Tags / 116 quotes from 17 sources
#brain
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The closer to brains, the less belief in superintelligence
Contrast this view with that of Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis,5 who is actually building brain-machine interfaces, or BMIs. “The arguments favoring the emergence of a relativistic brain strongly suggest,” writes Nicolelis, “that the primate central nervous…
Our brains hallucinate all the time
powers of intelligence. One thing discussions on superintelligence are missing that is fundamental to human brains is hallucination. Human brains hallucinate frequently in many different circumstances, because of certain diseases and on certain types of drugs such as LSD…
The ontology of the digital
There is a strange relationship between digital ideology and the metaphysical belief that our brains also run as computations. It is as if one belief justifies the other. It would indeed be very convenient for Google if it turns out that creating artificial intelligence is just…
Is the brain computable?
One fundamental problem is that we do not understand human consciousness. Many in science and artificial intelligence assume that human consciousness is based on information or computations. Several writers have tried to tackle this assumption, most notably the British…
Irreducible subjectivity
As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory…
Grabbing a coffee cup is harder than chess
Yale University AI researcher and philosopher Drew McDermott points out that current AI systems tend to work in narrow domains and outperform humans only in areas such as chess and numerical computation, where there are clear ground rules. He says, “A robot that can walk into a…
A principle of intellectual integrity
Identify all of the assumptions upon which you base your theoretical commitments, then state these assumptions as clearly as possible, and finally examine these assumptions as critically as possible. For what it’s worth, I am quite ambivalent about this future. I love…
AI is still building wing-flapping machines
However, when studying human thought and artificial intelligence we do not have something like aerodynamics. We do not know the right physical principles and models that allow humans to think or be conscious. Right now we are convinced it is through computations, but I believe…
The Logical ½ behind computer glitches
function represented by the sloping line in the grey area very steep. Nevertheless, in practice the line between one and zero is actually rather fuzzy. This situation recurs on every circuit, which means that at any point in the computer’s processors, a Logical ½ signal can be…
Number sense is like color perception
Dehaene further likens our perception of math to how we perceive color. Color is not an objective property of the world that exists independently of human brains. Color does not exist in the world. Our brains create color when certain wavelengths of light hit our eyes, and they…
What if the brain doesn't represent the world?
Modern neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence often implicitly assume that our senses determine the contents of our conscious experience. The assumption is that the brain is primarily reflexive and simply exists to respond to the environment. The task of AI is to…
How attention filters out the gorilla
we can think of it like this: our top-down attention to our task somehow focuses our eye movements on the ball only. Even though the person in the gorilla suit passes through our field of view, our brain is not looking for a gorilla. Our visual cortex and visual system do not…
Vision as a construction of the brain
cameras that take pictures of this preexisting world. What we see is more or less what is out there in the world. What neuroscience has discovered, however, is that this is not really what is happening. Vision and conscious awareness of the world are constructions of the brain…
Vision builds a world in a fraction of a second
Hoffman says: “When we open our eyes, our visual system constructs in a fraction of a second all the shapes, depths, colors, motions, textures, and objects that we see. The computational power required for such construction is massive, but the construction is done so quickly…
Eyes only count photons
all the eye is doing is catching and counting photons. The millions of photoreceptors in our eyes only react to the number of photons they catch. Our brains then construct the colors, shapes, objects, depths, motion, or textures we see based partly on how many photons the…
Color doesn't exist outside the brain
As mentioned earlier, color is a well-known example of something that does not exist outside of our brains. There are no colors in the observer-independent physical world. The photons that hit our eyes travel in wavelengths.…
Why the apple stays red
However, an apple still looks red at the beach on a sunny day, and at your desk in your office on a rainy day. There is about a hundred times more light hitting your eye at the beach than in your office—yet the apple is still red. The redness of the apple is entirely…
The plasticity principle
even if our own private experiences are purely creations of our brains. To paraphrase the late neurobiologist (and Buddhist) Francisco Varela, we are condemned to treat the representations we experience as though they were the world. Will artificial agents that we create also…
Choosing the right data from the environment
The key to human intelligence is that our brain chooses the right data out of the environment, and then runs the right algorithms on that data. I say algorithms for lack of a better word, because I do not believe that our brains run algorithms at all.
