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| Neuroscience | type: Thematic count: 103 |
The world’s first human testing of a mind-controlled artificial limb is ready to begin.
Tags: Neuroscience, Robotics
Posted: 08.04.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
Posted: 05.28.10 | 3 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 05.03.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Although a Croatian teen had only just started studying German at school, the 13-year-old has been able to communicate fluently in German since waking up from a 24-hour coma.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 04.16.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Each day you face the highs and lows of your own state of mind, as well as the onslaught of external threats from terrorist alerts, earthquake warnings, and economic downturns. Your mind is in a constant state of arousal, and your happiness and your physical health pay the price. But Dr. Rick Hanson says that you have enormous power not only to change your frame of mind, but to physically alter your body and even the structure of your brain by taking charge of your thoughts.
Posted: 03.30.10 | 0 | AUDIO | GO TO LINK
Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level processes such as complex-pattern analysis, which can be applied to speech recognition, weather analysis and smart cars.
Posted: 02.12.10 | 1 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University. This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world. No one is sure where this feeling comes from. Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.
Posted: 02.05.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This is a mega public relations stunt - a clear case of scientific deception of the public. These simulations do not even come close to the complexity of an ant, let alone that of a cat. IBM allows Mohda to mislead the public into believing that they have simulated a brain with the complexity of a cat - sheer nonsense.
Posted: 12.07.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Knowledge of the brain is increasing exponentially. We are currently gathering as much information on the brain's structure and function each year as was gained in the entire 20th century. Neuroscientists are currently producing about 50,000 peer-reviewed articles per year. The Blue Brain project was launched in part to organize and coordinate this research.
Posted: 12.07.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Is it possible to create a complete model of the human brain? Henry Markram is well on his way, but explains that it's going to take a computer 20,000 times more powerful than any that exists today with a memory capacity 500 times the size of the Internet.
Posted: 12.06.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A study of seven terminally ill patients found identical surges in brain activity moments before death, providing what may be physiological evidence of "out of body" experiences reported by people who survive near-death ordeals.
Posted: 10.07.09 | 2 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. Web pundit Steven Johnson explains what we know about this phenomenon with a rare lucidity in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Starting with the weird behavior of the semi-colonial organisms we call slime molds, Johnson details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behavior among simple components: cells, insects, and software developers all find their place in greater schemes.
Posted: 08.25.09 | 5 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Dr. Campbell is an experienced emergency physician with a long-standing interest in mind-body medicine, the brain, and consciousness. In this podcast she shares recent discoveries from the world of neuroscience in a way that people of all backgrounds can enjoy. Dr. Campbell believes that understanding how the brain works gives us insight into what makes us human. She is also committed to showing how the scientific method has unravelled many long-standing mysteries.
Tags: Neuroscience, Ginger Campbell
Posted: 08.09.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
High levels of brain energy are required to maintain consciousness, a finding which suggests a new way to understand the properties of this still mysterious state of being, Yale University researchers report.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 06.17.09 | 4 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Norman Doidge's 2006 book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science was rightly celebrated on its initial release, and remains fascinating today. It's a chronicle of the checkered history of the theory of lifelong brain plasticity, an on-again/off-again theory that the brain's deepest, most specialized structures can be rewired to accomplish new tasks and to view the world in new ways, all through our lives.
Posted: 06.10.09 | 3 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
Posted: 05.26.09 | 6 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences.
Posted: 05.23.09 | 14 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A new article from Trends in Cognitive Sciences explores how cognitive neuroscientists are becoming increasingly interested in understanding hypnosis and are using it to simulate unusual states of consciousness in the lab.
Tags: Hypnosis, Neuroscience
Posted: 05.10.09 | 11 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."
Posted: 04.29.09 | 15 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
His resulting theory, described in his new book, "The End of Overeating," is startling. Foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain's chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat. "Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology -- what's going on in our body," he said. "The real question is what's going on in our brain."
Posted: 04.29.09 | 14 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com), each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.
Posted: 04.01.09 | 19 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In Edelman’s grand theory of the mind, consciousness is a biological phenomenon and the brain develops through a process similar to natural selection. Neurons proliferate and form connections in infancy; then experience weeds out the useless from the useful, molding the adult brain in sync with its environment.
Posted: 01.18.09 | 22 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
When you see somebody you hate, whether it's an evil ex or a mean colleague, your brain undergoes a rather unexpected transformation. A new study published in PLoS One today reveals that hatred isn't the blind, irrational emotion it might seem. In fact, hate activates the brain regions associated with higher reason and the ability to predict what other people will do.
