Mind & Brain

"Apr. 15, 2013 — A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study being presented this week in San Francisco is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills -- from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

""Working memory is believed to be a core cognitive function on which many types of high-level cognition rely, including language comprehension and production, problem solving, and decision making," says Brad Postle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is co-chairing a session on working-memory training at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting today in San... more... - Maitani

"The cornerstone brain-training exercise in this field has been the "n-back" task, a challenging working memory task that requires an individual to mentally juggle several items simultaneously. Participants must remember both the recent stimuli and an increasing number of stimuli before it (e.g., the stimulus "1-back," "2-back," etc). These tasks can be adapted to also include an audio... more... - Maitani

As with adults, some adolescents kill because they are chronically aggressive, cold and unfeeling. Some will kill because they "explode" in response to a history of "over-controlled hostility." Some will lash out after wallowing in feelings of victimization and after nurturing longstanding resentments. Others kill because they have been traumatized and are unable to tolerate their existence. Some who are immature and narcissistic become “obsessed.” Deprived of love or gratification, they feel justified while escalating to violence. Less common, but often more dramatic are the killings committed by the psychotic, those with disturbed and disordered thoughts and only a tenuous grasp on reality. - Halil from Bookmarklet

see Three teenagers who beat a homeless man to death http://ff.im/1f9WCi also Edlington attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... and Murder of James Bulger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Halil

"A new study that examined how the brain learns and retains motor skills provides insight into musical skill." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

But … but … but … sleep is unproductive and a waste of time! - Amit Patel

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by... more... - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt... more... - Amira

"Neuroscience has entered the public consciousness, and changed the way we talk about ourselves. But much of what passes as knowledge is inaccurate" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I never used to discuss neuroscience on the bus but it's happened twice in the last month. On one occasion a fellow passenger mentioned that her "brain wasn't working properly" to explain that she had gone through a long period of depression. On another, an exchange student enthusiastically told me that one of the advantages of learning abroad is that a new language "made your brain... more... - Maitani

"But it's the sheer penetration of neuroscience into everyday life that makes it remarkable. We talk about left- and right-brain thinking, brainstorming and brain disorders. Differences between the male and female brain are the subject of regular press speculation and newspapers publish stories on brain scans that claim to explain everything from love to memory. Young people are... more... - Maitani

"Afraid you will miss “something important”? From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of meta-information, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know. (…) The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. (…)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. (…) [F]ewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once... more... - Amira

“When people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.” — Adam Gopnik - Amira

Abstract: "In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions." - Amira

See also: Creating False Memories by Elizabeth F. Loftus http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus... - Amira

...and just the opposite: Harvard researchers found that 83% of radiologists didn't notice the gorilla in this image http://www.npr.org/blogs... :-) - Amira

"Technology has changed the speed and the scope of social influence and has really transformed our realities. (...) I see that most of our learning is by social modeling and through indirect experiences. Errors can be very costly and you can’t afford to develop our values, our competences, our political systems, our religious systems through trial and error. Modeling shortcuts this process. (…) With new technologies, we’re essentially transcending our physical environment and more and more of our values and attitudes and behavior are now shaped in the symbolic environment – the symbolic environment is the big one rather than the actual one. The changes are so rapid that there are more and more areas of life now in which the cyber world is really essential. One model can affect millions of people worldwide, it can shape their experiences and behaviors. We don’t have to rely on trial and error. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The revolutionary tendency of technology has increased our sense of agency. If I have access to all global knowledge, I would have fantastic capacities to educate myself. (…) The important thing in psychology is that we need a theory of human agency, rather than arguing that we’re controlled by neural networks. In every aspect of our lives we now have a greater capacity for exercicing agency." - Amira

We assume that aggression is inbred, but some societies are remarkably pacifistic. And we can also see large variations within a society. But the most striking example might be the transformation from warrior societies into peaceful societies. Switzerland is one example. Sweden is another: Those vikings were out mugging everyone and people would pray for protection: - Elestirel Gunluk

"What if the very thing that made you feel crazy happy also made you smarter? That’s the question underlying the work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where scientists believe that spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-force will solve “even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind.” (...) The culminating experiment features a ride that resembles a giant tropical plant. Riders enter a round car that rises slowly up, up, up and then takes off suddenly at incredibly high speed along one of the “branches.” “Unpredictability is a key part of our work,” says Laslowicz. After the ride, he says, people described experiencing a “readjustment of key goals and life aspirations.” Though he later adds that he wouldn’t put his own children on one of his rides. “These machines provide total freedom,” Laslowicz says, “cutting all connection to the world we live in: communication responsibility, weight. Everything is on hold when you’re being centrifuged.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

*Eivind* - Harold Cabezas from Android

Ten great questions about the unknowns, worthy of your perusal. They should be posted over at Quora :-) though in the meantime check out the CogSci "blog" https://cogsci.quora.com - Adriano from Bookmarklet

