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UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."

"Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people,"

We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that.

The Problem of Consciousness* John R. Searle (copyright John R. Searle) Abstract: This paper attempts to begin to answer four questions. 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid? The most important scientific discovery of the present era will come when someone -- or some group -- discovers the answer to the following question: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? This is the most important question facing us in the biological sciences, yet it is frequently evaded, and frequently misunderstood when not evaded. In order to clear the way for an understanding of this problem. I am going to begin to answer four questions: 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?

If science is supposed to give an account of how the world works and if subjective states of consciousness are part of the world, then we should seek an (epistemically) objective account of an (ontologically) subjective reality, the reality of subjective states of consciousness. What I am arguing here is that we can have an epistemically objective science of a domain that is ontologically subjective.

Savants can perform extraordinary cognitive feats much like trained experts, but unlike experts they usually cannot describe what makes them so talented, seemingly relying on intuition rather than conscious deliberation to quickly make choices.

he consensus among many researchers is that intuitions are judgments made by unconscious processes in the brain.

Studies have shown that inhibiting activity in certain areas of the brain can facilitate solving geometric puzzles.

his contention that consciousness is not merely a by-product of brain activity, but is a necessary function of the body as a whole, including the brain.

he proposes at least four levels of self, from least complex to most complex:1. Neural Self (or proto-self) - a short term collection of neural patterns of activity which represent the current state of the organism2. Core Self - a second-order entity which maps the state of the proto-self in rather the same way the proto-self maps the current state of the body: whenever an encounter with an object impinges on the proto-self, the change is registered by activity in the core self3. Autobiographical Self - draws on permanent (though modifiable) memories instead of just the immediate experiences which power the core self. At this point, there is a real, though still pre-linguistic, sense of self. Damasio thinks chimpanzees and probably dogs enjoy this level of consciousness4. Reflective Self - greater use of longer-term memory, delivers the kind of foresighted, reflective consciousness which we typically associate with human beings

In Damasio's view, one which I share, emotions are body states that then are interpreted by the brain to assign a label based on memory and previous learning.

For the first time ever, a paralyzed man can move his fingers and hand with his own thoughts thanks to an innovative partnership between The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Battelle.

“It’s much like a heart bypass, but instead of bypassing blood, we’re actually bypassing electrical signals,” said Chad Bouton, research leader at Battelle. “We’re taking those signals from the brain, going around the injury, and actually going directly to the muscles.”

Ian’s brain signals bypass his injured spinal cord and move his hand, hence the name Neurobridge.

Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.

“aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:

We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”

how culture drove human evolution

cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.

Kim Peek, who lent inspiration to the fictional character Raymond Babbitt—played by Dustin Hoffman—in the movie Rain Man, was a remarkable savant.

He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye

He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes

In the Zen Brain retreats, prominent scientists and Zen practitioners explore Buddhist, neuro-scientific and clinical science perspectives on topics like altruism, compassion and consciousness. Lectures and discussions with participants are embedded within zazen (meditation) practice throughout each day.

In these unusual programs, participants explore constructs like “affective stickiness,” a phrase coined by Dr. Richard Davidson, Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the phenomenon by which we interpret an experience as negative and then become so strongly identified with it that it becomes a fixed part of “us.”

The particular kind of misinterpreation of self-identification can prevent us from accessing our full range of consciousness and often limits our capacity to make choices regarding a situation.

David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.

Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.

His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.

Zull begins his journey with sensory-motor learning, and how that leads to discovery, and discovery to emotion. He then describes how deeper learning develops, how symbolic systems such as language and numbers emerge as tools for thought, how memory builds a knowledge base, and how memory is then used to create ideas and solve problems. Along the way he prompts us to think of new ways to shape educational experiences from early in life through adulthood, informed by the insight that metacognition lies at the root of all learning.

he argues that self-knowledge, awareness of how and why we think as we do, and the ability to adapt and learn, are critical to our survival as individuals; and that the transformation of education,

The emerging field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate, by imaging humans while performing tasks demanding the understanding of an intention, belief or other mental state.

The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as mind-blindness.

Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity.[27]

If you are like me, you interact with a flood of information, online networks, and people everyday.  To handle it all, we multitask.  Unfortunately, it's easy to get off track or drift off course while multi-tasking.  

the act of multi-tasking -- responding to an e-mail/tweet/phone call, adding a new post/picture, etc. -- becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

How do you build a scan for online multitasking?  Build a checklist. List the online tasks you want/need to keep up with.    Organize the list from the most important task to the least.  Repeat important tasks in the list if the intervening tasks take you away too long from that important task. After you go through enough scans to clear the deck, take a break to work on items that require long term thinking. 

The Learning Pyramid states that people retain:90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.20% of what they learn from audio-visual.10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.

One of the studies reviewed by our lab was on meditation and how being in the moment decreases the noise in your brain, leading to improved scores on working memory and intelligence tests.

When you tie an emotion to an experience, a hormone is released that greases the wheels at certain chemical locations in the brain where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits:

We can talk about attention training, multitasking, the dangers of distraction.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

Infotention

researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.

Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”

Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas: