Wednesday Is Indigo Blue - Table of Contents - The MIT Press
What brain damage might reveal about moral thinking
Bloggingheads.tv - Percontations: Your Brain and Your Genes
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Archives
Thursday, April 30, 2009
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
In his startling new book Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press), Georgia State University law professor Paul A. Lombardo looks at the Supreme Court?s notorious 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld a Virginia law permitting the forced sterilization of the ?feebleminded and socially inadequate.? (Reason Magazine)
Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain
Video on TED.com
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
What is transhumanism? A pretty good definition is offered by bioethicist and transhumanist James Hughes who states that transhumanism is "the idea that humans can use reason to transcend the limitation of the human condition."[i] Specifically, transhumanists welcome the development of intimate technologies that will enable people to boost their life spans, enhance their intellectual capacities, augment their athletic abilities, and choose their preferred emotional states. What's particularly noteworthy is that Hughes argues that democratic decision-making is central to the task of guiding humanity into the transhuman future.
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Saturday, April 25, 2009
It's unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby's brain. (Jonah Lehrer)
"AH-HAH!" Insights And The Right Frontal Lobe
It's thrilling when it happens, but what actually causes insight? New research in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience takes us one step closer to an answer: up to 8 seconds before people solve problems thought to require insight, a particular set of very fast oscillations are observable above the right frontal lobe.
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Friday, April 24, 2009
Can evolution explain how minds work?
Biologists have tended to assume that closely related species will have similar cognitive abilities. (Nature)
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Do Women Have Better Empathy Than Men?
In this Edge Video, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen looks at one test he's developed to see if there are differences between males and females in the mind.
What neuroeconomics tells us about money and the brain. (The New Yorker)
This list collects academic writings on the topic of neuroethics. For whose new to the field we recommend Martha Farah's two short papers as an introduction (Farah 2002 and 2005). (BRAINETHICS)
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Choice blindness: You don't know what you want
WE HAVE all heard of experts who fail basic tests of sensory discrimination in their own field: wine snobs who can't tell red from white wine (albeit in blackened cups), or art critics who see deep meaning in random lines drawn by a computer. We delight in such stories since anyone with pretensions to authority is fair game. But what if we shine the spotlight on choices we make about everyday things? Experts might be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of their skills as experts, but could we be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of our skills as experts on ourselves? (18 April 2009 - New Scientist)
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Monday, April 20, 2009
A young man I?ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn?t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn?t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. ?Trite as it sounds,? he told me, it seemed important to ?maybe appreciate my own youth.? Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.
How Does the Brain Form Sentences?
Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought. A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory?the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command. (Scientific American)
This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I?ve addressed in print efore. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what happens when you try to integrate Darwinism with an intentional theory like propositional attitude psychology.
Total Recall: The Woman Who Can't Forget
I first saw Price last May in a YouTube clip of her on 20/20. Diane Sawyer asks Price, an avid television viewer, to identify certain significant dates in broadcast history. When did CBS air the "Who shot JR?" episode of Dallas? When was All in the Family's baby episode shown? And so on. Price nails every question. She not only gives the date for the final episode of MASH but describes the weather that day.
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Freedom of Memory Today by Adam Kolber
Emerging technologies raise the possibility that we may be able to treat trauma victims by pharmaceutically dampening factual or emotional aspects of their memories. Such technologies raise a panoply of legal and ethical issues. While many of these issues remain off in the distance, some have already arisen.
In this brief commentary for the journal Neuroethics, I discuss a real-life case of memory erasure. The case reveals why the contours of our freedom of memory -- our limited bundle of rights to control our memories and be free of outside control -- already merit some attention.
