Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Here is an interesting project .
Computers are introduced into the wild (a rather romantic notion). Slum kids (who?) in India are exposed to computers without the benefit of any further guidance. No adults. No instructions. In an experiment repeated several times now, they go through several ...
Posted in Society, Neuroscience, evolution, social environment, philosophy | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
In a now classic article from 1977, Sverker Runeson observed that variables which we scientists consider to be basic, such as length, duration, etc, may or may not be basic from the point of view of opportunistic, evolved perceptual systems. He suggests that perception may consist of "smart mechanism" which ...
Posted in Neuroscience, Science, evolution, social environment | Comments Off
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Take any two human brains and compare them. Their coarse structure will be similar: here a gyrus, there the thalamus. The correspondence is pretty good as you look closer and closer, until you get down to a certain scale. The exact scale probably depends on the local ...
Posted in Neuroscience, Consciousness, religion, social environment, madness | Comments Off
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling.
No.
Brains bring forth ...
Posted in Consciousness, Neuroscience, Science, evolution, philosophy, social environment, madness | Comments Off
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
In this remarkable talk at TED, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the phenomenology of a stroke. She gives a very moving and spirited account of what it felt like for her to suffer a major stroke which essentially knocked out the left half of her brain. The experience was essentially mystical ...
Posted in Consciousness, Neuroscience, Science, evolution, social environment, religion, philosophy | Comments Off
Monday, February 25th, 2008
I'm reading a very short note in this months Scientific American (so short it doesn't warrant a counterpart on their website, so no link. Sorry). In treats of people with body dysmorphic disorder, in which sufferers perceive themselves as flawed based on very little evidence. Functional MRI has ...
Posted in Neuroscience, Science, religion, social environment, philosophy | Comments Off
Monday, February 25th, 2008
More and more, I find that the vision of being I am outlining here and in the sister site is one that aligns well with the enactive approach in Cognitive Science. I try not to read too much ahead of me, but when I do read in this area, things ...
Posted in Consciousness, Neuroscience, Science, religion, social environment, friends, philosophy | Comments Off