The structures for hallucination are in all of us
The structures for hallucination are in all of us. For instance, even those who may have barely used their eyes may experience visual hallucinations on LSD. A 1963 study reported:
Huxley's reducing valve
Human perception and consciousness often hide the true complexity of the world. Aldous Huxley, after his experiences with mescaline and LSD, saw the brain like a “reducing valve” that is actually protecting us from the vast amount of information that might otherwise flood and…
Consciousness anticipates the environment
Human consciousness then is something that the brain does, but not in response to the environment. Consciousness anticipates the environment. The environment only sets certain limits on the contents of our waking consciousness—or biases us to experience our representations in a…
Long-range connections behind the global workspace
The idea of the global workspace is motivated by the fact that the frontal areas of the brain and the sensory areas at the back of the brain are long-range connections.
Global neural ignition
Global neural network “ignition,” as it is sometimes called, means that neurons across your entire brain become active in response to a stimulus. This is in contrast to when a stimulus is flashed for only twenty milliseconds, for example.
The brain as a network of networks
Our current understanding is that the brain is a complex network of networks composed of billions of neurons. Some of these have long-range feed-forward and feedback connections that enable neurons in one brain region to communicate with other neurons in other regions of the…
Consciousness as integrated information
applies it to consciousness. In a nutshell, the idea is that the level of consciousness you have is related to how many possible states your brain could be in and how tightly integrated those states are. Consciousness is, according to the IIT, the same thing as the brain…
Consciousness without central organization
organization.
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Big brains, narrow hips and the birth of parenting
But why does it take so much time and effort? Blame our big, fat, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained big…
Folic acid and the neural tube
It’s vital that this neural tube develop properly. If it doesn’t, the baby could have a protruding spinal cord or a tumor near his lower back, a condition known as spina bifida. Or the baby could grow without a complete head, a rare condition known as anencephaly. This is why…
Embryos still carry our evolutionary past
Fortunately, most babies’ brains form just fine. The brain end of the neural tube continues its construction project by creating bulges of cells that look like complex coral formations. These eventually form the large structures of the brain. Before the first month, the baby’s…
Migrating neurons like loosed bloodhounds
Cell migration reminds me of when tracking bloodhounds are suddenly loosed from the sheriff’s truck to pick up the scent of a criminal. Neurons bolt out of their ectodermal cages, crawling over one another, sniffing out molecular cues, pausing, trying out different pathways…
Fetuses turn to the outside world in late pregnancy
So the questions for prying parents become: What do fetuses know, and when do they know it? When is your baby capable of sensing, say, taps on your belly? The developmental principle to remember is this: The brain spends the first half of pregnancy setting up its…
Babies are not blank slates
Babies are highly attuned to these perceptions of safety, though they may not look it. At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up on your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing…
Einstein had a fairly average brain
What did they discover? The most surprising finding was that there was nothing surprising. Einstein had a fairly average brain. The organ had a standard internal architecture, with a few structural anomalies. The regions responsible for visuospatial cognition and math…
No two brains solve problems alike
When you examine living geniuses solving some tough problem, you do not find reassuring similarities; you find disconcerting individualities. Problem solving and sensory processing do not look the same in any two brains.
