Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items matching "brain" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Brain Science Be Dangerous? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • The idea that poverty can change the brain has gotten significant attention recently, and not just from those lay readers (a minority, according to recent research) who spend a lot of time thinking about neuroscience. Policy makers and others have begun to apply neuroscientific principles to their thinking about poverty — and some say this could end up harming poor people rather than helping. At The Conversation, the sociologist Susan Sered takes issue with “news reports with headlines like this one: ‘Can brain Science Help Lift People Out Of Poverty?’” She’s referring to a June story by Rachel Zimmerman at WBUR, about a nonprofit called Crittenton Women’s Union that aims to use neuroscience to help get people out of poverty. Elisabeth Babcock, Crittenton’s chief executive, tells Ms. Zimmerman: “What the new brain science says is that the stresses created by living in poverty often work against us, make it harder for our brains to find the best solutions to our problems. This is a part of the reason why poverty is so ‘sticky.’”
  • “The new neuroscience offers wonderful possibilities regarding Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, brain injuries and much more,” writes Dr. Sered. “But scientific knowledge always develops and is utilized within social contexts.” She and others fear that, used incorrectly, neuroscience might spread the view that poor people are lesser than others, that they are irrevocably debilitated by their experiences with poverty — or, conversely, that if they fail to respond to programs that science says will help them, it must be their own fault.
  • Ms. Williams writes that many of today’s child-development ideas are very similar to those of the psychiatrist John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory. But, she notes, he developed his ideas through psychological observation, not brain scans. And she quotes Sebastian Kraemer, a psychiatrist: “If John Bowlby were alive today, he would say, this [neuroscience] does not add anything. People are just more persuaded by it, by the facts and the pictures.” People do seem to find neuroscience extremely persuasive, even when it’s wrong. And this may be part of what critics fear — that images and facts about the brain are so powerful, they can make us believe things we really shouldn’t.
Lawrence Hrubes

Lights Out: A New Reckoning for Brain Death : The New Yorker - 0 views

  •  
    "But brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists might like. A doctor can't always determine whether the brain is truly dead. The diagnosis is made the old-fashioned way: by careful observation. A doctor checks to see whether the eyes are responsive to light or touch; she pricks the nailbeds to discern whether the pain registers; she tests muscle reflexes; she determines whether the buildup of carbon dioxide triggers spontaneous breathing if the ventilator is shut off; and she may use an electroencephalograph to detect electrical activity in the brain. (However, even a dead brain may produce some voltage.) If all the findings are negative, then the declaration is made. Even then, the doctor can be wrong. "
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brain That Couldn't Remember - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.
  • Five years after Milner’s first paper about Henry, she published a second that was almost as revelatory. That paper documented Henry’s gradual improvement over a three-day period on a difficult hand-eye coordination task. His improvement came despite his inability to ever remember his previous attempts at the task, indicating that there are at least two different memory systems in the brain — one responsible for our conscious, episodic memories, the second responsible for task-or-skill related “procedural” memories — and that these two systems seem to rely on entirely distinct parts of the brain. This was another fundamental step forward in our understanding of how memory works. Together, Milner’s two Henry-­related revelations can be viewed as the cornerstones of modern memory science.
  • Corkin: Yeah, but it’s not peer-­reviewed, for one thing. That’s important. The stuff that’s published is good stuff. Peer-­reviewed. You can believe it. Things that, you know, experiments that might not have been good experiments, there might have been inadequate control groups. ... There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with experiments. Not every experiment is publishable.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Me: But they can still be interpreted by other people. ... Maybe as we continue to understand how the brain works, and how memory works, some of this existing data of H.M.’s could be reilluminated by new theories, by new ideas, by new — it just seems a shame to destroy it. And it also seems — and this would be the darker interpretation of it — it locks in stone your own telling of H.M.’s story.
Lawrence Hrubes

You're an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Leah H. Somerville, a Harvard neuroscientist, sometimes finds herself in front of an audience of judges. They come to hear her speak about how the brain develops.It’s a subject on which many legal questions depend. How old does someone have to be to be sentenced to death? When should someone get to vote? Can an 18-year-old give informed consent?
  • Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  •  
    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
Lawrence Hrubes

Annals of Medicine: As Good as Dead : The New Yorker - 1 views

  •  
    "Confusion about the concept of brain death is not unusual, even among the transplant professionals, surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple with it regularly. brain death is confusing because it's an artificial distinction constructed, more than thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to suggest that brain-dead patients aren't really dead at all-that the concept is just the medical profession's way of dodging ethical questions about a practice that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year."
Lawrence Hrubes

Henry Gustave Molaison: The Basis for 'Memento' and the World's Most Celebrated Amnesiac : The New Yorker - 0 views

  •  
    "Scoville later called the operation "a tragic mistake" and warned neurosurgeons never to repeat it, but neuroscience and cognitive psychology benefitted hugely. The operation could not have been better designed if the intent had been to create a new kind of experimental object that showed where in the brain memory lived: there was no other way that Molaison's brain injuries could have occurred, and no other way that the precision of his memory damage could have been brought about. Molaison gave scientists a way to map cognitive functions onto brain structures. It became possible to subdivide memory into different types and to locate their cerebral Zip Codes."
Lawrence Hrubes

On the Brain - The New Yorker - 1 views

  •  
    This is an archive of various NYer articles about the brain. Many links to areas of knowledge.
Lawrence Hrubes

Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain? - The New York Times - 1 views

  • I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.
markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University School of Medicine - 0 views