Tags: Neuroscience, Emotion
Posted: 10.31.08 | 42 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A new imaging method that offers an unprecedented view of complex neural structures could help explain the workings of the brain and shed light on neurological diseases.
Tags: Neuroscience, Neuroimaging
Posted: 10.30.08 | 31 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Scientists are a step closer to being able to wipe the mind clean of painful memories, a deveolpment that will offer hope to those with a fear of spiders or who are trying to bury traumatic experiences.
Posted: 10.30.08 | 46 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Although humans and chimpanzees genetically vary by just 1.2 percent, that small percentage makes a world of difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species.
Tags: Neuroscience, Evolution
Posted: 10.17.08 | 36 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
I think it can, although the research is in an early stage. A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states -- including our feelings, cravings, and moods -- has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner.
Posted: 09.20.08 | 53 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This popular synthesis of a technical field in neuroscience explores how the brain constructs its models of the body. Entangled with the perception of self, these maps are multitudinous and dynamic, as experimenters have discovered. The Blakeslees ground the idea of mental maps in the work of Wilder Penfield, a 1940s researcher whose probes on the brains of living people localized which areas of the brain represent which parts of the body. Subsequently, scientists have refined the concept of body maps, a history that binds the Blakeslees' informative explanations of specific maps, case studies, and psychic disorders. Expressed in an amiable, we're-all-in-this-together manner, their tour describes one's personal space and its extension to one's clothes, tools, instruments, and sports gear. The body in motion generates its own set of changing mental maps, distinguishing the graceful from the clumsy. Maps are plastic, report the Blakeslees, yet they also have permanence: successful dieters may still feel overweight, and amputees retain a map of the missing limb. Varied and revealing, this will intrigue readers interested in the clinical perspective on self-perception
Posted: 09.20.08 | 136 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.
Posted: 09.05.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In 2001, Francis was diagnosed with colon cancer. He realized that the problem of the neural correlates of consciousness might outlast him. Francis was walking with a cane, still not waiting for anyone, nor allowing anyone to wait for him. He continued to find time for new faces in the field and continued to work on consciousness. While he had made many strides forward, he saw the race for him was winding down. He had had his hope for understanding the structure of consciousness. He had laid the groundwork. He decided to encapsulate his ideas in a “Framework” paper with Koch (Crick and Koch 2003). For many of us it was clear that he was laying out where he would go, had he enough time.
Tags: Neuroscience, Francis Crick
Posted: 09.02.08 | 40 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness.
Tags: Neuroscience, Phenomenology
Posted: 08.09.08 | 77 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.
Tags: Neuroscience, Mind/Body
Posted: 08.02.08 | 65 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
"Theory of mind" is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 07.29.08 | 29 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Neuroscientifically Challenged Mirror Neurons May Be Responsible For Global Warming US Economic Woes
To credit mirror neurons alone with a function that carries such importance, like the ability to infer the mental states of others, seems to oppose much of what has been learned thus far about neuroscience. We have never found language neurons, love neurons, or fear neurons. Instead we have found networks that spread throughout brain regions that correlate with the ability to experience these aspects of cognition. I suspect we will soon say the same about mirror neuron networks and their involvement in social interaction.
Tags: Neuroscience, Mirror Neurons
Posted: 07.29.08 | 30 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A list of unsolved problems may refer to several conjectures or open problems in various fields.
Posted: 07.18.08 | 41 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Brooks speculates: How do you talk about the unconscious or love at a Congressional Hearing? We tend to focus on what we can easily measure. Yet, what really matters is extremely emotional, unconscious, and relationship-based and, for that, we need a new vocabulary.
Posted: 07.16.08 | 61 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
The main finding of the study is that it has enabled us to confirm that tactile sensations are initially located unconsciously in anatomical coordinates, but they reach our awareness only when the brain has formed an image of their origin in the spatial coordinates, external to the body, explained Salvador Soto-Faraco. The coexistence of different spatial reference frames in the brain has been known for some time. So has the fact that confusions between them may result in some cases, such as when we invert the usual anatomical position of some body parts (e.g. when crossing our arms over the body midline).
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 07.13.08 | 36 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
For Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neuroscience at Duke University Medical Center, the backbone of mind-machine interfaces is the ability to analyze neural activity. Sure, the system demonstrated at Pitt in May accessed information from 100 neurons at once. But Nicolelis’s lab has managed five times that amount, with data coming from up to 10 different brain structures. “We’re able to look at brain dynamics on a scale that no one else has been able to,” he says.
