How Brain Organizes Reality: Neuroscience Of Meaning & Association. They called him “Diogenes the Cynic,” because “cynic” meant “dog-like,” and he had a habit of basking naked on the lawn while his fellow philosophers talked on the porch. While they debated the mysteries of the cosmos, Diogenes preferred to soak up some rays – some have called him the Jimmy Buffett of ancient Greece. Anyway, one morning, the great philosopher Plato had a stroke of insight. He caught everyone’s attention, gathered a crowd around him, and announced his deduction: “Man is defined as a hairless, featherless, two-legged animal!” Whereupon Diogenes abruptly leaped up from the lawn, dashed off to the marketplace, and burst back onto the porch carrying a plucked chicken – which he held aloft and shouted, “Behold: I give you… Man!” Chunks of reality At the most basic level, we don’t really perceive separate objects at all – we perceive our nervous systems’ responses to a boundless flow of electromagnetic waves and biochemical reactions.
Semantic Space. Chunks in the brain. Peter McGraw and Joel Warner: Your Mind Is a Sloppy Humor Research Laboratory. Some of civilization's great thinkers pondered the meaning of humor long and hard. Thomas Hobbes put forth the idea that humor emerges from superiority or "sudden glory" over an enemy. Immanuel Kant believed humor arose from a process of incongruity in which a "strained expectation" is transformed into "nothing.
" Unfortunately, these theories and many others, while compelling, haven't withstood the test of time. Superiority, for example, has trouble explaining why the victim of a tickle attack does the laughing (rather than the aggressor). Moreover, whereas incongruity theories seem to do a good job of explaining what is funny, it has trouble explaining what is not funny. Why have humor theories long fallen short? Maybe it's because thinkers have spent too long thinking about them, and not enough time subjecting them to empirical tests. It's easy to understand the lure of thought experiments for those trying to figure out what makes things funny. Wrong. 1) Errors of introspection. How Renaissance People Think. Do you think like a polymath? Here's a quick test: If you cringed as you read the question and thought to yourself " ", then you're on the polymath path. According to psychologist Seymour Epstein's cognitive-experiential self-theory, humans have two parallel but interacting modes of information processing.
The system is analytic, logical, abstract, and requires justification via logic and evidence. In contrast, the system is holistic, affective, concrete, experienced passively, processes information automatically, and is self-evidently valid (experience alone is enough for belief). According to Epstein [1], A large body of research by Epstein and others, including a hot-off-the-press article in the [1], supports the importance of harnessing modes of thought. To see how each mode of thought comes with both advantages and disadvantages, here is a summary of a number of findings over the years showing both the positive and negative attributes associated with each thinking style: Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.: Social and Mechanical Reasoning Inhibit Each Other.
I've got two questions for you: A guitar is a musical instrument with five metal strings of varying thicknesses. Plucking the strings causes them to vibrate and produce a sound. Each string has a different pitch depending on its thickness, which affects the speed of the vibration. The lightest or thinnest string will vibrate the quickest, while the heaviest string will vibrate the slowest. To test the pitch, the lightest string is plucked. Did your head feel any different while you were solving each problem? In recent years, neuroscientists have identified two opposed brain networks: the default mode network (DMN) and the executive attention network (EAN).
In a recent study, Anthony Jack and colleagues argue that the crucial distinction between the two networks isn't internal vs. external attention but information processing. To test their hypothesis, they presented participants with social and physical scenarios (text and video), and asked them to predict the outcomes. William T. Talman, MD: Back to Basics. Did you ever consider why the thing scientists do is called "research"?
If what they're seeking is so new, why isn't the work they do just called "search"? Where did the "re" come from? If it derives from "repeat," as some might suggest, then it is no surprise that the answer to that question really defines why science is what it is. Rarely has there been a scientific discovery that stood in such isolation, with nothing preceding it, that it could be called completely "new. " That is not to say that nothing really new comes from scientific study but that all new ideas arise from elements of past observation. The public expects scientists to engage in this rigorous approach to their work, which, at its core, must be pure and organized both to avoid bias and to assure the validity of the outcome.
To avoid carrying that metaphor too far, let me explain. Not convinced yet? Susan Celia Greenfield: Jane Austen Weekly: The Brain and Mind. Since I wrote about Jane Austen and sex organs last week, it's only fair that I give the brain and mind equal time. (Plus, it's a good excuse to avoid the presidential debate.) No problem here. Among her countless accomplishments, Austen is making news in the field of neuroscience. The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging (CNi) has been tracking the blood flow patterns in the brains of Austen readers. How? By having literature graduate students read the second chapter of Mansfield Park while getting brain images using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
The subjects were asked to alternate styles, reading some passages for pleasure and others with the kind of close critical attention required in literature courses like my own. Natalie Phillips, an Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, is a co-director of the study. "Natalie," I said, "the study is fascinating, but why is Jane Austen relevant?
Not really, Natalie said. Victor Stenger: Is Evolution Compatible With Religion? Every major scientific society has affirmed that all our knowledge of biological science convincingly supports evolution by natural selection and cannot be understood without it. At the same time, these societies have carefully avoided offending religious groups by assuring that evolution does not conflict with religious beliefs.
(See, for example, National Academy of Sciences. Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998, p. 58). In fact, this attempt by scientists to convince the American public that evolution poses no threat to faith has largely fallen on deaf ears, perhaps because it is simply untrue, and believers can see this clearly enough. A 2010 Gallup Poll found that only 16 percent of Americans believe in "Naturalist Evolution," defined as the view that "Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life [and] God had no part in the process.
" He doesn't tell us how he knows all this. Ben Thomas: How Your Body Controls Your Mind. You might think that your body's metabolism reflects your state of mind, but a new study finds that the reverse is often true: Your biological clock actually opens and closes specific communication channels in your brain. I can already hear some of you saying, "Well, obviously -- when I turned 12, I suddenly realized there were beautiful girls (or boys) everywhere, and I'd never noticed them before! " What we're talking about here is much more precise than hormonal shifts, though: Throughout every day and night, an area of your brain known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) "listens in" on your body's chemical state and responds by actively tinkering with the sensitivity of other neural pathways.
This overturns a long-held belief about the brain: "The idea has always been that metabolism is serving brain function," says biologist Martha Gillette, who headed the study's research team. This raises a curious idea about thoughts themselves. Yet somehow that never stops us. Physicists Find Particle That Could Be the Higgs Boson.