Topics That Should Be Studied by Scholars of Brains and Minds [Head Truth blog post]

[Laird]

Topics That Should Be Studied by Scholars of Brains and Minds

Mark Mahin
January 8, 2026
Head Truth

Mark tabulates an interesting list of relevant topics, with an explanation of the relevance of each and links to find out more about each. A few examples:

The preservation of intelligence after removal of half a brain in a hemispherectomy operation.

...the relevance of which Mark explains as:

Under the "brains make minds" idea, we should expect that removing half a brain would vastly reduce intelligence. Observations to the contrary challenge such an idea.

Another example:

The unreliability of synaptic transmission: the fact that a typical chemical synapse transmits a nerve impulse or action potential with a likelihood of 50% or less.

...the relevance of which Mark explains as:

Because the vast majority of synapses are chemical synapses, and because traversing a very small length of brain tissue requires traversing very many chemical synapses, the unreliability of synaptic transmission would seem to exclude the possibility of any reliable memory recall or accurate calculation by means of synaptic transmission.

This seems like a generally reliable list, with a few exceptions about which I'm not totally convinced (i.e., where the implications drawn don't necessarily seem to follow), and with the caveat that some of the information is new to me and I haven't fact-checked it, nor explored the links. Some of it will already be familiar to most forum members, such as veridical near-death experiences and their implications.