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In This Snapchat Campaign, Election News Is Big and Then It's Gone - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-election-campaign-news.html campaign election news journalism social media bias memory
shared by Javier E on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.
  • In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,
  • Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,
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  • The 2004 campaign was the year of the “Web log,” or blog, when mainstream reporters and campaigns officially began losing any control they may have had over political new
  • Marco Rubio’s campaign marched into the election season ready to fight the usual news-cycle-by-news-cycle skirmishes. It was surprised to learn that, lo and behold, “There was no news cycle — everything was one big fire hose,” Alex Conant, a senior Rubio strategist, told me. “News was constantly breaking and at the end of the day hardly anything mattered. Things would happen; 24 hours later, everyone was talking about something else.”
  • Snapchat represents a change to something else: the longevity of news, how durably it keeps in our brain cells and our servers.
  • Snapchat is recording the here and the now, playing for today. Tomorrow will bring something new that renders today obsolete. It’s a digital Tibetan sand painting made in the image of the millennial mind.
  • Snapchat executives say they set up the app this way because this is what their tens of millions of younger users want; it’s how they live.
  • They can’t possibly have enough bandwidth to process all the incoming information and still dwell on what already was, can they?
  • Experienced strategists and their candidates, who could always work through their election plans methodically — promoting their candidacies one foot in front of the other, adjusting here and there for the unexpected — suddenly found that they couldn’t operate the way they always did.
  • The question this year has been whether 2016 will be the “Snapchat election,
  • Then there was Jeb Bush, expecting to press ahead by presenting what he saw as leading-edge policy proposals that would set off a prolonged back-and-forth. When Mr. Bush rolled out a fairly sweeping plan to upend the college loan system, the poor guy thought this was going to become a big thing.
  • It drew only modest coverage and was quickly buried by the latest bit from Donald Trump.
  • In this “hit refresh” political culture, damaging news does not have to stick around for long, either. The next development, good or bad, replaces it almost immediately.
  • Mr. Miller pointed to a recent episode in which Mr. Trump said a protester at a rally had “ties to ISIS,” after that protester charged the stage. No such ties existed. “He says ‘ISIS is attacking me’; this was debunked in eight minutes by Twitter,” Mr. Miller said. “Cable talked about it for three hours and it went away.”
  • “Hillary Clinton said that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia” — she wasn’t — “and that has stuck with her for 20 years,”
  • Mr. Trump has mastered this era of short attention spans in politics by realizing that if you’re the one regularly feeding the stream, you can forever move past your latest trouble, and hasten the mass amnesia.
  • It was with this in mind that The Washington Post ran an editorial late last week reminding its readers of some of Mr. Trump’s more outlandish statements and policy positions
  • The Post urged its readers to “remember” more than two dozen items from Mr. Trump’s record, including that he promised “to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them,” and “lied about President Obama’s birth certificate.”
  • as the media habits of the young drive everybody else’s, I’m reminded of that old saw about those who forget history. Now, what was I saying?
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Wiretapping the senses: Scientists monitor conversation between sensory perception, beh... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...160602132636.htm senses perception
shared by kirkpatrickry on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Many types of sensory information enter the brain at a structure called the primary sensory cortex, where they are processed by different layers of cells in ways that ultimately influence an animal's perception and behavioral response.
  • An ultimate goal of neurobiological research is to understand how a brain integrates a constant flow of various types of stimuli, makes sense of it, and helps coordinate an appropriate behavioral respons
  • Understanding the most basic principles of this system will require careful studies of regions of animal brains that are simple enough to keep track of nerve impulses as they enter, and yet complex enough to follow different types of signals as they exit along different routes.
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New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' - The New York Times - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...nto-the-brains-music-room.html new york times music brain science research language
shared by kushnerha on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
  • And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”
  • devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
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  • “Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
  • Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.
  • Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.
  • In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”
  • , many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology
  • when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. “This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”
  • The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?
  • Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”
  • Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.
  • “The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”
  • The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.
