Mind

Remember when neurohype was supposed to replace thinking about thinking? Neuroskeptic offers a spring cleaning tip: … take this sentence about stress and the benefits of meditation. “Stress activates your amygdala, creates a red alert, activates your flight-or-fight symptoms, and heats up your system. Your thinking brain gets totally frozen and completely hijacked by your emotional brain.” Impressive – but what happens if we take out the word “brain”, and the other neuroscientific terms like “amygdala”? Then we’re left with “Stress creates a red alert, activates your flight-or-fight symptoms, and heats up your system. Your thoughts get totally frozen and completely hijacked by your emotions.” More. A normal sentence in English. If technical terms don’t tell us anything new, they’re Read More ›

From PNAS: Significance: A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis: the proposal that universal human behaviors are underpinned by strong, domain-specific, innate constraints on cognition. We use a general model of the processes that shape human behavior—learning, culture, and biological evolution—to test the evolutionary plausibility of this hypothesis. A series of analyses shows that culture radically alters the relationship between natural selection and cognition. Culture facilitates rapid biological adaptation yet rules out nativism: Behavioral universals arise that are underpinned by weak biases rather than strong innate constraints. We therefore expect culture to have dramatically shaped the evolution of the human mind, giving us innate predispositions that only weakly constrain our behavior. (public access) More. It’s sometimes hard Read More ›

Recently there has been a spate of newspaper reports extolling Denmark as the world’s happiest country. Secular liberals often point to the Scandinavian countries as an earthly paradise, when compared with what they see as a broken-down, inegalitarian, hyper-religious United States. Are they right? I decided to check out the facts, and here’s what I’ve come up with. My findings, in a nutshell 1. Latin Americans are actually the world’s happiest people; Danes are the world’s most contented people. 2. The success of Sweden and Denmark is due to its social homogeneity and its Protestant work ethic, rather than socialism. 3. Scandinavian societies are egalitarian, but they also tend to stifle individuality. 4. Denmark and Sweden have their own social Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Behind the apparent randomness of a basketball game, a process of self-organisation is actually taking place amid the teams. The interactions between team mates and opponents are constantly influencing each other while the game itself allows for creative behaviours to emerge. This phenomenon, detected by Spanish researchers after analysing over 6,000 NBA games, resembles the way in which living things must continually evolve in order to survive in nature. More. Hmmm. If the basketball players are evolving as a result of their strategies, they are keeping it a secret. In a predator-prey system, for instance, or in a natural changing environment with limited resources, species evolve in their arms race by adapting. They continuously fight and give it Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views : In Chapter 10 of his new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton argues for the proposition that language and the higher intellectual faculties — the gifts that uniquely make us human — arose by saltation. In other words, they are gifts — sudden ones. Denton’s view, as he makes clear, has precedents reaching from Alfred Russel Wallace to linguist Noam Chomsky. In a nice coincidence, Chomsky and MIT colleague Robert C. Berwick are just out with a book of their own, from MIT Press, provocatively titled Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. To be sure, Chomsky and Berwick are not advocates of Denton’s structuralist take on the theory Read More ›

From Popular Archaeology: Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple ‘Mode 1’ stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of ancient riverbanks and channel erosion sediments. The report authors state that the frequent occurrence of butchery traces on bones of large-sized herd animals, such as an ancient species of Bison, may suggest that the early human occupiers of the site had an enhanced need for meat because of changes resulting in a depletion of nutritive plants Read More ›

From the publisher’s copy for The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M.Wegner and Kurt Gray The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets–animals, machines, comatose people, god–Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm Read More ›

From David Eagleman’s review of David Gelernter’s The Tides of Mind, The problem of consciousness sits at the heart of neuroscience, and it is into this question that Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter steps with his fascinating “The Tides of Mind.” At the heart of Mr. Gelernter’s book is a critical observation often overlooked by artificial-intelligence researchers and neuroscientists alike: Your conscious experience is not just one thing. Instead, it falls on a spectrum. At one end, you’re attuned to the outside world; as you move further down the spectrum, you’re increasingly inside your own head, recalling memories and daydreaming. Each day you journey back and forth along the spectrum; your conscious experience changes hour by hour. … Mr. Gelernter Read More ›

