Lecture 8

We continue with the work of Noe and his colleagues before progressing on to Ramachandran and others in this lecture;

The first point is about synestheia, the attested ability to “see” odours, “smell” colours” and so on. Can Noe and his colleagues handle this? In any case, Noe et al press their attack on NCC's – and by implication on much consciousness “research” - by arguing that the situation is infinitely more complex than the “hard problem” scenario we have considered. In a rather Gothic experiment, a ferret's brain was cross-wired to show what they call “intermodal deference” (Since I recorded these lectures in 2009, my enunciated skepticism about the stats involved have been amply confirmed by Vul et alia as 2010 paper originally titled “Voodoo correlation...” and the ethics are suspect in the extreme)

However, Noe et al have a critical point; there are explanation gaps wrt “intermodal deference” and “intramodal deference” as well as the “hard problem”.Working in the same paradigm as Noe et al, Ramachandran managed to attest a cure for “phantom limb” phenomena. The lecture ends with speculation about 2 data highways in the brain