Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/30/2009

• Descent of Rational Man

  From the ‘herding instincts’ of traders to our unselfish approach to transactions, behavioural studies are turning the economic orthodoxy of rational self-interest on its head. Pete Lunn explains what this means for consumer policy.

  tags: rationality, evolution, instincts, grue, cogsci

• Nature v nurture? Please don't ask

  The question has fuelled some of history's fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer (Times Online)

  tags: nature-nurture, aapt, grue, 150, cogsci

• Large-Scale Problems in Neuroscience > Patricia Churchland

  What do neuroscientific discoveries imply for free will and responsibility?

  tags: freewill, neuroscience, neuroethics, grue, cogsci, aapt

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/29/2009

• BOLD-faced lie detection

  You wouldn't know it from the claims of companies like No Lie MRI, but we're a long way off being able to use brain scans to detect reliably whether a person is lying or not. Nonetheless, cognitive psychologists are busy beavering away in the background, testing the ways that brain activity varies when people lie compared with when they tell the truth. One such study has just been published, claiming to be the first to investigate deception in the context of face recognition.

  tags: lie-detection, neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/28/2009

• Scientists Map the Brain, Gene by Gene

  Behind all the gore there's a profound purpose: The scientists here are mapping the brain. And while conventional brain maps describe distinct anatomical areas, like the frontal lobes and the hippocampus—many of which were first outlined in the 19th century—the Allen Brain Atlas seeks to describe the cortex at the level of specific genes and individual neurons. Slices of tissue containing billions of brain cells will be analyzed to see which snippets of DNA are turned on in each cell.

  tags: brain, neuroscience, neuroethics, AZB, cogsci, grue

• When we enhance cognition with Adderall, do we sacrifice creativity? A preliminary study

  The preliminary evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that Adderall has an overall negative effect on creativity. Its effects on divergent creative thought cannot be inferred with confidence from this study because of the ambiguity of null results. Its effects on convergent creative thought appear to be dependent on the baseline creativity of the individual. Those in the higher range of the normal distribution may be unaffected or impaired, whereas those in the lower range of the normal distribution experience enhancement.

  tags: neuroethics, neuropharmacology, brain, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/27/2009

• Daniel Dennett Explains How People Are Like Robots

  Video at Big Think

  tags: robots, mind, Dennett, aapt, cogsci, AZB, 150

• Alva Noe, You are not your brain | Salon

  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)

  tags: embodiment, brain, Noe, aapt, grue, cogsci, AZB, CDC

• Crabs Not Only Suffer Pain, But Retain Memory Of It

  New research published by a Queen's University Belfast academic has shown that crabs not only suffer pain but that they retain a memory of it.

  tags: pain, consciousness, other-minds, aapt, grue, cogsci

• Brain Activity Associated With Phantom Limbs, Study Shows

  Phantom limbs, often described after amputation, are also experienced as an extra limb in patients who are paralyzed on one side following a stroke. Referred to as supernumerary phantom limb (SPL), patients can usually perceive these limbs as a vivid somatosensory presence of an extra limb, but generally cannot see or intentionally move them. In some unusual cases, however, patients have reported seeing their phantom limb or feeling objects or body parts with it, which indicates that multiple areas of the brain may be involved in SPLs.

  tags: phantom-limbs, brains, grue, AZB, cogsci

• The Living Robot

  The robot now gets around well enough. “But it has a biological brain, and not a computer,” says Warwick, and so it must navigate based solely on the very limited amount of information it receives from a single sensory device. If the number of sensory devices connected to its brain increases, it will gain a better understanding of its surroundings. “I have another student now who has started to work on an audio input, so in some way we can start communicating with it,” he says.

  tags: robots, AI, aapt, cogsci, AZB, grue, 150

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/26/2009

• Scientists identify brain region that helps us make choices

  They have identified a brain region that predicts choices before we even know what they are. The caudate nucleus, part of a structure called the striatum, is involved in anticipating rewards.

  tags: decision-making, brain, neuroscience, cogsci, grue

• Visual Attention: How The Brain Makes The Most Of The Visible World

  The visual system has limited capacity and cannot process everything that falls onto the retina. Instead, the brain relies on attention to bring salient details into focus and filter out background clutter. Two recent studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, one study employing computational modeling techniques and the other experimental techniques, have helped to unravel the mechanisms underlying attention.

