Mind

A product of carefully balanced chaos?  According to the last whiz that blew through here, There is no “I” anyway. From Science: Instead, consciousness might emerge from a careful balancing that causes the brain to “explore” the maximum number of unique pathways to generate meaning, he says. The researchers call this balance point “a critical point.”“[It’s] like cars exploring the streets of the city,” Tagliazucchi says. “If the cars move always in the same restrictive manner, if they move from point A to point B and back, at the end of the day you don’t really understand the city. But if the cars are thorough explorers and go through all possible parts of the city, you get a map that’s Read More ›

Cartloads of it these days at places like Big Think: Jon Kabat-Zinn: If you put people in a scanner and tell them to just do nothing; just rest in the scanner; don’t do anything at all, it turns out that there’s a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex that’s known as the default mode network that just lights up, that all of a sudden gets very, very active. I mean you’re told to do nothing and then your brain starts to use up energy a lot. A lot of ATP in this, you know, activation in the medial frontal areas. And that’s called the default mode network because when you’re told to do nothing, you default to activity Read More ›

Readers may remember Ethan Siegel, science columnist at Forbes, who went on record in December saying that string theory is not science: Although there was an entire conference on it earlier this month, spurred by a controversial opinion piece written a year ago by George Ellis and Joe Silk, the answer is very clear: no, string theory is not science. The way people are trying to turn it into science is — as Sabine Hossenfelder and Davide Castelvecchi report — by redefining what “science” is. That’s daring at a time when so many people need string theory to be science. Now he asks, also at Forbes, Is The Universe Itself Alive? … You’ve seen the analogies before: how atoms are Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” … The Salk team, while building a 3D reconstruction of rat hippocampus tissue (the memory center of the brain), noticed something unusual. In some cases, a single axon from one neuron formed two synapses reaching out to a single dendrite Read More ›

From BBC: The theory goes that although we sleep for fewer hours than other primates, the sleep that we have is of high quality so we do not need as much. To understand whether human sleep is unique, Samson and Nunn compared the sleep patterns of 21 primates, whose slumber patterns had already been analysed. Humans therefore have the deepest sleep of any primate As well as noting how long the animals slept for, they looked at how much time they spent in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is when we dream, and when our brain consolidates our memories into long-term storage. Humans slept the least. The sleepiest primates were grey mouse lemurs and night monkeys, which slept for 15 Read More ›

From New Scientist: Impulsive people may have less free will than the rest of us … A person who kills someone while driving drunk might tell the jury this: People who were deemed impulsive did indeed have shorter time intervals between their conscious awareness of the intention to act and the moment of action. The more impulsive they were, the shorter the interval. “It might suggest that maybe impulsive individuals have less time to inhibit or control their actions,” says Caspar. Maybe skip this: Aaron Schurger at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, who has worked on understanding the implications of the Libet experiment, cautions that any conclusions depend on how you interpret the various signals. His own Read More ›

Further to Consciousness? No hard problem! Your brain only tells itself it is conscious, and that is why you believe it. There, that’s settled: From Charite: Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point – the ‘point of no return’. The results of this study have been published in the journal PNAS*. … “The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that Read More ›

From scientist and novelist Michael Grazziano at the Atlantic: It’s just the brain describing itself—to itself. but … Wait … Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. Well, that one’s been tried before. As here, it involves speculations about human evolution based on one or two slender skeins of evidence. The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, Read More ›

From ABC (Australia): Who, or what, is ‘I’? It’s a question that humans have obsessed over for millennia. Philosophers continue to debate whether or not the ‘self’ exists while scientists attempt to define the seemingly indefinable. Well, isn’t it a bit like “pain”? Suppose we said: Philosophers continue to debate whether or not ‘pain’ exists while scientists attempt to define the seemingly indefinable. There is nothing indefinable about pain as far as the sufferer is concerned. But by definition one cannot objectively account for subjectivity – though one can certainly convey to other subjects what it is like. So, doubtless, with “the self.” That said, “The strange science of self” (Olivia Willis and Lynne Malcolm) recounts the case of Graham, Read More ›

In 2005, New Scientist listed the placebo effect as Number 1 among 13 things that do not make sense. Now they are trying to figure out how to harness it over there: From New Scientist: How you can harness the placebo effect … “It’s hard to believe that sham surgery can produce a long-lasting effect,” says Luana Colloca, who studies the placebo effect at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. But it can. More. We don’t make this stuff up, you know. If we had that kind of imagination, we’d be getting rich writing screenplays. See also: Royal Society meet on paradigm shift in evolution? Many of the 50 or so scientists associated with The Third Way of Evolution will attend.

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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In fact, it’s unlikely that people at New Scientist are going to do much of that themselves; it sounds more like a message intended for Everyone Else. Reviewing two new books for the Christmas trade, CultureLab: WITH the year drawing to a close, it’s time to throw out old ideas and bring in the new. Two mind-stretching books, The Secret of our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich, and The Crucible of Language by cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans, will help you do just that. Both contain powerful ideas. The first forces a rethink of what makes humans special: the answer is not that we are terribly clever or able to do much with our big brains on our own. The second Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How does our brain form creative and original ideas? If you have never been a writing coach, you will never know how often people ask that question, whether screaming in the night or crying on an editor’s shoulder. Have we found the answer via neuroscience? The researchers hypothesized that for a creative idea to be produced, the brain must activate a number of different — and perhaps even contradictory — networks. In the first part of the research, respondents were give half a minute to come up with a new, original and unexpected idea for the use of different objects. Answers which were provided infrequently received a high score for originality, while those given frequently received a low Read More ›

From New Scientist: Evolution has built bias into our brains – here are the best ways to overrule your instincts and make better decisions about everything … Understanding the often irrational factors that affect how we make decisions has been a key aim of psychologists over the past few decades – and we’re just getting to the stage where we can begin to apply their insights. More. We’d have to pay to read more. But why? If “evolution” causes us to have an irrational brain, what causes us to gain control of it? An unevolved entity? Maybe, but that’s hardly what one would expect to hear from New Scientist in a “subscription drive” feature’s blurb. One might just as well Read More ›

From Margaret Wertheim at Aeon: I feel therefore I am … Giulio Tononi’s book Phi (2012) asks the question: ‘How could mere matter generate mind?’ As a neuroscientist, Tononi says this is a mystery ‘stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief’. Nonetheless, he offers us an explanation of consciousness grounded in information theory that has been admired by both Tegmark and Koch. He wants to do for psychic phenomena what Descartes, Galileo and their heirs did for physical phenomena: he wants to explain subjective experience by generalised empirical rules, and he tells us that such experiences have shapes in a multidimensional mathematical space. Personally, I don’t have a problem with the idea that subjective experiences might have mathematical Read More ›