http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.nature.com/news/computer-modelling-brain-in-a-box-1.10066 Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making. ]]> Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:33:55 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/computer-modelling-brain-in-a-box-1.10066 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses ]]> Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:35:21 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html "I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from… ]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:34:32 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview 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. ]]> Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:53:13 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/ As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his colleagues managed to extract some fragments of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil–by coincidence, the very first Neanderthal discovered in 1857. The DNA was of a special sort. Along with the bulk of our genes, which are located in the nucleus of our cells, we also carry bits of DNA in jellybean-shaped structures called mitochondria. Since there are hundreds of mitochondria in each cell, it’s easier to grab fragments of… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:09:18 -0700 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/23/explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic//explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic Neuroscience has shown that all thoughts and behaviors are associated with neural activity within the brain. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the zombie brain would look and function differently than the gray matter contained in your skull. Yet, how would one know what a zombie brain looks like? Luckily, the rich repertoire of behavioral symptoms shown in cinema gives the astute neuroscientist or neurologist clues as to the anatomical and physiological underpinnings of zombie behavior. By taking a forensic neuroscience approach, we can piece together a hypothetical picture of the zombie brain. ]]> Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:08:02 -0700 http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/23/explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic//explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QItJVagE Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1QItDnVwR
What is human nature? A biologist might see it like this: humans are animals and, like all animals, consist mostly of a digestive tract into which they relentlessly stuff other organisms – whether animal or vegetable, pot-roasted or raw – in order to fuel their attempts to reproduce yet more such insatiable, self-replicating omnivores. The fundamentals of human nature, therefore, are… ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2011 08:55:05 -0700 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QItJVagE http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false 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… ]]> Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:30:37 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. In this view, natural selection is so riddled by accidents and saddled with developmental constraints that the resultant biological hardware and software should be described as a “just good enough” solution rather than as a “fine-tuned machine.” So it is no wonder that, when many… ]]> Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:01:30 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm 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… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:59:51 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html 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… ]]> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php 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… ]]> Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:04:00 -0700 http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php http://themindi.blogspot.com/ Now available for free online:

The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. It is a collection of essays and creations about the nature of the mind and the self, tied together with commentary by the editors.

This book is an exploration of the human mind and soul, ranging from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the 20th… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:30:00 -0700 http://themindi.blogspot.com/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate 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… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:46:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/ In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys… ]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:07:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/ http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/witness/the-struggle-for-the-possible-soul-of-david-eagleman/ There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.

That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean.

Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:36:00 -0700 http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/witness/the-struggle-for-the-possible-soul-of-david-eagleman/ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:49:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75895/the-perils-progress Pinker, true to type, opens his piece: "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber."

Just as these, in Pinker's estimation, proved to be false alarms, so, too, he confidently predicts, will be the case with the current moral panic over new electronic technologies. When I read his list of "reality checks" that are supposed to mollify critics—for example, "the decades of television, transistor radios, and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:48:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75895/the-perils-progress http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs "In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was.… ]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:03:00 -0700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL