Neuroscience

Here. In this way, the researchers looked back at selection events that occurred up to 500,000 years ago, revealing the evolutionary forces that shaped the dawn of modern humans, thought to be around 200,000 years ago. Most previous methods for uncovering such changes reach back only about 30,000 years, says Stephen Schaffner, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The analytical approach that Tang’s team used is promising, he adds. “It’s treating all kinds of selection in a uniform framework, and it’s also treating different eras of selection in a more or less uniform way.” But Schaffner says that further research is needed to confirm that the method is broadly applicable. Still, even the most powerful genomic-analysis Read More ›

From Huffington Post Mind Controlled Robot Arm Lets Paralyzed Man Drink a Beer on His Own … doesn’t that mean mind over matter? A man paralyzed for 13 years can finally have a drink on his own again, thanks to a robotic arm he’s able to control using his brain. More. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism but then the brain got away Follow UD News at Twitter!

Cause unknown. From Britain’s Daily Telegraph last year: It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism. But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted. One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room. One issue worth considering is that clinical death today is a defined state. A medic told News some years ago that Read More ›

Earlier discussed here. The most fulsome one is, of course, in New Scientist: For me the attacks on science were unnecessary and ill-formed. “Where in the brain is metaphor happening?” asks Hilary. “Where is accountability and free will?” These don’t show up in a fMRI scan, she says. In fact metaphor may well show up in scans and so do all sorts of interesting aspects of our inner lives, including areas where we operate theory of mind, the ability to see another person’s point of view. No one is saying that brain scans will explain consciousness, but I can’t understand those who seem to want to mock what neuroscientists are discovering. Some people are afraid that we lose something if we Read More ›

Jerome Bruner, cognitive psychologist, 96: Through research and observation, Bruner understood that human behavior is always influenced by the world and culture in which we live. His work helped move the field of psychology away from strict behaviorism and contributed to the emergence of cognitive psychology. Bruner eventually turned his attention to developmental and educational psychology, with an interest in how children learn. He argued that the goal of teaching isn’t to pass on knowledge, but to teach students to think and solve problems for themselves. He promoted a so-called “spiral curriculum,” in which students learn basic concepts and then circle back to revisit them again and again as more complicated concepts are added over time. He is credited with Read More ›

Here. Many of the benefits of mindfulness are little more than hype. Mindfulness is better than medication for treating depression. Mindfulness helps students combat negativity, focus on their homework and pay more attention in class. Mindfulness helps long-haul airline travellers avoid air rage over delays and bad service. Mindfulness gives hedge fund managers a competitive advantage. That’s what the headlines say about mindfulness. But is it really a wonder drug for the 21st century? More and more people are realizing that much (not all) of hopes placed in mindfulness are little more than hype. First, if mindfulness meditation proves a legitimate treatment, it could be harmful if used wrongly. The same is true of drugs, surgery, nutritional supplements, psychotherapy, or Read More ›

From The Guardian: Research has revealed that so-called neurobabble is surprisingly convincing – here’s a quick guide to harnessing its persuasive powers … Among the strategies offered by British neurologist Jules Montague: Make grand claims about mirror neurons For example: “Mirror neurons are the basis of human empathy, the entire emergence of human culture, and the shaping of our civilisation.” What it means: This is absolute codswallop. Mirror neurons, which fire when monkeys do something or see a fellow monkey doing it, have been called “the most hyped concept in neuroscience”. But the research is not yet proven to apply to humans. If you can shout “Parklife!” at the end of your sentence with the word “hippocampus” “or “fusiform gyrus” Read More ›

In a paywalled Wall Street Journal story, theory of mind researcher Alison Gopnik informs us that “Young children develop the concept of free will in the short period between ages 4 and 6.” Here’s a free copy from her site: Along with Tamar Kushnir and Nadia Chernyak at Cornell University and Henry Wellman at the University of Michigan, my lab at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to see what children age 4 and 6 think about free will. The children had no difficulty understanding the first sense of free will: They said that Johnny could walk through the doorway, or not, if the door was open, but he couldn’t go through a closed door. But the 4-year-olds didn’t Read More ›

