In search of my own brain. Are we on information overload? The last two decades have completely transformed the way we know. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, information is far more accessible than ever before. It’s more connected to other pieces of information and more open to debate. Organizations — and even governmental projects like Data.gov — are putting more previously inaccessible data on the Web than people in the pre-Internet age could possibly have imagined. But this change raises another, more ominous question: Is this deluge overwhelming our brains? In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives.
Salon spoke to Weinberger over the phone about the rise of the information cloud, the demise of expert knowledge, and why this is the greatest time in human history. Yes. Yes, exactly. OK. It’s both good and bad. How to stop the political insanity. Like most people living through this jarring age of economic turbulence and political dysfunction, you can probably recall a moment in the last few months when you thought to yourself that our lawmakers and corporate leaders are all crazy.
And not just run-of-the-mill crazy, à la George Costanza’s parents, but the kind of crazy that makes films like “Silence of the Lambs” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” so frightening. The good news for you is that you aren’t insane for thinking this. The bad news for all of us, though, is that according to two new scientific analyses, you are more correct in your assessment than you may know. The first revelation came from Dr.
Now comes a new study from Switzerland’s University of St. As the website Newser reported, the researchers “pitted a group of stockbrokers against a group of actual psychopaths in various computer simulations and intelligence tests and found that the money men were significantly more reckless, competitive and manipulative.” A New State of Mind. Has evolution essentially bootstrapped our penchant for intellectual concepts to the same kinds of laws that govern systems such as financial markets? Read Montague is getting frustrated. He’s trying to show me his newest brain scanner, a gleaming white fMRI machine that looks like a gargantuan tanning bed. The door, however, can be unlocked only by a fingerprint scan, which isn’t recognizing Montague’s fingers.
Again and again, he inserts his palm under the infrared light, only to get the same beep of rejection. Montague is clearly growing frustrated — ” I can’t get into my own scanning room!” He yells, at no one in particular — but he also appreciates the irony. A pioneer of brain imaging, he oversees one of the premier fMRI setups in the world, and yet he can’t even scan his own hand. Montague is director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in downtown Houston. The centerpiece of the lab, however, isn’t visible.
“We are profoundly social animals. Neuroeconomists tackle the irrational. For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed mathematically in terms of a “utility function.” And his choices are driven by rational calculations about how to maximize that function: whether consumers are deciding between corn flakes or shredded wheat, or investors are deciding between stocks and bonds, those decisions are assumed to be based on comparisons of the “marginal utility,” or the added benefit the buyer would get from acquiring a small amount of the alternatives available. It’s easy to make fun of this story. Nobody, not even Nobel-winning economists, really makes decisions that way. But most economists — myself included — nonetheless find Economic Man useful, with the understanding that he’s an idealized representation of what we really think is going on.
If this sounds like spooky science fiction, well, it’s not. The scientific argument for being emotional. At the end of his second year of Harvard graduate school, neuroscientist and bestselling author Richard Davidson did something his colleagues suspected would mark the end of his academic career: He skipped town and went to India and Sri Lanka for three months to “study meditation.” In the ’70s, just as today, people tended to lump meditation into the new-age category, along with things like astrology, crystals, tantra and herbal “remedies.” But contrary to what his skeptics presumed, not only did Davidson return to resume his studies at Harvard, his trip also marked the beginning of Davidson’s most spectacular body of work: neuroscientific research indicating that meditation (and other strictly mental activity) changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion — he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That’s a great example. MIT’s Brainput boosts your brain power by offloading multitasking to a computer. A group of American researchers from MIT, Indiana University, and Tufts University, led by Erin Treacy Solovey, have developed Brainput — pronounced brain-put, not bra-input — a system that can detect when your brain is trying to multitask, and offload some of that workload to a computer. The idea of using computers to do our grunt work isn’t exactly new — without them, the internet wouldn’t exist, manufacturing would be a very different beast, and we’d all have to get a lot better at mental arithmetic. I would say that the development of cheap, general purpose computers over the last 50 years, and the freedoms they have granted us, is one of mankind’s most important advancements.
Brainput is something else entirely though. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is basically a portable, poor man’s version of fMRI, Brainput measures the activity of your brain. Now, it’s easy to see how this could be extrapolated out into the real world. Study: Conservatives have larger “fear center” A study to be published next year at University College London suggests that conservative brains are structured differently than the brains of other people. The investigation, led by Geraint Rees, focused on 92 individuals in the U.K. — 90 students and two members of Parliament. Specifically, the research shows that people with conservative tendencies have a larger amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate than other people. The amygdala — typically thought of as the “primitive brain” — is responsible for reflexive impulses, like fear.
The anterior cingulate is thought to be responsible for courage and optimism. This one-two punch could be responsible for many of the anecdotal claims that conservatives “think differently” from others. Since only adults were included in the investigation, researchers were unable to determine if cerebral physiology drives politics or if political beliefs change the brain. Divining the brain. Can we actually see God in the brain? Well, not exactly. But a few enterprising neuroscientists have found ways to detect and measure the varieties of our religious experience. Using brain scanning technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated during prayer and meditation.
