Saturday, April 25, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/25/2009


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Friday, April 24, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/24/2009


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Thursday, April 23, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/23/2009


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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/21/2009

  • WE HAVE all heard of experts who fail basic tests of sensory discrimination in their own field: wine snobs who can't tell red from white wine (albeit in blackened cups), or art critics who see deep meaning in random lines drawn by a computer. We delight in such stories since anyone with pretensions to authority is fair game. But what if we shine the spotlight on choices we make about everyday things? Experts might be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of their skills as experts, but could we be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of our skills as experts on ourselves? (18 April 2009 - New Scientist)

    tags: choice, blindness, mind, psychology, neuroethics, grue, cogsci


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/20/2009

  • A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

    tags: neuroethics, enhancement, grue, cogsci

  • Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought. A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory—the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command. (Scientific American)

    tags: language, evolution, grue, cogsci

  • I first saw Price last May in a YouTube clip of her on 20/20. Diane Sawyer asks Price, an avid television viewer, to identify certain significant dates in broadcast history. When did CBS air the "Who shot JR?" episode of Dallas? When was All in the Family's baby episode shown? And so on. Price nails every question. She not only gives the date for the final episode of MASH but describes the weather that day.

    tags: memory, cogsci, grue


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/16/2009

  • Emerging technologies raise the possibility that we may be able to treat trauma victims by pharmaceutically dampening factual or emotional aspects of their memories. Such technologies raise a panoply of legal and ethical issues. While many of these issues remain off in the distance, some have already arisen.

    In this brief commentary for the journal Neuroethics, I discuss a real-life case of memory erasure. The case reveals why the contours of our freedom of memory -- our limited bundle of rights to control our memories and be free of outside control -- already merit some attention.

    tags: memory, neuroethics, grue, cogsci


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/15/2009

  • On the day I visited, there were half a dozen brains sitting on a table. Vonsattel began by passing them around so the medical students could take a closer look. When a brain came my way, I cradled it and found myself puzzling over its mirror symmetry. It was as if someone had glued two smaller brains together to make a bigger one. (Carl Zimmer)

    tags: human-evolution, brain, cogsci, grue

  • Language, memory and intuition depend on rapid communication between both hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum is the conduit for that communication. Tony Grobmeier was born without one. Lynn Paul, a neuroscientist, tries to understand how Tony faces the world with a brain disconnected from itself. (YouTube)

    tags: neuroethics, splitbrain, theory-of-mind, 150, grue, aapt, cogsci

  • To Steven Quartz & Colin Camerer the brain is a huge number-cruncher, assigning a numeric value to everything from a loaf of bread to our most deeply held moral "values". In that sense, moral decisions are also economic ones. Using a brain scanner (fMRI), they want to catch the brain in the act—to see what it's doing at exactly the moment a tough moral decision gets made. Their research is pioneering a new branch of neuroscience -- neuroeconomics. (YouTube Video)

    tags: neuroethics, 150, grue, morality, brain, cogsci, neuroeconomics, aapt


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/14/2009


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Monday, April 13, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/13/2009


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Sunday, April 12, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/12/2009


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Thursday, April 09, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/09/2009


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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/08/2009


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Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/07/2009


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Monday, April 06, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/06/2009


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Sunday, April 05, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/05/2009


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Saturday, April 04, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/04/2009


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Thursday, April 02, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/02/2009

  • In a recent issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (45, 155-60), Daniel Batson—known for his influential empathy-altruism studies—and colleagues find little evidence of moral outrage. In a series of studies meant to measure people’s judgments of torture, they find little evidence that torture evokes much anger unless the subjects have some relation to the person tortured. (Neuroethics & Law Blog)

    tags: neuruoethics, morality, emotion, grue, cogsci


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Cognitive Neuroscience Links 04/01/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.