Mind

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: In a stunning discovery, a team of archaeologists in Australia has found extensive remains of a sophisticated human community living 50,000 years ago. The remains were found in a rock shelter in the continent’s arid southern interior. Packed with a range of tools, decorative pigments, and animal bones, the shelter is a wide, roomy space located in the Flinders Ranges, which are the ancestral lands of the Adnyamathanha. The find overturns previous hypotheses of how humans colonized Australia, and it also proves that they interacted with now-extinct megafauna that ranged across the continent. Dubbed the Warratyi site, the rock shelter sits above a landscape criss-crossed with deep gorges that would have flowed with water Read More ›

From Sean Martin at Daily Express: While scientists are still unsure about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizona’s Stuart Hameroff believes that it is merely information stored at a quantum level. British physicist Sir Roger Penrose agrees and believes he and his team have found evidence that protein-based microtubules – a structural component of human cells – carry quantum information – information stored at a sub-atomic level. More. Couple thoughts: 1. To say that there is no good or even reasonable theory of consciousness would be to shower the discipline with unearned praise. The ”perceptronium” thesis gives some sense of that, but there are other gems out there. 2. No one knows how to relate information to matter Read More ›

From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: In recent years it has become clear that hallucinations are much more than a rare symptom of mental illness or the result of mind-altering drugs. Their appearance in those of sound mind has led to a better understanding of how the brain can create a world that doesn’t really exist. More surprising, perhaps, is the role they may play in our perceptions of the real world. As researchers explore what is happening in the brain, they are beginning to wonder: do hallucinations make up the very fabric of our reality? (paywall) More. Of course in a world where the war on falsifiability is the new cosmology, objectivity is just evidence that a guy is Read More ›

From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Newly made cells in the brains of mice adopt a more complex morphology and connectivity when the animals encounter an unusual environment than if their experiences are run-of-the-mill. Researchers have now figured out just how that happens. According to a study published today (October 27) in Science, a particular type of cell—called an interneuron—in the hippocampus processes the animals’ experiences and subsequently shapes the newly formed neurons. … Most of the cells in the adult mammalian brain are mature and don’t divide, but in a few regions, including an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, neurogenesis occurs. The dentate gyrus is thought to be involved in the formation of new memories. In Read More ›

From ecosystem scientist Sean Nee at The Conversation: [Contention 1:] We humans like to think of ourselves as on the top of the heap compared to all the other living things on our planet. Life has evolved over three billion years from simple one-celled creatures through to multicellular plants and animals coming in all shapes and sizes and abilities. In addition to growing ecological complexity, over the history of life we’ve also seen the evolution of intelligence, complex societies and technological invention, until we arrive today at people flying around the world at 35,000 feet discussing the in-flight movie. Yes. It’s almost like we are in charge of the planet, at least morally and intellectually. Researchers assumed that that meant Read More ›

A recent article tries to tackle some important and often-missed points of social psychology. [Unbridled skepticism] has given rise to a belief that what we think about ourselves and our lives together cannot be held with any confidence until objective, scientific insight into these problems is obtained. The result of taking such a stance on our knowledge in this realm is that we become thoroughly unsure of the only seat of experience available to us: ourselves. Doubt penetrates to the deepest level such that we begin to wonder if we are merely mirages, and the scientific method is seen as the sole means of reassurance that this is not the case. In consequence, the prospect of making genuine discoveries, ones Read More ›

From Edwin Cartlidge at Physics World: Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people’s brains varies according to individuals’ conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain’s “entropy”. Statistical mechanics is very good at explaining the macroscopic thermodynamic properties of physical systems in terms of the behaviour of those systems’ microscopic constituent particles. Emboldened by this success, physicists have increasingly been trying to do a similar thing with the brain: namely, using statistical mechanics to model networks of neurons. Key to this Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study is the first to demonstrate beneficial placebo effect for lower back pain sufferers who knew they were taking ‘fake pills.’ Patients who knowingly took placebos reported 30 percent less pain and 29 percent reduction in disability compared to control group. ‘Open-labeling’ addresses longtime ethical dilemma, allowing patients to choose placebo treatments with informed consent. … “These findings turn our understanding of the placebo effect on its head,” said joint senior author Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This new research demonstrates that the placebo effect is not necessarily elicited by patients’ conscious Read More ›

