Mind

Let alone the human brain. From Ed Yong at Atlantic: The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, underlies all of humanity’s scientific and artistic endeavours, and has been repeatedly described as the most complex object in the known universe. By contrast, the MOS 6502 microchip contains 3510 transistors, runs Space Invaders, and wouldn’t even be the most complex object in my pocket. We know very little about how the brain works, but we understand the chip completely. So, Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording wondered, what would happen if they studied the chip in the style of neuroscientists? How would the approaches that are being used to study the complex squishy brain fare when used on a far simpler artificial processor? Read More ›

There’s a certain haplessness to ScienceDaily. For example: Human intelligence might have evolved in response to the demands of caring for infants, new research suggests. Experts in in brain and cognitive sciences have developed a novel evolutionary model in which the development of high levels of intelligence may be driven by the demands of raising offspring. … Piantadosi and Kidd tested a novel prediction of the model that the immaturity of newborns should be strongly related to general intelligence. “What we found is that weaning time–which acts as a measure of the prematurity of the infants–was a much better predictor of primate’s intelligence than any of other measures we looked at, including brain size, which is commonly correlated with intelligence,” Read More ›

More goodness brought to us by naturalism From philosopher Stephen Cave at the Atlantic: The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate Read More ›

And is not even trying to be, according to Robert Epstein at Aeon: To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed Read More ›

From Human Genesis: So that leaves intentional burial, not necessarily because burial makes perfect sense but because everything else makes much less sense. After all, it is really hard to imagine why Homo naledi would crawl so far underground to bury their dead. If they did access the cave, they must have been able to use fire well. They must have advanced beyond just making a fire to making functional torches or lamps. The fact that these bodies were deposited over time even suggests that there was a cultural transmission going on: Older Homo naledi must have taught the younger ones where to take dead bodies and how to get into the Dinaledi chamber. As mentioned above, the intentional burial Read More ›

You’ve probably heard vaguely somewhere about oxytocin (the love drug). = Oxytocin explains why we care. Of course, that turned out not to be so years ago, We thought the hype was already dead but New Scientist seems to want to drive a stake through the heart: The “cuddle chemical”. The “moral molecule”. Oxytocin has quite a reputation – but much of what we thought about the so-called “love hormone” may be wrong. Oxytocin is made by the hypothalamus and acts on the brain, playing a role in bonding, sex and pregnancy. But findings that a sniff of the hormone is enough to make people trust each other more are being called into question after a string of studies failed to Read More ›

If humans are just meat robots, can we be rational creatures? Tim Stratton argues the case that libertarian free will is required in order to consider ourselves in any way rational – that if our decisions are solely the result of physics and chemistry, then we cannot then trust them to be rational in any significant sense. Even if naturalism were true, its being true would undercut our ability to justify the belief that it was true. Read Article

From Aeon: I had just finished giving a talk about severe brain injury, and told the story of Terry Wallis, a man in Arkansas who’d had a car accident in 1984. He survived but was left in a vegetative state, and his doctors and family thought he would be unconscious forever. Then in 2003 he began to speak. Tentatively at first, he said ‘Mom’ and then ‘Pepsi’. It was a stunning development almost two decades after he was injured. Terry’s words became the stuff of international headlines, baffling commentators who thought that recovery from the vegetative state was impossible. Why? Because the vegetative state had gained an almost iconic status in the United States, in law and in medicine, following Read More ›

One almost doesn’t expect to see a hedder like this: How Consciousness Explains Ventriloquists and Religion But there it is. Were I writing a parody of pop science writing today, I would put that in my sketch notes, then erase it, saying no, no, too obvious. Even cheerleaders for “science” don’t write like that. But there it is… and the rest follows: From neuroscientist Michael Graziano at the Atlantic: One of the more surreal examples of social perception is ventriloquism, which pits perception against cognition. Everyone in the audience knows cognitively that there’s no mind in the puppet’s wooden head, but we still can’t help falling for the illusion. The ultimate example may be our attribution of consciousness to ourselves. Read More ›

From Scientific American via Business Insider: In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along. Though the precise way in which the mind could do this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before feeling an actual touch further up our Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The researchers discovered a traveling spike generator that appears to move across the hippocampus — a part of the brain mainly associated with memory — and change direction, while generating brain waves. The generator itself, however, produces no electrical signal. “In epilepsy, we’ve thought the focus of seizures is fixed and, in severe cases, that part of the brain is surgically removed,” said Dominique Durand, Elmer Lincoln Lindseth Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Case School of Engineering and leader of the study. “But if the focus, or source, of seizures moves — as we’ve described — that’s problematic.” … The team is also trying to understand what these non-synaptic events do and whether they are relevant to processing Read More ›

From Amanda Gefter at Quanta: The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality It’s an interview with cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman on the basic theme “Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.” More. If Hoffman is correct, evolution makes science hopeless. Some people have said that for years, but we didn’t think they’d be getting their evidence from Darwin’s crowd itself. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away and Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, on new atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris’s Spirituality without Religion: There’s no “I” in “Me” (and no sense in Sam Harris) … As with nearly all of Harris’s work, the book can safely be discarded before exiting the first chapter. In Saganesque fashion (remember Cosmos, “the universe is all that is or was or ever will be”?), Harris gives us, “Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had.”(p 2) His main thesis is that the mystics of antiquity were right in denying even this. There is no self, and so there is no mind (quotes to this affect forthcoming). How does Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: The researchers found that people with more varied heart rates were able to reason in a wiser, less biased fashion about societal problems when they were instructed to reflect on a social issue from a third-person perspective. But, when the study’s participants were instructed to reason about the issue from a first-person perspective, no relationship between heart rate and wiser judgment emerged. “We already knew that people with greater variation in their heart rate show superior performance in the brain’s executive functioning such as working memory,” says Prof. Grossmann. “However, that does not necessarily mean these people are wiser – in fact, some people may use their cognitive skills to make unwise decisions. To channel their cognitive Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at the Daily Dot: Why is there so much neurobullshit around today? I think the answer is that neuroscience really has made great advances in the past few decades, and these advances have been very visible. Methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), introduced in 1990, have made it possible to measure and picture brain activity in real time. FMRI really is an amazing technology that has revolutionized neuroscience; it has also made neuroscience more accessible to the public. The trouble is that the colorful images produced by fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques are immensely compelling but often misinterpreted. Such images have led to the impression that now, for the first time, we can understand the brain, Read More ›