was that kind of device Cohen was longing for when he received his doctoral degree in neuroscience in 1985. what he wanted out of his work, he says, was to understand the relationship between brain structure and function. Given the state of technology, he was convinced he didn't have a prayer. "It was my impression," he recalls, "that it was truly irrelevant how many electrodes you stuck into an animal, you would never have a clue how it felt." Disillusioned, he left neuroscience after receiving his doctorate. So Cohen went into biomedical technology, and set to work trying to make an MRI scanner that could image the human body in less than the standard 40 minutes it took at the time. And with that seemingly orthogonal career choice, Cohen launched himself on a path that has brought him back 13 years later to attaining his original goal. Now an associate professor of neurology, radiology and psychiatry working within the UCLA Brain Mapping MRI laboratory, he works with the world's fastest MRI machine, exploring some of the most exciting questions in cognitive science. "Five years ago I came to UCLA with the goal of setting up a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging lab dedicated to the observation of brain function, and with the tremendous support of the UCLA Brain Mapping Division, under Professor John Mazziotta, that's what we've done," Cohen says. |
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Perhaps it is not surprising that most of us live with an impression about the mechanistic nature of our brains that dates back to the 17th century and the thinking of French philosopher René Descartes. In this model, the brain presents the external world to the mind. It is in the mind, which exists as a separate organ, or even a separate substance, that consciousness takes place. This concept for which the philosopher Daniel Dennett has coined the term the "Cartesian theater" suggests, in effect, that somewhere in our brain is an object that holds the essence of our consciousness and that this runs the rest of our brain. "The Cartesian theater is flawed terribly," says UCLA neuroscientist Mark Cohen, "and yet it is the world model we tend to live in."