  tags: brain, attention, perception, cogsci, grue

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Dynamics of Cognitive Processing and Learning: Linking Connectionist, Neuroscience, and Dynamical Systems Approaches

Abstract:
Connectionist or parallel-distributed processing models provide mechanistic accounts of cognitive processes, demonstrating how emergent dynamics of higher-order cognitive states such as percepts, decision states, and actions can arise from the micro-dynamics of the interactions of simple neuron-like processing units. These models can also address changes in representation and processing that occur as a result of experience, via adjustments in the strengths of the connections among the units that participate in processing. As such these models make several points of contact with the literature on dynamical systems in development. The models also link to many other recent models on the neural population dynamics underlying decision making in the brain. This talk will discuss recent developments related to these issues, building on a model of the dynamics of simple perceptual decision making (Usher and McClelland, 2001). http://tinyurl.com/cb2wuv

Judgement and Decision Making

Discovering Psychology (11)

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/25/2009

• Evolution of Human Minds Video

  William Calvin discusses the evolution of the human mind

  tags: evolution, minds, human-evolution, brain, aapt, grue, cogsci, AZB

• Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip

  An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine. (Technology Review)

  tags: brain, technology, cogsci, 150, aapt

• Mugged By Our Genes?

  Last Monday, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself. His mother was one of the world’s most famous suicides, and news stories have mentioned the tendency of suicide and depression to run in families. But this tragic inheritance is just part of a more complex story in which our lives are shaped by genes, environment — and unexpected connections between the two.

  tags: genetics, depression, cogsci, grue, 150

• Study Links Depression to Thinning of Brain’s Cortex

  Scientists who have been following families with a history of depression have found structural differences in family members’ brains — specifically, a significant thinning of the right cortex, the brain’s outermost surface. The thinning may be a trait or a marker of vulnerability to depression, the researchers suggested. (NYTimes.com)

  tags: brain, depression, cogsci

• What Can Magicians Teach Us about the Brain?

  Neuroscience can learn a lot by tapping the intuitive knowledge of magicians as new sources for inspiration and study. (Scientific American)

  tags: neuroscience, brain, magic, cogsci, neuroethics, aapt, grue

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/24/2009

• Genetic neoteny - how delayed genes separate human brains from chimps

  Take our brains, for example. In the brains of humans, chimps and many other mammals, the genes that are switched on in the brain change dramatically in the first few years of life. But Mehmet Somel from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found that a small but select squad of genes, involved in the development of nerve cells, are activated much later in our brains than in those of other primates. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

  tags: genetics, primates, development, cogsci, neuroethics, grue

• Stanford Brain Videos

  Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com), each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.

  tags: brains, video, aapt, cogsci, grue, neuroethics

• Jonah Lehrer on the Decisive Moment

  video talk

  tags: decision-making, Lehrer, appt, cogsci, neuroethics

• The empathic powers of those who can't feel pain

  A popular account for how we empathise with other people's physical pain involves the idea that we perform a mental simulation of their suffering, using the pain pathways of our own brain. Support for this comes from research showing that when I see you in pain, the pain areas of my own brain are pricked into activity.
  
  Now an intriguing study by Nicolas Danziger and colleagues has tested this simulation account with the help of patients with congenital insensitivity to pain - that is, they've grown up with abnormal pain fibres, thus rendering them unable to feel physical pain. The findings may require us to rethink the way we characterise some brain areas associated with pain processing. (BPS RESEARCH DIGEST)
  

  tags: emotion, empathy, cogsci, neuroethics, aapt

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/23/2009

• The Biology of Creativity - Right Hemispheric Thinking, Problem Solving by Insight, and Diffuse Attention