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains
On the day I visited, there were half a dozen brains sitting on a table. Vonsattel began by passing them around so the medical students could take a closer look. When a brain came my way, I cradled it and found myself puzzling over its mirror symmetry. It was as if someone had glued two smaller brains together to make a bigger one. (Carl Zimmer)
How can what we learn about the brain teach us to teach robots? Can we build a machine that can make learn and make decisions? If we mirror the brain's neural hardware, can we create a machine with a soul? (YouTube)
Language, memory and intuition depend on rapid communication between both hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum is the conduit for that communication. Tony Grobmeier was born without one. Lynn Paul, a neuroscientist, tries to understand how Tony faces the world with a brain disconnected from itself. (YouTube)
To Steven Quartz & Colin Camerer the brain is a huge number-cruncher, assigning a numeric value to everything from a loaf of bread to our most deeply held moral "values". In that sense, moral decisions are also economic ones. Using a brain scanner (fMRI), they want to catch the brain in the act?to see what it's doing at exactly the moment a tough moral decision gets made. Their research is pioneering a new branch of neuroscience -- neuroeconomics. (YouTube Video)
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
What does it feel like to have too many arms? (Scientific American)
Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass
Emotions linked to our moral sense awaken slowly in the mind, according to a new study from a neuroscience group led by corresponding author Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
How should we deal with cognitive-enhancing drugs?
- supporting the use?with safeguards?of prescription drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall as a way for healthy adults to improve brain functions, including concentration and memory.
- our regulatory system isn?t set up to look at or think about the enhancement uses of drugs that are approved for medical conditions. We think there needs to be more research and more work on safety.
- Well, I think part of it is, drug is a dirty word. Somebody?s talked about our pharmacological Puritanism.
- There are issues of fairness, safety and coercion.
- Law?s a very practical subject. It really eschews seeking the best and is in reality a practice of muddling through and making do.
What if we could look inside, or even pry open, the mind of a suspected criminal or terrorist? (Neuroworld)
The Neuroscience of Pathological Lying
n 2005, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a study which found an increased amount of white matter, and a decreased amount of gray matter, in the brains of subjects they categorized as ?pathological liars.? (Neuroworld)
Unleashed: I learn therefore I am
In 2001, Philosophy became available in Year 11 and 12 for students in Victoria and in 2008 Western Australia followed suit with a course in Philosophy and Ethics. And as the news gets around about these senior secondary philosophy courses, there are bound to be calls for other states and territories to follow suit.
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Monday, April 13, 2009
Musing on the often acrimonious debate between atheists and believers, Simon Blackburn takes as his inspiration David Hume, who approached the issue not with hatred but with humour (Times Higher Education)
Here are 18 ways attention can go wrong, some very common, some extremely unusual, a few downright weird; each giving us an insight into how our minds work. (PsyBlog)
Cultural Evolution in Full Text
I?ve managed to round up a bunch of pdf or full text links for recent papers on cultural evolution and on the evolution of language. (Neuroanthropology)
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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Evolutionary thinking has lately expanded from the biological to the human world, first into the social sciences and recently into the humanities and the arts. Many people therefore now understand the human, and even human culture, as inextricably biological. But many others in the humanities?in this, at least, like religious believers who reject evolution outright?feel that a Darwinian view of life and a biological view of humanity can only deny human purpose and meaning. (Brian Boyd, The American Scholar)
Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.
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Thursday, April 09, 2009
A researcher argues that peers are much more important than parents, that psychologists underestimate the power of genetics and that we have a lot to learn from Asian classrooms. (Scientific American)
Neuro Talk: Tap In | The Experts Weigh In
Some of the world's top scientists and ethicists met at Banff earlier in March, to ponder the most pressing issues in neuroscience. Their focus: Neuroethics
Brain technologies raise unprecedented ethical challenges
We share Jens Clausen's opinion, expressed in his Commentary 'Man, machine and in between' (Nature 457, 1080?1081; 2009), that brain?machine interfaces promise many benefits and should be pursued. However, we do not agree that these technologies pose similar ethical challenges to those already addressed. Some consequences may be unprecedented.
Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Neurocinimatics: the neuroscience of film
Uri Hasson,Ohad Landesman,Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines,Nava Rubin,and David J.Heeger
The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency
Hsu et al. 320 (5879): 1092 -- Science
Our flexible friend (the brain)
There is growing evidence that the brain can be trained to compensate for dead or damaged areas. As Ian Sample reports, this could benefit those suffering anything from a stroke to depression or relationship problems
The experimenters used a regular movie, a silent without accompanying sound track, a purely audio storytelling, an unedited film of people aimlessly moving about, and a series of films that demonstrated a gradation of less and less directorial control.
I'd sum that up by saying the viewers' brains behaved alike at the level of sensory processing and simple comprehension of the plot of the film. But in later experiments, this group refined those findings.