  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
markfrankel18

The Brain on Trial - Issue 5: Fame - Nautilus - 0 views

  • Now we are regularly bombarded with new insights into how the unconscious guides our behavior. At the same time, neuroscience has largely debunked the idea of an autonomous self that has the final say in decisions; few science-savvy folks still believe there is a “ghost in the machine,” a little homunculus in the brain who is watching our perceptions or thinking our thoughts. Some philosophers even question whether the conscious mind plays any role in our thoughts. In short, present-day neuroscience has pulled the rug out from under the concept of “the rational man.”
  • If you are asked why you chose the violin, your answer is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the unconscious competition that led to your choice. In effect, the decision happened to you. Your brain developed a “violin neural circuit” in the same way that fame makes some actors, musicians, and novelists superstars while others, for reasons that are never entirely clear, are relegated to obscurity.
  • Imagine that you are a juror assigned to the sentencing phase of a person convicted of first-degree murder. The defendant is a 33-year-old woman who has confessed to shooting her boyfriend in the head, then stabbing him nearly 30 times before unsuccessfully trying to decapitate him with a butcher knife. Initially she tells police she hadn’t been present, that her boyfriend had been killed by “unknown intruders.” When she can offer no evidence to substantiate her alibi, she then confesses, arguing self-defense and that her boyfriend had submitted her to prior physical and mental abuse. On a national TV news show, she predicts that no jury will find her guilty, yet after a several-month trial, you find her guilty of first-degree murder. It is now sentencing time. Your assignment is to determine whether the crime warrants the death penalty or a life sentence without parole, or a lesser sentence with the possibility of parole.
markfrankel18

Why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - Jeff Zacks - Aeon - 1 views

  • Throughout evolutionary history, we never saw anything like a montage. So why do we hardly notice the cuts in movies?
  • Simply put, visual perception is much jerkier than we realise. First, we blink. Blinks happen every couple of seconds, and when they do we are blind for a couple of tenths of a second. Second, we move our eyes. Want to have a little fun? Take a close-up selfie video of your eyeball while you watch a minute’s worth of a movie on your computer or TV.
  • Between blinks and saccades, we are functionally blind about a third of our waking life.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Worse yet, even when your eyes are open, they are recording a lot less of the world than you realise.
  • There is, however, one situation in which stitching a new view in with the previous one is a bad idea: when the new view represents a transition from one event to another.
  • That makes good evolutionary sense, doesn’t it? If your memory conflicts with what is in front of your eyeballs, the chances are it is your memory that is at fault. So, most of the time your brain is stitching together a succession of views into a coherent event model, and it can handle cuts the same way it handles disruptions such as blinks and saccades in the real world.
  • Our brains do a lot of work to fill in the gaps, which can produce some pretty striking – and entertaining – errors of perception and memory.
  • So now I think we have a story about why our heads don’t explode when we watch movies. It’s not that we have learned how to deal with cuts. It’s certainly not that our brains have evolved biologically to deal with film – the timescale is way too short. Instead, film cuts work because they exploit the ways in which our visual systems evolved to work in the real world.
markfrankel18

Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 4 views

  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.
  • White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Great A.I. Awakening - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Translation, however, is an example of a field where this approach fails horribly, because words cannot be reduced to their dictionary definitions, and because languages tend to have as many exceptions as they have rules. More often than not, a system like this is liable to translate “minister of agriculture” as “priest of farming.” Still, for math and chess it worked great, and the proponents of symbolic A.I. took it for granted that no activities signaled “general intelligence” better than math and chess.
  • A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility. This notion is not new — a version of it dates to the earliest stages of modern computing, in the 1940s — but for much of its history most computer scientists saw it as vaguely disreputable, even mystical. Since 2011, though, Google Brain has demonstrated that this approach to artificial intelligence could solve many problems that confounded decades of conventional efforts. Speech recognition didn’t work very well until Brain undertook an effort to revamp it; the application of machine learning made its performance on Google’s mobile platform, Android, almost as good as human transcription. The same was true of image recognition. Less than a year ago, Brain for the first time commenced with the gut renovation of an entire consumer product, and its momentous results were being celebrated tonight.
markfrankel18

This is your brain on knockoffs: The science of how we trick ourselves into not believing our eyes - Salon.com - 0 views

  • In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).
  • But while non-experts are led by being told what is authentic and what is not, clever forgers do a more elaborate version of the same thing to snare specialists. Rather than telling them “this is authentic,” which would summon a defensive reaction on the part of the expert (“Oh yeah, I’m the expert here, I’ll tell you what’s authentic and what isn’t”), they lay a trail of traps by scattering subtle clues that lead the expert into following a carefully plotted trail, but to come to their own conclusion about the authenticity of the work in question.
markfrankel18

Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  • Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion.
Lawrence Hrubes

Pawan Sinha: How brains learn to see | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  •  
    "Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The difficult task of reading the brain - 0 views

  • Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, but despite advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Many of us have seen the pictures and read the stories. A beautiful picture of the brain where an area is highlighted and found to be fundamental for processes like fear, disgust or impaired social ability. There are so many stories it can be easy to be swayed into thinking that much more of the brain's mystery has been solved than is the case.
markfrankel18

Are We Really Conscious? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.
  • How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Artists 'have structurally different brains' - 1 views

  • Artists have structurally different brains compared with non-artists, a study has found. Participants' brain scans revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery. The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate. But training and environmental upbringing also play crucial roles in their ability, the authors report. As in many areas of science, the exact interplay of nature and nurture remains unclear.
1 - 20 of 149 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page