From Amy Ellis Nutt at Washington Post: For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch in his mind-controlled robotic arm. For the cutting-edge experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, electrodes smaller than a grain of sand were implanted in the sensory cortex of the man’s brain. The electrodes received signals from a robot arm. When a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the man felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand, effectively bypassing his damaged spinal cord. The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with 30-year-old Nathan Copeland, offer a breakthrough in the restoration Read More ›

Oh, and the mind is an illusion that the meat somehow produces? A new book noted at Springer seems poised to try: Many believe that the language and concepts of philosophy will eventually be superseded by those of neuroscience. This collection of essays questions this assumption and attempts to show how philosophy can contribute to real explanatory progress in neuroscience while remaining faithful to the full complexity of the phenomena of life and mind. The general orientation of the volume is Aristotelian, as it seeks to promote a non-reductive understanding of subjectivity that is firmly rooted in biology, paying close attention to the special formal and material properties of living systems. However, its contributors represent a diversity of perspectives and Read More ›

From Phys.org: Physicists have implemented the first experimental demonstration of everlasting quantum coherence—the phenomenon that occurs when a quantum system exists in a superposition of two or more states at once. Typically, quantum coherence lasts for only a fraction of a second before decoherence destroys the effect due to interactions between the quantum system and its surrounding environment. The collaboration of physicists, led by Gerardo Adesso at The University of Nottingham and with members from the UK, Brazil, Italy, and Germany, have published a paper on the demonstration of the extreme resilience of quantum coherence in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. “Quantum properties can be exploited for disruptive technologies but are typically very fragile,” Adesso told Phys.org. “Here Read More ›

… because we aren’t really anyone anyway, says neuroscientist. From Cody Delistraty, interviewing neurocientist Thomas Metzinger (Being No One, 2003) at Nautilus: We know there is a robust experience of self-consciousness; I don’t doubt this. The question is how could something like that emerge in evolution in an information-processing system like the human brain? Can we at all conceive of that being possible? Many philosophers would have said no, that’s something irreducibly subjective. In Being No One I tried to show how the sense of self, the robust experience of being someone, could emerge in a natural way in the course of many millions of years of evolution. The question was how to arrive at a novel theory of self-consciousness, Read More ›

From neuroscience PhD student Joel Frohlich at Psychology Today: While it is impossible to ever truly breach this epistemological hurdle, most of us operate on the assumption that other minds exist and individuals with behavior similar to our own experience the world as we do. Accepting this axiom, meaningful questions may be asked: Which brain architectures best support consciousness? Why does consciousness feel like “one thing” despite containing so much information? Why does consciousness vanish during seizures? Why do cerebellar lesions minimally impact consciousness? Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has developed a system to answer these questions using the framework of information theory. In this context, information is a reduction in uncertainty, as in knowing the value of a variable with many Read More ›

From Debra Heine at Townhall: A child genius in Pennsylvania is studying to be an astrophysicist so he can become the person who finally proves the existence of God. Nine-year-old William Maillis graduated from high school in May and is now attending a community college as he develops his theories as to how the universe was created. … William’s parents, Peter and Nancy Maillis, also have a daughter, 29, and son, 26. “[William] was our 17-year-surprise,” the elder Maillis said. He told People that he realized William was advanced when he “started accurately identifying numbers at 6 months old and speaking in complete sentences at just 7 months old.” Priceless: William’s parent’s are allowing him to decide for himself what Read More ›

From Julien d’Huy at Scientific American: Although the animals and the constellations may differ, the basic structure of the story does not. These sagas all belong to a family of myths known as the Cosmic Hunt that spread far and wide in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas among people who lived more than 15,000 years ago. Every version of the Cosmic Hunt shares a core story line—a man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals, and the creatures are changed into constellations. Folklorists, anthropologists, ethnologists and linguists have long puzzled over why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar. In recent years a promising scientific approach to Read More ›