MachineMachine /stream - tagged with brain

Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:35:04 -0700

Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:03 -0700

Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically) but are quiescent until adulthood - during metamorphosis, these neurons put on their game face and start to do real work in adulthood. B) Some neurons are useful in larval life and not in adult life, and basically die during metamorphosis. C) Some neurons are useful in both larval and adult life, but do different things - so they basically retract their projections during metamorphosis and make new ones…

Neuroscience Challenges Old Ideas about Free Will: "Human knowledge can’t help itself in the long run."

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:53:13 -0700

Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Is mental time travel what makes us human?

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The…

Three arguments against the singularity

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:48:28 -0700

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment -- machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions. That…

Are Artists Liars?

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:55:27 -0700

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling…

Jon Ronson On… Voices in the Head

Sun, 01 May 2011 11:43:38 -0700

Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long.

Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:30:37 -0700

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of…

‘World Wide Mind’

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:40:27 -0700

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to…

The Library in the New Age

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since…

The Soul Niche

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:46:10 -0700

Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter, it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it.

The Soul Niche

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:59:51 -0700

Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up.
Undaunted by history, one psychologist believes he has the answer. The problem, says Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, is that people have been looking in the wrong place.

"Scientists and philosophers have assumed all along that consciousness is somehow helping us think better, somehow improving our intelligence or our cognitive skills," he says.
Consciousness, he argues in his…

What the science of human nature can teach us

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:17:38 -0700

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

When new narratives meet old brains

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:00 -0700

We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. "We" refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. "Narratives" refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's…

Consciousness, Qualia, and Self

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:41:00 -0700

Anhedonia

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:47:11 -0700

In psychology and psychiatry, anhedonia (< Greek ἀν- an-, "without" + ἡδονή hēdonē, "pleasure") is an inability to experience pleasurable emotions from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise, social interaction or sexual activities.

Anhedonia is seen in the mood disorders, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder and other mental disorders.

Ancient death-grip leaf scars reveal ant–fungal parasitism

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:40:00 -0700

Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an ideal location for spore dispersal from a dead body following host death. Fossil leaves record many aspects of insect behaviour (feeding, galls, leaf mining) but to date there are no known examples of behavioural manipulation. Here, we document, to our knowledge, the first example of the stereotypical death grip from 48 Ma leaves of Messel, Germany, indicating the antiquity of this behaviour. As well as probably being the first…

Reclaiming the Imagination

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:12:00 -0700

Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one — but you can still let your imagination rip. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.

Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine…

Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:04:00 -0700

There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.

His latest claim is that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we'll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He's not just speculating…

The internet: is it changing the way we think?

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:46:00 -0700

Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

"Over the past few years," Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a…