Human learning is fundamentally relational
What is strong enough, Kuhl and other researchers wondered, to keep that door from closing? Say you expose your baby, in the critical period, to a tape of someone speaking a foreign language. Does the brain stay open for phonemic business? The answer is no. How about a DVD of…
The brain learns in order to survive
First, I need to correct a misconception. Many well-meaning moms and dads think their child’s brain is interested in learning. That is not accurate. The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving. Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was…
Perception as a handshake with expectations
The second reason content is so important is that our expectations and assumptions profoundly influence our perception of reality. This is because of the brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing—and then fool you into…
Exercise boosts executive function
This rise in pediatric obesity is painful to hear in the brain science community, especially because we know so much about the relationship between physical activity and mental acuity. Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive…
Emotions versus feelings
This kind of filtering is exactly what emotions do in the brain. You’re probably used to thinking of emotions as the same thing as feelings, but to the brain, they’re not. In the textbook definition, emotions are simply the activation of neurological circuits that prioritize…
Mirror neurons and empathy
These so-called mirror neurons are scattered across the brain like tiny cellular asteroids. We recruit them, in concert with memory systems and emotional processing regions, when we encounter another person’s experiences. Neurons with mirrorlike properties come in many forms…
Not every child has equal talent for empathy
Because this type of neural activity easily can be measured, it is possible to ask if every child has an equal talent for empathy. The unsurprising answer is no. Autistic children, for example, have no ability to detect changes in people’s emotional states. They simply can’t…
Dio odia il Giappone (Douglas Coupland, M. Howatson and Anna Mioni)
La depressione chiamata umore
I parenti materni (il tuo «lato X») tendono a essere «umorali». Lo metto tra virgolette perché nessuno è autorizzato a menzionare il vero problema che affligge quell’ala della famiglia, cioè (e qui mi conviene abbassare la voce) la depressione. Ogni volta che guardi indietro…
Guidelines For The Construction, Format, And Management Of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. American National Standards Institute
Synonymy and the single preferred term
Synonymy occurs when a concept can be represented by multiple terms having the same or similar meanings. The desired content may be difficult to retrieve because it can be described by different but equivalent terminology. Words: Artificial consciousness, Biocomputers…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Strong AI as a closet dualism
For Searle, to argue anything else means you must believe in a form of dualism, the position that the mental realm has no causal connection with the physical realm. According to Searle, this is precisely the position many AI researchers take. They believe that their models have…
The mystery of conscious machinery
For Searle, the nature of the machinery required for consciousness is a mystery. He makes no claim to have an answer explaining why computers cannot support properties such as understanding and consciousness, but brains can. In contrast, Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist…
Quantum gravity and the conscious mind
If human thought comprises non-computational processes, then how is the brain supporting these processes? To answer this question, Penrose appeals to physics, and claims that the theory of quantum gravity is likely to be the kind of physics required to explain a conscious mind.
Microtubules as the seat of consciousness
The idea that quantum gravity may prove important to our understanding of consciousness predates Penrose, but he has stuck his neck out and specifically proposed that quantum gravity effects in the brain are likely to rely on microtubules – conveyor-belt-like structures inside
Fodor: the mind as task-specific modules
Fortunately, cognitive brain functions are not part of a complex mush that cannot be decomposed. Many have argued that our brain is structured rather like an interconnected set of sub-computers. Some of these sub-computers seem to work independently, which is good news for Al…
Connectionism models the mind on the brain
Connectionism gained popularity in the 1980s and is often depicted as a radical departure from the classical, symbolic approach to AI. Rather than viewing the processes of the mind as a computer program, connectionism draws a parallel between the processes of the mind and the…
Artificial neurons as activation units
The building blocks of neural networks are simplified versions of biological neurons called activation units. These units have a set of input connections and a set of output connections. These connections model the job performed by axons.
The brain computes in parallel
The brain is massively parallel, whereas most computers compute serially. This is why the brain is so fast, despite its relatively slow machinery. The property of parallelism present in neural networks makes connectionist models appealing. The manner in which they carry out the…
Artificial neurons rarely represent anything alone
Of course, neural networks themselves are built up from atomic units – artificial neurons – but these units are rarely used by the designer to represent anything in themselves.
