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The organization of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a lasting mystery in cognitive neuroscience, but not for lack of answers - the issue is deciding among them, since all seem to characterize prefrontal function in very different but apparently equally-valid ways. If this mystery were…
A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species: [Marc] Hauser describes animals as having "laser-beam" intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have "floodlight"…
Welcome to another article in the 'over-enthusiastic swallowing' series. As was the case with the previous article (the one on Mushu the pet bearded dragon), this one doesn't involve the death of the animal(s) concerned. In fact - so far as we can tell - the creature(s) that did the swallowing…
An astonishing recent discovery in computational neuroscience is the relationship between dopamine and the "temporal differences" reinforcement learning algorithm (which Jake describes wonderfully here, and I've described in a little more detail here). The essential principle is that the…