Mind

Six new kind of brain cells discovered, maybe don’t form until later in life From Popular Mechanics: “Just asking ‘what types of cells make up the brain’ is such a basic question… that establishing a complete census of all neuron cell types is of great importance in moving the field of neuroscience forward,” says Tolias, at Baylor College of Medicine. Most previous studies investigating the odd menagerie of brain cells have used juvenile mice, mostly because it’s easier to get high-resolution pictures of their brains. But there’s a problem: Brains keep maturing and complicating as they get older, and Jiang’s team believes that their new-found neurons might not form until adulthood. More. But stop, wait, the brain is a machine, Read More ›

From Alva Noe at NPR, we learn: For some time now, I’ve been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon. Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick’s famous claim — he called it his “astonishing hypothesis” — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. Read More ›

Thoughts spurred by ISIS, apparently. From New Scientist: What turns an ordinary person into a killer? The idea that a civilised human being might be capable of barbaric acts is so alien that we often blame our animal instincts – the older, “primitive” areas of the brain taking over and subverting their more rational counterparts. But fresh thinking turns this long-standing explanation on its head. It suggests that people perform brutal acts because the “higher”, more evolved, brain overreaches. The set of brain changes involved has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil. Yes, evil is an intelligent choice. Not a “natural” one. As Aesop’s fable tells it, the scorpion doesn’t sting because he is evil, but Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers decode patterns that make our brains human … Despite the anatomical complexity of the brain and the complexity of the human genome, most of the patterns of gene usage across all 20,000 genes could be characterized by just 32 expression patterns. While many of these patterns were similar in human and mouse, the dominant genetic model organism for biomedical research, many genes showed different patterns in human. Surprisingly, genes associated with neurons were most conserved across species, while those for the supporting glial cells showed larger differences. … “The human brain is phenomenally complex, so it is quite surprising that a small number of patterns can explain most of the gene variability across the brain,” says Christof Read More ›

As late as several decades ago, brain tissue was assumed not to regenerate, with catastrophic consequences for stroke victims, who had largely to heal on their own if they ever did. Now it is widely recognized that the brain, like any other organ, always tries to heal. But that was not without controversy. See, for example, “A Christmas tale: Neuroscientist discovers hope for stroke victims – and science establishment’s hostility” Today, however, the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society has put out a special open access issue on the subject (Volume 21 / Special Issue 10 / November 2015), focusing on the importance of continued physical activity. Comes at a good time, as increased longevity means that more people struggle Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Monkey. Scanning the brains of humans and monkeys, the research team has identified the area at the front of the brain which in both humans and monkeys recognizes when sequences of sounds occur in a legal order or in an unexpected, illegal order. Scanning the brains of humans and macaque monkeys, the research team has identified the area at the front of the brain which in both humans and monkeys recognises when sequences of sounds occur in a legal order or in an unexpected, illegal order. Professor Petkov said: “Young children learn the rules of language as they develop, even before they are able to produce language. So, we used a ‘made up’ language first developed to study Read More ›

From Mental Floss: From the outside, Elena del Peral seems to be like any other high-achieving college senior. She goofs around the campus quad of Massachusetts’ Curry College with her classmates and posts pictures on Facebook of birthday drinks with girlfriends. She holds a philanthropic job at a childhood cancer foundation and is on the dean’s list. She’s friendly, bright, and fit. Outwardly, perhaps the most provocative thing about her is that she’ll wear both a Yankees cap and a Red Sox jersey at the same time—a peacemaker among the long-standing rivals. But beneath her cap is one remarkable mind. Elena del Peral has only half a brain. She was born with very severe epilepsy which not only destroyed the Read More ›

Remember anthropologist Jonathan Marks? Author of the recent Tales of the Ex-Apes, he took issue with evolutionary psychology in an op-ed recently, at some “Darwin the future” site, where he said “And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.” No, of course not. Darwinism is only science when it produces results Darwin followers can use. Most of the time, it’s just the racket they enforce on Science Street. It’s becoming entertaining to watch who, helplessly, just pays up. Usually, the toffs with taxpayers’ money to waste. Anyway, anthropologist Barbara J. King opines, That term – ex-apes – get emphasized in the book a Read More ›

Michael Egnor, here, at Evolution News & Views: Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary argument that humans are descended from apes, the differences between humans and apes are so profound as to render the view that humans are apes abject nonsense. It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite. Nonhuman animals have a mental capacity to perceive and respond to particulars, which are specific material Read More ›

From the BBC: The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly Read More ›

From “oddball” study? From New Scientist: Doubts are emerging about one of our leading models of consciousness. It seems that brain signals thought to reflect consciousness are also generated during unconscious activity. … Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in the UK is impressed by the rigorous methods used in the study, but cautions against interpreting the P3b signal as indicative of complex cognition. “The subject isn’t doing anything that need involve complex, sustained cognitive activity,” says Seth. Still, he agrees that the study raises questions about neural correlates of consciousness. “The neural signatures of conscious processing are likely to be more complex and interesting than just a P3b,” says Seth. “[The study] is pushing us towards more Read More ›

So most neuroscientists are wrong about the brain? From Nautilus: Here’s Why Most Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain From a computational point of view, directions and distances are just numbers. And numbers, rendered in binary form, are just bit strings. It’s a profound truth of computer science that there is no such thing as information that is not in a deep sense numerical. Claude Shannon’s famous 1948 paper, which founded the field of information theory, used a symphony concert as an example of an information-transmission problem that could be treated numerically. A consequence is that it does not make sense to say that something stores information but cannot store numbers. Neuroscientists have not come to terms with this truth. Read More ›

Pearcey i author of Finding Truth, and these podcasts touch on its themes: Are Humans Simply Robots? Nancy Pearcey on the “Free Will Illusion” and “Freeloading” from Religion: Nancy Pearcey on Materialism and Human Rights Well, robots gotta freeload, right? But wait! CAN they?

From Aeon: Like IQ or EQ, there should be FQ: a freedom quotient to show how much free will we have – and how to get more It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo. There we Read More ›

From New York mag: In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we Read More ›