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Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._how_did_it_evolve.single.html free will human sciences natural scions
shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
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  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
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The anti-Trump protest movement digs in -- but can it win? - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by maxwellokolo on 10 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 10 Feb 17
     
    "I rushed out, didn't have any of my equipment, just my cell phone, and was there," he said 48 hours after his livestream of the demonstrations -- which eventually drew thousands and set off a taxi strike -- had been viewed 15 million times on Facebook.
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A scientific revolution? - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC1369155 science paradigm shift
shared by oliviaodon on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Puzzle-solving science, according to Kuhn, can therefore trigger a scientific revolution as scientists struggle to explain these anomalies and develop a novel basic theory to incorporate them into the existing body of knowledge. After an extended period of upheaval, in which followers of the new theory storm the bastions of accepted dogma, the old paradigm is gradually replaced.
  • biology is heading towards a similar scientific revolution that may shatter one of its most central paradigms. The discovery of a few small proteins with anomalous behaviour is about to overcome a central tenet of molecular biology: that information flows unidirectionally from the gene to the protein to the phenotype. It started with the discovery that prions, a class of small proteins that can exist in different forms, cause a range of highly debilitating diseases. This sparked further research
  • Scientific revolutions are still rare in biology, given that the field, unlike astronomy or physics, is relatively young.
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  • The idea that all living beings stem from a primordial cell dating back two billion years is, in my opinion, a true paradigm. It does not have a heuristic value, unlike paradigms in physics such as gravitation or Einstein's famous equation, but it has a fundamental aspect.
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Turning Negative Thinkers Into Positive Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inkers-into-positive-ones.html new york times brain science research psychology
shared by sissij on 03 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • I leave the Y grinning from ear to ear, uplifted not just by my own workout but even more so by my interaction with these darling representatives of the next generation.
  • I lived for half a century with a man who suffered from periodic bouts of depression, so I understand how challenging negativism can be.
  • “micro-moments of positivity,”
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  • The research that Dr. Fredrickson and others have done demonstrates that the extent to which we can generate positive emotions from even everyday activities can determine who flourishes and who doesn’t.
  • Clearly, there are times and situations that naturally result in negative feelings in the most upbeat of individuals. Worry, sadness, anger and other such “downers” have their place in any normal life.
  • Negative feelings activate a region of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in processing fear and anxiety and other emotions.
  • Both he and Dr. Fredrickson and their colleagues have demonstrated that the brain is “plastic,” or capable of generating new cells and pathways, and it is possible to train the circuitry in the brain to promote more positive responses.
  • reinforce positivity
  • Practice mindfulness. Ruminating on past problems or future difficulties drains mental resources and steals attention from current pleasures.
  • sissij on 03 Apr 17
     
    The distance between negative attitude and positive attitude is not that far away. Just by changing a few wordings in the sentence, we can describe an event in a really positive manner. From my personal experience, attitude is like a habit. If you always like to think negatively, then you brain tends to give pessimistic response to events. So sometimes, you have to train your brain into positive thinkers. As we learned in TOK, we tends to see things and think in pattern, so it is very importantly to create a good pattern for our thinking. --Sissi (4/3/2017)
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BBC - Future - The strange case of the phantom Pokemon - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ge-case-of-the-phantom-pokemon
shared by dicindioha on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Her terrifying hallucination reveals the mysterious 'twilight zone' between waking and sleep — a strange state of consciousness that may also lie behind various phenomena, from the Salem Witch Trials to alien abductions.
  • But my first thought, as an experimental psychologist with a particular focus in anomalous perceptual experiences was, “Well, that could have happened to anybody.” Although it’s impossible to definitively explain this woman’s experience, I nevertheless felt quite confident that this late-night Pokemon assault fit neatly into our existing understanding of sleep.
  • The short, seemingly paradoxical, explanation is that she could have been awake and she could have been dreaming.
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  • The technical term that might apply here is ‘sleep paralysis,’ a subtype of parasomnia, or sleep disturbance. Beyond the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations.
  • Effectively, imagery from your dreams can actually intrude into your waking reality.
  • Records of incidents attributable to sleep paralysis can actually be found throughout history and across cultures with records dating back at least as far as 400 BC.