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 07.09.08 | 32 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This week, the scientific effort to simulate out-of-body experiences to probe the limits of the self. And, remarkable stories of vision gone heywirewhat they reveal about our 'seeing brain'. Two scientists join Natasha Mitchell with extraordinary insights into how your brain creates your mind...
Posted: 06.30.08 | 35 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of indirect realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be second-hand and, worse, hidden behind a "veil of sensation"--a position that would slide easily into relativism and solipsism, presenting an ethical dilemma. In The Case for Qualia, proponents of qualia defend the Indirect Realist position and mount detailed counterarguments against opposing views.
Posted: 06.29.08 | 102 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Novelist and science writer Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer) wades bravely into the morass of modern memory research to sort the truth from a wide assortment of hyperbole and promises and platitudes. The news is mixed: most of us won't develop Alzheimer's, but everyone will suffer some memory loss. After describing the different types of memory, Halpern gamely undertakes a series of brain scans used to reveal brain damage and tries diagnostic tests that measure memory through the ability to recall words, images and smells. Researchers have identified a gene closely linked with Alzheimer's, but drugs to treat or prevent memory loss are still far from reality, Halpern says, adding that for many drug companies, the success of a remedy is measured only by how quickly it moves off the shelves.
Tags: Neuroscience, Memory
Posted: 06.15.08 | 68 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
In The Scalpel and The Soul, acclaimed Neurosurgeon Allan Hamilton shares his considerable knowledge and experience while baring his heart, soul and passion for his profession and for pursuing those unique patient occurrences that defy scientific explanation with our current knowledge of traditional western medicine. His observations and insights push the limits of current scientific knowledge as he attempts to bring some rational thought to the unexplainable. This book is thought provoking and will equally inspire the average citizen as much as it does our fellow physicians and scientists.
Posted: 06.11.08 | 72 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankins study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, Nice weather were having.
Tags: Neuroscience, The New York Times
Posted: 06.04.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
IEEE Spectrum magazine is the flagship publication of the IEEE, the world's largest professional technology association. It is a monthly magazine for technology innovators, business leaders, and the intellectually curious. Spectrum explores future technology trends and the impact of those trends on society and business.
Posted: 06.02.08 | 31 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
"Philosophers, psychologists, linguists and others have debated for centuries how the brain organises and represents meaning. But they were hampered in debating these issues because they lacked experimental data," said Mitchell. "[We have] established for the first time a direct connection between how a word is used in a large collection of typical language, and the neural activity the brain uses to represent the word's meaning."
Tags: Neuroscience, fMRI
Posted: 06.01.08 | 50 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston’s group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter. Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses.
Posted: 06.01.08 | 60 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
We have become accustomed over the past half-century to critics sending out to other disciplines for theoretical frameworks in which to place their engagement with works of literature. The results have often been dire, the work or author in question disappearing in a sea of half-comprehended or uncritically incorporated linguistics, mathematics, psychiatry, political theory, history, or whatever. Why do critics do this?
Tags: Neuroscience, Raymond Tallis
Posted: 05.28.08 | 65 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have "mirror neuron" systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling.
Posted: 05.23.08 | 62 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time and has founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain.
Posted: 05.23.08 | 57 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
The neurotech industry is engaged in a $2 trillion race to fix your brain. Many players will fail, but the payoff will be huge for those who succeed.
Tags: Neuroscience, Neuromarketing
Posted: 05.20.08 | 49 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences. We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
Posted: 05.16.08 | 46 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
From neuroscience to Nietzsche. A sobering look at how man may perceive himself in the future, particularly as ideas about genetic predeterminism takes the place of dying Darwinism.
Posted: 05.15.08 | 35 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
Posted: 05.15.08 | 71 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith. The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the authors many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 05.14.08 | 68 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The Infinite Mind is a weekly, public radio program focusing on the art and science of the human mind and spirit, behavior, and mental health. The series is hosted by Dr. Fred Goodwin, formerly the nation's "top psychiatrist" as director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and the world's leading expert on manic depression.
Posted: 05.07.08 | 57 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
"Contemplative Science is a must read for anyone interested in consciousness. Alan Wallace challenges neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and Buddhists, with lucid, provocative scholarship." -- Paul Ekman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Francisco, and author of Emotions Revealed
Posted: 05.01.08 | 57 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Human errors are often put down to a momentary loss of concentration. But it now appears that sometimes a localised change in brain activity can be involved. Not only does that change contribute towards making a mistake, but also the type of brain activity is detectable before the mistake is made. That means it could be used to help predict, and so possibly prevent, some human errors.