You're also very welcome to this 'blog' http://cognitive_science.quora.com/ :-) - Amira

And just as I predicted... on Quora for 2013: https://www.quora.com/Neurosc... - Adriano

"Cellist Katinka Kleijn performed both halves of a duet Sunday night. Her hands played the cello, and her brain, hooked up to a headset that detects cerebral electrical signals, played itself. (...) "Intelligence in the Human Machine,” the cello/brain duet, explored the relationship a performer has to the music she’s playing. During the performance, at Chicago’s Cultural Center, Kleijn wore an Emotiv EPOC, a neuroheadset with 14 sensors that attach to the scalp and detect brainwaves. In front of her, a laptop flashed a word and a few measures of music. She then played the music on her cello, interpreting the word onscreen. At the same time, her brainwaves, translated to audio, changed sounds as she reacted to the word. (...) “Not only is Katinka playing the cello, but she is also, in a sense, playing her brain waves, emphasizing what’s going on in her brain while she’s performing,” Dehaan says." - Amira

vay arkadaş - kemik

"We know quite a bit about how long-term memory is formed in the brain - it's all about strengthening of synaptic connections between neurons. But what about remembering something over the course of just a few seconds? Like how you (hopefully) still recall what that last sentence as about? Short-term memory is formed and lost far too quickly for it to be explained by any (known) kind of synaptic plasticity. So how does it work? British mathematicians Samuel Johnson and colleagues say they have the answer: Robust Short-Term Memory without Synaptic Learning." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The mechanism, which we call Cluster Reverberation (CR), is very simple. If neurons in a group are more densely connected to each other than to the rest of the network, either because they form a module or because the network is significantly clustered, they will tend to retain the activity of the group: when they are all initially firing, they each continue to receive many action potentials and so go on firing." - Maitani

"It was a good world. Each generation could anchor the moral norms of its particular present in the past – in particular, the belief that a society with better morals was possible and that it was thus worthy to fight for the upholding of moral norms." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

For the current study, Volk and fellow team member Julia Bachman made mice that lacked working PKMζ, so-called genetic "knockouts." The goal was to compare the synapses of the modified mice with those of normal mice, and find clues about how the enzyme works. But, says Volk, "what we got was not at all what we expected. We thought the strengthening capacity of the synapses would be impaired, but it wasn't." The brains of the mice without PKMζ were indistinguishable from those of other mice, she says. Additionally, the synapses of the PKMζ-less mice responded to the memory-erasing ZIP molecule just as the synapses of normal mice do. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Protein kinase C, zeta (PKCζ), also known as PRKCZ, is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the PRKCZ gene. The PRKCZ gene encodes at least two alternative transcripts, the full-length PKCζ and an N-terminal truncated form PKMζ. PKMζ is thought to be responsible for maintaining long-term memories in the brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... Hmm, this may need updating now... - Halil

"The science of self-improvement never ceases. Every year brings dozens of new quirky findings about how to be more effective, whether in managing our time, being more creative or just getting things done. Here are some of the highlights for me from 2012." - Lit from Bookmarklet

"1. You don’t know yourself as well as you think. We think we know ourselves best, but more and more evidence is surfacing to the contrary. This raises an interesting challenge for employers who solely base their hiring decisions on self-reported questionnaires. Psychologist Timothy Wilson proposes that to really know someone, you have to ask others to evaluate you. It turns out that... more... - Lit

"3. We’re more creative when thinking about others. Creativity in the business world is increasingly important. Creativity often involves viewing things from different perspectives. New findings show that we are more creative when we think of others solving problems instead of ourselves. To test this, professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich presented 137 undergraduates with this riddle:... more... - Lit

"Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who began her seminal research on cell development while dodging bombs and fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II, died Dec. 30 at her home in Rome. She was 103. ...Dr. Levi-Montalcini was widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of her generation, and her accomplishments were particularly notable because of the handicaps and obstacles faced in science by women throughout the world when she began her career.Her rise to the highest reaches of scientific achievement was made even more difficult because she embarked on her career under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who expelled her and her fellow Jews from the Italian academic world. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a substance known as the nerve growth factor, a naturally occurring protein that helps spark the growth of nerve cells. She launched that groundbreaking research in a makeshift bedroom laboratory during... more... - Lit

"In essence, Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s discovery helped explain how embryonic nerve cells grow into a fully developed nervous system and, more broadly, how a damaged nervous system might be repaired. Cohen was credited with the identification of the epidermal growth factor, a similar substance that helps regulate the growth of skin and other cells. Together, those advances “opened new... more... - Lit

“What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a theory that explains how brains create explanations. (…) What distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program. Nor can it be achieved merely by improving their performance at tasks that they currently do perform, no matter by how much. Why? I call the core functionality in question creativity: the ability to produce new explanations. (…) What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not. (…)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds. Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not ‘true’... more... - Amira

"Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips — is what researchers call “a continuous semantic space.” Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same “semantic neighborhood”) while others (hallways and buckets) are less obvious. The researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout. “Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed... more... - Lit from Bookmarklet

"A clearer understanding of how the brain organizes visual input can help with the medical diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. These findings may also be used to create brain-machine interfaces, particularly for facial and other image recognition systems. Among other things, they could improve a grocery store self-checkout system’s ability to recognize different kinds of... more... - Lit

"'The structure and content of thinking looks very much like the structure and content of dreaming. They may be the product of the same machine,' said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at MIT and a panelist at the New York Academy of Sciences discussion 'The Strange Science of Sleep and Dreams' on Friday (Nov. 9). His work and others' explores the crucial link between dreams and learning and memory. Dreams allow the brain to work through its conscious experiences. During them, the brain appears to apply the same neurological machinery used during the day to examine the past, the future and other aspects of a person's (or animal's) inner world at night. Memory is the manifestation of this inner world, Wilson said. 'What we remember is the result of dreams rather than the other way around,'" he said. - Wynne Parry - Lit from Bookmarklet

Recommended... brings together snippets from CogSci to real life :-) "Harvard psychologist and author of _Stumbling on Happiness_, Prof. Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face. Each episode weaves together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research along with revealing comments from celebrities." PBS http://www.pbs.org/thisemo... - Adriano

Here is an alternative playlist on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch... :-) - Amira

"Dec. 13, 2012 — The initial excitement of hearing a new song fades as it's replayed to death. That's because the brain naturally functions as a kind of ticking time bomb, obliterating the thrill for artistic sounds, images and words by making them familiar over time." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"So the artist, musician or author's challenge is to create a work that retains a freshness, according to Case Western Reserve University's Michael Clune, in his new book, Writing Against Time (Stanford University Press). And, for the artist, musician or writer, creating this newness with each work is a race against "brain time."" - Maitani

"Clune explains how neurobiological forces designed for our survival naturally make interest in art fade. But the forces don't stop artists from trying for timelessness. While the phenomenon is true for all art, the assistant professor of English focuses on the intersection of literature and science, describing what writers can do to block or slow that natural erosion over time. Clune's... more... - Maitani

"Self-change is tough, but it's not impossible, nor does it have to be traumatic...To increase the overall probability of success, divide a behavior into parts and learn each part successively." - Lit from Bookmarklet

"Change Requires Structure Many people view structure as restrictive, something that inhibits spontaneity. While spontaneity is wonderful for some activities, it's a surefire method for sabotaging change. Strategy: Identify what works Classify all activities and materials you're using as either helpful, neutral or unhelpful in achieving your goal. Eliminate unhelpful ones, make neutrals... more... - Lit

"Spatial location is closely connected to the formation of new memories. Until now, grid cells were thought to be part of a single unified map system. New findings from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology demonstrate that the grid system is in fact composed of a number of independent grid maps, each with unique properties. Each map displays a particular resolution (mesh size), and responds independently to changes in the environment. A system of several distinct grid maps can support a large number of unique combinatorial codes used to associate new memories formed with specific spatial information. (...) Your brain has at least four different senses of location – and perhaps as many as 10. And each is different. (...) This independence can be used by the brain to create new combinations - many combinations - which is a very useful tool for memory formation. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

:-) - Amira

One of the challenges of understanding the complex behavior of animals is to relate the behavior to the complex processes occurring within the brain. So far, neural models have not been able to bridge this gap, but a new software model, Spaun, goes some way to addressing this problem. - lotek93

на элементах развернутую статью выложили: http://elementy.ru/news... - bifurcafe

"Self-help books are full of advice for thinking positively, and using affirmations to tell ourselves that the reality we wish to be true is in fact true. This is interesting because psychologists have discovered that people in general have a large positive cognitive bias – a wishful thinking bias. All other things being equal, we will tend to assume that what we wish to be true is actually true. Sometimes we can maintain this belief despite significant contradictory evidence." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"It may be that this bias exists because it relieves cognitive dissonance. Essentially, it makes us feel better, and that may be sufficient. However, there is also a theory that such wishful or positive thinking is, to an extent, self-fulfilling. People who think they will be successful will take advantage of opportunities and work harder to make that success a reality. Expectations can... more... - Maitani

"Within the “New Age” spiritual community, however, this psychological discussion over the impact of positive or wishful thinking is all moot. Within this community there is the widely held belief, or at least claim, that wishful thinking does not just create a successful attitude – it actually alters reality. This belief reached its pinnacle, perhaps, in the widely successful book, The... more... - Maitani

"ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2012) — In the 1960s and 1970s, classic social psychological studies were conducted that provided evidence that even normal, decent people can engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others. However, in an essay published November 20 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Professors Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher revisit these studies' conclusions and explain how awful acts involve not just obedience, but enthusiasm too -- challenging the long-held belief that human beings are 'programmed' for conformity." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

This will come in very handy in my plans for world domination… - Amit Patel