Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/31/2009

• Brain Cells for Socializing

  Allman was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant—like a human being—manages to stay attuned to the ever-shifting nuances of social interplay. These spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures. Allman, 66, compares the brains of people and other animals to gain insight into the evolution of human behavior.

  tags: brains, social-neuroscience, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/28/2009

• Joseph LeDoux: Why the "Right Brain" Idea is Wrong-Headed

  As someone who studies the brain and also tries to disseminate information about the brain in a user-friendly, but scientifically accurate, way, I cringe when I read some pop accounts of brain research. For example, I recently saw this CNN headline: "Will right-brainers rule this century?" Clicking on the link took me to OPRAH.com, which promised, less hesitantly, to explain "Why right-brainers will rule this century." At least CNN considered the possibility that there was some question about the veracity of the statement. Oprah's headline implied it's a done deal.

  tags: brain, ledoux, cogsci, grue

• Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

  Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.

  tags: disgust, morality, neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/26/2009

• Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room

  I think the Chinese Room is worth a second look not for the force of its argument but for what it reveals about contemporary ideas on what constitutes the essence of the human, especially intelligence, consciousness, and meaning. Excavating these and juxtaposing them with current controversies over the boundaries of the human will enable us to see what has changed, why it has changed, and what the change signifies in the decade and a half that has passed since Searle delivered the coup de grace that failed to deliver.

  tags: Searle, chinese-room, AI, 150, AZB, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/24/2009

• The Mind and Brain in Popular, and Not-So-Popular, Music (Blitz)

  Because I’m sure some readers of this blog like to keep reflecting about neuroscience and psychology even when they’re too tired to keep reading books, articles, and blog posts, I thought I’d offer a list of some relaxing (and in some cases, not so relaxing) music that touches on this theme, so that those who are interested can tide themselves over until the caffeine kicks in. Since most of the songs in the list are from my own music library, it has a strong eighties college radio bias.

  tags: music, mind, brain, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/23/2009

• Gambling and Compulsion: Play at Your Own Risk

  This post will look more closely at casino’s techniques to draw gamblers back to the slot chairs and the tables, focusing on both physiological aspects and engaged decision making. Ultimately, these observations will demonstrate that casinos create more than entertainment; they develop an entire compulsive experience.

  tags: addiction, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/21/2009

• Edge: CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE: A Conversation With Jonah Lehrer

  tags: mind, brain, consciousness, Lehrer, grue, cogsci

• The Origin of Artificial Species: Creating Artificial Personalities

  Does your robot seem to be acting a bit neurotic? Maybe it's just their personality. Recently, a team of researchers has designed computer-coded genomes for artificial creatures in which a specific personality is encoded. The ability to give artificial life forms their own individual personalities could not only improve the natural interactions between humans and artificial creatures, but also initiate the study of “The Origin of Artificial Species,” the researchers suggest.

  tags: species, personalities, genetics, personality, grue, cogsci

• The Origin of Artificial Species: Creating Artificial Personalities

  Does your robot seem to be acting a bit neurotic? Maybe it's just their personality. Recently, a team of researchers has designed computer-coded genomes for artificial creatures in which a specific personality is encoded. The ability to give artificial life forms their own individual personalities could not only improve the natural interactions between humans and artificial creatures, but also initiate the study of “The Origin of Artificial Species,” the researchers suggest.

  tags: species, personalities, genetics, personality, grue, cogsci

• Do Brains Make Minds?

  Joining host Robert Kuhn is consciousness expert David Chalmers; philosopher of mind John Searle; anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz; theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf; and neuropsychologist Barry Beyerstein. The panelists discuss the connection between the gray matter called a brain, the thoughts we think, the mind-body connection, and whether there's something more to the human mind than what resides in the brain. (ResearchChannel)

  tags: mind, consciousness, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/20/2009

• With a wave of the hand: How using gestures can make you smarter

  The study has important implications for the field of cognitive psychology. Historically, the field has viewed concepts, the basic elements of thought, as abstract representations that do not rely on the physicality of the body. This notion, called Cartesian Dualism, is now being challenged by another school of thought, called Embodied Cognition. Embodied Cognition views concepts as bodily representations with bases in perception, action and emotion. There is much evidence supporting the Embodied Cognition view. However, until now there has never been a detailed, experimentally supported account of how embodiment through gesture plays a role in learning new concepts. (Scientific American)

  tags: cognitive-science, embodiment, grue, cogsci

• With a wave of the hand: How using gestures can make you smarter

  The study has important implications for the field of cognitive psychology. Historically, the field has viewed concepts, the basic elements of thought, as abstract representations that do not rely on the physicality of the body. This notion, called Cartesian Dualism, is now being challenged by another school of thought, called Embodied Cognition. Embodied Cognition views concepts as bodily representations with bases in perception, action and emotion. There is much evidence supporting the Embodied Cognition view. However, until now there has never been a detailed, experimentally supported account of how embodiment through gesture plays a role in learning new concepts. (Scientific American)

  tags: cognitive-science, embodiment, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/19/2009

• Gambling Near-Misses Enhance Motivation to Gamble and Recruit Win-Related Brain Circuitry

  “Near-miss” events, where unsuccessful outcomes are proximal to the jackpot, increase gambling propensity and may be associated with the addictiveness of gambling, but little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie their potency. Using a simplified slot machine task, we measured behavioral and neural responses to gambling outcomes.

