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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - A Point of View: The upside of losing one's memory - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31849855

memory memory loss wisdom cognition neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Reading the scientific research, I learn that the brain starts deteriorating from the mid-20s onwards. By our 40s and 50s, it's well under way. The changes include a drop in brain volume, loss of myelin integrity, cortical thinning, impaired receptor binding and signalling, and altered concentrations of various brain metabolites. The accumulation of neuro-fibrillary tangles, something we associate with Alzheimer's, also happens in normal ageing.
  • You may be asking what I am worrying about. I'm not yet 50, after all. I don't have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or any reason to be worried about those diseases. My favourite novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald, was nearly 80 when her last and best book, The Blue Flower, was published. The philosopher Mary Midgley is still sharp as a razor, and she'll be 96 next birthday. She didn't even write a book till she was past 50. The psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar was still seeing patients at the age of 102.
  • Last week, my colleague listened to his father, behind a drawn hospital curtain, doing an Alzheimer's diagnostic test. He said that the trickiest part was when they read out a list of words but instead of asking you to repeat them they moved on to some numerical questions before asking you to list the words a moment later. He was petrified to find that he couldn't do it himself.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If I was looking for advice about anything other than which smart phone to buy, I'd generally ask someone aged 80- rather than an 18-year-old. It's like when you take a photograph - there's the shutter speed to consider, but there's also the depth of field. Perspective matters.
markfrankel18

How optical illusions trick your brain - Nathan S. Jacobs | TED-Ed - 1 views

ed.ted.com/...ick-your-brain-nathan-s-jacobs

TOK illusions perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Optical illusions are images that seem to trick our minds into seeing something different from what they actually are. But how do they work? Nathan S. Jacobs walks us through a few common optical illusions and explains what these tricks of the eye can tell us about how our brains assemble visual information into the 3D world we see around us.
markfrankel18

Setting Limits for Testing Brains - Atlantic Mobile - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...389880

TOK science ethics neuroscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • With progress, though, comes a whole new set of ethical questions. Can drugs used to treat conditions like ADHD, for example, also be used to make healthy people into sharper, more focused versions of themselves—and should they? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease? Can brain scans submitted as courtroom evidence reveal anything about a defendant’s intent? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease?To address these questions, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, an independent advisory group, recently released the second volume of a report examining the issues that may arise as neuroscience advances. The commission outlined three areas it deemed particularly fraught: cognitive enhancement, consent, and the use of neuroscience in the legal system.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-26151062

TOK maths math beauty emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14
     
    "Brain scans show a complex string of numbers and letters in mathematical formulae can evoke the same sense of beauty as artistic masterpieces and music from the greatest composers."
Lawrence Hrubes

Is It Wrong to Watch Football? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-it-wrong-to-watch-football

ethics sports health brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
  • His body wrecked at 36, Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing in the National Football League. After he died of an overdose of pain medication at 27, Tyler Sash was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Concussion diagnoses have increased by about a third since the league let independent medical officials assess players. And it seems that with each N.F.L. veteran’s death, another diagnosis of C.T.E. is revealed. How can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives?
Lawrence Hrubes

Neuroscience and Moral Responsibility - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...-and-moral-responsibility.html

ethics science neuroscience neurology brain free will teens morality moral knowledge

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • ARE you responsible for your behavior if your brain “made you do it”?Often we think not. For example, research now suggests that the brain’s frontal lobes, which are crucial for self-control, are not yet mature in adolescents. This finding has helped shape attitudes about whether young people are fully responsible for their actions. In 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, its decision explicitly took into consideration that “parts of the brain involved in behavior control continue to mature through late adolescence.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ects-consciousness-brains.html

science animals biology consciousness ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
markfrankel18

This Is Not Yellow | Big Think TV | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...this-is-not-yellow

TOK perception color

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Your retina does not have individual cells programmed to see yellow. Then how can it tell your brain that you're seeing the color? It turns out that it's easy to lie to the brain. Our friends at VSauce explain how.
Lawrence Hrubes

Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rockett_beware_neuro_bunk.html

TOK science neuro neurology neuroscience TEDTalk Molly Crockett badscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13
     
    "Brains are ubiquitous in modern marketing: Headlines proclaim cheese sandwiches help with decision-making, while a "neuro" drink claims to reduce stress. There's just one problem, says neuroscientist Molly Crockett: The benefits of these "neuro-enhancements" are not proven scientifically. In this to-the-point talk, Crockett explains the limits of interpreting neuroscientific data, and why we should all be aware of them."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Trusting your gut: Smart management or a fool's errand? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...0923-should-you-trust-your-gut

TOK intuition hunch business management photography arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    ""A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually domain specific," said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, and author of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life. "Intuition is the result of your subconscious brain picking up on clues and hints and calculating the situation for you, and that's based solely on experience.""
markfrankel18

Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

www.anxiousmachine.com/...placibo-philes

TOK placebo perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
  • n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
markfrankel18

What's Up With That: Why It's So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/wuwt-typos

TOK perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “
  • As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”
  • Unfortunately, that kind of instinctual feedback doesn’t exist in the editing process. When you’re proof reading, you are trying to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time. Stafford suggests that if you want to catch your own errors, you should try to make your work as unfamiliar as possible. Change the font or background color, or print it out and edit by hand. “Once you’ve learned something in a particular way, it’s hard to see the details without changing the visual form,” he said.
markfrankel18

The Psychology of Cheating : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-makes-people-cheat.html

psychology cheating TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13
     
    "When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he'll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?"
Lawrence Hrubes

The Psychology of Cheating : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-makes-people-cheat.html

TOK ethics cheating

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 13
     
    "When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he'll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?"
markfrankel18

What Emotions Are (and Aren't) - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-emotions-are-and-arent.html

TOK emotions psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Analogously, emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context. When you’re angry with your co-worker, sometimes your heart rate will increase, other times it will decrease and still other times it will stay the same. You might scowl, or you might smile as you plot your revenge. You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.
  • The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain. Instead of asking where emotions are or what bodily patterns define them, we would do better to abandon such essentialism and ask the more revealing question, “How does the brain construct these incredible experiences?”
Andrea Barlien

What happens in your brain when you make a memory? | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-brain-when-you-make-a-memory

memory WOK

shared by Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15
     
    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
  • Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15
     
    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
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