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What if a jury could decide a man's guilt through mind reading? What if reading a defendant's memory could betray their guilt? And what constitutes 'intent' to commit murder? These are just some of the issues debated and reviewed in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, the latest interdisciplinary project from Wiley-Blackwell, which for registered institutions will be free for the first two years. In the article "Neurolaw," in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, co-authors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Annabelle Belcher assess the potential for the latest cognitive science research to revolutionize the legal system.

"Social scientists are often concerned about the importation of poorly understood concepts from the hard sciences into "softer" fields like anthropology or sociology. In my view, the story of mirror neurons shows that the reverse also happens: scores of brilliant neuroscientists were set to work on entities celebrated and, one might say, partly invented because they allowed neuroscience to relate to social concepts, like imitation, culture, and art. Once it got started, the story was one of mutual seduction. The disenchantment, if it takes place at all, may take years. Will the speculative bubble burst? "

If I were a sociologist of science, I would jump on mirror neurons - they are the perfect object if you want to study a scientific controversy today.

Dan Jones writes an interesting essay in a recent issue of Science (PDF here) on how work in evolutionary theory, moral philosophy, and neuroscience casts doubt on the idea that disgust embodies a deep-seated wisdom. Instead it provides an emerging portrait of an evolutionarily constrained emotion that is a poor guide to ethical action. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

At the center of the discovery is the signaling of rhodopsin to transducin. Rhodopsin is a pigment in the eye that helps detect light. Transducin is a protein (sometimes called "GPCR") which ultimately signals the brain that light is present. The researchers were able to "freeze frame" the chemical communication between rhodopsin and transducin to study how this takes place and what goes wrong at the molecular level in certain disorders. (Science Blog)

By combining the models and tasks of Game Theory with modern psychological and neuroscientific methods, the neuroeconomic approach to the study of social decision-making has the potential to extend our knowledge of brain mechanisms involved in social decisions and to advance theoretical models of how we make decisions in a rich, interactive environment. Research has already begun to illustrate how social exchange can act directly on the brain's reward system, how affective factors play an important role in bargaining and competitive games, and how the ability to assess another's intentions is related to strategic play. These findings provide a fruitful starting point for improved models of social decision-making, informed by the formal mathematical approach of economics and constrained by known neural mechanisms. -- Sanfey 318 (5850): 598 -- Science

The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" That is the "annual question" at the online salon edge.org, where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers.

publication

No matter which public topic you discuss or which personal aspect you worry about - you need reasons for your opinion and argumentation. Moreover, the ability of reasoning is responsible for your cognitive features of decision making and choosing among alternatives.

Across the board, Hauser says, there are signs that animal evolution passed along some capabilities "and then something dramatic happened, a huge leap that enabled humans to break away. Once symbolic representation happened, if the combinatorial capacity was there, things just took off. Precisely how and when this happened, we may never know." (November-December 2008)

Is it to be full understanding or nothing? I should think there would be some value in enough understanding to make useful predictions. His position is that a scientific understanding of man is undesirable, but I thinnk there is something very desirable about useful predictions.

Envy and schadenfreude (gloating over the other's misfortune) are social emotions widely agreed to be a symptom of the human social tendency to compare one's payoffs with those of others. Given the important social components of envy and gloating, we speculated that oxytocin may have a modulating effect on the intensity of these emotions.