David Eagleman: The human brain runs on conflict This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Throughout the 60s, pioneers in artificial intelligence worked late nights trying to build simple robotic programs capable of finding, fetching and stacking small wooden blocks in patterns. It was one of those apparently simple problems that turn out to be exceptionally difficult, and it led AI scientists to think: perhaps the robot could solve the problem by distributing the work among specialised subagents -- small computer programs that each bite off a piece of the problem. One computer program could be in charge of finding, another could fetch, another could solve stacking. The society-of-mind framework was a breakthrough, but, despite initial excitement, a collection of experts with divided labour has never yielded the properties of the human brain.
How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness, by Rick Hanson There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” gobyg It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind. But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse. For example, more activation in the left prefrontal cortex is associated with more positive emotions. So we can see that as the brain changes, the mind changes. Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes. This is known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.”
Eye Movements Do Not Reveal Lying: Scientific American Podcast The eyes are the windows to the soul. As such they can reveal if someone is lying, right? Cop shows, advice shows, even some organizational training courses hold that if somebody looks up and to the right, they’re probably lying. Up and to the left means they’re telling the truth. Now a study says that there is no connection between eye movement and lying. The work is in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. Researchers tested eye movement and honesty in multiple ways. The researchers also closely analyzed 52 archived news videos of real people making a public plea for the safe return of a missing relative. —Steve Mirsky [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] Emotional Wiring Different in Men and Women Men and women are actually from the same planet, but scientists now have the first strong evidence that the emotional wiring of the sexes is fundamentally different. An almond-shaped cluster of neurons that processes experiences such as fear and aggression hooks up to contrasting brain functions in men and women at rest, the new research shows. For men, the cluster "talks with" brain regions that help them respond to sensors for what's going on outside the body, such as the visual cortex and an area that coordinates motor actions. For women, the cluster communicates with brain regions that help them respond to sensors inside the body, such as the insular cortex and hypothalamus. "Throughout evolution, women have had to deal with a number of internal stressors, such as childbirth, that men haven't had to experience," said study co-author Larry Cahill of the University of California Irvine. Cahill and his co-author Lisa Kilpatrick, scanned the brains of 36 healthy men and 36 healthy women.
Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence Why Do We Love Music? | Life's Little Mysteries Music has been with us as long as we can collectively remember. Musical instruments have been found dating back tens of thousands of years. Yet no one knows why we love music, or what function, if any, it serves. Researchers have yet to find a "music center" in the brain. One study found that when focusing on harmony in a piece, a subject experiences increased activity in the right temporal lobe's auditory areas. Other studies have focused on our emotional responses to music. A 2001 experiment at McGill College used brain scans to study the neural mechanics of the goosebumps that great music can sometimes induce. Blood flow in the brain rises and falls to swells of music in areas associated with reward, emotion and arousal. As stimulation for food and sex are important for a organism's survival, the fact that similar neural activity is observed in responses to features in music suggests that there could be some evolutionary advantage to the ability to hear — or hum — a good tune.
What Is the Fundamental Nature of Consciousness? [Excerpt] This chapter from PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 2012) describes Tononi’s theory of consciousness as a measure of information. The brain, Tononi postulates, consists of billions of neurons: think of them as if they were transistorlike bits that, when tallied, sum to equal more than their parts. That increment above and beyond—Tononi calls it phi—represents the degree to which any being, whether human or mule, remains conscious. From the forthcoming book PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi Copyright © 2012 by Giulio Tononi Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Integrated Information: The Many and the One In which is shown that consciousness lives where information is integrated by a single entity above and beyond its parts When is an entity one entity? While musing such matters, Galileo was startled by a voice. An image came to Galileo.
U.S. researchers map emotional intelligence of the brain We tend to think of reason and emotion as being two different things, but it turns out that there may not be a choice between the heart and the head. A University of Illinois team, led by neuroscience professor Aron Barbey, has made the first detailed 3D map of emotional and general intelligence in the brain, that shows a strong overlap of general and emotional intelligence. Reason and emotions aren’t opposites, but rather two types of intelligence or, perhaps, two aspects of one intelligence. Reason comes under the heading of general intelligence. There are a number of theories about how general and emotional intelligence are related. Relationships between general and emotional intelligence The study was based on computed tomography (CT) scans taken of the brains of 152 US Vietnam War veterans. The CT scans provided the first detailed 3D map of the regions of the brain associated with general and emotional intelligence. In the video below, Aron Barbey discusses the study.
Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain | Mind & Brain Zimmer: There is a lot of work lately in understanding how perception translates into action, making sense of what goes on when we make a decision to do something. Wang: Some neuroscientists who are studying these processes are interested in the idea that perhaps you could have a brain center that gathers evidence and reaches a threshold for making a commitment. There might be another brain center that expresses confidence in the decision or even the very awareness of the decision. Here’s an example that many of you may have encountered from everyday life. So you can be pretty committed to a decision yet be unaware of it. Zimmer: Mike, you’ve been working with legal scholars to try to bring insights from neuroscience to the law. When you have this basic insight, then you realize that new knowledge about who we are is going to change how we think about the law. The more immediate issue is that neuroscience is everywhere. Audience member?
What Makes You Feel Fear? : Shots - Health News hide captionMovies like The Shining frighten most of us, but some brain-damaged people feel no fear when they watch a scary film. However, an unseen threat — air with a high level of carbon dioxide — produces a surprising result. Warner Bros. Movies like The Shining frighten most of us, but some brain-damaged people feel no fear when they watch a scary film. In shorthand often used to describe the brain, fear is controlled by a small, almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. But it's not quite that simple, as a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience demonstrates. One of the best ways to figure out how parts of the brain work is to study people who have damage in those specific areas. A few years ago, SM told Justin Feinstein, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, that she'd never felt fear, even when she'd been confronted by a knife-wielding assailant. Feinstein put her claim to the test.
MindPapers: Contents Search tips There are two kinds of search you can perform on MindPapers: All fields This mode searches for entries containing the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on MindPapers pages. Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Remember: viewing options in the menu above affect the results you get when searching. Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. What Do Emotions Have to Do with Learning? Thinkstock When parents and teachers consider how children learn, it’s usually the intellectual aspects of the activity they have in mind. Sidney D’Mello would like to change that. The University of Notre Dame psychologist has been studying the role of feelings in learning for close to a decade, and he has concluded that complex learning is almost inevitably “an emotionally charged experience,” as he wrote in a paper published in the journal Learning and Instruction earlier this year. During the learning experiments described in his paper, he notes, the participating students reported being in a neutral state only about a quarter of the time. Another counter-intuitive contention made by D’Mello is that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning. Confusion motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result. animated agents discussing scientific case studies. Related