According to yet another experimental manipulation. From ScienceDaily: “Challenging a person’s belief in free will did not seem to provide them with a conscious justification for uncooperative behavior,” Protzko said. “If it did, we should have observed fewer contributions when people were given adequate time to think about their decision on the amount to contribute. “It’s very damaging to hear that we don’t have free will,” said Protzko. “Discounting free will changes the way we see things. Yet given time, we recover and go about our lives as though nothing were different.” More. Paper. (paywall) At least in their game simulation. See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice? and “I will ” means something Read More ›

From Matthew Davidson at The Conversation: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and was proposed in 2008 by Guilio Tononi, a US-based neuroscientist. It also has one rather surprising implication: consciousness can, in principle, be found anywhere where there is the right kind of information processing going on, whether that’s in a brain or a computer. … The theory says that a physical system can give rise to consciousness if two physical postulates are met. The first is that the physical system must be very rich in information. … This brings us to the second postulate, which is that for consciousness to emerge, the physical system must also be highly integrated. … The authors report some success in testing a related idea, Read More ›

  That is, are our brains shaped for fitness, not for truth? From a review in Catholic World Report: We began…by noting that our view of consciousness is the new field upon which the academic and cultural battle between materialism, panpsychism, and transcendentalism is being waged. We now see that the outcome of this battle will not only affect our personal view of life’s purpose, the world, human dignity, and human value, but also the culture’s outlook on these important ideas and ideals. Jesus’ proclamation that ‘the truth will make you free’ (Jn. 8:32) is particularly important here—for if we and the culture falsely underestimate our purpose, dignity, value, and destiny, we will also unnecessarily restrict our freedom and potential Read More ›

From Aeon: Nigel Warburton, author of A Little History of Philosophy (2011) vs. Jules Evans, Policy Director, Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary U London: NW: I suppose this all turns on what you think philosophy is. I see philosophy as an activity of thinking critically about what we are and where we stand in relation to the world, an activity with a long and rich history. Philosophy is concerned with how things are, the limits of what we can know, and how we should live. It is anti-dogmatic and thrives on questioning assumptions. No serious philosophy is likely to leave the philosopher unchanged, but that doesn’t mean that the change will be for the better or Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our empathetic impulses — and temporarily disabling other regions that oppose those impulses — two UCLA neuroscientists are coming down on the optimistic side of human nature. “Our altruism may be more hard-wired than previously thought,” said Leonardo Christov-Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior. The findings, reported in two recent studies, also point to a possible way to make people behave in less selfish and more altruistic ways, said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a UCLA psychiatry professor. “This is potentially groundbreaking,” he said. (Abstract, paywall) More. Presumably, citizens would be force-fed AltrientsTM instead of nutrients. Otherwise, it’s hard to think of a Read More ›

[cannot locate drive] From BBC News: So Itskov is putting a slice of his fortune in to a bold plan he has devised to bypass ageing. He wants to use cutting-edge science to unlock the secrets of the human brain and then upload an individual’s mind to a computer, freeing them from the biological constraints of the body. “The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone’s personality into a completely new body,” he says. … But Itskov is far from home and dry. At Duke University, one leading neuroscientist argues that the brain’s dynamic complexity – from which the human condition emerges – cannot be replicated. “You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code Read More ›

The news that a computer program has beaten Go master Lee Se-dol in a best-of-five competition may have shocked some readers. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think it matters much at all, by telling a little story about three guys named Tom, Sam and Al. Tom has a brilliant mind. He puts his perspicacious intellect to good use by playing mentally challenging games, and he always wins. Tom’s freakish ability to win games by performing astonishing leaps of mental intuition leaves many spectators baffled. “How on earth do you do it?” they ask him, whenever he chalks up a victory against yet another hapless opponent. “It’s a strange gift I have,” Tom answers modestly. “I Read More ›