In this section I have only scratched the surface of the kinds of explanations that neuroscience is
increasingly able to give of diverse kinds of thinking. Those wanting more detail should consult
textbooks and journals in cognitive neuroscience and psychopharmacology, which will provide
pointers to thousands of experiments that investigate the neural bases of perception, memory, learning,
emotion, and other mental processes. The hypothesis that minds are brains is part of a highly
successful and rapidly expanding research program that has been generating neural explanations for a
wide range of mental phenomena. Experimental methods used by this research program include not
only brain scans that can identify correlations between thinking and neural activity, but also
transcranial magnetic stimulation that can cause changes in thinking by noninvasive alteration of the
electrical activity of neurons. In this technique, electromagnetic pulses are used to disrupt neural
firing, causing changes in cognitive processes such as vision and memory.