The additional perception is
regarded by the trained synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's
eye. Its reality and vividness are what makes artificial synesthesia so interesting in its violation
of conventional perception. Synesthesia in general is also fascinating because logically it should
have been a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing
coordination, mutual consistency and perceptual robustness in the processing of different sensory
inputs.
Artificial Synesthesia for Synthetic Vision via Sensory Substitution - 0 views
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synesthesia
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options it may provide for people with sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness, where a neural joining of senses can help in replacing one sense by the other:
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How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution.
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What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
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Attention Schema Theory (AST),
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The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right-and that has yet to be determined-then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
Growing evidence of the brain's plasticity could benefit stroke victims or those suffer... - 0 views
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With the right training, scientists now know the brain can reshape itself to work around dead and damaged areas, often with dramatic benefits.
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Therapies that exploit the brain's power to adapt have helped people overcome damage caused by strokes, depression, anxiety and learning disabilities, and may one day replace drugs for some of these conditions.
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Children with language difficulties have been shown to make significant progress using computer training tools that are the equivalent of cerebral cross-training.
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Autism Blog - Autism: Is it all about bigger brains? « Left Brain/Right Brain - 0 views
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in light of the increased cranial volumn and minicolumnar density in autism, more recent studies have begun targeting certain proteins and steroids called Growth Factors, which are in part intimately involved in neocortical expansion.
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Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor (bFGF or FGF2) has particularly important implications in autism given its involvement in prolonging the period of cell division of the number of undifferentiated radial glial cells (cortical stem cells) which determine the total number of eventual minicolumns: the longer these radial glial divide, the greater the number of minicolumns, like that seen in autism.
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It’s fascinating to think that while autism can undoubtedly provide for its share of handicap, these foundational elements may be “abnormal” only in the sense that they’re extremes of those things which make us most human.
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Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor (bFGF or FGF2) has particularly important implications in autism given its involvement in prolonging the period of cell division of the number of undifferentiated radial glial cells (cortical stem cells) which determine the total number of eventual minicolumns: the longer these radial glial divide, the greater the number of minicolumns, like that seen in autism.
You won't find consciousness in the brain - opinion - 07 January 2010 - New Scientist - 0 views
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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.
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This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations.
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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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Sign language study shows multiple brain regions wired for language - 1 views
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A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.
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Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.
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"We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."
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Use It or Lose It: The Principles of Brain Plasticity - 3 views
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You probably haven't realizd it, but as you acquire an ability – for example, the ability to read – you have actually created a system in the brain that does not exist, that's not in place, in the non-reader. It [the ability; the brain system that controls the ability] actually evolves in you as it has been acquired through experience or learning.
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"There are some very useful exercises at www.BrainHQ.com that are free, and using them can give a person a better understanding of how exercising your brain can drive it in a rejuvenating direction. Using exercises at BrainHQ, most people, of any age, can drive sharp improvements in brain speed and accuracy, and thereby rewire the brain so that it again represents information in detail," he says.
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Children operating in the 10th to 20th percentile of academic performance are commonly able to improve their scores to the middle or average level with 20-30 hours of intensive computer-based training. "That's a big difference for the child," he says. "It carries most children who are near the bottom of the class, on the average, to be somewhere in the middle or above average in the class. And that gives struggling children a chance to really succeed and in many cases excel in school."
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