Sartre’s Existentialism and Current Neuroscience Research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65828/mmnn7b86Abstract
Sartre's brilliant and indefatigable investigations of consciousness are less well read than they used to be. But the advent of positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and magnetoencephalography has enabled neuroscientist to look at the functioning brain during tasks requiring consciousness, and they are ratifying many of the insights that Sartre obtained from phenomenology. This paper reviews these, and introduces a self-propelling, flock living machine as an illustration of them, and of the basics of being human that Sartre set out, principally in the early phase of his career culminating in 'Being and Nothingness'.
Complete access to the full archive of articles is available with SEA membership. Existing members: please log in with your membership password to view full text. Non-members can buy a single article or issue by registering an account on this website, then selecting a padlocked full text button to purchase.
References
Baars.B. (1997). Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, 292-309.
Bhatt, M. & Camerer, C. F. (2005). Self-referential thinking and equilibrium as states of mind in games: fMRI evidence. Games and Economic Behavior, 52, 424-459. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2005.03.007
Brothers, L. (1990). The social brain: a project for integrating primate behaviour and neurophysiology in a new domain. Concepts in Neuroscience, 15, 27-51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3077.003.0029
Cheng, D. T., Knight, D. C., Smith, C. N., & Helmstetter, F. J. (2006). Human amygdala activity during the expression of fear responses. Behav.Neurosci, 120, 1187-1195. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7044.120.5.1187
du, B. F., Levy, R., Volle, E., Seassau, M., Duffau, H., Kinkingnehun, S. et al. (2006). Functions of the left superior frontal gyrus in humans: a lesion study. Brain, 129, 3315-3328. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awl244
Eippert, F., Veit, R., Weiskopf, N., Erb, M., Birbaumer, N., & Anders, S. (2007). Regulation of emotional responses elicited by threat-related stimuli. Hum.Brain Mapp., 28, 409-423. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.20291
Etkin, A. & Wager, T. D. (2007). Functional Neuroimaging of Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis of Emotional Processing in PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Specific Phobia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164, 1476-1488. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2007.07030504
Frischen, A., Bayliss, A. P., & Tipper, S. P. (2007). Gaze Cueing of Attention: Visual Attention, Social Cognition, and Individual Differences. [Article]. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 694-724. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.4.694
Greene, J. & Cohen, J. (2004). For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything. Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London.Series B: Biological Sciences 359, 1775-1785. Ref Type: Journal (Full) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1546
Herrington, J. D., Mohanty, A., Koven, N. S., Fisher, J. E., Stewart, J. L., Banich, M. T. et al. (2005). Emotion-modulated performance and activity in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Emotion, 5, 200-207. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.5.2.200
Lloyd-Jones, T. J., Brown, C., & Clarke, S. (2006). Verbal overshadowing of perceptual discrimination. Psychon.Bull.Rev., 13, 269-274. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03193842
Morin, A. & Michaud, J. (2007). Self-awareness and the left inferior frontal gyrus: Inner speech use during self-related processing. Brain Research Bulletin, 74, 387-396. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresbull.2007.06.013
Osaka, N., Otsuka, Y., Hirose, N., Ikeda, T., Mima, T., Fukuyama, H. et al. (2007). Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) applied to left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex disrupts verbal working memory performance in humans. Neuroscience Letters, 418, 232-235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2007.01.087
Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, D. A., Cortese, B. M., Seraji-Bozorgzad, N., Tancer, M. E., & Moore, G. J. (2005a). Anterior cingulate neurochemistry in social anxiety disorder: 1H-MRS at 4 Tesla. Neuroreport, 16, 183-186. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1097/00001756-200502080-00024
Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, D. A., Nathan, P. J., Moore, G. J., Uhde, T. W., & Tancer, M. E. (2005b). Neural substrates for voluntary suppression of negative affect: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Biol.Psychiatry, 57, 210-219. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2004.10.030
Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, D. A., Nathan, P. J., & Tancer, M. E. (2006). Association between amygdala hyperactivity to harsh faces and severity of social anxiety in generalized social phobia. Biol.Psychiatry, 59, 424-429. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.08.012
Sartre, J.-P. (1965). What is literature? New York: Harper and Row.
Sartre, J.-P. (1969a). Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203827123
Sartre, J.-P. (1969b). Nausea. London: Penguin.
Sartre, J.-P. (1974). Between existentialism and Marxism. New York: Pantheon.
Sartre, J.-P. (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason. (vols. 1) London: Verso. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511779497.008
Tantam, D. (2003). The flavour of emotions. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 76, 23-45. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1348/14760830260569229
Taylor, S. F., Welsh, R. C., Wager, T. D., Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, K. D., & Gehring, W. J. (2004). A functional neuroimaging study of motivation and executive function. Neuroimage., 21, 1045-1054. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.10.032
Troiani, V., Ash, S., Reilly, J., & Grossman, M. (2006). The neural correlates of narrative discourse: An investigation using arterial spin-labeling. Brain and Language, 99, 191-192. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2006.06.110
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5824.001.0001
Whissell, C. (1996). Readers' opinions of romantic poetry are consistent with emotional measures based on the Dictionary of Affect in Language. Percept.Mot.Skills 2003.Jun., 990-992. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.96.3.990-992


