Neurophilosophy
Archives for January, 2010
Human grid cells tile the environment
Posted by Mo on January 27, 2010 HOW does the brain encode the spatial representations which enable us to successfully navigate our environment? Four decades of research has identified four cell types in the brains of mice and rats which are known to be involved in these processes: place cells, grid cells, head direction cells and, most recently, border cells. Although the…
Does time dilate during a threatening situation?
Posted by Mo on January 23, 2010 “WHEN a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour,” said Albert Einstein, “it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour.” Einstein was describing one of the most profound implications of his Theory of General Relativity – that the perception…
Single cells in the monkey brain encode abstract mathematical concepts
Posted by Mo on January 21, 2010 OUR ability to use and manipulate numbers is integral to everyday life – we use them to label, rank, count and measure almost everything we encounter. It was long thought that numerical competence is dependent on language and, therefore, that numerosity is restricted to our species. Although the symbolic representation of numbers, using numerals and…
Viewing headless bodies causes face adaptation
Posted by Mo on January 13, 2010 VIEWING a stimulus for a prolonged period of time results in a bias in the perception of a stimulus viewed afterwards. For example, after looking at a moving stimulus for some time, a stationary stimulus that is viewed subsequently appears to drift in the opposite direction. These after-effects reveal to us the properties of our…
Desire influences visual perception
Posted by Mo on January 9, 2010 WE tend to assume that we see our surroundings as they really are, and that our perception of reality is accurate. In fact, what we perceive is merely a neural representation of the world, the brain’s best guess of its environment, based on a very limited amount of available information. This is perhaps best demonstrated…