A reviewer notes that Sharon Dirckx makes her case in a way that is easy for the attentive non-specialist reader to understand
Tag: brain
The Paris Zoo “blob”: What exactly IS the role of the brain in processing information?
“Polycephalum’s type of organism is thought to have existed for roughly a billion years though it has only been studied intensively in recent decades. It is technically called a “protist” (a catch-all category for life forms that are hard to classify). It makes decisions with no apparent source of intelligence.”
Birds must choose between big brains and big guts
This is further indirect evidence— not, of course, drawn out here—that the human brain did not develop the way it did simply to enable survival.
Journal Science wouldn’t publish failed replication of “liberal vs conservative” brain study
The researchers who cold not replicate that “conservatives’ brains are more attuned to threats” were dismissed by the AAAS journal Science with no reasonable explanation.
Researchers identify a new form of brain communication
If we were in the middle of an information revolution, how would you know?
This time it was a taste for fat that made us human
None of these explanations can explain what they set out to: How did the capacity for reason develop? Many life forms wish to hunt large animals but do not develop sophisticated tools and throwing skills as a result. Naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” will—one senses—always be stuck in this rut and never recognize it as a rut.
2018 AI Hype Countdown 3: Robert J. Marks on the claim, You Will Never Have Secrets Again!
AI help, not hype: Did you read about the flap they had to cut out of a volunteer’s skull?
Crows Can Be as Smart as Apes
But they have quite different brains. The intelligence doesn’t seem to reside in the details of the mechanism Studying animals’ intelligence has taught us many things. But in some ways, it has deepened the mystery of intelligence. We might have thought that intelligence, in terms of individual learning ability, would gradually increase among animals, from […]
Can culture explain why brains have become bigger?
From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on […]
Researchers: Starchy food may have aided human brain development
From ScienceDaily: A perennial topic in human evolution is, what gave humans an advantage? A logical response to the question is: Name just about anything and someone will make a case out of it. A little while ago, it was meat. This time, it’s starch. People with more copies of the AMY1 gene — and corresponding […]
Michael Egnor: Does your brain construct your conscious reality?
Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors. Part II Does your brain construct your conscious […]
New research: Human brains do not differ much from reptile brains
These findings don’t show that reptiles are secretly smart. They mainly deepen the mystery of the human mind, which traverses regions unknown to any of them without the brain being that much different.
Newly discovered tiny tunnels run from skull to brain
They may be a shortcut for the immune system. From ScienceDaily: “We always thought that immune cells from our arms and legs traveled via blood to damaged brain tissue. These findings suggest that immune cells may instead be taking a shortcut to rapidly arrive at areas of inflammation,” said Francesca Bosetti, Ph.D., program director at the […]
Mutations Degrade Inherited Intelligence
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.