Mind

From Sean Martin at  UK Express: Lead researcher Dr Sam Parnia said: “Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. “If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as ‘cardiac arrest’; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called ‘death’.” Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead. More. Natural death is usually a process, so such a finding should not seem surprising. Read More ›

In the 1980’s, some people’s lives were wrecked by false accusations made by children, people under hypnosis, etc., based on theories like “children don’t lie” or “therapy techniques can reveal truth.” Such theories were impervious to the middle ground approach: People may not be lying but that does not mean that the statements they are making are records of fact on which we should base our actions. From Julia Shaw’s guest blog at Scientific American: Just because you’re absolutely confident you remember something accurately doesn’t mean it’s true She quotes Elizabeth Loftus, a false memory researcher who played a key role in ending the late twentieth century witch hunt. According to Loftus: “The one take home message that I have Read More ›

Every so often something exquisitely stupid turns up, something worth celebrating on that account: From ScienceDaily: A new scientific study puts the final nail in the coffin of a long-standing theory to explain human’s remarkable cognitive abilities: that human evolution involved the selective expansion of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. It does so by determining that the prefrontal region of the brain which orchestrates abstract thinking, complex planning and ecision making contains the same proportion of neurons and fills the same relative volume in non-human primates as it does in humans. “People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who directed the study. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because Read More ›

From Smithsonian: A Neuroscientist Tells You What’s Wrong With Your Brain Dean Burnett’s new book, Idiot Brain, explains why your mind evolved to thwart you People should be free to write what they want, including idiocy, but these neurosciencey claims about how our brains are constantly fooled and our minds do not really grasp anything undermine the idea that adults, citizens, voters, can make valid decisions. And that has been going on for decades. Good news for long-running corrupt rackets of every kind. Less good news for responsible government. That said, Burnett notes, in response to a question, Research seems to show that more intelligent people use less brain power. Why? [Researchers were] putting people into fMRI machines and giving Read More ›

Video: [youtube SC9Hx3WpsCk] Blurb at the Amazon page for the book: >>Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a Read More ›

From Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn at Frontiers in Medicine, reviewing The Logic of Madness: A New Theory of Mental Illness … It is rational behavior in response to a compound misunderstanding of various emotions. The starting point of Blakeway’s theory is a basic algorithm that converts an emotion into an action that optimizes biological fitness. Depending upon the circumstances, an action state is driven by the emotion having the highest calculated value. He divides emotions into four categories, basic survival (e.g., fear, hunger), reproductive (e.g., lust, jealousy), social (e.g., guilt, anger), and strategic (e.g., anxiety, regret). Most of these biologically derived emotions are shared with other animals, especially chimpanzees, although there is the question of whether other animals can perform tactical Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans. … … Dennis et al. don’t quite rule out all neurogenesis in adults. However, the authors say that if human adult neurogenesis takes place, it does so at an extremely low rate: relatively speaking, it’s about 10 times lower than the rate seen in adult rodents.More. In that case, old neurons must be learning new functions because rehabilitation happens all the time. See also: Birds have more neurons than primates do. It’s unclear how neurons relate to intelligence, exactly. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Yes, this is getting a bit bistro, isn’t it? From Animals, abstraction, arithmetic and language: During the past two weeks, over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Egnor has been arguing that it is the capacity for abstract thought which distinguishes humans from other animals, and that human language arises from this capacity. While I share Dr. Egnor’s belief in human uniqueness, I have to take issue with his claim that abstraction is what separates man from the beasts. More. We ask questions about how we think, and about how animals think. No animal asks such questions. Terms like “abstraction” are human ideas; whether an animal can abstract hardly matters. He is none the worse for not caring. All Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters: Suzan Mazur: Do you have a definition for life? Mae-Wan Ho: I would define it as a quantum coherent system. It is a circular thermodynamic system that can reproduce. Suzan Mazur: How do you think about origin of life? Mae-Wan Ho: I think there was an origin of lifel If you look at water, which has been the subject of my research for a number of years – the physic o life depends on wter in a very fundamental way. Water has all the characteristics of consciousness. It’s very sensitive, it’s flexible. It responds to light. Electromagnetic fields, etc. Suzan Mazur: Have you commented about electrons and consciousness? Mae-Wan Ho: It was Alfred North Whitehead’s Read More ›

Linguist Noel Rude on Tom Wolfe: Just read Tom Wolfe’s The Origins of Speech: In the beginning was Chomsky. It was so interesting and so well written I couldn’t put it down. Michael Denton, you might remember, enlisted Noam Chomsky in his recent critique of Darwin, even as now Tom Wolfe sees Daniel L. Everett as demolishing Chomsky. American linguistics–which in the 20 th century pretty much meant world linguistics– was dominated on the one side by structuralism and on the other by functionalism (the terms generally have mutated into cognitive; linguistics). Denton shows biology to have been similarly split in the 19th century. And, as Denton also reminds us, the biological functionalists supported Darwin whereas the structuralists doubted this Read More ›

From Johns Hopkins U: Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act. Unlike most brain studies where scientists watch as people respond to cues or commands, Johns Hopkins researchers found a way to observe people’s brain activity as they made choices entirely on their own. The findings, which pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and action, are now online, and due to appear in a special October issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics “How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences. “What parts of Read More ›

From Economist: “IN THE state of nature, profit is the measure of right,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher with a dim view of human nature.More. The mag wants you to pay to find out, but we can tell you for free: We keep each other honest . See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice? Follow UD News at Twitter!

The many advances in computer technology have convinced many people that AI is real and it is coming soon. This article focuses on the concept of creativity, and what that means for the question of whether someone can actually build an “artificial intelligence” with computers. Read More

From ScienceDaily: The constant battle between pathogens and their hosts has long been recognized as a key driver of evolution, but until now scientists have not had the tools to look at these patterns globally across species and genomes. In a new study, researchers apply big-data analysis to reveal the full extent of viruses’ impact on the evolution of humans and other mammals. Their findings suggest an astonishing 30 percent of all protein adaptations since humans’ divergence with chimpanzees have been driven by viruses. … “We’re all interested in how it is that we and other organisms have evolved, and in the pressures that made us what we are,” said Petrov. “The discovery that this constant battle with viruses has Read More ›

John Searle, who is currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the world’s most highly respected philosophers. In a recent nine-minute interview with Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Searle succinctly defined the problem of free will, in laypersons’ language. Although Searle finds it difficult (as a materialist) to see how human beings could possibly possess free will, he also realizes that it’s impossible for us not to believe that we have it. If it is an illusion, then it’s one we can never hope to escape from. At the same time, Searle is withering in his criticism of “compatibilist” philosophers, who assert that even if our actions are fully determined, Read More ›