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
For Descartes no material object is conscious
The problem for Descartes was not the general question of how a mental substance can arise out of neurobiology, because for him it cannot. His question was rather how specific mental contents such as feeling a pain can arise from the impact of an injury to my body. We think the…
How I know my dog is conscious
I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine…
Minds are just brains
The sheer implausibility of behaviorism had become an embarrassment by the 1960s and it was gradually replaced among materialist-minded philosophers by a doctrine called “physicalism,” sometimes called the “identity theory.” The physicalists said that Descartes was not wrong…
Type-type versus token-token identity
The type-type identity theory says “Every type of mental state is identical with some type of physical state.” By their own lights this is a bit sloppy, because the identity in question is between actual concrete tokens and not abstract universal types. What they meant is: for…
Black-box functionalism
The functionalists naturally wanted to know what was the nature of the inner mental brain states that enabled them to cause behavior. How did the mental states differ from other sorts of brain states? One answer was to say that this is not really a suitable question for…
The brain as a universal Turing machine
Turing, in an important mathematical result known as Turing’s Theorem, proved that there is a Universal Turing machine that can simulate the behavior of any other Turing machine. More precisely, Turing proved that there is a Universal Turing machine, UTM, such that for any…
The computational theory of mind
The collection of ideas that I have just explained contains the tools necessary to articulate the single most influential and powerful theory of the mind in the last decades of the twentieth century. The brain is a digital computer, in all probability a Universal Turing…
Computation is in the eye of the beholder
When I add two plus two to get four, that computation is not observer relative. I am doing that regardless of what anybody thinks. But when I punch: ”2+2 =” on my pocket calculator and it prints out “4” it knows nothing of computation, arithmetic, or symbols, because it knows…
Biological naturalism
Suppose an animal gets a shortage of water in its system. The shortage of water will cause “saline imbalances” in the system, because the ratio of salt to water is excessive in favor of salt. This triggers certain activities in the kidneys. The kidneys secrete rennin, and the…
Consciousness as a system-level biological feature
The worst mistake is to suppose that the common-sense distinction between mental states naïvely construed and physical states naïvely construed is an expression of some deep metaphysical distinction. On the view that I am presenting, it is not. Consciousness is a system-level…
Split-brain patients and two conscious fields
One of the ways to study consciousness is to study the pathological or degenerate forms of consciousness, and this is a method that I will use several times in this book. The split-brain patients suffered from terrible forms of epilepsy that could not be treated by the normal…
Mysterians and the mystery of consciousness
Mysterians think that consciousness is a mystery that cannot be solved by our existing scientific methods; and some mysterians think we will never be able to understand how consciousness could be explained by brain processes. Thomas Nagel5 thinks it might be possible one day to…
The building-block approach to consciousness
our present era is remarkable in that there is a large number of very able neurobiologists attempting to figure out exactly how brain processes cause conscious states. Ideally, such a research project proceeds in the three stages I mentioned earlier. First, find the neuronal…
The unified-field approach to consciousness
The second approach to the problem of consciousness, the unified-field approach, begins by taking seriously the feature of qualitative subjective unity that I mentioned earlier. For this approach, the paradigm of consciousness, the initial target of the investigation, is not…
Demystifying intentionality through biology
We are speaking, as we did about consciousness, of a certain set of biological capacities of the mind. And it is best to start with the biological capacities that are primitive—for instance, hunger, thirst, the sex drive, perception, and intentional action. In the last chapter…
Life experience and innate capacities shape our desires
If we reject the externalist’s claim that intentional content is determined by external causal chains, what then does determine intentional content? Causally speaking, I do not think there is any general answer to this question except to say that our intentional contents are…
Purchase Talks & Lectures By Alan Watts - The Works – Alan Watts Electronic University
You are god
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. (Alan Watts)
Rhizome | Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, And Cybernetics
Eno on cybernetics
One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
Every act of pity is a kind of prayer
Dead and naked he looked thinner, feebler somehow. I should’ve pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Brain dominance theory
A great deal of research has been conducted for decades on what has come to be called brain dominance theory. The findings basically indicate that each hemisphere of the brain—left and right—tends to specialize in and preside over different functions, process different kinds of…
Peak performers are visualizers
Dr. Charles Garfield has done extensive research on peak performers, both in athletics and in business. He became fascinated with peak performance in his work with the NASA program, watching the astronauts rehearse everything on earth, again and again in a simulated environment…
Leadership as a right-brain art
Management, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It’s more of an art; it’s based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you’re dealing with personal leadership issues.
Manage from the left, lead from the right
Management is the breaking down, the analysis, the sequencing, the specific application, the time-bound left-brain aspect of effective self-government. My own maxim of personal effectiveness is this: Manage from the left; lead from the right.
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Mind at Large and the reducing valve
Earlier in his essay he had referred to possibilities broached by the English philosopher C. D. Broad. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has…
LSD and the right hemisphere
For centuries, Western industrial society has overplayed the importance of the left hemisphere, referring to it as the major hemisphere, while systematically downgrading the right and calling it the minor hemisphere. The idea I was pushing around in my journal was that LSD…
Seeing sight itself
Whenever I had approached such intensity before there’d been a whirring, then cracking sound in my head; this time, however, it wasn’t sound but sight that started to disintegrate. Vision went pointillist. It began to break down into pixels. The world started to go grainy…
I am everything I behold
“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
No spooks needed: brains and the cosmos
We have not had to drag in any such spooks as mind, soul, or spirit. We have simply been talking of an interaction between physical vibrations and the brain with its various organs of sense, saying only that creatures with brains are an integral feature of the pattern which…
The stomach strike and bad politics in science
Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. Once upon a time the mouth, the hands, and the feet said to each other, “We…
All knowledge of the world is self-knowledge
Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its…
The head-tailed cat
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again…
The only true atom is the universe
“Individual” is the Latin form of the Greek “atom”—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person’s head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper…
Experiencing with more awareness
As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Saint or brain damaged: cognitive dissonance
Imagine believing someone to be a shining spiritual example, only to then conclude that they were in fact simply brain damaged. This would provoke too much ‘cognitive dissonance’: the mental discomfort caused by holding incompatible beliefs.
No centre of the self in the brain
The most important finding, which seems to be universally accepted by all researchers into the self and the brain, is that brain research has given up on the search for the pearl of self. As the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks put it to me, ‘We have this deep intuition…
The homunculus and the infinite regress
it is tempting to think that light shines on the retina and then the brain creates from this a single, three-dimensional image. But who sees this image? The temptation is to think (or perhaps more usually assume) that there is a kind of mind’s eye which inspects the image in…
Self assembled from many brain systems
So how does it all come together? It’s too soon to say that there is a definitive answer, but there are sufficient similarities between different researchers’ views to suggest that the outlines of an answer are in place. The central insight is that the sense of self is…
The neocortex is not a neural lasagne
The newest and most advanced parts of our brains are a mere 24–55 million years old, born during the Eocene and Oligocene epochs. This is the neomammalian brain, otherwise known as the neocortex or cerebral cortex. Higher brain functions like logical reasoning and episodic…
What neuroscientists agree on about the self
It would be misleading to suggest that neuroscientists speak with one voice on the self, but all the leading people in the field do seem to agree on a few key fundamentals: that higher functions of self build on and incorporate lower ones; that there is no part of the brain at…
Transient epileptic amnesia
Another example is found in people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy, in an experience called transient epileptic amnesia.
Split brains and two centres of awareness
Because normally the corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres to communicate, this presents no practical difficulty for most people. But the corpus callosum had been severed in Sperry and Gazzaniga’s patients, so this information exchange could not occur. That meant that if…
The sense of a unified self is robust
Despite these enormous upheavals, ‘sense of self is generally pretty robust,’ says Broks. The split selves of the commissurotomy patients, for instance, only emerge in specific experimental conditions. In real life, they find ways of retaining a unified experience of the world…
We don't miss what we can't access
Michael Gazzaniga explains one aspect of this when he discusses why it is that a split-brain patient ‘does not find one side of the brain missing the other’. His simple answer is that ‘we don’t miss what we no longer have access to’.
