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Rudy Garns

An underlying cause for psychopathic behavior? - 2 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100427091723.htm

psychopathy neuroethics neuroscience empathy

shared by Rudy Garns on 21 Oct 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
  • Rudy Garns on 21 Oct 10
     
    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

Does the Internet Change How We Think? - Sharon Begley - Newsweek.com - 1 views

www.newsweek.com/...229843

brain internet technology AZB cosci

shared by Rudy Garns on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 26 Jan 10
     
    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.
Rudy Garns

Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex: A role in reward-based decision making -- Bush et al.... - 0 views

www.pnas.org/...523

anterior.cingulate brain neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • anticipate and detect targets, indicate novelty, influence motor responses, encode reward values, and signal errors
Rudy Garns

Brain scans may help fix criminal responsibility - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...x-criminal-responsibility.html

brain scans neuroethics neurolaw

shared by Rudy Garns on 25 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 25 Sep 10
     
    Now neuroscientists claim we are closer to being able to estimate brain maturity using brain scans, which might prompt lawyers to offer a defence of immaturity based on an accused individual's own brain scan.
Rudy Garns

Cognitive science research to revolutionize the legal system - 0 views

aurmoth.blogspot.com/...itive-science-research-to.html

neuroethics neurolaw neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 25 Jan 10
     
    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.
Rudy Garns

Neuroscience: Small, furry … and smart - 0 views

www.nature.com/...461862a.html

neuroscience intelligence memory CDC evolution

shared by Rudy Garns on 14 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Rudy Garns on 14 Oct 09
     
    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.
Rudy Garns

Stages of Brain Development - 0 views

www.learningdiscoveries.com.au/StagesofBrainDevelopment.htm

brain-development cogsci

shared by Rudy Garns on 12 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 12 Oct 09
     
    From a single fertilised egg of about 0.14 millimetres in diameter, to an adult human being, the neurophysiology of development of the brain and nervous system is nothing short of remarkable. We are born with around 100 billion neurons, and the development of the brain continues long after birth, with dendrites of some neurons in the neocortex continuing to grow well into old age
Rudy Garns

Researchers Identify Critical Gene For Brain Development, Mental Retardation - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...090904165103.htm

brain-development cogsci

shared by Rudy Garns on 12 Oct 09 - Cached
  • brain protein srGAP2 can also impose cell shape by directly bending membranes, forming filopodia as a mean to control the migration and branching of neurons during brain development
  • establishing the neural wiring necessary to function normally depends on the ability of neurons to make finger-like projections of their membrane called filopodia.
  • Rudy Garns on 12 Oct 09
     
    In laying down the neural circuitry of the developing brain, billions of neurons must first migrate to their correct destinations and then form complex synaptic connections with their new neighbors.
Rudy Garns

Where is my mind? - 0 views

www.lrb.co.uk/...fodo01_.html

mind extended-mind clark fodor cogsci

shared by Rudy Garns on 06 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Is what my robot does when it ‘decides’ to change course a sort of thing which if it had happened inside the robot, ‘I would have had no hesitation in accepting as part of [a] cognitive process?’
  • But how am I to understand the hypothesis that it would (or wouldn’t) have changed course if it had collided with the couch in my head?
  • His real argument is that, barring a principled reason for distinguishing between what Otto keeps in his notebook and what Inga keeps in her head, there’s a slippery slope from the one to the other.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things.
  • What I should have said isn’t that only what’s literally and unmetaphorically mental has content, but that if something literally and unmetaphorically has content, then either it is mental (part of a mind) or the content is ‘derived’ from something that is mental. ‘Underived’ content (to borrow John Searle’s term) is the mark of the mental; underived content is what minds and only minds have.
  • Externalism needs internalism; but not vice versa. External representation is a side-show; internal representation is ineliminably the main event.
  • your internal model of the world contains stuff that the world itself does not; this happens not just when your beliefs are false but also when they are hypothetical (‘if there are clouds, there will be rain’ can be true even if there aren’t any clouds); or when they are modal (‘it might rain’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain); or when they are in the past or future tense (‘it used to rain here a lot’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain here anymore).
  • Rudy Garns on 06 Feb 09
     
    There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You'll regret it if you don't. (Jerry Fodor review of Clark)
Rudy Garns

Do the Impossible: Know Thyself - 0 views

www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm

human.nature neuroscience science

shared by Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08 - No Cached
  • 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
      Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
       
      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
      Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
       
      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
      Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
       
      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.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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
      Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
       
      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
      Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
       
      Do we need to fully explain behavior? Is it full explanation or nothing? Might there not be value in partial explanations?
  • Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
     
    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

Anterior cingulate cortex regulation of sympathetic activity -- Luu and Posner 126 (10)... - 0 views

brain.oxfordjournals.org/...2119

anterior.cingulate brain neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • lesions to the ACC do not produce massive or consistent cognitive deficits.
  • patients with ACC lesions do demonstrate performance deficits on the Stroop task and other tasks that have been shown to activate the ACC
    • Rudy Garns
      Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
       
      Greene refers to the Stroop Effect and the ACC; ACC is thought to monitor conflict between prepotent social-emotional moral responses and cognitive-utilitariann responses.
  • apathetic and unconcerned when significant events occur, such as making mistakes
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • divide the ACC into subregions that are separately responsible for affective and cognitive processes
  • adaptive
  • the mechanisms by which mental processes are integrated with bodily systems.
  • these processes produce autonomic reactions that signal the requirement for adaptive control of behaviour.
  • regulation of autonomic processes
  • the ACC is involved in detecting when strategic control is required and that the lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in strategic control
  • the anterior cingulate is very metabolically active at rest
  • changes in heart rate in both cognitive and motor tasks related to the strength of activation in the ACC.
Rudy Garns