Tags: Neuroscience, EEG
Posted: 04.25.08 | 48 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one.
Posted: 04.15.08 | 56 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Police may soon be able to monitor suspicious brain activity from a distance as well. New neurotechnology soon may be able to detect a person who is particularly nervous, in possession of guilty knowledge or, in the more distant future, to detect a person thinking, "Only one hour until the bomb explodes." Today, the science of detecting and decoding brain activity is in its infancy. But various government agencies are funding the development of technology to detect brain activity remotely and are hoping to eventually decode what someone is thinking. Scientists, however, wildly disagree about the accuracy of brain imaging technology, what brain activity may mean and especially whether brain activity can be detected from afar.
Tags: Neuroscience, EEG
Posted: 04.14.08 | 40 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Rather than spotlighting the rococo workings of the human brain, the author highlights its bald frailty: the ease with which a tap on the head, as Mason puts it, can blow apart a life.
Posted: 04.13.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Twenty years after The Society of Mind, where he introduced the concept that "minds are what brains do," Minsky probes deeper into the question of natural intelligence. Don't look for simple explanations: he believes "we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events"; we need to break our thought processes down into the most precise steps possible. In fact, in order to truly understand the human mind, Minsky suggests, we'll probably need to reverse-engineer a machine that can replicate those functions so we can study it. Thus, he rejects the idea of consciousness as a unitary "Self" in favor of "a decentralized cloud" of more than 20 distinct mental processes. In this view, emotional states like love and shame are not the opposite of rational cogitation; both, Minsky says, are ways of thinking.
Tags: Neuroscience, Emotion
Posted: 04.11.08 | 166 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches.
Tags: Technology, Neuroscience
Posted: 04.04.08 | 42 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have used a monkey's brain activity to control a robot on the other side of the globe. In what researchers tout as a first-of-its-kind experiment, monkeys' thoughts controlled the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.
Tags: Technology, Neuroscience
Posted: 03.26.08 | 28 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Karinthys book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographicalthe entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though the technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and Journey Around My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best.
Posted: 02.29.08 | 103 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Jill Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious scientist, she watched her mind deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of the brain, her respect for the cells in her body, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 02.28.08 | 67 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained and published brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered her mind, brain and body. Having lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left brain, along with its language centers and thus ego center, Jill’s consciousness shifted away from normal reality. In the absence of her left brain’s neural circuitry, her consciousness shifted into present moment thinking whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 02.28.08 | 43 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The scientists have made a significant step into the understanding of conscious perception, by showing how single neurons in the human brain reacted to certain images.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 02.20.08 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It's probably fair to say that most philosophers of mind still ignore neuroscience and think they can get away with it. It's up to us to show them how outdated they are.
Tags: Neuroscience, Philosophy
Posted: 02.10.08 | 52 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran.
Tags: Neuroscience, V.S. Ramachandran
Posted: 01.31.08 | 44 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies.
Posted: 01.16.08 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Standing on the relatively recent achievements of the young field of cognitive science (pointing out that not so long ago, babies were considered only slightly animate vegetables--"carrots that could cry"), the authors succinctly and articulately sum up the state of what's now known about children's minds and how they learn. Using language that's both friendly and smart (and using equally accessible metaphors, everything from Scooby-Doo to The Third Man), The Scientist in the Crib explores how babies recognize and understand their fellow humans, interpret sensory input, absorb language, learn and devise theories, and take part in building their own brains.
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 01.01.08 | 85 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The automatic mind generally takes care of things like muscle control. But it also does more ethereal things. It recognizes patterns and construes situations, searching for danger, opportunities or the unexpected. It also shoves certain memories, thoughts, anxieties and emotions up into consciousness. Baseball is one of those activities that are performed mostly by the automatic mind. Professional baseball players have phenomenal automatic brains.
Tags: Neuroscience, The New York Times
Posted: 11.09.07 | 89 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This is an older story, but one that has very interesting connotations: "Neuroscience more than other disciplines is the science at the interface between modern philosophy and science," wrote one neuroscientist on the petition, Dr. Zvani Rossetti of the University of Cagliari in Italy. He added, "No opportunity should be given to anybody to use neuroscience for supporting transcendent views of the world."
Posted: 10.28.07 | 103 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Massive oversimplification: Consider that there are approximately 1 trillion neural connections in the human brain. For simplicity sake, assume that any given instant, each connection is either "on" or "off" (firing or not firing). Then the number of possible states is two raised the power of one trillion.
