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Rudy Garns

Human facial expressions aren't universal - 0 views

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    Facial expressions, Charles Darwin argued in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, are a universal window into emotion. But new research challenges that notion, showing that east Asian people struggle to recognise facial expressions that western Caucasians attribute to fear and disgust. By focusing on eyes and brows, Asians miss subtle cues conveyed via the mouth. (13 August 2009 - New Scientist)
Rudy Garns

Losers With Winners' Brains - 0 views

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    One of the mysteries of gambling is that even when we should know we're going to lose, we somehow think we're going to win. Dr. Luke Clark, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, may have discovered one of the reasons why. Using MRI, he studied brain activity in people gambling, looking particularly at "near misses" in which a loss seems close to a win. He found that the brain activated the same reward system that is activated in a real win, despite the fact that people report that these near misses are unpleasant. (CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | February 21, 2009)
Rudy Garns

Brain correlates of dealing with risk versus ambiguity - 0 views

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    another interesting study from the group at Wellcome Center group at University College associated with Ray Dolan - cognitive neuroscience that is directly relevant to our current economic and political reality: (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)
Rudy Garns

Do the Impossible: Know Thyself - 0 views

  • Two main questions arose in my mind during the neuropsychiatric conference. The first was whether any scientific self-understanding was possible. The second was whether, if possible, it was desirable. My answer to both questions was, and is, no.
    • Rudy Garns
       
      Notice the question is whether ANY scientific self-understanding is possible, not just whether we have one now or whether neuroscience alone will provide all the answers.
  • difficult even to conceive of what a scientific self-understanding would actually be like
    • Rudy Garns
       
      So what? Why should we assume we can conceive of it prior to achieving it? It might be complicated. Perhaps it is the wort of thing we approximate over a long period of time through the scientific endeavors of lots of people.
  • How does one develop a universal law that explains an infinite number of unique events that are infused with meaning and intentionality?
    • Rudy Garns
       
      I doubt it will require a single universal law to understand human nature, or the mortivations for human behavior. At best we might develop theories that allow us to predict human behavior fairly accurately. We already try to do this personally; neuroscience, genetics, etc., should enhance those abilities considerably.
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  • already been answered
  • Nothing is important or significant but conscious thinking makes it so: the type of thinking, moreover, that employs moral categories that are inherently non-natural.
    • Rudy Garns
       
      it certainly doesn't seem right that conscious thinking lies behind our moral (or other) values. But even so, why would that make them non-natural?
  • The fact is that, however many factors you examine, you cannot fully explain behaviour, not even relatively simple behaviour.
    • Rudy Garns
       
      Do we need to fully explain behavior? Is it full explanation or nothing? Might there not be value in partial explanations?
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    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.
Rudy Garns

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity : NPR - 0 views

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    A new study says so-called "heavy multitaskers" have trouble tuning out distractions and switching tasks compared with those who multitask less. And there's evidence that multitasking may weaken cognitive ability. Stanford University professor Clifford Nass explains the work.
Rudy Garns

Neuroscience: Small, furry … and smart - 0 views

  • Much of the work involves making an adult brain behave more like a younger, more flexible version of itself by increasing the organ's plasticity.
  • neuroscientists using genetic engineering to generate cognitively enhanced animals in a bid to understand memory and learning.
  • Tsien created Doogie by overexpressing a subunit of the NMDA receptor called NR2B. This kept the receptors open for longer, strengthening the synaptic link and making it easier for disparate events to be linked together.
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    Tsien, based at Princeton University in New Jersey at the time, named his creation Doogie after the teenage genius in the television programme Doogie Howser, MD. The work was one of the earliest examples of neuroscientists using genetic engineering to generate cognitively enhanced animals in a bid to understand memory and learning.
emedevents

Flu Vaccine Expected to Protect Against Most U.S. H3N2 Viruses | eMedEvents - 0 views

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    A novel bioinformatics approach can predict vaccine effectiveness for the influenza season, and indicates that the current vaccines are likely to be effective against H3N2 flu viruses in the U.S. 2017/2018 flu season, according to research published online Nov. 29 in F1000 Research. Slobodan Paessler, D.V.M., Ph.D., from the University of Texas Medical Branch, and Veljko Veljkovic, Ph.D., from Biomed Protection, both in Galveston, Texas, used a bioinformatics platform to predict vaccine effectiveness for the 2017/2018 influenza season in the United States. The hemagglutinin HA1 region of 251 and 113 human H3N2 viruses collected in Australia and the United States from July to September 2017 were analyzed. The informational spectrum method-based phylogenetic analysis of H3N2 viruses was performed to serve as a base for predicting vaccine effectiveness. The researchers found that analyses of Australian viruses generated two clusters; the vaccine virus was placed in the smaller group. As a result, the vaccine was predicted not to be efficient against most Australian H3N2 viruses in the 2017 flu season; low vaccine effectiveness was reported in Australia in the 2017 flu season in accordance with this prediction. The U.S. H3N2 viruses were also grouped into two clusters, but the vaccine virus was placed in the largest cluster encompassing 71 percent of analyzed viruses. Consequently, the vaccine effectiveness is expected not to be suboptimal in the United States.
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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