  • For comparison’s sake, consider this account by Jon Loudner, who gave ‘evidence’ during the infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692:
  • Witchcraft is a less popular explanation for contemporary sufferers, but even today, the precise physiological mechanisms that result in sleep paralysis are still not entirely understood.
  • a circuit breaker; it effectively blocks your brain’s motor planning signals from becoming motor action signals
  • However, our brains are highly complex systems, and, as such, are prone to the occasional glitch.
  • Researchers have shown that sleep paralysis experiences can be induced in laboratory participants when they are repeatedly woken from deep sleep.
  • Given their highly subjective nature, dreams are notoriously difficult to study scientifically.
  • In fact, the connection between video games and dreams is one of the better documented areas of research on the subjective experiences of dreamers. 
  • This evidence has been used to support the idea that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life - consolidation is term that refers to the process of reinforcing and strengthening newly created memories.
  • Various experiments have demonstrated that people who are given memory-based tasks will perform better if they’re given the opportunity to sleep after learning
  • In both rats and humans, the hippocampus is the part of the brain, which among other functions, is strongly associated with the way we form memories of physical spaces.
  • As the rats slept, the cells in the hippocampus would light up with activity. And not just any activity – the patterns of activations that occurred while the rats slept corresponded with the pattern associated with the correct maze runs
  • One caveat is that none of this work proves a direct causal link between dreaming and memories: dreaming itself might not cause the memories to be reinforced, but could simply be a kind of side-effect of the consolidation process. 
  • dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
     
    Our experiences in daily life can translate to our dreams, and having dreams that relate to something that recently occurred to someone might support the idea that sleeping functions to process and reinforce new memories.
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Practice And The Self - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...training-the-brain.html habit practice neuron brain science integration
shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill
  • it reflects what one might call a conservative truth: we become what we do. We are not Etch-A-Sketches, blank slates on whom a new abstract idea can simply and easily be applied to turn our lives around. We are constantly evolving organisms, each choice leading to another fate and another choice and all of these creating us, slowly, by will and habit.
  • . I'm also reminded of Pascal's rather controversial dictum that merely practicing faith will instill it. Acts become thoughts which become acts, and habits become personality which becomes character. There can be no total rupture - which is why I am not a fan of "born-again" Christianity. It only takes if it reorients practice.
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  • what exercize and diet and sleep do for the body, thought and practice and sleep do for the brain. And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does.
  • where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral.
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The Science of Bragging and Boasting - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4451104577390392329291890.html self-presentation self-portrayal emotion brain science psychology
shared by Javier E on 09 May 12 - Cached
  • Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money
  • About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts.
  • Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information
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Eric Kandel's Visions - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...131095 art aesthetics brain science research consciousness psychology
shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails
  • Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:
  • "At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."
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  • His key findings on the snail, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showed that learning and memory change not the neuron's basic structure but rather the nature, strength, and number of its synaptic connections. Further, through focus on the molecular biology involved in a learned reflex like Aplysia's gill retraction, Kandel demonstrated that experience alters nerve cells' synapses by changing their pattern of gene expression. In other words, learning doesn't change what neurons are, but rather what they do.
  • In Search of Memory (Norton), Kandel offered what sounded at the time like a vague research agenda for future generations in the budding field of neuroaesthetics, saying that the science of memory storage lay "at the foothills of a great mountain range." Experts grasp the "cellular and molecular mechanisms," he wrote, but need to move to the level of neural circuits to answer the question, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?
  • Since giving a talk on the matter in 2001, he has been piecing together his own thoughts in relation to his favorite European artists
  • The field of neuroaesthetics, says one of its founders, Semir Zeki, of University College London, is just 10 to 15 years old. Through brain imaging and other studies, scholars like Zeki have explored the cognitive responses to, say, color contrasts or ambiguities of line or perspective in works by Titian, Michelangelo, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists. Researchers have also examined the brain's pleasure centers in response to appealing landscapes.
  • it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way.
  • "as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources—musical and visual—and probably by other sources as well." Specifically, in this "brain-based theory of beauty," the paper says, that faculty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
  • It also enables Kandel—building on the work of Gombrich and the psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, among others—to compare the painters' rendering of emotion, the unconscious, and the libido with contemporaneous psychological insights from Freud about latent aggression, pleasure and death instincts, and other primal drives.