Tags: Neuroscience, Philosophy
Posted: 10.28.07 | 50 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A new blog from the BBC about the mind, neuroscience, consciousness and so forth.
Posted: 10.26.07 | 72 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. "You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who's next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself," he said. "(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it's a live computation device."
Tags: Technology, Neuroscience
Posted: 10.24.07 | 45 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A heartfelt and incredibly powerful meditation on Alzheimer's and how it effects both the individual who has the condition and everyone around that individual. It's not a date movie, but one that firmly plants you in the here and now of life and why you really need to enjoy every minute of what you have.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 10.22.07 | 46 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.
Posted: 10.18.07 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Microsoft applied for a patent to monitor user's brain waves to understand how good (or bad) their interfaces are.
Tags: Technology, Neuroscience
Posted: 10.15.07 | 73 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Scientists already suspected birds' eyes contain molecules that are thought to sense Earth's magnetic field. In a new study, German researchers found that these molecules are linked to an area of the brain known to process visual information.
Tags: Neuroscience, Science
Posted: 10.09.07 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An incredible article about a neuroscientist who suffers from a stroke and analyzes himself throughout the entire event.
Posted: 10.08.07 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith
Posted: 10.08.07 | 75 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A well written and informative blog combining philosophy and brain science.
Posted: 09.27.07 | 79 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
An article about how Oxytocin has an impact on social behavior. "Both our lab and the Domes lab have found that oxytocin facilitates the processing of social information gathered through at least two different sensory modalities -- that is, through both hearing and vision. This raises questions about just how oxytocin actually facilitates social cognition and theory of mind."
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 09.27.07 | 27 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In humans, oxytocin is released during orgasm in both sexes. In the brain, oxytocin is involved in social recognition and bonding, and might be involved in the formation of trust between people
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 09.27.07 | 47 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
An incredible video demonstrating what happens when a person has the connection between the left and right brains severed. It demonstrates that the brain still processes information that the consciousness is not aware of.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 09.19.07 | 86 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
Posted: 09.19.07 | 73 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The Dana Foundation Important Books on the Brain An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction and NonFiction
A very comprehensive list of books about the brain.
Tags: Neuroscience, Science
Posted: 09.19.07 | 39 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing.
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 09.19.07 | 48 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
According to the Blakeslees, body maps are created by the brain, using touch, to spell out the brain's experience of the body and the space around it.
Posted: 09.13.07 | 75 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
A very short entry on Metzinger.
Posted: 08.31.07 | 57 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Focus on the brain at Scientific American.
Tags: Neuroscience, Science
Posted: 08.31.07 | 45 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
Using fMRI's to deal with pain and other preventive type uses.
Posted: 08.28.07 | 73 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Nice overview from Discover magazine on ten big mysteries.
Tags: Neuroscience, Science
Posted: 08.23.07 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker about people who have had near death experiences and found new inspiration in experiences.
Posted: 07.21.07 | 123 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
New lie detectors using the fMRI machines are being debated.
Posted: 07.21.07 | 46 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Anti-evolutionary arguments are answered in a chapter titled "The Unintelligent Design of the Brain," in which Linden proposes that it's the brain's "weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions" that makes humans unique.
Tags: Neuroscience
Posted: 07.06.07 | 61 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
A recent paper by Massimini et al (2007) reports on how individual slow waves can be evoked during non-REM sleep with the help of transcranial magnet stimulation (TMS).
Tags: Neuroscience, Sleep
Posted: 07.03.07 | 59 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This is a PDF file of a specific study on Magical Thinking and where it originates in the brain.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 07.03.07 | 40 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Excellent resources for a wide variety of articles about consciousness and the mind.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 07.03.07 | 76 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
This post is the culmination of a month-long chronicling of the major brain computation insights of all time.
Posted: 07.03.07 | 55 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
This study, announced today and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, indicates the brain reacts to mistakes before information even gets processed consciously.
Tags: Consciousness, Neuroscience
Posted: 07.02.07 | 53 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A highly intelligent and entertainment talk by Jeff Hawkins about the brain theory and how he is working to develop artificial brain-like intelligence.
Posted: 06.26.07 | 114 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Next Show:
Monday, May 17, 2010 at 10:30pm (PDT)
| Psychology | 184 | |
| Consciousness | 144 | |
| Philosophy | 132 | |
| Religion | 116 | |
| Lucid Dreaming | 105 | |
| Neuroscience | 103 | |
| Science | 88 | |
| Out Of Body Experiences | 74 | |
| The New York Times | 74 | |
| Technology | 66 | |