rules amended, inferences rejected
A Psychopath's Brain In The Courtroom : NPR
"Neuroscience and neuroimaging is going to change the whole philosophy about how we punish and how we decide who to incapacitate and how we decide how to deal with people," he says, echoing comments of a growing number of leading scholars across the country, including Princeton and Harvard.
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains
What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise?and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
Addiction: a loss of plasticity of the brain?
...the transition to addiction could result from a persistent impairment of synaptic plasticity in a key structure of the brain.
In a new paper, ?Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions,? published this week in the journal Science, Ackerman and his co-authors, Christopher Nocera of Harvard and John Bargh of Yale, describe the results of six studies showing a variety of ways that tactile sensations can affect decision-making. From workplace judgments to financial decisions, they write, ?haptically acquired information exerts a rather broad influence over cognition, in ways of which we are probably often unaware.?
Chimpanzees are highly intelligent animals, capable of great acts of empathy, technological sophistication, culture and cooperation. But they can also be murderers. Groups of chimps, mostly male, will mount lengthy aggressive campaigns against individuals from other groups, attacking them en masse and beating them to death. Their reasons for such killings have long been a source of debate among zoologists, but the aftermath of the Ngogo murders reveals an important clue. After the chimps picked off their neighbours, they eventually took over their territory. It seems that chimps kill for land.
Songbirds learn their songs during sleep
The brain is active during sleep It has been known that sleep plays an important role in learning in humans and other mammals. In songbirds it had been shown previously that during sleep the brain has the same pattern of activity as during singing the day before. The present findings show that the more young songbirds have learned from their father's song, the more active their brain is during subsequent sleep.
Pat Churchland on Eliminative Materialism
Some philosophers believe that conceptual analysis will reveal the essence of mental states. Pat Churchland disagrees. In conversation with Nigel Warburton she explains how philosophers can learn from neuroscience and why some 'folk' psychological terms may need revision. philosophy bites
Psychopathy: Causes and Interpretations
It should come as no surprise that we don?t notice everything that we see. We all experience this on a regular basis ? there is a great deal of visual information in our field of view but we only pay attention to a small fraction of it. Yet at the same time something within our vision can capture our attention if it flashes, moves, or otherwise changes dramatically enough. Interestingly, despite our common and frequent experience with the limitations of our own visual attention, people tend to have overconfidence in their ability to notice details and are often surprised when an important detail goes unnoticed.
Epigenetics and the Brain: The Switches That Can Turn Mental Illness On and Off
The difference between one personality and another is not determined by genes alone. Love?s got something to do with it too.
Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber
Culture is like art or pornography, it's hard for people to define but everyone knows it when they see it. Cultural anthropologists have long struggled to develop a consistent definition of the very thing that they study, a problem that has resulted in bitter arguments between scholars that, to an outsider, may seem as esoteric as church doctrinal disputes over how many angels can sit upon the point of a needle.
Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams
AM I awake or am I dreaming?" I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this "reality check" in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.
How the brain recognizes objects
A new computational model sheds light on the workings of the human visual system and could help advance artificial-intelligence research, too.
Did humans evolve to fill a ?cognitive niche?? « Why Evolution Is True
Darwin saw our minds, like our bodies, as resulting from the accumulation of adaptive differences through selection. Wallace, on the other hand, thought that our higher mental powers would be evolutionary overkill?faculties that were simply not needed to become human. Wallace saw these as arising instead from the intercession of ?a superior intelligence?, and so was the first exponent of ID after Darwin.
Language lessons: You are what you speak
...one of the most influential ideas in the study of language is that of universal grammar. Put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, it is widely interpreted as meaning that all languages are basically the same and that the human brain is born language-ready, with an in-built program that is able to decipher the common rules underpinning any mother tongue. For five decades this idea has dominated work in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. To understand language, it implied, you must sweep aside the dazzling diversity of languages and find the common human core.
David Chalmers on the Singularity
In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast David Chalmers discusses the philosophical implications of the artificial intelligence of the future - an imaginable time when machines are more intelligent and more powerful than humans.
Rudy Garns
philosopher, educator, citizen
"...rules and particular inferences alike are justified by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is ammended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. The process of justification is the delicate one of making mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences...." (Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast)
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