  • Kandel views the Expressionists' art through the powerful multiple lenses of turn-of-the-century Vienna's cultural mores and psychological insights. But then he refracts them further, through later discoveries in cognitive science. He seeks to reassure those who fear that the empirical and chemical will diminish the paintings' poetic power. "In art, as in science," he writes, "reductionism does not trivialize our perception—of color, light, and perspective—but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual ideas of their art."
  • The author of a classic textbook on neuroscience, he seems here to have written a layman's cognition textbook wrapped within a work of art history.
  • "our initial response to the most salient features of the paintings of the Austrian Modernists, like our response to a dangerous animal, is automatic. ... The answer to James's question of how an object simply perceived turns into an object emotionally felt, then, is that the portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like the dangerous animal at a distance—both perceived and felt."
  • If imaging is key to gauging therapeutic practices, it will be key to neuroaesthetics as well, Kandel predicts—a broad, intense array of "imaging experiments to see what happens with exaggeration, distorted faces, in the human brain and the monkey brain," viewers' responses to "mixed eroticism and aggression," and the like.
  • while the visual-perception literature might be richer at the moment, there's no reason that neuroaesthetics should restrict its emphasis to the purely visual arts at the expense of music, dance, film, and theater.
  • although Kandel considers The Age of Insight to be more a work of intellectual history than of science, the book summarizes centuries of research on perception. And so you'll find, in those hundreds of pages between Kandel's introduction to Klimt's "Judith" and the neurochemical cadenza about the viewer's response to it, dossiers on vision as information processing; the brain's three-dimensional-space mapping and its interpretations of two-dimensional renderings; face recognition; the mirror neurons that enable us to empathize and physically reflect the affect and intentions we see in others; and many related topics. Kandel elsewhere describes the scientific evidence that creativity is nurtured by spells of relaxation, which foster a connection between conscious and unconscious cognition.
  • Zeki's message to art historians, aesthetic philosophers, and others who chafe at that idea is twofold. The more diplomatic pitch is that neuroaesthetics is different, complementary, and not oppositional to other forms of arts scholarship. But "the stick," as he puts it, is that if arts scholars "want to be taken seriously" by neurobiologists, they need to take advantage of the discoveries of the past half-century. If they don't, he says, "it's a bit like the guys who said to Galileo that we'd rather not look through your telescope."
  • Matthews, a co-author of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (Dana Press, 2003), seems open to the elucidations that science and the humanities can cast on each other. The neural pathways of our aesthetic responses are "good explanations," he says. But "does one [type of] explanation supersede all the others? I would argue that they don't, because there's a fundamental disconnection still between ... explanations of neural correlates of conscious experience and conscious experience" itself.
  • There are, Matthews says, "certain kinds of problems that are fundamentally interesting to us as a species: What is love? What motivates us to anger?" Writers put their observations on such matters into idiosyncratic stories, psychologists conceive their observations in a more formalized framework, and neuroscientists like Zeki monitor them at the level of functional changes in the brain. All of those approaches to human experience "intersect," Matthews says, "but no one of them is the explanation."
  • "Conscious experience," he says, "is something we cannot even interrogate in ourselves adequately. What we're always trying to do in effect is capture the conscious experience of the last moment. ... As we think about it, we have no way of capturing more than one part of it."
  • Kandel sees art and art history as "parent disciplines" and psychology and brain science as "antidisciplines," to be drawn together in an E.O. Wilson-like synthesis toward "consilience as an attempt to open a discussion between restricted areas of knowledge." Kandel approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould's wish for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."
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New Statesman - All machine and no ghost? - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...consciousness-mind-brain evolution human brain intelligence contingent
shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 12 - Cached
  • More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse. They are collapsers rather than deniers. Though not avowedly eliminative, this kind of view is tacitly a rejection of the very existence of consciousness
  • it occurred to me that the problem might lie not in nature but in ourselves: we just don't have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery. Ontologically, matter and consciousness are woven intelligibly together but epistemologically we are precluded from seeing how. I used Noam Chomsky's notion of "mysteries of nature" to describe the situation as I saw it. Soon, I was being labelled (by Owen Flanagan) a "mysterian"
  • Dualism makes the mind too separate, thereby precluding intelligible interaction and dependence.
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  • At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion
  • idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit?
  • pan­psychism: even the lowliest of material things has a streak of sentience running through it, like veins in marble. Not just parcels of organic matter, such as lizards and worms, but also plants and bacteria and water molecules and even electrons. Everything has its primitive feelings and minute allotment of sensation.
  • The trouble with panpsychism is that there just isn't any evidence of the universal distribution of consciousness in the material world.
  • The dualist, by contrast, freely admits that consciousness exists, as well as matter, holding that reality falls into two giant spheres. There is the physical brain, on the one hand, and the conscious mind, on the other: the twain may meet at some point but they remain distinct entities.
  • The more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it's just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity - all machine and no ghost.
  • mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding
  • The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden. How everything fits together is particularly elusive, perhaps reflecting the disparate cognitive faculties we bring to bear on the world (the senses, introspection, mathematical description). We are far from obtaining a unified theory of all being and there is no guarantee that such a theory is accessible by finite human intelligence.
  • real naturalism begins with a proper perspective on our specifically human intelligence. Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?
  • The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would reg
  • rd as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history - as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.
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National - Robert Wright - Creationists vs. Evolutionists: An American Story - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258384 science denial global warming evolution Darwinian US belief
shared by Javier E on 12 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • About half of Americans--46 percent, in the latest Gallup Poll--believe human beings weren't created by evolution. Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan says this is a grave problem. "I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world." Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum says Andrew should calm down. "This 46% number has barely budged over the past three decades
  • in recent years disagreement over evolution has become more politically charged, more acrimonious, and that the rancor may be affecting other science-related policy areas, such as climate change.
  • fundamentalist Christians, upon being maligned by know-it-all Darwinians, are starting to see secular scientists more broadly as the enemy; Darwinians, climate scientists, and stem cell researchers start to seem like a single, menacing blur.
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  • Over the past two years, the portion of respondents who don't believe in evolution has grown by six percentage points. Where did those people come from? The graph suggests they're people who had previously believed in an evolution guided by God--a group whose size dropped by a corresponding six percentage points. It's as if people who had previously seen evolution and religion as compatible were told by the new militant Darwinians, "No, you must choose: Which is it, evolution or religion?"--and pretty much all of them chose religion.
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Impact Factor and the Future of Medical Journals - Haider Javed Warraich - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282763 science research knowledge medical journals future peer review issues
shared by kenjiendo on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
    • kenjiendo
      kenjiendo on 10 Jan 14
       
      An article highlighting recent criticism for the accuracy of published Medical Journals, origins of the issue, and possible solutions for the future. 
  • Impact Factor and the Future of Medical Journals Some research publications are getting away from flawed measures of influence that make it easy to game the system.
  • This year's Nobel Prize winner in physiology, Randy Scheckman, announced his decision to boycott the three major “luxury” journals: Science, Nature, and Cell.
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  • medical journals are very rigid
  • impact factor, defined as the number of citations divided by the number of papers published in the journal, which is a measure to convey the influence of journals and the research they carry.
  • Journals employ several strategies to artificially raise the impact factor
  • caught trying to induce authors to increase the number of citations
  • cite each other’s articles
  • citations are barely a reflection of the quality of the research and that the impact factor is easily manipulated
  • shing’s growth is actually one of its g
  • overwhelmed with the avalanche of information
  • current system of peer-review, which originated in the 18th century, is now stressed
    • kenjiendo
      kenjiendo on 10 Jan 14
       
      An example from our reading from U6-9
  • future of the medical journal was, he summed it up in just one word: “Digital.”
  • more innovative approache
  • PLOS One, which provides individual article metrics to anyone who accesses the article.
  • Instead of letting the reputation of the journal decide the impact of its papers, PLOS One provides information about the influence of the article on a more granular level.