  tags: addiction, dopamine, grue, cogsci

• Numbers up for dopamine myth

  because of reward expectancy the dopamine system is most active when we think we can control the outcome and modify our strategy next time, even if that sense of control is completely false. (Mind Hacks)

  tags: dopamine, addiction, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/18/2009

• Review of Supersized Mind

  I was agreeably surprised by Andy Clark’s ‘Supersizing the Mind’. I had assumed it would be a fuller treatment of the themes set out in ‘The Extended Mind’, the paper he wrote with David Chalmers, and which is included in the book as an Appendix. In fact, it ranges more widely and has a number of interesting points to make on the general significance of embodiment and mind extension. Various flavours of externalism, the doctrine that the mind ain’t in the head, seem to be popular at the moment, but Clark’s philosophical views are clearly just part of a coherent general outlook on cognition. (Conscious Entities)

  tags: Clark, mind, extended-mind, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/15/2009

• Monkeys feel regret like humans, study shows

  Monkeys to feel regret and learn from their mistakes just like humans, according to a new study.

  tags: primates, regret, neuroethics, emotion, cogsci, grue

• Science Saturday: Brains and Gavels

  Science Saturday: Brains and Gavels on Bloggingheads.tv. Zimmer and Gazzaniga

  tags: neuroethics, brain, neuroscience, cogsci, grue

• How the brain talks to itself - errors in emotional prediction

  Gilbert and Wilson offer an engaging essay in the Philisophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (PDF here) titled: "Why the brain talks to itself: sources of error in emotional prediction." In trying to plan futures that involve more pleasure than pain, we perform mental simulations (previews) of future events, which produce affective reactions (premotions), which are then used as a basis for forecasts (predictions) about the future event’s emotional consequences. Their review summarizes several main sources of systematic errors of these predictions. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

  tags: brain, cogsci, emotion

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/12/2009

• Dan Dennett on our consciousness | Video on TED.com

  Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

  tags: consciousness, dennett, grue, cogsci, magic

• When Senses Intersect

  Dr. Richard Cytowic is one of the leading researchers of synesthesia, a condition in which two normally separated sensations - such as sight and sound, or touch and taste - occur at the same time. As a result, a synesthetic person might experience the taste of a dish on her fingertips, or be convinced that the letter X is a vibrant turquoise. (Scientific American)

  tags: synesthesia, qualia, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/11/2009

• Don’t!

  Most of the children were like Craig. They struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist. (New Yorker)

  tags: self-control, mind, psychology, neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/09/2009

• Is religious cognition adaptive?

  There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows. (Evolving Thoughts)

  tags: evolution, religion, religious-cognition, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/08/2009

• The neuroeconomics of taking your pick.

  Whaley offers a summary of papers by Martino et al. (open access) and Sharot et al. in a recent issue of J. Neurosci and a more recent paper by Croxson et al. notes correlates of cost-benefits valuation. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

  tags: decision-making, value, brain, grue, cogsci, neuroeconomics

• Watching Movies

  Instead of having our narrative understanding slowly build, these directors dole out comprehension in sudden spurts, when a crucial twist is suddenly revealed. The end result is that disbelief can't be suspended because we're too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on. (The Frontal Cortex)

  tags: movies, cognition, 150, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/07/2009

• In search of the conscious will

  Studying how people form a conscious intention to move is troublesome for at least two reasons. First, as soon as you instruct a participant that now is the time for them to move freely, of their own volition, you've already undermined the idea that they're making up their own minds. Second, there's no room in materialist science for a conscious will, separate from the electro-chemical workings of brain. (BPS RESEARCH DIGEST)

  tags: volition, freewill, brain, grue, cogsci, AZB, neuroethics

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/06/2009

• Talking Philosophy » Emotion and Ethics

  Naturally, it is reasonable to consider the role of emotions in moral decision making. Obviously, most people feel bad about murder and this no doubt plays a role in their view of the second case. However, to simply assume that the distinction is exhausted by the emotional explanation is clearly a mistake. After all, a person can clearly regard murdering one person to save five as immoral without relying on a gut reaction. It could, in fact, be a rational assessment of the situation.

  tags: morality, emotion, neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/05/2009

• Clips of Penn Neuroethicists

  Here are some five to ten minute video clips of neuroethicists from the University of Pennsylvania that may interest readers (or should I say viewers!):

  tags: neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/04/2009

• Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion

  For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

  tags: magic, perception, grue, cognitive-science, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/03/2009

• Culture May Be Encoded in DNA

  “We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome,” said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday. (Wired Science)

  tags: culture, genetics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/02/2009

• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong discusses the relevance of psychological research to moral philosophy

  Moral psychology is the empirical study of how people make moral judgements. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Walter Sinnott-Armstrong discusses the relevance of psychological research to moral philosophy. (Philosophy Bites)

  tags: moral-judgment, morality, neuroethics, grue, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 05/01/2009

• Interpreting hybrid images

  How the brain interprets complex visual scenes is an enduring mystery for researchers. This process occurs extremely rapidly - the "meaning" of a scene is interpreted within 1/20th of a second, and, even though the information processed by the brain may be incomplete, the interpretation is usually correct.
  
  Occasionally, however, visual stimuli are open to interpretation. This is the case with ambiguous figures - images which can be interpreted in more than one way. When an ambiguous image is viewed, a single image impinges upon the retina, but higher order processing in the visual cortex leads to a number of different interpretations of that image. (Neurophilosophy)

  tags: vision, brain, grue, hybrid-images, cogsci

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