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Rudy Garns

Anterior cingulate cortex - Wikipedia - 0 views

  • the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is primarily related to rational cognition while the ventral is more related to emotional cognition.
  • early learning and problem solving
  • processing top-down and bottom-up stimuli and assigning appropriate control to other areas in the brain.
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  • ACC response in Stroop task experiments (designed to measure adherence to sequential decision-making paths) remains relatively elevated in typical human subjects, as the alternative - spontaneity - is sacrificed.
  • A typical task that activates the ACC involves eliciting some form of conflict within the participant that can potentially result in an error.
  • inability to detect errors, severe difficulty with resolving stimulus conflict in a Stroop task, emotional instability, inattention, and akinetic mutism
  • difficulty in dealing with conflicting spatial locations in a Stroop-like task and having abnormal ERNs
  • appears to play a role in a wide variety of autonomic functions, such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate, as well as rational cognitive functions, such as reward anticipation, decision-making, empathy and emotion.
Rudy Garns

An underlying cause for psychopathic behavior? - 2 views

  • impairment in the emotional aspects of these abilities may account for psychopathic behaviour.
  • ToM is made up of different aspects: a cognitive part, which requires inferences about knowledge and beliefs, and another part which requires the understanding of emotions.
  • striking similarities between the mental impairments observed in psychopaths and those seen in patients with frontal lobe damage.
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  • The pattern of impairments in the psychopathic participants showed a remarkable resemblance to those in the participants with frontal lobe damage, suggesting that an underlying cause of the behavioural disturbances observed in psychopathy may be dysfunction in the frontal lobes.
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    Psychopaths are known to be characterized by callousness, diminished capacity for remorse, and lack of empathy. However, the exact cause of these personality traits is an area of scientific debate. The results of a new study, reported in the May 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, show striking similarities between the mental impairments observed in psychopaths and those seen in patients with frontal lobe damage.
Rudy Garns

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior - New York Times - 0 views

  • Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language.
  • Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.
  • human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies
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  • other chimpanzees would console the loser.
  • Social living requires empathy
  • reconciliation
  • human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders.
  • eciprocity and fairness
  • Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them.
  • These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
  • People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.
  • Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task
  • reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached
  • Morality, he writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.”
  • Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others.
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