http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2010/02/where-is-mind-science-gets-puzzled-and.html
Related: new docs • Where's My Mind? • `test 1016 • `test 1016Knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge.[1] It refers to a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.[2] An established discipline since 1991 (see Nonaka 1991), KM includes courses taught in the fields of business administration, information systems, management, and library and information sciences.[3][4] More recently, other fields have started contributing to KM research; these include information and media, computer science, public health, and public policy.[5] Columbia University and Kent State University offer dedicated Master of Science degrees in Knowledge Management.[6][7][8] History[edit] In 1999, the term personal knowledge management was introduced; it refers to the management of knowledge at the individual level.[14] Research[edit]
Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter — NOVA Next It’s not enough to have a brain. Consciousness—a hallmark of humans, mammals, birds, and even octopuses—is that mysterious force that makes all those neurons and synapses “tick” and merge into “you.” It’s what makes you alert and sensitive to your surroundings, and it’s what helps you see yourself as separate from everything else. uld a mind-reading machine soon be a reality? Scientists 'decode' human brainwaves By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 08:37 GMT, 18 May 2011 A 'mind-reading machine' that can display mental images is a step closer after scientists decoded brain signals related to vision, it was claimed today. Researchers from the University of Glasgow showed six volunteers images of people's faces displaying different emotions such as happiness, fear and surprise. In a series of trials, parts of the images were randomly covered so that, for example, only the eyes or mouth were visible. Nowhere to hide: A 'mind-reading machine' that displays mental images is a step closer after scientists said they have decoded brain signals related to vision
Normal distribution In probability theory, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution is a very commonly occurring continuous probability distribution—a function that tells the probability that an observation in some context will fall between any two real numbers. Normal distributions are extremely important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences for real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known.[1][2] The normal distribution is immensely useful because of the central limit theorem, which states that, under mild conditions, the mean of many random variables independently drawn from the same distribution is distributed approximately normally, irrespective of the form of the original distribution: physical quantities that are expected to be the sum of many independent processes (such as measurement errors) often have a distribution very close to the normal. The Gaussian distribution is sometimes informally called the bell curve.
Persistence Now, if your going to do something well you must be persistent at it, single minded in its delivery: you'll first find a wealth of team players willing to offer up strict advice, guidelines and then support; it's your idea, and as such, only accept sincerity, to the rest, ignore. Keep working at it ... And, dwell upon your task with focus and flow: Sooner or later, your persistence will engage them once again. They'll try to berate you for it. This will inform you that you are indeed starting to make head-way.
How We Create Reality Al Smith, Contributing WriterWaking Times Do you wonder why life is a chaotic roller coaster of both positive and negative events? Have you, like most, earnestly tried positive thinking, meditation or prayer without any tangible beneficial results? Do you stress over your quietly desperate realization that you have little control over your own life? Do you fear that most of us are floating helplessly like plankton on the waves? Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy Faith can open your mind but it can also cause your brain to shrink at a different rate, research suggests. Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in the US claim to have discovered a correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults. The study, published in the open-access science journal, Public Library of Science ONE, asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious group, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Changes in the volume of their hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, were tracked using MRI scans, over two to eight years.
Living in the Present Is a Disorder The opening titles sequence of Game of Thrones conveys a presentist style. Image: HBO We’re living in the now, we no longer have a sense of future direction, and we have a completely new relationship to time. That’s the premise of Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a sort-of update to Alvin Toffler’s influential Future Shock from decades ago. I met Rushkoff back when I was editor of the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000, when he was working on his first book about digital culture.
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in eight weeks Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter. "Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."
Decision theory Normative and descriptive decision theory[edit] Since people usually do not behave in ways consistent with axiomatic rules, often their own, leading to violations of optimality, there is a related area of study, called a positive or descriptive discipline, attempting to describe what people will actually do. Since the normative, optimal decision often creates hypotheses for testing against actual behaviour, the two fields are closely linked. Furthermore it is possible to relax the assumptions of perfect information, rationality and so forth in various ways, and produce a series of different prescriptions or predictions about behaviour, allowing for further tests of the kind of decision-making that occurs in practice. In recent decades, there has been increasing interest in what is sometimes called 'behavioral decision theory' and this has contributed to a re-evaluation of what rational decision-making requires.[1]