the brain and, and the person or the mind, as you said?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so what is really important to say is that mind and brain are very closely connected.

If we just take the, the healthy, uh, as far as, you know, we can say, the healthy situation, um, that if you put someone, for example, in an MRI scanner or you give them a task to do that uses their mind, you will see their brain light up in, in correlation with that.

So mind and brain are closely connected.

Um, the question is what is the nature of that connection? Just because they're connected doesn't mean they're identical necessarily.

... more about what you think there? So what is the basis of that for you? How does that frame your thinking around this?

It's a real privilege to be here.

So we're going to look at the question, are humans unique? What is it about us? Is there anything special that means what it is to be a human being? What exactly are we? And in order to think about the question of human uniqueness, we do need to think about what we actually are.

Are we just advanced apes that have climbed to the top of the food chain? Are we souls that will one day escape the confines of the body and float off to some higher existence? Are we machines? Are we purely material beings that will one day be replicated and superseded? And of course, there are many different answers to this question in the world at the moment.

And how we answer this question has actually huge implications, and not least for the area of healthcare.

What is the nature of the person in front of you? Whether that is in the GP surgery, on the wards, in the operating room.

What we actually believe a human being is vastly impacts how we care for a person, how we treat them and how we educate them.

about human beings.

And the implications also for neurodegenerative disease.

Do you wanna tell our viewers and listeners a bit about that?

Yeah, so I, um...

Well, I first of all, I, I, um, I came to Christian faith as a scientist studying biochemistry, um, and then I went on to move into brain imaging and, and did a PhD in functional MRI, um, which was at the University of Cambridge.

Um, and so my, my PhD was a fairly uninteresting deep dive into some of the methodology at a time when functional MRI was just getting going.

This was the late '90s.

Um, but I got to do a more interesting postdoc.

Uh, later on, I went to the Medical College of Wisconsin, and I was studying human cocaine abuse, again using functional MRI.

Hmm