Mind

From neuroscientist Michael Graziano at The Atlantic: Here’s how we can construct theories that do a better job of explaining, even if they appeal less to our biases and intuitions. The brain is an information-processing machine. It takes in data, transforms it, and uses it to help guide behavior. When that machine ups and says, “Hey, I have a conscious experience of myself and the things around me,” that assertion is based on data computed in the brain. As scientists we can ask a series of basic questions. How did the machine arrive at that self-description? What’s the specific, adaptive use of that self-description? What networks in the brain compute that type of information? These are all scientifically approachable questions. Read More ›

What else to make of this, from New Scientist?: A lot of problems in today’s world are too big for our brains. An algorithm that identifies how cause and effect are linked could lead us to better solutions … Finding solutions means doing what Newton did with gravity: asking the right questions, teasing out causes and effects, and so building an intellectual framework to explain the puzzle. But how do we do that with the sheer quantity of data sloshing around in today’s world? It’s this problem that has led some to think we need to think seriously about the way we think. Only by rebooting our powers of logic and going beyond what nature has hardwired into our brain Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: A transgression can be defined as an “act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense.” Brains Behaving Badly focuses on the Western religious classifications of the “seven deadly sins:” pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Accordingly, this post will attempt to provide a few ideas relating to behaviors that many in the Western world consider to be immoral. This post is an opinion piece covering ideas involving morality, evolutionary psychology, religion and philosophy. As such, much of it is speculative, opinionated and is meant to help spark conversations involving behavior and morality, rather than serve as a definitive scientific paper on any of the subjects discussed. I believe most of Read More ›

From LiveScience: Neuroscientists and many philosophers have typically planted themselves firmly on the materialist side. But a growing number of scientists now believe that materialism cannot wholly explain the sense of “I am” that undergirds consciousness, Kuhn told the audience. One of those scientists is Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. At the event, he described a relatively recent formulation of consciousness called the integrated information theory. The idea, put forward by University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, argues that consciousness resides in an as-yet-unknown space in the universe. Integrated information theory measures consciousness by a metric, called phi, which essentially translates to how much power over Read More ›

Well, two decades have come and gone since Tom Wolfe announced that the soul had just died, and from the Guardian, a mixed review from Vaughn Bell: But Wolfe’s political biases may have served him well when considering one of the most contentious debates of the day: the role of biology in understanding violence. He mentions the Violence Initiative, a US government project to study the genetics of violent behaviour in inner cities. Already controversial, it was abandoned after the lead researcher gave a jaw-dropping speech that referred to the evolutionary basis of violence in monkeys and compared inner cities to a “jungle”. Wolfe rightly described this as being “the stupidest single word uttered by an American public official in Read More ›

As long as they are delusions caused by brain glitches: Further investigation revealed that damage to a specific area of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was linked to markedly increased mysticism. Previous research found that this brain region, located in the frontal lobes, is key to imposing inhibitions. “The frontal lobes are the most evolved areas of the human brain, and help control and make sense of the perceptual input we get from the world,” Grafman said. “When the frontal lobes’ inhibitory functions are suppressed, a door of perception can open, increasing the chances of mystical experiences.” Of course they do not mean a “door of perception” at all, as they make clear: The researchers suggested that Read More ›

From New Scientist: We may have a complex, scientific take on the unconscious mind, but as Eliexer Sternberg’s new book shows, explanations demand a nuance befitting the subject Actually, we don’t know very much about the mind at all, and there has been legitimate doubt whether the “unconscious mind” exists. The “unconscious mind” uually means an inner consciousness of which we are unaware: “Schmeazle unconsciously wanted to avoid marrying GerdyLou. That’s why he fell down the back stairs and broke his hip the night before the wedding.” Everyone but Schmeazle is apparently conscious of the reasoning powers of his unconscious. That sort of thing did fall into disrepute, for good reasons and bad ones. We oughtn’t to confuse such a Read More ›