  A Northwestern research group has found that people that solve anagram puzzles by sudden insight rather than by conscious search or analytic strategies have an EEG resting state that prefers the right over the left hemisphere. What's different about this finding compared to a previous study is that this hemispheric difference exists even before problem solving begins. (Eide Neurolearning Blog)

  tags: brain, creativity, cogsci, ttl, grue

• Feeling our way to right and wrong

  Whatever role one believes emotions should play in moral judgment, new research demonstrates that the influence of these low-level passions is profound. In fact, a study published in Science earlier this month suggests that many moral judgments are mediated by the same emotional mechanism that is activated by rotten leftovers and dirty socks. (Olivia Scheck)

  tags: neuroethics, ethics, disgust, aapt, grue, cogsci, emotion

• The Attentional Spotlight

  The experience of ‘looking out of the corner of the eye’ using peripheral vision is commonplace but it conceals a unusual fact about attention. That is that we probably spend a lot more of our time than we might imagine with our ‘mind’s eye’ looking in a different direction to our eyeballs. (PsyBlog)

  tags: consciousness, attention, mind, cogsci, grue, perception

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/19/2009

• Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet and funny--an evolutionary riddle

  Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. (TED)

  tags: Dennett, evolution, consciousness, freewill, neuroethics, cogsci, grue, 150

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/17/2009

• Lingo: What Child Is This?

  Jargon or no, what has evolved to suit the requirements of grown-ups in an information-rich world is Occam's-razoresque: short sentences, simple vocabulary, logical progression. Parents who want their infants to learn language need a lot more than this. They need "motherese," that high-pitched sing-song dialect that puts everything in the third person and diminutizes it.

  tags: language, evolution, cogsci, grue

• Memory Switch Could Enable Brain Hacks

  Forget the memory-boosting pills: In the future, powers of recall could be boosted with programs on a handheld PDA.

  tags: brain, memory, neuroethics, cogsci, grue

• MRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court

  Defense attorneys are for the first time submitting a controversial next-generation lie-detection test as evidence in U.S. court.

  tags: fmri, lie-detection, neuroethics, cogsci, grue

• Unconscious decisions

  Benjamin Libet’s experimental finding that decisions had in effect already been made before the conscious mind became aware of making them is both famous and controversial; now new research (published in a ‘Brief Communication’ in Nature Neuroscience by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes) goes beyond it. Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds. (Conscious Entities)

  tags: freewill, Libet, consciousness, neuroethics, cogsci

• Benjamin Libet - Libet's short delay.

  The experiments carried out by Benjamin Libet into the timing of conscious awareness (briefly described here ) have provoked, and go on provoking, a vast amount of discussion. His own theory of consciousness as a kind of field has received somewhat less attention; and the strange brain-cutting experiment he proposed to test it seems likely to remain unperformed for the foreseeable future. A large number of papers and discussions have been published: in 2004, Libet finally summarised his own account in the book 'Mind Time'. (consciousentities.com)

  tags: freewill, Libet, consciousness, mind, neuroethics, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/16/2009

• Who's Controlling My Brain?

  Excerpt of Karl Pilkington asking Ricky and Steve if he's in control of his brain from season 2 of The Ricky Gervais Show.

  tags: self, identity, brains, mind-body, 150, neuroethics, cogsci

• Neural correlates of religious belief - neuroscience and spirituality

  recent publications and then some work on neural correlates of religious belief. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

  tags: religion, neuroscience, cogsci, grue

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/15/2009

• Why Minds Are Not Like Computers

  People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer. When theorizing about the mind, especially to outsiders but also to one another, defenders of artificial intelligence (AI) often rely on computational concepts. They regularly describe the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, the mind as a “pattern” and the brain as a “substrate,” senses as “inputs” and behaviors as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units” and synapses as “circuitry,” to give just a few common examples. (The New Atlantis)

  tags: AI, computers, minds, cogsci, 150, grue

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/14/2009

• Brain Science Podcast #55: Patricia Churchland on Neurophilosophy

  In this interview we talked about neurophilosophy, which is an approach to philosophy of mind that gives high priority to incorporating the empiric findings of neuroscience. We also talk about the evolving relationship between philosophy and neuroscience. Churchland shares her enthusiasm for how the discoveries of neuroscience are changing the way we see ourselves as human beings. We also talked a little about the issues of reductionism that I first brought up in Episode 53.

