Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/26/2010

• New insight into brain's decision-making process

  The hippocampus, a part of the brain essential for memory, has long been known to "replay" recently experienced events. Previously, replay was believed to be a simple process of reviewing recent experiences in order to help consolidate them into long-term memory. However, researchers have discovered that the replay function of the hippocampus is actually a much more complex, cognitive process.

  tags: brain, decision-making, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/25/2010

• Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking

  Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences. - life - 24 March 2010 - New Scientist

  tags: mind, matter, extended-mind, cogsci

• Study: Apes have metacognitive ability - UPI.com

  German scientists say they have determined great apes realize they can make mistakes when making choices.

  tags: apes, primates, metacognition, mind, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/23/2010

• Talking Brains: Mirror neurons support action understanding -- "from the inside"?

  tags: no_tag

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/21/2010

• Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes from

  22 March 2010 - New Scientist

  tags: consciousness, azb, cogsci, global-workspace

• Talking Brains: Mirror Neurons - The unfalsifiable theory

  tags: mirror-neurons, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/14/2010

• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You | Wired Science | Wired.com

  An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.
  

  tags: extended-mind, cogsci, AZB

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/04/2010

• Inequality Aversion : The Frontal Cortex

  When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1⎯a minimal amount⎯and the responder would accept it. After all, $1 is better than nothing, and a rejection leaves both players worse off. Such an outcome would be a clear demonstration of our innate selfishness and rationality.

  tags: aversion, inequality, brain, neuroethics, economics, politics, cogsci

• A Mind of Crime | How brain-scanning technology is redefining criminal culpability.

  The X’s marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan’s brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X’s would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan’s brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? Or had he chosen freely when he abducted, raped and killed a 10-year-old girl in 1983?

  tags: neuroethics, justice, law, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/03/2010

• 'Trust Hormone' May Improve Autism - ScienceNOW

  A dose of the "trust hormone" oxytocin may help bring some autistic people out of their shell. Patients with the condition usually have a hard time interacting with others, but when they inhaled oxytocin in a new study, they began looking at people in the eye and recognizing social concepts like fairness in a computer game. Although the results are preliminary, the work could lead to drugs to treat a variety of social disorders, including schizophrenia and anxiety,

  tags: trust, oxytocin, autism, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 03/02/2010

• Bringing New Understanding to the Director’s Cut - NYTimes.com

  the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

  tags: film, brain, movies, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 02/09/2010

• What Happens in the Amygdala... Damage to Brain's Decision-Making Area May Encourage Dicey Gambles: Scientific American

  The amygdala damage did not appear to affect risk-aversion—a similar behavior with an important difference. People who are risk-averse are less likely to take chances even when they have nothing to lose.

  tags: amygdala, decision-making, cogsci

• Center for Culture, Mind and the Brain

  We invite you to apply to attend the first Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. SICN is an annual two-week program that provides graduate students as well as faculty with an overview of core topics and recent research developments related to cultural neuroscience in order to prepare them to start their own empirical investigations.

  tags: institute, neuroscience, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 02/08/2010

• Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds | Video on TED.com

  Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions.

  tags: saxe, theory-of-mind, AZB, neuroethics, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 02/03/2010

• Easy = True - The Boston Globe

  One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.

  tags: cognitive-fluency, psychology, politics, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 02/02/2010

• Abstract Thoughts Prompt Literal Physical Responses - NYTimes.com

  tags: embodied-cognition, embodiment, cognitive-science, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 01/06/2010

• Mirror-touch synesthesia is linked with empathy : Abstract : Nature Neuroscience

  Watching another person being touched activates a similar neural circuit to actual touch and, for some people with 'mirror-touch' synesthesia, can produce a felt tactile sensation on their own body. In this study, we provide evidence for the existence of this type of synesthesia and show that it correlates with heightened empathic ability. This is consistent with the notion that we empathize with others through a process of simulation.

  tags: mirror-neurons, empathy, brain, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 12/07/2009

• Rethinking artificial intelligence

  The new project, launched with an initial $5 million grant and a five-year timetable, is called the Mind Machine Project, or MMP, a loosely bound collaboration of about two dozen professors, researchers, students and postdocs. According to Neil Gershenfeld, one of the leaders of MMP and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, one of the project’s goals is to create intelligent machines — “whatever that means.”

  tags: AI, inteligence, MIT, cogsci, AZB, CDC

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 11/29/2009

• The Psychology of Body Language | Psychology Today

  tags: psychology, language, body-language, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 11/26/2009

• Did McCulloch and Pitts 1943 Offer a Theory of Cognition in terms of Digital Computation?

  tags: brains, connectionism, digit-computer, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 11/17/2009

• Oxytocin Receptor Variants Linked To Empathy

  Researchers have discovered a genetic variation that may contribute to how empathetic a human is, and how that person reacts to stress. In the first study of its kind, a variation in the hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin's receptor was linked to a person's ability to infer the mental state of others.

  tags: oxytocin, empathy, cogsci, neuroethics

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 11/14/2009

• Michael Gazzaniga: Split brains and other heady tales

  Beyond the hype of left brain versus right brain lies the work of acclaimed neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. His career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, and together their trailblazing experiments have illuminated the differences between the brain's two hemispheres. All In The Mind - 14 November 2009 -

  tags: mind, splitbrain, Gazzaniga, 150, brains, cogsci

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 10/29/2009

• A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task - NYTimes.com

  In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don’t watch out, you’ll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain.

  tags: dopamine, motivation, neuroscience, cogsci, brain

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Cognitive Neuroscience Links 10/20/2009

• UCLA Study: The Internet Is Altering Our Brains

  Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

  tags: brains, internet, cogsci, CDC

• Creature Consciousness

  Animal studies tests the boundary between human and animal—and between academic and advocate

  tags: animals, consciousness, cogsci

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