From New Scientist: The term “parapsychology” can raise eyebrows. Do you encounter opposition to what you do? There is occult baggage attached to the field, which is really not related to what we actually do. We are scientists. Sometimes other scientists describe parapsychology as a pseudoscience, and that’s unfair. I’ll stick my neck out and say that the methodological standards of parapsychologists are sometimes higher than those of psychologists. For example, since 2012 I’ve been operating a parapsychology study registry; psychologists are only now starting to take study registration seriously. Parapsychologists are making extraordinary claims, so we have to ensure our research eliminates as many artefacts and normal explanations as we can. … Then it trails off into subscription brushland… Read More ›

From New Scientist: Until recently, the consensus has leaned towards a very Darwinian story. In this scenario, sometime around 600 million years ago, the common ancestor to all animals gave rise to some organisms with simple neural networks. Central nervous systems arose later, allowing for greater coordination and more complex behaviours. These perhaps started out as tight balls of neurons, but eventually gave rise to the magnificently complex primate brain. The story was somewhat turned on its head by the recent whole genome sequence of comb jellies. These small marine animals look like jellyfish but in fact seem to be only distantly related. They use a neural network just beneath their skin and a brain-like knot of neurons at one Read More ›

From The Register: Neurobabble makes nonsense brain ‘science’ more believable Neuroscientific explanations of human behaviour appeal to people because we’re suckers for simplified, mechanistic brain-centred explanations – even if they’re rubbish or don’t make sense. A droll study by four psychologists tested psychological statements and placed them alongside “irrelevant” information from neuroimaging fMRI scans, to “ask whether such superfluous neuroscience information increases the perceived quality of psychological explanations and begin to explore the possible mechanisms underlying this effect”. They also tested participants’ analytical skills. Some of the psychological insights were well founded, while some were rubbish. Did the inclusion of neuroimaging fMRI make the rubbish sound more authoritative? Apparently so. “Across four experiments, the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information made Read More ›

Here: Our fascination with the brain seems to come from a longing to make psychology more like a hard science and hence, we assume, more useful. Physics gave us electricity, skyscrapers, and the Internet. Chemistry gave us medicine and more fresh food. Psychology is still taking baby steps, designing empirical tests of unsurprising observations. It may be too much to expect science to reliably save marriages, but how desperately we need the secret to stopping people from burning others alive. More. Psychology is like looking in a mirror and expecting objectivity. See also: The human mind Follow UD News at Twitter!

To “the Singularity”? Science writer John Horgan interviews Neuroskeptic (Discover) It’s a wonder anyone is asking. Aren’t we still baffled as to what consciousness is? Perceptronium vs. the immateriality and consciousness? We might usefully decide first what we are trying to upload. See also: Why the human mind continue to baffle

From New Scientist: Big money is being spent on initiatives like the European Union’s Human Brain Project. Will people hoping to learn about consciousness be disappointed? Absolutely. From what I hear, some of that project’s neuroscientists are disappointed because it isn’t nearly strong enough in asking cognitive questions. It is asking the basic, materialistic questions – such as which cells connect with what, or which chemicals are diffusing – but these basic questions aren’t the only important ones. More. See also: Why studies of the human mind go nowhere.

Yeah. Here. You wouldn’t even think the concept still existed, if Darwin were right: The fact is that we don’t “make” anything of our compulsions, or use them to “realize the self”. We have no ability to “realize” our self; all we can do is rationalize what we do and re-brand it as “freedom” so people don’t get scared. So Eagleton’s simply engaging in nonsense when he says stuff like this: Freedom is not a question of being released from the forces that shape us, but a matter of what we make of them. The world, however, is now divided down the middle between off-the-wall libertarians who deny the reality of such forces, and full-blooded determinists such as the US Read More ›