To test this, you’d need to somehow identify a group of patients that were going to receive some kind of very specific brain surgery, and give them a pre- and post- rationality test.
At this point I was mostly wondering if there were any motivating anecdotes such as Phineas Gage or gourmand syndrome, except with a noticeable personality change towards rationality. Someone changing his political orientation, becoming less superstitious, or gambling less as a result of an injury could be useful (and, as a caveat, all could be caused by damage that has nothing to do with rationality).
and even then you would only expect 1 in 50 or so kinds of brain surgery to remove the part that caused (say) motivated cognition, and only one in 5 or so of those to not do so much damage that you could actually detect the positive effect.
Better, use high-precision real-time brain imaging to image somebody’s brain when motivated cognition is happening, then use high-precision TMS to switch just that part off.
To test this, you’d need to somehow identify a group of patients that were going to receive some kind of very specific brain surgery, and give them a pre- and post- rationality test.
At this point I was mostly wondering if there were any motivating anecdotes such as Phineas Gage or gourmand syndrome, except with a noticeable personality change towards rationality. Someone changing his political orientation, becoming less superstitious, or gambling less as a result of an injury could be useful (and, as a caveat, all could be caused by damage that has nothing to do with rationality).
This paper on schizophrenia is interesting.
...because of the following insights ____.
and even then you would only expect 1 in 50 or so kinds of brain surgery to remove the part that caused (say) motivated cognition, and only one in 5 or so of those to not do so much damage that you could actually detect the positive effect.
Better, use high-precision real-time brain imaging to image somebody’s brain when motivated cognition is happening, then use high-precision TMS to switch just that part off.