March 29, 2007
Category: Link Posts
Recent highlights from the best in brain-blogging: Is our sense of morality localized to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex? More reasons for caution when beginning sentences with the phrase; "Only humans are cognitively capable of ......." Are wild monkeys in a...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:46 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
"A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on." - G.C. Lichtenberg Although the brain-computer metaphor has served cognitive psychology well, research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed many important differences between brains and computers. Appreciating these...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:38 PM • 68 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
The past continuously besets our ability to act flexibly in the future; habits grow strong, automaticity takes over and the mind wanders. Before you know it, you've forgotten to stop for milk on your regular commute, neglected to go to...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:22 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 22, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Imagine you are invisible. Congratulations, you are now actually less likely to remember what you were doing a few minutes ago, and possibly a lot longer ago than that. At least, this is the basic finding from a 2002 article...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 3:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2007
Category: Artificial Intelligence
In the new issue of Seed, Douglas Hofstadter talks about "strange loops" - his term for patterns of level-crossing feedback inside some medium (such as neurons) - and their role in consciousness. Likewise, Gerald Edelman has talked about how a...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:54 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Imagine that you are about to pass to a teammate when he suddenly darts in another direction, in an attempt to get clear. With some difficulty, you will be able to modify your pass and correctly throw the ball to...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Last week I discussed how central dopamine levels appear to correlate with how strongly actions are bound to particular visual features. I presented this as part of "the binding problem," but in fact the topic runs must deeper: cognitive neuroscience...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:02 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 13, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Some theories suggest that color and shape information - processed in different parts of the brain - must be integrated by attention in order to give rise to a coherent visual experience (in other words, attention is thought to solve...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 8:51 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 10, 2007
Category: Link Posts
Recent highlights from the best in brain blogging: Online experiments at the Harvard Visual Cognition Lab! Less invasive brain-computer interfacing, for video games. Brain-computer interface implants: videos. A new weapon in the Israeli arsenal: the VIPER robot. The current state...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:49 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 9, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo Da Vinci "The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks