Consciousness
oracknows | June 15, 2014Deepak Chopra isn't very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he's issued a hilariously fatuous "challenge" to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra's One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics:
Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a. TAM) less than four weeks away, Chopra is looking to stir the pot a little bit with his usual blend of Choprawoo about consciousness and mind-body dualism and how nasty skeptics can't accept the paranormal and the healing powre of "intent." It's…
oracknows | November 12, 2013Last week, everyone's favorite woo-meister, the man whose woo is so strong that I even coined a term for it way back in the early mists of time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), was woo-fully whining about all those allegedly nasty skeptics on Wikipedia. Yes, Deepak Chopra was clutching his pearls and getting all huffy because, according to him, a group of skeptics known as the Guerilla Skeptics was actually applying science and reason to the Wikipedia entry for his good buddy Rupert Sheldrake. The only problem was, he totally missed the target in that the Guerilla Skeptics…
cevans | November 2, 2012The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The theory of Evolution turned us from mini-gods into just a consequence of squicky biological randomness. The decipherment of the structure of DNA and the human genome turned the spark of life into something that can be written down, stored, and analyzed by computers. Again and again, we have found our…
edyong | March 22, 2010Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you'd expect them to influence the way we think too.
And so they do - Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
neurophilosophy | November 6, 2009A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.
Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2009THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine.
Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled…
edyong | July 14, 2009In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures.
Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes…
edyong | May 7, 2009When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.
Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you…
edyong | September 18, 2008When we're suddenly confronted with a shocking image, our skin becomes moist and we blink strongly. These actions are automatic and unintentional; they happen without conscious thought. So it may come as a surprise that they can also predict some of our most seemingly considered beliefs - our political attitudes.
According to a new American study, the stronger these responses, the more likely people are to support the Iraq War, Biblical truth, the Patriot Act and greater defence budgets. Conversely, people who show weaker "startle reflexes" are more likely to support foreign aid, immigration…
grrlscientist | August 19, 2008tags: cognition, behavior, self-recognition, self awareness, tool use, memory, brain architecture, birds, European magpie, Pica pica, researchblogging.org
Figure 1. European magpie, Pica pica, with yellow mark [larger view].
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202.
Birds have been disparaged publicly as "bird brains" for so long that most people have lost the ability to view them as intelligent and sentient beings. However, a group of researchers in Germany have conducted a series of studies with several captive European magpies, Pica pica, that challenge the average person's view of birds and…
edyong | April 13, 2008Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one.
It seems natural to think that we carry out actions after consciously deciding to do so. I decide to start typing and as a result, my hands move around a keyboard. But according to modern neuroscience, that feeling of free will may be an illusion. For over twenty years, experiments have suggested that…
neurontic | March 3, 2006"It is better to tackle ten fundamental [scientific] problems and succeed in only one, than to tackle ten trivial ones and solve them all," Francis Crick once told his devoted pupil V.S. Ramachandran, director of San Diego State's Center for Brain and Cognition.
Ramachandran, apparently, took this advice to heart. The man who contends that neuroscience is ushering in "the greatest [scientific] revolution of all" believes that understanding the circuitry of the brain will soon allow us to tackle the existential questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries. He is so confident, in fact…