Why it's time to lay the selfish gene to rest – David Dobbs. A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named Steve Rogers was describing these two creatures — one elegant, modest, and well-mannered, the other a soccer hooligan. The grasshopper, he noted, sports long legs and wings, walks low and slow, and dines discreetly in solitude. The locust scurries hurriedly and hoggishly on short, crooked legs and joins hungrily with others to form swarms that darken the sky and descend to chew the farmer’s fields bare.
Related, yes, just as grasshoppers and crickets are. But even someone as insect-ignorant as I could see that the hopper and the locust were radically different animals — different species, doubtless, possibly different genera. How does this happen? Why? It should. A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious - Wired Science. WIRED: How do you square what you believe about animal consciousness with how they're used in experiments? Koch: There are two things to put in perspective. First, there are vastly more animals being eaten at McDonald's every day. The number of animals used in research pales in comparison to the number used for flesh.
And we need basic brain research to understand the brain's mechanisms. WIRED: Getting back to the theory, is your version of panpsychism truly scientific rather than metaphysical? Koch: In principle, in all sorts of ways. The theory also says you can have simple systems that are conscious, and complex systems that are not. The more relevant question, to me as a scientist, is how can I disprove the theory today. WIRED: I still can't shake the feeling that consciousness arising through integrated information is — arbitrary, somehow. Koch: If you think about any explanation of anything, how far back does it go?
With consciousness, it's ultimately going to be like that. How to Build a Happier Brain - Julie Beck. There is a motif, in fiction and in life, of people having wonderful things happen to them, but still ending up unhappy. We can adapt to anything, it seems—you can get your dream job, marry a wonderful human, finally get 1 million dollars or Twitter followers—eventually we acclimate and find new things to complain about. If you want to look at it on a micro level, take an average day. You go to work; make some money; eat some food; interact with friends, family or co-workers; go home; and watch some TV. Nothing particularly bad happens, but you still can’t shake a feeling of stress, or worry, or inadequacy, or loneliness. According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. I spoke with Hanson about this practice, which he calls “taking in the good,” and how evolution optimized our brains for survival, but not necessarily happiness.
“Taking in the good” is the central idea of your book. Do you want to explain how that actually works in terms of brain structure? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - Download free content from Oxford University. Social group may be key to fostering creativity. (Phys.org) —Creativity and genius are commonly seen as attributes of an individual, but new research indicates the role played by the surrounding group may be just as important. Shared group membership, or lack of it, motivates individuals to rise to particular creative challenges, says Professor Alex Haslam from the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland. "Shared group membership provides a basis for certain forms of originality to be recognised, or disregarded," said Dr Haslam, who collaborated with international colleagues on a paper published recently in the Personality and Social Psychology Review.
"Our research supports the argument that geniuses and creative people are very much products of the groups and societies within which they are located. " Typically it is assumed that genius and creativity are the product of the exceptional genes and personality of the individual. "Yet punk only makes sense with reference to what it is breaking away from. Well-connected hemispheres of Einstein's brain may have sparked his brilliance. The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain were unusually well connected to each other and may have contributed to his brilliance, according to a new study conducted in part by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk. "This study, more than any other to date, really gets at the 'inside' of Einstein's brain," Falk said.
"It provides new information that helps make sense of what is known about the surface of Einstein's brain. " The study, "The Corpus Callosum of Albert Einstein's Brain: Another Clue to His High Intelligence," was published in the journal Brain. Lead author Weiwei Men of East China Normal University's Department of Physics developed a new technique to conduct the study, which is the first to detail Einstein's corpus callosum, the brain's largest bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication.
Evolution. [This critique has been withdrawn by the author.] This point in the reasoning chain requires that different genes result in differing reproductive success and that those genes are passed on to offspring. Otherwise there isnt a reason to think that genetic mutation would result in accumulated differences. My impression here that randomized changes that dont result in variable reproductive success are eventually canceled out by other changes.
Future species would have more variation in their genome, but wouldn't be any different, in other words the average genome would stay the same. Im not sure I follow, but I dont think my objection is solid enough to be a basis for rejecting the premise. [This rebuttal addresses an earlier critique versionand has not been revised.] While differences in reproductive success are very important in evolution, my statement does not strictly depend on them. Scenario: two animals, same species, different genders, mate with one another and produce four offspring. Searle.pdf. Evolution of lying. (Phys.org) —Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature. Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that considers the evolution of "tactical deception" using a theoretic model and a comparative study of primates.
I'm interested to see how the news media handle this paper. Because the main conclusion – that lying is a way of exploiting others' cooperative behaviour – seems awfully obvious. But I suspect the true value of today's paper is a bit more nuanced. Cooperation evolves Many species – most notably our own – have evolved quite extraordinary capacities to cooperate. We might take cooperation as an obvious facet of life, but long-term cooperative gain requires a willingness to put aside narrow self-interest in the short term. Cooperation makes it possible for some individuals to cheat, prospering off the cooperative efforts of others.
Share Video undefined. Advances in Cultural Neuroscience. A lot of good stuff coming out around cultural neuroscience right now. Here are the three main things up front, so people can have them. Then I’ll go over them in turn. And finally, a reflective comment at the end highlighting potential differences between cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology. Cultural Neuroscience special issue in Psychological Inquiry, with a target article by Joan Chiao and colleagues and commentaries by leaders in the field. The inaugural issue of the new journal Culture and Brain , with Shihui Han serving as editor-in-chief A 2013 Annual Review of Psychology article, A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain , also by Shihui Han and a long-list of leaders in cultural neuroscience Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise The abstract for the Chaio et al. review: Contemporary advances in cultural and biological sciences provide unique opportunities for the emerging field of cultural neuroscience.
New journal Culture and Brain. Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100, Experts Say | The Singularity & Artificial Intelligence. Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords? The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity — the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts — might happen in just 16 years. But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.
Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells. [5 Reasons to Fear Robots] Singularity near? "My estimates have not changed, but the consensus view of AI scientists has been changing to be much closer to my view," Kurzweil wrote. Infinite abilities. Physicist Proposes New Way To Think About Intelligence. (ISNS) -- A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research. Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developed an equation that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use.
The researchers suggest that intelligent behavior stems from the impulse to seize control of future events in the environment. This is the exact opposite of the classic science-fiction scenario in which computers or robots become intelligent, then set their sights on taking over the world. "It's a provocative paper," said Simon DeDeo, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, who studies biological and social systems. "It's not science as usual. " Home. IBM simulates 530 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses on supercomputer. A network of neurosynaptic cores derived from long-distance wiring in the monkey brain: Neuro-synaptic cores are locally clustered into brain-inspired regions, and each core is represented as an individual point along the ring. Arcs are drawn from a source core to a destination core with an edge color defined by the color assigned to the source core.
(Credit: IBM) Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 1010 neurons (10 billion) and 1014 synapses (100 trillion, based on estimates of the number of synapses in the human brain) to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.”
Simulating 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses on most powerful supercomputer Neurosynaptic core (credit: IBM) Two billion neurosynaptic cores DARPA SyNAPSE Phase 0DARPA SyNAPSE Phase 1DARPA SyNAPSE Phase 2. Tutorials | 2013 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.