Are We Our Brains? Neuroscience and the Soul | Dr. Paul LaPenna

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2022

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 9, 2022 at Texas A&M University. The slides for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/5bv6865r. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.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	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.9	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:12.5	Today I'm going to be introducing a concept in neurology called localization.
0:21.6	Okay. And I'm going to talk about the development. a concept in neurology called localization. Okay?
0:22.6	And I'm going to talk about the development of localization throughout history.
0:27.6	And we're going to ask, does everything essentially human localized to the brain?
0:32.6	So, in a sense, are we just our brains?
0:35.6	I'm going to discuss the correlations between mental states and brain states.
0:41.3	We're going to ask some questions about this.
0:43.9	Is the mind identical to the brain?
0:46.8	Does the brain generate the mind?
0:49.6	Are the body and mind two separate substances that interact? Or none of the above. Perhaps the whole scheme is wrong.
0:59.5	We're going to then introduce Aristotelian and to mystic metaphysics. And then we're going to make
1:06.2	some concluding remarks on the human person. All right. So this is a real brain, and this is what it
1:14.8	looks like. It doesn't look that impressive, but it's a really impressive structure. So there's,
1:20.4	in this 3.3 pounds of kind of this mushroom-like texture. Has anyone ever touched one of these?
1:29.4	Yeah?
1:30.4	Yeah, there's just some folks here.
1:31.9	Fantastic.
1:33.7	So, yeah, it feels like a mushroom if you touch it.
1:36.9	And when you look at it, it doesn't look very impressive,
1:40.4	but it's very impressive.
	...

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