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Tero Toivanen

YouTube - bf skinner on reinforcement - general psychology - 0 views

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skinner reinforcement pigeon behaviour reward learning youtube free will

shared by Tero Toivanen on 19 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Tero Toivanen on 19 Jul 09
     
    Skinner explains about reinforcement and "free will".
Tero Toivanen

The five ages of the brain: Adolescence - life - 04 April 2009 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...-of-the-brain-adolescence.html

Adolescence brain scanning grey-matter neural connections prefrontal cortex white matter

shared by Tero Toivanen on 21 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have followed the progress of nearly 400 children, scanning many of them every two years as they grew up. They found that adolescence brings waves of grey-matter pruning, with teens losing about 1 per cent of their grey matter every year until their early 20s (Nature Neuroscience, vol 2, p 861).
  • This cerebral pruning trims unused neural connections that were overproduced in the childhood growth spurt, starting with the more basic sensory and motor areas.
  • Among the last to mature is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the very front of the frontal lobe. This area is involved in control of impulses, judgement and decision-making, which might explain some of the less-than-stellar decisions made by your average teen. This area also acts to control and process emotional information sent from the amygdala - the fight or flight centre of gut reactions - which may account for the mercurial tempers of adolescents.
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  • These changes have both benefits and pitfalls. At this stage of life the brain is still childishly flexible, so we are still sponges for learning. On the other hand, the lack of impulse control may lead to risky behaviours such as drug and alcohol abuse, smoking and unprotected sex.
  • As grey matter is lost, though, the brain gains white matter
  • Substance abuse is particularly concerning, as brain imaging studies suggest that the motivation and reward circuitry in teen brains makes them almost hard-wired for addiction.
  • since drug abuse and stressful events - even a broken heart - have been linked to mood disorders later in life, this is the time when both are best avoided.
  • Making the most of this time is a matter of throwing all that teen energy into learning and new experiences - whether that means hitting the books, learning to express themselves through music or art, or exploring life by travelling the world.
  • Tero Toivanen on 21 Jun 09
     
    Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have followed the progress of nearly 400 children, scanning many of them every two years as they grew up. They found that adolescence brings waves of grey-matter pruning, with teens losing about 1 per cent of their grey matter every year until their early 20s (Nature Neuroscience, vol 2, p 861).
Tero Toivanen

Brain Stimulant: Brain Chip to Restore Functioning from Damage - 1 views

brainstimulant.blogspot.com/...-restore-functioning-from.html

brain Brain Chip restore damage neuromorphic engineering neurons stroke

shared by Tero Toivanen on 10 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The ReNaChip project is developing electronic biomimetic technology that could serve to replace damaged or missing brain tissue. This is basically neuromorphic engineering that seeks to mimic how neurons function. In the future this may be useful for people who have had injuries due to stroke or other illnesses.
  • The objective of this project is to develop a full biohybrid rehabilitation and substitution methodology; replacing the aged cerebellar brain circuit with a biomimetic chip bidirectionally interfaced to the inputs and outputs of the system. Information processing will interface with the cerebellum to actuate a normal, real-time functional behavioural recovery, providing a proof-of-concept test for the functional rehabilitation of more complex neuronal systems.
  • A sophisticated exocortex could potentially allow a two way communication between the external apparatus and the mind. The contraption could essentially scale up the amount of neurons in your brain by an artificial means. Most likely it would be used to improved the disabled first, with other applications being more speculative possibilities.
  • Tero Toivanen on 10 Dec 09
     
    The ReNaChip project is developing electronic biomimetic technology that could serve to replace damaged or missing brain tissue. This is basically neuromorphic engineering that seeks to mimic how neurons function. In the future this may be useful for people who have had injuries due to stroke or other illnesses.
Ruth Howard

You won't find consciousness in the brain - opinion - 07 January 2010 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...onsciousness-in-the-brain.html

consciousness brain neuroscience neurons

shared by Ruth Howard on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy.
  • This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations.
  • It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.
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  • While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with it.
  • Many features of ordinary consciousness also resist neurological explanation.
  • There is nothing in the convergence or coherence of neural pathways that gives us this "merging without mushing", this ability to see things as both whole and separate.
  • This concerns the disjunction between the objects of science and the contents of consciousness. Science begins when we escape our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and reach towards a vantage point the philosopher Thomas Nagel called "the view from nowhere".
  • Thus measurement takes us further from experience and the phenomena of subjective consciousness to a realm where things are described in abstract but quantitative terms. To do its work, physical science has to discard "secondary qualities", such as colour, warmth or cold, taste - in short, the basic contents of consciousness. For the physicist then, light is not in itself bright or colourful, it is a mixture of vibrations in an electromagnetic field of different frequencies. The material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically. In short, physical science is about the marginalisation, or even the disappearance, of phenomenal appearance/qualia, the redness of red wine or the smell of a smelly dog.
  • Consciousness, on the other hand, is all about phenomenal appearances/qualia.
  • There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.
  • Then their "appearings" will depend on the viewpoint of the conscious observer.
  • Material objects require consciousness in order to "appear".
  • Our failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity inside the brain inside the skull is not due to technical limitations which can be overcome. It is due to the self-contradictory nature of the task, of which the failure to explain "aboutness", the unity and multiplicity of our awareness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions, the construction of self are just symptoms.
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