The self is not a thing but a process
The fragility and robustness of the self is therefore no paradox, but another riddle that makes perfect sense when you understand enough about it. In short, the robustness of the self lies in the fact that it is not a thing at all, but a product of the complex interaction of…
A self flexible enough for constant renovation
This means that very few, if any, parts are critical to its existence, and so it can adapt to sometimes massive losses. However, self does still depend on that functioning brain, and the wrong kind of malfunction can dramatically change it or completely destroy it. To put it…
H.M. and the varieties of memory
H.M.’s loss was an immeasurable gain to the science of memory. Experiments conducted by Milner showed that although H.M. formed no new memories, he could learn new tasks. This showed that episodic memory – recollection of facts and events – worked quite differently from…
Brains and bodies suffice for consciousness
To this we need to add another compelling fact: if you have a sufficiently complex brain and body, you will be conscious. Combined with the first fact, most people would conclude that brains and bodies are both necessary and sufficient for human consciousness: you can’t think…
Soul as light bulb, brain as socket
‘What I have argued,’ he writes, ‘… is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) – not that it will not exist.’9 Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. ‘The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an…
Multiple selves are possible in everyone
To put it in broader terms, the self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. If that’s so, then there is absolutely no reason in principle why the brain couldn’t do different things at different times. In that sense, as the philosopher Daniel…
A singular self without a singular thing
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it. It…
Neural correlates are not experiences
The second truth is that whatever thoughts and feelings are, they are not straightforwardly physical. You can’t see a memory under a microscope, and an emotion has no mass or velocity. It is true that with fMRI scanners you can see the brain activity associated with such…
The self as a verb dressed as a noun
It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them. As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, ‘your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively…
Consciousness emerges from the working brain
what does seem to be true is that consciousness does indeed emerge from complex physical events in the brain, even if we don’t know how it does so. Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there’s something…
Remaining mysteries don't justify souls
Those who hold on to the idea that something other than a functioning brain is required to create persons with a sense of self are simply not looking the evidence in the face. Just because some mysteries remain, that does not mean that everything is a mystery, and it certainly…
Brain plasticity and screen culture
‘Although most neuroscientists are familiar with the concept of what we call plasticity,’ she told me, ‘it might be that most people haven’t really grasped just how malleable their own brains are, how sensitive their brains are to the environment.’ Given that, she is fascinated…
Brain connections make each of us unique
‘When you’re born, you’re born with pretty much all the brain cells you’ll ever have, but it’s the growth of the connections between those brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. So, even if you’re a clone – that means an identical twin – you will…
Different connections, different kinds of self
Where Greenfield gets a little more speculative is when she imagines the variations in types of selves which might emerge if different kinds of connections become dominant.
The Functional Art: An Introduction To Information Graphics And Visualization
Graphics are tools for the eyes and brain
By giving numbers a proper shape, by visually encoding them, the graphic has saved you time and energy that you would otherwise waste if you had to use a table that was not designed to aid your mind. The first and main goal of any graphic and visualization is to be a tool for…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Developmental tasks can always be renegotiated
He believed it was always possible to go back and renegotiate issues from a previous stage of development. He was convinced that the tasks of each stage continue to present themselves at times of crisis in love and work throughout our lives. Though it is true that basic trust…
Urban Dictionary: Excuse Me, While I Kiss The Sky
Kiss the sky
PURPLE HAZE lyrics, from the album 'Are You Experienced?' (released in the UK on May 12, 1967) Purple haze all in my brain Lately things don't seem the same Actin' funny but I don't know why 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky Purple haze all around Don't know if I'm comin' up or…
Why The Modern World Is Bad For Your Brain (daniel J Levitin)
Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop…
Email-, facebook- and twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction
In a famous experiment, my McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine production and is the region…