  • future of medical publishing is a democratic one
  • Smart software will decide based on largely open access journals which papers will be of most interest to a particular reader.
  • Biology Direct, a journal that provides open peer review that is available for readers to read along with the article, with or without changes suggested by the reviewers.
  • Impact Factor and the Future of Medical Journals
  • Impact Factor and the Future of Medical Journals
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New Truths That Only One Can See - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ths-that-only-one-can-see.html research knowledge
shared by Sophia C on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • eproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true
  • With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.
  • any hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong
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  • the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable. Without any ill intent, a scientist may be nudged toward interpreting the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.
  • He found that a large proportion of the conclusions were undermined or contradicted by later studies.
  • He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer
  • esearchers deeply believed that their findings were true. But that is the problem. The more passionate scientists are about their work, the more susceptible they are to bias
  • “The slightest shift in their microenvironment can alter the results — something a newcomer might not spot. It is common for even a seasoned scientist to struggle with cell lines and culture conditions, and unknowingly introduce changes that will make it seem that a study cannot be reproduced.
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Don't Ask Your Doctor About 'Low T' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-your-doctor-about-low-t.html testosterone aging
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year
  • Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.
  • Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.
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  • prescription testosterone doesn’t just give your T level a boost: it may also increase your risk of heart attack. It can add huge numbers of red blood cells to your bloodstream and shrink your testes. In some men, it increases aggression and irritability.
  • a large study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that, within three months, taking the hormone doubled the rate of heart attacks in men 65 and older, as well as in younger men who had heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has begun an investigation.
  • Used clinically since 1937 and approved by the F.D.A. since 1953, testosterone is now administered in at least five forms, including patches, gels and injections
  • In addition to the cardiac risks, prescription T can mean a permanent shut-off in men’s own, albeit diminished, testosterone production. In other words, once you start, you may well be hooked for life.
  • men should address the leading cause of the problem. Losing weight is a tried and true way to naturally boost testosterone levels. According to findings presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2012, obese men who lost an average of 17 pounds saw their testosterone levels increase by 15 percent. In general, a man’s waist should be half his height.
  • At the end of the day, eating more of the right foods and fewer junk foods improves mood and energy — which may be the only fix many men need.
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False Memory: Did It Happen? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...false-memory-did-it-happen memory psychology science research
shared by julia rhodes on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • . As convincing as juries may find the testimony of witnesses, good prosecutors know that human memory is, more often than not, the least reliable source of evidence.
  • “We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,” says Northwestern University scientist Kenneth Paller. “Thus, the vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that’s very similar to that of an experienced event.”
  • How this process works is a research question of great interest to neuroscientists. This week, researchers affiliated with a project at MIT reported a giant step toward explaining how external stimuli can distort mental representations to produce brand new, seemingly accurate—but completely false—memories.
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  • The researchers studied a group of brain cells in the hippocampal region of the mouse brain. They found that they could create false associations between events and environments by artificially stimulating the neurons.
  • A member of the MIT team, Susumu Tonegawa, commented on the significance of the research in Science  magazine's weekly podcast:Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with a bad or good high valence, online event. So, in other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you, so this is a way we believe that at least some form of strong force memory observed in humans could be made. Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms, it is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. So we can study this, because we have a mouse model now.
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How the Brain Creates Personality: A New Theory - Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Mille... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281287 brain personality research science brain science
shared by grayton downing on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • It is possible to examine any object—including a brain—at different levels
  • if we want to know how the brain gives rise to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we want to focus on the bigger picture of how its structure allows it to store and process information—the architecture, as it were. To understand the brain at this level, we don’t have to know everything about the individual connections among brain cells or about any other biochemical process.
  • top parts and the bottom parts of the brain have differ­ent functions. The top brain formulates and executes plans (which often involve deciding where to move objects or how to move the body in space), whereas the bottom brain classifies and interprets incoming information about the world. The two halves always work together;
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • You have probably heard of this theory, in which the left and right halves of the brain are characterized, respectively, as logical versus intuitive, verbal versus perceptual, analytic versus synthetic, and so forth. The trouble is that none of these sweeping generalizations has stood up to careful scientific scrutiny. The dif­ferences between the left and right sides of the brain are nuanced, and simple, sweeping dichotomies do not in fact explain how the two sides function.