You might think it would be easy to see how our brains function while we are watching a movie. Just hook some viewers up to an electroencephalograph or a magnetic resonance imager (MRI) and see what happens when they watch a movie. But who ever said it would be easy?
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Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Do testosterone and oestrogen affect our attitudes to fairness, trust, risk and altruism?
the study provides a solid blow to the idea that sex hormones affect our attitudes to trust or fairness, and it reminds us yet again to be cautious about relying too heavily on correlations. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous. (David Brooks)
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Monday, April 06, 2009
A look at some of the flawed thinking that prompts people who believe in certain non-scientific concepts to advise others who don't to be more open-minded.
Brain immediately recognizes transplanted hand
Amputation of a limb leads to significant reorganization of the primary somatosensory cortex, that part of the brain which processes touch- and pain-related information. The cortical region normally devoted to the amputated body part is suddenly deprived of sensory inputs, but because the adult brain is plastic, it does not lay dormant - the area assumes other functions, and begins to process sensory information from other parts of the body. (Neurophilosophy_
Finding Connections: How Do the Parts of the Brain Interact?
A novel brain-imaging technique uncovers the structural connections underlying personality, behavior and disease (Scientific American)
Our moral thermostat - why being good can give people license to misbehave
What happens when you remember a good deed, or think of yourself as a stand-up citizen? You might think that your shining self-image would reinforce the value of selflessness and make you more likely to behave morally in the future. But a new study disagrees. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Using False Photographs to Create False Childhood Memories
Because image-enhancing technology is readily availabl e, people are frequently exposed to doctored images. However, i n prior research on how adults can be led to report false childhood memories, subjects have typical ly been exposed to personal ized and detailed narratives describing false events. Instead, we exposed 20 subjects to a false childhood event via a fake photograph and imagery instructions.
How similar was Neandertal behavior to that of modern humans?
The results of a new study presented here last week at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society bolster that view, and suggest that, in fact, Neandertals acted in much the same way as early modern humans. (Scientific American Blog)
Should We Really Fear Reproductive Human Cloning?
What is actually needed is an unbiased assessment of both the perils and promises of cloning humans. (Jacob M. Appel)
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Sunday, April 05, 2009
The study thus shows that there is a unique pattern of activity in the brain in the context of hate. Though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, this pattern nevertheless shares two areas with the latter, namely the putamen and the insula.
Found: the brain?s centre of wisdom
SCIENTISTS have identified the seat of human wisdom by pinpointing parts of the brain that guide us when we face difficult moral dilemmas. (Times Online)
- medial prefrontal cortex
- It seems to involve a balance between more primitive brain regions, like the limbic system, and the newest ones, such as the prefrontal cortex.?
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Saturday, April 04, 2009
Alva Noe, You are not your brain
We have become too reductive in understanding ourselves, argues philosopher Alva Noe. Our thoughts and desires are shaped by more than neurons firing inside our heads. (Salon)
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Friday, April 03, 2009
After reading publius' defense of KY basketball on Obsidian Wings, I recalled Marx's comments on basketball.
Basketball is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man?state, society. This state and this society produce basketball, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Basketball is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against basketball is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. ... Basketball is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of basketball as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.Having spent over $32,000,000.00 on opium, what will KY do for education, health care and new jobs.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Anger or Moral Outrage? (Maibom)
In a recent issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (45, 155-60), Daniel Batson?known for his influential empathy-altruism studies?and colleagues find little evidence of moral outrage. In a series of studies meant to measure people?s judgments of torture, they find little evidence that torture evokes much anger unless the subjects have some relation to the person tortured. (Neuroethics & Law Blog)
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Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Why it Pays for Cheaters to Punish Other Cheaters
A new theory for why we put up with adulterers, steroid-using athletes and the mafia (Scientific American)
As neuroscientists, we?re excited about the potential of using computational models to test our understanding of how the brain works. On the other hand, although it eventually may be possible to design sophisticated computing devices that imitate what we do, the capability to make such a device is already here. All you need is a fertile man and woman with the resources to nurture their child to adulthood. With luck, by 2030 you?ll have a full-grown, college-educated, walking petabyte. A drawback is that it may be difficult to get this computing device to do what you ask. (NYTimes.com)
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