Invited address: George Paxinos
| Saturday, November 9, 2019 |
| 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM |
| Shiraz Room A & B |
Presentation
Shiraz Room A & B
Presenter(s)
Professor George Paxinos
Neuroscience Research Australia
Brain & Mind: Who is the Puppet and who the Puppeteer?
10:30 AM - 11:30 AMSummary
After presenting some of what I learned through my journey in the brain, I will address the question in the title. If the mind controls the brain, then there is FREE WILL and its corollaries, dignity and responsibility. You are king in your skull-sized kingdom. You are the architect of your destiny. If, on the other hand, the brain controls the mind, an incendiary conclusion follows: There can be no FREE WILL, no praise, no punishment and no purgatory. Our brain is the riverbed that holds and channels our stream of consciousness (Koch, 2012). It is molded by family and culture. Experience sculpts our character from the genetic material we are granted as Phidias sculpted Apollo from a block of Parian marble. Alzheimer’s disease will pay an unwelcome visit to many of us at end of life. It will disrupt the internal structure of our neurons and we will be living evidence the mind is the product of the brain and has no influence on it. Which one of us would not like to discard our depression, anxieties, obsessions, compulsions, our unrequited love? It seems the puppet is free only in as much as it loves its strings (Harris, 2012)
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George Paxinos is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow at NeuRA and Scientia Professor at UNSW. He finished high school in Ithaca, Greece, and studied at U California at Berkeley, McGill and Yale. He identified 91 hitherto unknown regions in the brain of rats and humans. He has published 57 books on the brain and spinal cord of humans and experimental animals and a novel. He constructed the first highly accurate stereotaxic coordinates and atlases for the brain of rats, mice, birds, monkeys and humans – a factor facilitating neuroscience research since the early 1980’s. Paxinos received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Australian Psychological Society and the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Australasian Neuroscience Society (ANS). Correspondingly, he is a Fellow of two learned Australian academies – the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Science. He received the Humboldt Award and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his work in neuroscience. He was president of ANS and IBRO Word Congress of Neuroscience. Works in which he is first author have been cited 75,538 times and the entirety of his scientific works has been cited 100,646 (Google Scholar, April 2019).