As opposed to junk food for the mind on the brain: Last night I taught a two hour class called ‘Navigating Neuroscience’ for the Guardian Masterclass series and I had the interesting challenge of coming up with a two hour course on some key concepts to help people make better sense of brain science, how it’s discussed, and its changing place in society. As part of that, I recommended some books to give interested non-specialists a good critical introduction. I added a book after hearing some of the questions and I’ve included the list below. I’ve mentioned some of them before on Mind Hacks in their own right, but I thought they’re worth mentioning as a set. The books have Read More ›

From Jo Marchant in Nature: Study suggests how dummy pills might reduce drug doses in routine care. For some conditions — such as pain and immune disorders — trials have shown2 that it is possible to train people to respond to placebos, although this practice hasn’t made its way into clinical care. Benedetti and his colleagues wondered whether the same effect might be possible for neurological disorders. They studied 42 people with advanced Parkinson’s disease who were having electrodes implanted into their brains for a therapy called deep brain stimulation, which eases symptoms by stimulating affected brain areas directly. That surgery gave Benedetti’s team a rare opportunity to measure the activity of individual neurons in the thalamus, a brain region Read More ›

From the Guardian: The reasons are twofold: science and necessity. First, neuroscience has demonstrated conclusively that there’s far more going on in the mind than the owners of those minds are generally aware. Mark Solms, a professor of neuropsychology and psychoanalyst who has pioneered much of the effort to test Freud’s findings against the neuroscientific, often points out that the conscious mind is capable of attending to six or seven things at once, while the rest of the nervous system is performing thousands. In that light, it seems perverse to deny that much of psychic life lies over the horizon of our awareness, doubly so when you consider experiences such as dreaming and slips of the tongue, or ordeals from Read More ›

From Michael Graziano at Atlantic: This is called the attention schema theory, a theory that my lab has been developing and testing experimentally for the past five years. It’s a theory of why we insist with such certainty that we have subjective experience. Attention is fundamental. It’s present in almost all animals. To help control it, the brain evolved an attention schema. Because of the quirky information contained in the attention schema, the brain-machine claims to have a conscious experience of things. Consciousness is phantom attention. Without resorting to magic, mysticism, hard problems, or spooky soul energy, the theory explains the behavior of us humans who claim—who swear up and down and get testy when challenged—that we have a ghost Read More ›

From New York Mag: Based on this result from 2012 and a similar finding in a study with rats published in 2014, the lead researcher of the 2012 study, Aaron Schurger at INSERM in Paris, and two colleagues have written in their field’s prestige journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that it’s time for a new perspective on Libet’s results — they say that their results call “for a reevaluation and reinterpretation of a large body of work” and that for 50 years their field may have been “measuring, mapping and analyzing what may turn out to be a reliable accident: the cortical readiness potential.” And like their counterparts in Germany, these neuroscientists say the new picture is much more in Read More ›

From Scientific American: Understanding how brains work is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our times, but despite the impression sometimes given in the popular press, researchers are still a long way from some basic levels of understanding. A project recently funded by the Obama administration’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative is one of several approaches promising to deliver novel insights by developing new tools that involves a marriage of nanotechnology and optics. … We also lack knowledge regarding the “code” large numbers of cells use to communicate and interact. This is crucial, because mental phenomena likely emerge from the simultaneous activity of many thousands, or millions, of interacting neurons. In other words, neuroscientists have yet Read More ›

From Jena University: The human brain works with division of labour. Although our thinking organ excels in displaying amazing flexibility and plasticity, typically different areas of the brain take over different tasks. While words and language are mainly being processed in the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is responsible for numerical reasoning. According to previous findings, this division of labour originates from the fact that the first steps in the processing of letters and numbers are also located individually in the different hemispheres. But this is not the case, at least not when it comes to the visual processing of numbers. Neuroscientists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and of the Jena University Hospital discovered that the visual processing of Read More ›

It’s come down to this, apparently, among the no-design crowd. From Raw Story: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for why biological organisms seem so well designed to live on our planet. This process is typically described as “unintelligent” – based on random variations with no direction. But despite its success, some oppose this theory because they don’t believe living things can evolve in increments. Something as complex as the eye of an animal, they argue, must be the product of an intelligent creator. I don’t think invoking a supernatural creator can ever be a scientifically useful explanation. But what about intelligence that isn’t supernatural? Our new results, based on computer modelling, link evolutionary processes to the principles Read More ›