Is anterior cingulate cortex necessary for cognitive control? -- Fellows and Farah 128 ... - 0 views

brain.oxfordjournals.org/...788

anterior.cingulate brain neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • activated when tasks require the ongoing adjustment of the allocation of attention.
  • All four subjects with dACC damage showed normal adjustments in performance following manipulation of response conflict in both Stroop and go–no go tasks
  • damage to the dACC did not impair the phenomenon of post-error slowing, nor alter the ability to adjust performance in response to explicit speed or accuracy instructions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • cognitive control, as assessed by four different measures in two different tasks, appears to be intact in these subjects, arguing against a necessary role for dACC in this process.
  • cognitive control.
  • Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
     
    Abstract
Rudy Garns

Neuroskeptic: How Brain Cells Avoid Getting All Tied Up - 0 views

neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/...ls-avoid-getting-all-tied.html

neuroskeptic neurons cogsci brains neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 02 Oct 09
     
    During the development of the brain, young neurones need to form connections with other cells. But equally important, they need to avoid making connections with themselves.
Rudy Garns

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21cnd-brain.html

brain ethics morality neuroethics neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • native revulsion
  • ventromedial prefrontal cortex
  • active during moral decision-making
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline
  • emotional system
  • utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
  • ventromedial area
  • ventromedial area
  • blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward
  • strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
  • direct action to kill or harm someone
  • Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train
  • navigate social interactions
  • brain stem
  • amygdala
  • emotional memories,
  • social emotions that we can feel, like embarrassment, guilt, compassion that are critical to guiding our social behavior,
  • ension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion
  • ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being
    • Rudy Garns
      Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
       
      It would be interesting to see whether other primates use the ventromedial cortex for similar responses to dilemmas involving conspecifics.
  • increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives
    • Rudy Garns
      Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07
       
      I wonder what would happen if you adjust the identity of the sacrificable person. What happens if person is a stranger versus a family member? They do run the "smother your baby" dilemma. Does it make a difference if it is a stranger? What about alternative to the other five victims? What information is the VMPFC working with?
Rudy Garns

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

www.nytimes.com/...20moral.html

ethics evolution morality primates

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task
  • 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.
  • eciprocity and fairness
  • 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.
Rudy Garns

Mixing Memory : Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...study_on_emotion_reason_an.php

morality neuroethics neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08 - Cached
  • emotion and intuition, both of which operate automatically and unconsciously for the most part, play a much larger role than most philosophers and psychologists had previously been willing to admit.
  • VMPC plays a role in encoding the reward value of stimuli, as well as emotions like fear.
  • determines approach and avoidance behavior.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • patients with damage to the VMPC, who have trouble processing emotional value as a result of that damage, would behave differently in those scenarios than normal individuals (and other brain-damaged patients
  • The standard interpretation of these results is that in the impersonal scenarios, people are making the moral decision using conscious reasoning. Specifically, they are thought to be using utilitarian ethical principles to make the decision to flip the switch and kill one person to save five. In the personal scenarios, however, people tend not to make utilitarian decisions, and researchers therefore believe that they are basing their decision on the emotional response the situation elicits.
  • damage to the VMPC can make decisions related to the value of a stimulus more difficult
  • there was a difference between the normal patients (and brain-damaged elsewhere patients) and the VMPC-damaged patients for the high-conflict personal moral scenarios. The normal and non-VMPC brain-damaged patients said "no" (they wouldn't smother the baby, e.g.) about 80% of the time in response to these scenarios, while the VMPC-damaged patients said no less than 60% of the time (in fact, their response rate was pretty close to 50-50).
  • more rational
  • they just didn't know how to respond to those scenarios
  • unable to decide
  • when people are making these decisions, both the emotional reaction and the moral principle are available at the same time, and one will win out over the other, depending largely on the strength of the emotional response (which is strong in the personal scenarios, and weak in the impersonal ones, at least when they're just being read on paper). This would be inconsistent with strong intuitionist theories of moral judgment.
  • Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08
     
    Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Damasion, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature.
Rudy Garns

Politika Erotika: DAVID BROOKS: The Morality Line - 0 views

politikaerotika.blogspot.com/...avid-brooks-morality-line.html

neuroethics

shared by Rudy Garns on 02 Apr 08 - Cached
  • There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It’s just that these selves can’t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.
  • we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice — and individual responsibility — begins. The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.
  • now the language of morality is often replaced with the language of determinism. >
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s important knowledge, but it’s had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self. “Man is the measure of all things,” the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared millenniums ago. But in the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing. Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within.
Rudy Garns

Anterior cingulate cortex - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Anterior_cingulate_cortex

anterior.cingulate brain neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 22 Mar 07 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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

Clean and Virtuous: When Physical Purity Becomes Moral Purity - 0 views

www.sciam.com/article.cfm

metaphors morality purity virtue cogsci neuroethics

shared by Rudy Garns on 11 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 11 Mar 09
     
    How embodied metaphors, rooted in our physical understanding of abstract concepts, shape our view of the world. (Scientific American)
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