  • top and bottom portions of the brain have very different functions. This fact was first discovered in the context of visual perception, and it was supported in 1982 in a landmark report by National Medal of Science winner Mortimer Mishkin and Leslie G. Ungerleider, of the National Institute of Mental Health.
  • scientists trained monkeys to perform two tasks. In the first task, the monkeys had to learn to recognize which of two shapes concealed a bit of food.
  • These functions occur relatively close to where neural connec­tions deliver inputs from the eyes and ears—but processing doesn’t just stop there.
  • top parts of our frontal lobe can take into account the confluence of information about “what’s out there,” our emo­tional reactions to it, and our goals.
  • Four distinct cognitive modes emerge from how the top-brain and bottom-brain systems can interac
  • The two systems always work together. You use the top brain to decide to walk over to talk to your friend only after you know who she is (courtesy of the bottom brain). And after talking to her, you formulate another plan, to enter the date and time in your calendar, and then you need to monitor what hap­pens (again using the bottom brain) as you try to carry out this plan (a top-brain activity).
  • speak of differences in the degree to which a person relies on the top-brain and bottom-brain systems, we are speaking of differences in this second kind of utilization, in the kind of processing that’s not simply dictated by a given situation. In this sense, you can rely on one or the other brain system to a greater or lesser degree.
  • The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feel­ings, and behavior in profound ways. The notion that each system can be more or less highly utilized, in this sense is the foundation of the Theory of Cognitive Modes. 
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Drug Widens Immunity to Flu | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37940/title/Drug-Widens-Immunity-to-Flu/ immunity flu science research
shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • drug rapamycin paradoxically helped to protect mice against a diverse range of influenza viruses after the animals were vaccinated against just one flu strain.
  • many subtypes and strains of influenza, which evolve at great speed and often hybridize into entirely new strains. Current flu vaccines cannot protect against all of these strains, which forces scientists to try and predict those most likely to cause problems in the coming year.
  • In treated mice, the B cells produced a more diverse repertoire of antibodies, which targeted different parts of the incoming viruses, including regions that are conserved across many strains. This provided protection against flu viruses regardless of strain. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • cross-reactive antibodies bind relatively weakly to their targets and, under normal circumstances, would probably get outcompeted by antibodies with a narrower focus but higher affinity. “For whatever reason, antibodies to the conserved regions are very rare,”
  • possible to skew the response towards more broadly cross-reactive antibodies, in mice, in a particular situation,”
  • not advocating that we use rapamycin [in humans],” said McGargill. However, her group’s discovery could point to other ways of achieving the same effect, perhaps by manipulating the immune system into producing more cross-reactive antibodies. “Maybe instead of trying to enhance the immune response, we need to dampen it a little bit, and allow it to be more diverse,
6More

Snakes on a Visual Plane | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38053/title/Snakes-on-a-Visual-Plane/ snakes research brain science
shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • primates have a remarkable ability to detect snakes, even in a chaotic visual environment.
  • first evidence of snake-selective neurons in the primate brain that I’m aware of,
  • recorded pulvinar neuronal activity via electrodes implanted into the brains of two adult macaques—one male, one female—as they were shown images of monkey faces, monkey hands, geometric shapes, and snakes. The brains of both monkeys—which were raised at a national monkey farm in Amami Island, Japan, and had no known encounters with snakes before the experiment—showed preferential activity of neurons in the medial and dorsolateral pulvinar to images of snakes, as compared with the other stimuli. Further, snakes elicited the fastest and strongest responses from these neurons.
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  • neurobiological evidence of pulvinar neuron responses to a potential predation threat is convincing, Dobson noted more work is needed to support a role for snakes in primate evolution.
  • “fear module” in the primate brain—a construct that enables “quick responses to stimuli that signal danger, such as predators and threatening faces”
  • “Since they [the authors] haven’t—to my knowledge—tested the same stimuli on various other parts of the visual system, they don’t have evidence that these putatively selective cells are a specialization of the ‘fear module’ at all,”
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