Tags / 38 quotes from 6 sources
#neuroscience
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…
Reinforcement learning inspired by the brain
DeepMind’s algorithm is directly inspired by theories about how the human brain stores, retrieves, and learns information—called reinforcement learning. The founder of the company, Demis Hassabis, is himself a neuroscientist who began his career as a game developer. Using…
The computational stance
create artificial minds. However, despite assuming that the brain is a computational system—what philosopher Riccardo Manzotti calls “the computational stance”—neuroscience is still discovering that…
Ketanserin ends an LSD trip
Ketanserin is a powerful serotonin antagonist, which means it blocks the activity of your serotonin receptors—effectively ending your LSD trip. Ketanserin is used in clinical studies of LSD as an emergency countermeasure in case someone
Koch's caveat on definitions
However, as neuroscientist Christof Koch has remarked:
Dehaene studies mathematics in the brain
Compared to Penrose, Dehaene’s approach to the issues of consciousness and math is much more empirical. Dehaene uses the tools of cognitive psychology and the latest brain imaging techniques to isolate precise brain regions, and to analyze exactly what these regions are doing…
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…
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…
How do brains achieve useful hallucinations?
how do our brains achieve useful hallucinations? This is one of the outstanding questions for neuroscience in the coming decades. Changing the underlying assumption that the role of human intelligence is to translate information about the world into veridical representations of…
The global neuronal workspace
the global neuronal workspace, which was developed by cognitive scientist Bernard Baars.
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…
Tononi's integrated information theory
Another prominent theory is the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness put forth by University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Giulio Tononi. This theory expands on the classical information theory of Claude Shannon and
Psychedelics and the useful-hallucination theory
In the same spirit as “disorders of consciousness research,” scientists are also beginning to study the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs by using these modern brain-imaging technologies. Which theory about consciousness best supports the conception that consciousness is a form…
Brain imaging's undefined computations
Within the more empirical fields of brain imaging and experimental cognitive neuroscience, the computational assumption is interwoven into most hypotheses about the brain. In fact, in almost every brain imaging study the concepts of information and computation are deployed…
Psychedelics as tools to study consciousness
Despite revolutionary advancements in brain imaging over the last twenty years, there exist few studies on LSD and hallucinogens using modern neuroscience techniques. Researchers are now able to measure various aspects of the neural mechanisms of LSD action using objective…
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
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…
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…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Neurology must study subjective feelings
the whole science of neurology requires that we try to seek an epistemically objective scientific account of pains, anxieties, and other afflictions that patients suffer from in order that we can treat these with medical techniques. Whenever I hear philosophers and…
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…
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…
Neuroethics - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Neuroethics
Neuroethics refers to two related fields of study: What the philosopher Adina Roskies has called the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience comprises the bulk of work in neuroethics. It concerns the ethical, legal and social impact of…
Tenure Track Researcher Language In Interaction - University Of Amsterdam
Modeling language
One of the major challenges in current research on the human language system is to unify formal modelling of crucial interactive linguistic activities such as communication, learning and argumentation, with the wide-ranging experimental approaches to language found in…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
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…
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…
Pathological cases shed light on ordinary selves
Broks has written eloquently about these issues, first in magazines and newspapers, and then in his book Into the Silent Land. His prose evokes the strangeness, mysteries and paradoxes of our experiences of self, usually starting from pathological cases, but using them to shine…
Spiritual selflessness as a freak pathology
The environment seems real but unfamiliar, but they know that they are. What is it that Descartes said? I know that I am, but what is this I that I know?’ This sounds very similar to Suzanne Segal’s far longer-term experience, and to the kind of state of selflessness that many…
The fragility of our seemingly essential selves
Writers like Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks and Todd Feinberg have vividly described numerous other strange cases, often with detailed neurological explanations. Reading them, one is struck by the fragility of what we take to be permanent, essential features of our selves.
Living as an ego theorist despite neuroscience
Broks says that, despite his intellectual convictions, he lives as a ‘soul theorist’ or ‘ego theorist’ who persists with the belief in a fixed core of self. ‘I think we probably all do, because that’s the way we’ve evolved biologically and sociologically to think and behave…
The limits of neuroscience for philosophy
The limits of what neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of self was made evident to me as I read more and more about how the brain constructs a sense of self. The findings I have reported here do seem to illuminate the issue, or at least shine a light different from…
No pearl at the heart of self
There are, however, two highly significant features of the self that scientific knowledge pulls into focus. Firstly it underlines very strongly the fact that there is no pearl at the heart of self. The apparent unity of self is the result of a highly organised play of parts…
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…
Descartes' error: emotion supports reason
The legacy of Descartes has also come under attack in neuroscience, explicitly so in the case of Antonio Damasio, who called one of his books Descartes’ Error. Damasio’s target is not just the general separation of mind and body, but the distinction between reason and emotion…
Greenfield's speculations on changing identity
Greenfield has received a lot of flak from colleagues for her self-confessed speculative musings on how the very nature of human identity might change.