While they can’t answer the biggest question of all — does God exist? — they are probing one of the deepest mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness. They’re also wading into a thorny issue in the science and religion debate: the connection between brain and mind. One of the pioneers in the new field of neurotheology is Andrew Newberg, a 40-year-old physician at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, who has just published a book, “Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth,” written with his colleague Mark Robert Waldman. We did see similar changes. Exactly. MIT crowdsources and gamifies brain analysis. There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections.
Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard.
At the moment we know that neurons trigger an electrical signal, and that hormones affect the speed at which signals cross between synapses, and that somehow this results in a mental image of a naked Kristen Bell from her Veronica Mars period, but that’s about it. MIT wants to change all that by tasking thousands of people with analyzing a 0.3-millimeter slice of mouse retinal tissue.
Buddha on the brain. The debate between science and religion typically gets stuck on the thorny question of God’s existence. How do you reconcile an all-powerful God with the mechanistic slog of evolution? Can a rationalist do anything but sneer at the Bible’s miracles? But what if another religion — a nontheistic one — offered a way out of this impasse?
That’s the promise that some people hold out for in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama himself is deeply invested in reconciling science and spirituality. He meets regularly with Western scientists, looking for links between Buddhism and the latest research in physics and neuroscience. B. In his new book, “Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge,” Wallace takes on the loaded subject of consciousness. In conversation, Wallace is a fast talker who laughs easily and often gets carried away with his enthusiasm. Why do you think Buddhism has an important perspective to add to the science and religion debate? Not at all. Not in the same way. Yes. How your brain pursues pleasure. Human nature, at war for itself. For centuries, that was the fundamental view of our interior life: a perpetual struggle between the brain — the capital of rationality — and the heart, the sloppy seat of passion.
A line from Ludacris’ “Can’t Live With You” voices this dilemma: “My mind says yes, but my heart says no” — a conundrum whose lyrical ancestry runs from Shakespeare to Coleridge (Samuel T.) to Cole (Porter). But that vexing civil war, with its shifting fields of victory and surrender, has actually never been waged with such crisp skirmishing. Indeed, the fact that we can’t trust our brains to be sober assessors, that they are as lacking in objective vigilance as the untrustworthy heart, that they were wired by an ancient (and often amoral) electrician and are thus no longer entirely useful in a modern age, has become reasonably well known to the general reader. David J. That would be exciting if it were at all new. So it turns out that Linden’s gauntlet is pretty gaunt. THC Prevents MDMA Neurotoxicity in Mice. [PLoS One. 2010. How music changes our brains. Not long ago, a young man drove onto Robert Trivers’ Jamaica property. Suspicious of the man’s sudden appearance, and convinced he was intent on either extorting money from him or robbing him, Trivers, a Rutgers professor, confronted him about his identity.
His first name, the man said, was Steve. “What’s your last name?” Trivers asked. Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about the mechanics and meaning of deception than almost anybody else in the world, and his new book, “The Folly of Fools,” covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the topic. Salon spoke to Trivers over the phone about Arnold Schwarzenegger, “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the connection between staying in the closet and HIV. When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?
Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. Self-deception, by contrast, has been a long problem in human thought. Right. I’m 27. Ha! Madison Avenue and your brain. Pity the poor overstuffed couch potato, little suspecting that his latest turn of appetite is not the true call of hunger but a hijacking of his brain’s circuitry from afar. While he waits for his favorite rerun to air, a fast-food commercial shows him images of moist, steaming meat; crisp, glistening vegetables; and taut strands of melted cheese.
A cascade of neurotransmitters is set off in an ancient part of his brain, and his food cravings reawaken. Several decades into the era of consumer capitalism, the whiz kids on Madison Avenue have learned fairly well how to attach psychic puppet strings to our minds, but they have never really known why (or often whether) their tricks worked. Enter the age of neuroscience. Stock assertions like “People buy designer clothes because it makes them happy” or “Americans are overweight because they’re weak-willed” are not real explanations. Take the case of the hunger-struck couch potato. “Are marketers tapping into this system unknowingly? The Brain on Trial - Magazine. Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note: I don’t really understand myself these days.
By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. For that matter, so did Whitman. At the same time, Alex was complaining of worsening headaches. “Compass of Pleasure”: Sex, drugs and volunteer work. In his epic ode to sex, “Don Juan,” Lord Byron wrote: “Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.” Apparently, not much has changed since the early 19th century. No matter our era or nationality or creed, we humans like pleasure. The pleasure may take different forms. But whether it’s chocolate cake or morning jogs, vodka or volunteering, we’re all ultimately in search of the next hit. Recent science has found that different kinds of pleasure are surprisingly similar in terms of brain chemistry and physiology.
In his new book “The Compass of Pleasure,” David J. After all, we’ve never had so much easy access to pleasure as we do now. What made you decide to write a book about pleasure? Because what we do, we do for pleasure. The subtitle of your book, “how our brains make fatty foods, orgasm, exercise, marijuana, generosity, vodka, learning and gambling feel so good,” speaks to this idea — that our vices and virtues might have more in common than we realize. Right. How music changes our brains. The Brain: The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives | Mind & Brain.
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