  tags: neurophilosophy, Churchland, cogsci, grue

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/12/2009

• A Hormone to Remember

  Given only a small dose of oxytocin, individuals in a recent study found that their memory significantly improved. Not for historical dates, strings of digits, or bars of music, but for something much more significant: each other. (Seed)

  tags: oxytocin, memory, cogsci, neuroethics

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/11/2009

• Neuroscientists Map Intelligence In The Brain

  Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have conducted the most comprehensive brain mapping to date of the cognitive abilities measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the most widely used intelligence test in the world. The results offer new insight into how the various factors that comprise an "intelligence quotient" (IQ) score depend on particular regions of the brain.

  tags: brains, intelligence, cogsci, fmri

• Clean and Virtuous: When Physical Purity Becomes Moral Purity

  How embodied metaphors, rooted in our physical understanding of abstract concepts, shape our view of the world. (Scientific American)

  tags: metaphors, morality, purity, virtue, cogsci, neuroethics

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/10/2009

• 'Theory of mind' could help explain belief in God

  The research shows that, to interpret a god's intentions and feelings, we rely mainly on the same recently evolved brain regions that divine the feelings and intentions of other people. (New Scientist)

  tags: religion, god, brain, theory-of-mind, cogsci

• Different neuron networks control fear of different threats

  If you wanted to turn a rat into a fearless critter, unfazed by cats or bigger rats, the best way would be to neutralise a small pair of tiny structures in its brain called the dorsal premammillary nuclei, orPMD. According to new research by Simone Motta at the University of Sao Paolo, these small regions, nestled within a rat's hypothalamus, control its defensive instincts to both predators and other rats. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

  tags: fear, brains, cogsci, amygdala

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/09/2009

• Eyewitness: How Accurate Is Visual Memory?

  How difficult is it to manufacture someone else`s memory? Psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus says it`s a whole lot easier than you might think.

  tags: perception, memory, law, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/08/2009

• Neuroethics Journal

  Articles can be downloaded for free

  tags: neuroethics, journal, ethics, cogsci

• Julian Savulescu on the 'Yuk' Factor

  Should we base our morality on our emotional reactions of disgust? We all have a sense of 'yuk' at some activities or situations. Julian Savulescu of Oxford University discusses the relevance of revulsion to our moral judgements in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. (Philosophy Bites Podcast)

  tags: disgust, morality, neuroethics, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/06/2009

• A mother's experience can alter her offspring's memory performance.

  If a similar phenomenon occurs in humans, the effectiveness of one's memory during adolescence, particularly in those with defective cell signaling mechanisms that control memory, can be influenced by environmental stimulation experienced by one's mother during her youth. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

  tags: memory, epigenetic, eevolution, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/04/2009

• SMART HEURISTICS

  What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?

  tags: heuristics, decision-making, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/03/2009

• What Is an Illusion, Exactly?

  If one knows enough about the world, one should know that an oar partly submerged in water (seen from a particular viewing angle) should look bent just like that. (The Splintered Mind)

  tags: illusion, perception, cogsci

• In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue

  As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

  tags: morality, human-development, cogsci

• Babies and Morality

  humans evolved a powerful set of moral instincts - a set of instincts that far exceed those of our primate relatives - because we depend on others to help us rear our helpless infants (The Frontal Cortex)

  tags: morality, human-development, neuroethics, cogsci

• State of the Art Research into Cognitive Load Theory

  Computers in Human Behavior,
  Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 253-596 (March 2009)
  Including the Special Issue: State of the Art Research into Cognitive Load Theory
  Edited by Paul Ayres and Tamara van Gog

  tags: cognitive-load, cogsci

• Women and Criminality

  International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Volume 32, Issue 1, Pages 1-64 (January-February 2009)
  Women and Criminality
  Edited by Hanna Putkonen and Ghitta Weizmann-Henelius

  tags: law, neuroethics, criminality, women, cogsci

• "Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness" by Justin Sytsma

  Powerpoint with audio lecture

  tags: consciousness, qualia, Dennett, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/02/2009

• Biased minds make better inferences.

  a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

  tags: decision-making, cogsci, bias

• Brain study sheds light on decision-making process

  Everyday actions such as sending an email or eating a sandwich are governed in the brain by a cascade of decision-making that runs from abstract to concrete, rather as in a large corporation, a new study has shown.

  tags: cogsci, decision-making

• FORA.tv - Jonah Lehrer: Inside My Mind

  tags: cogsci, decision-making, mind

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Jonah Lehrer on FORA.tv