David Eagleman: The human brain runs on conflict This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Throughout the 60s, pioneers in artificial intelligence worked late nights trying to build simple robotic programs capable of finding, fetching and stacking small wooden blocks in patterns. It was one of those apparently simple problems that turn out to be exceptionally difficult, and it led AI scientists to think: perhaps the robot could solve the problem by distributing the work among specialised subagents -- small computer programs that each bite off a piece of the problem. One computer program could be in charge of finding, another could fetch, another could solve stacking. The society-of-mind framework was a breakthrough, but, despite initial excitement, a collection of experts with divided labour has never yielded the properties of the human brain.
Eye Movements Do Not Reveal Lying: Scientific American Podcast The eyes are the windows to the soul. As such they can reveal if someone is lying, right? Cop shows, advice shows, even some organizational training courses hold that if somebody looks up and to the right, they’re probably lying. Up and to the left means they’re telling the truth. Now a study says that there is no connection between eye movement and lying. The work is in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. Researchers tested eye movement and honesty in multiple ways. The researchers also closely analyzed 52 archived news videos of real people making a public plea for the safe return of a missing relative. —Steve Mirsky [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence
What Is the Fundamental Nature of Consciousness? [Excerpt] This chapter from PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 2012) describes Tononi’s theory of consciousness as a measure of information. The brain, Tononi postulates, consists of billions of neurons: think of them as if they were transistorlike bits that, when tallied, sum to equal more than their parts. That increment above and beyond—Tononi calls it phi—represents the degree to which any being, whether human or mule, remains conscious. From the forthcoming book PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi Copyright © 2012 by Giulio Tononi Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Integrated Information: The Many and the One In which is shown that consciousness lives where information is integrated by a single entity above and beyond its parts When is an entity one entity? While musing such matters, Galileo was startled by a voice. An image came to Galileo.
Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain | Mind & Brain Zimmer: There is a lot of work lately in understanding how perception translates into action, making sense of what goes on when we make a decision to do something. Wang: Some neuroscientists who are studying these processes are interested in the idea that perhaps you could have a brain center that gathers evidence and reaches a threshold for making a commitment. There might be another brain center that expresses confidence in the decision or even the very awareness of the decision. Here’s an example that many of you may have encountered from everyday life. So you can be pretty committed to a decision yet be unaware of it. Zimmer: Mike, you’ve been working with legal scholars to try to bring insights from neuroscience to the law. When you have this basic insight, then you realize that new knowledge about who we are is going to change how we think about the law. The more immediate issue is that neuroscience is everywhere. Audience member?
MindPapers: Contents Search tips There are two kinds of search you can perform on MindPapers: All fields This mode searches for entries containing the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on MindPapers pages. Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Remember: viewing options in the menu above affect the results you get when searching. Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. The Psychology of Nakedness | Wired Science Editor’s Note: Portions of this story in italics below were found to come from LiveScience. The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers. Most of the time, this approach works well enough. If I notice someone squinting their eyes and clenching their jaw, I automatically conclude that he must be angry; if she flexes the zygomatic major – that’s what happens during a smile – then I assume she’s happy. But this intricate connection between mind theorizing and sensory perception can also prove problematic. Do people’s mental capacities fundamentally change when they remove a sweater? What does all this have to do with nakedness? PS.
How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect | Wired Science Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. Here’s where the fMRI data proved useful.
El cerebro, teatro de las emociones Antonio Damasio, neurólogo, premio Príncipe de Asturias El estudio de las emociones desde el punto de vista de las neurociencias es un campo relativamente novedoso. Antonio Damasio es uno de los pioneros en este tipo de investigaciones y una de las personas con más autoridad en el mundo para hablar sobre el tema. En esta charla con Eduard Punset, aborda desde la fisiología neuronal de las emociones hasta las consecuencias de ello para la educación. Fecha de la entrevista: 2006-04-11Lugar de la entrevista: Madrid Web personal de Damasio en la Universidad de Southern California.Información sobre Damasio en la web de la Fundación Premios Príncipe de Asturias.Entrada sobre Damasio en la Wikipedia (castellano, inglés, portugués). Eduard Punset: Dices que los sentimientos son esquivos, pero también que las emociones preceden a los sentimientos. Antonio Damasio: ¡Es cierto! EP: En las escuelas, en las instituciones o en un estadio de fútbol, a veces podemos encontrar racismo. EP: Claro… EP: Claro…
Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Las redes sociales crearán la conciencia universal – (Entrevista a Susan Grienfield, neurocientífica, La Vanguardia, 03/07/2011) | Historias de un practicante zen Tengo 61 años: la edad te hace más tú misma, pero sigo abierta a todo. Nací en Londres: estimulante. Soy profesora de Farmacología Sináptica. Mi religión es la apertura de mente. Si no curamos el alzheimer, nuestro Estado de bienestar será insostenible. Quién es mejor, Mozart o Shakespeare? Si me permite, baronesa, es una pregunta estúpida. ¡Correcto! Porque el talento no se puede medir cuantitativamente. Como si fueran pichichis de la Liga… Porque lo que les hace genios no es su cantidad de genio, sino que el suyo era único e irrepetible. Midamos el esfuerzo y premiémoslo, pero no el talento. Algo que aprendes, pero no te enseñan. Incentivemos, pues, la diversidad de talentos, el genio individual de cada uno. ¿El mediocre no lastra al brillante? No hay estudiantes mediocres, sino personas que aún no han encontrado su talento: ayudémoslos a encontrarse ¡Demonios! Me parece usted muy inteligente. Intento ser yo misma. Nunca tuve tanto talento. ¿La mediocridad es la uniformidad? ¿Por qué? ¿Cómo?
Steven Pinker - La tabla rasa A don, Judy, Leda y John. Hacer alguien tabla rasa de algo: Prescindir odesentenderse de ello, por lo comúnarbitrariamente(Definición del DRAE). La concepción que podamos tener de la naturaleza humanaafecta a todos los aspectos de nuestra vida, desde laforma en que educamos a nuestros hijos hasta las ideaspolíticas que defendemos.