Are We Our Brains? Neuroscience And The Soul | Doctor Paul LaPenna

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2023

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given on February 23, 2023 at the University of South Carolina. For more information please visit thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Paul LaPenna is a neurologist in Greenville, SC and Associate Professor of Neurology at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, Carolinas Campus. Dr. LaPenna completed his neurology residency at Indiana University School of Medicine in 2018. As a neurohospitalist, Dr. LaPenna’s skill set is focused on treatment of neurological emergencies and performing and interpreting electrophysiological studies of the brain and peripheral nervous system. As an Associate Professor of Neurology, Dr. LaPenna has won numerous teaching awards, including Clinical Medicine Professor of the neuroscience curriculum in 2019, 2020, and 2021. For the 2020-2021 academic year, Dr. LaPenna was awarded the Preceptor of the Year. For his care towards patients, he was elected to the Arnold P. Gold Humanism Honor Society in 2016. Dr. LaPenna has an interest in the relationship between science and faith—in particular, the relationship between neuroscience and the soul, the overreaching claims of science, and the dignity of the human person, to name a few. Saint Thomas Aquinas has been a major influence in Dr. LaPenna’s intellectual and faith journey. Dr. LaPenna was previously a collegiate runner and now enjoys running recreationally, hiking, and spending time outdoors. Most of all, he loves his wife Nicole and their two daughters, Catherine and Susanna.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:07.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:20.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:30.8	Okay, well, thank you for having me, everyone.
0:33.3	Really looking forward to this.
0:35.3	So I teach at a medical school, so I usually start with a clinical case. So I'm going to forward to this. So I teach at a medical school.
0:37.6	So I usually start with a clinical case.
0:40.5	So I'm going to do that here too.
0:41.8	I know that you all are not in medical school so that you're not going to know the answer to this,
0:47.4	but it's to talk about more of a general principle.
0:51.5	Okay?
0:51.7	So this was maybe three years ago.
0:56.7	There was a young woman, she was, I need to make up her biographical information for
1:01.7	HIPAA purposes, but young woman, say she's 27 years old, Hispanic, and she's right-handed.
1:10.0	Neurologists always want to know if you're right-handed or left-handed. It's important to us, but she's right-handed. Neurologists always want to know if you're right-handed or left-handed.
1:12.4	It's important to us, but she's right-handed. She was previously healthy. Maybe in the prior
1:18.2	two or three weeks, she had a little bit of a viral prodrome, upper respiratory infection,
1:25.9	and got over it and things were going well.
1:29.2	She then went, she works with young children, and she was working with these babies.
1:38.2	And one day, she just felt this irritability that she couldn't contain.
1:43.9	And she started, she was holding this baby and just screaming at it.
	...

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