Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be.
Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
With biologist Richard Dawkins leading the way, many scientists today are locked in an unending match of whack-a-mole with Christian creationists, who insist that God created heaven, earth and humanity in its present form, and with disciples of intelligent design who want to expel evolution from its scientific prominence in public schools. If you've been following the battle, you might be inclined to believe that Americans are faced with a choice between believing in God and scientific fact.
This week's ABC Radio National's All in the Mind discusses what happens in the brain during out of body experiences, and why actions can be accurate even when our perceptions are not.
This week, the scientific effort to simulate out-of-body experiences to probe the limits of the self. And, remarkable stories of vision gone heywire—what they reveal about our 'seeing brain'. Two scientists join Natasha Mitchell with extraordinary insights into how your brain creates your mind...
Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of indirect realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be second-hand and, worse, hidden behind a "veil of sensation"--a position that would slide easily into relativism and solipsism, presenting an ethical dilemma. In The Case for Qualia, proponents of qualia defend the Indirect Realist position and mount detailed counterarguments against opposing views.
A new approach to the decades-old problem of quantum gravity goes back to basics and shows how the building blocks of space and time pull themselves together.
This wonderful photo from the mid-1970s depicts a young man named John Shepherd who "established this UFO-detecting station in his grandparent’s home… His equipment includes radar, sonar, scanners, and homing devices which attempt to track the 'Aliens' he believes are studying the earth."
Unlike most other physicists, who stay within the confines of the latest theories and measurements, the Swedish-born Tegmark has a night job. In a series of papers that have caught the attention of physicists and philosophers around the world, he explores not what the laws of nature say but why there are any laws at all.
Welcome to Dream Views! If you're searching the Internet trying to find information on the still relatively-unknown topic of lucid dreaming (either for personal use or for research purposes), you've come to the right place!
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has written an excellent piece on experimental philosophy, the practice of testing out philosophical ideas by using experiments or gathering data.
For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena.
Originally included in MoMA's recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, Beta Tank's Mind Chair has been transformed from a hacked polypropylene readymade into a working wooden prototype. The chair features an array of solenoids (electromagnetic coils) attached to the back and controlled by a video camera. The camera transmits information to the solenoid grid, which then inscribes the visual stimuli onto the user's back through a complex series of vibrations.
Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience.
The Asch conformity experiments, which were published in the 1950s, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the "Asch Paradigm".
It may be fun, but this is no comedy, it’s more like a documentary. Cults thrive on our vulnerabilities, and a good demonstration of just how vulnerable we all are was given in a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do, especially if you don’t even have a word for it. That’s the situation of the Pirahã people, denizens of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest who have no term for the number one or for any other exact quantity, a new study finds.
You don't have to be a scientist to observe that pornographic images lead to erections in men. But you would have to be one to show those images to volunteers while meticulously measuring the volume of response in the brain and penis. Harold Mouras, at University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, and his colleagues wanted to understand the cerebral underpinnings of visually-induced erections. They suspected there might be a role for mirror neurons, a special class of brain cell that fires both when people perform an action and when they observe it being performed.
Novelist and science writer Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer) wades bravely into the morass of modern memory research to sort the truth from a wide assortment of hyperbole and promises and platitudes. The news is mixed: most of us won't develop Alzheimer's, but everyone will suffer some memory loss. After describing the different types of memory, Halpern gamely undertakes a series of brain scans used to reveal brain damage and tries diagnostic tests that measure memory through the ability to recall words, images and smells. Researchers have identified a gene closely linked with Alzheimer's, but drugs to treat or prevent memory loss are still far from reality, Halpern says, adding that for many drug companies, the success of a remedy is measured only by how quickly it moves off the shelves.
Machine elves (also known as fractal elves, self-transforming machine elves) is a term coined by the ethnobotanist, writer and philosopher Terence McKenna to describe the entities that he claims one becomes aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs, especially DMT.
A complete stranger to science, Cass immersed himself in the world of neuroscience, subjecting himself to brain scans, psychological tests, and scientific conferences, as he attempted to gain a better understanding of ADHD, anxiety, stress, motivation and reward, and consciousness. Then things got a little weird. What began as a more clinical effort to understand himself soon became a personal and emotional journey into the fragile, mysterious workings of the mind and the self.
This suggests that when I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk, a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself, am touching the rim. And when he hits a three pointer, my mirror neurons light up as I've just made the crucial shot. They are what bind me to the game, breaking down that 4th wall separating fan from player. I'm not upset because my team lost: I'm upset because it literally feels like I lost, as if I had been on the court.
The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.
A cup of joe or a short nap can fend off normal afternoon sleepiness, but sleeping longer in the morning won’t keep a person who’s already gotten a full night’s sleep alert, a new study shows.
Although there may be some ways that metaphor is like synesthesia, when we add up the pros and cons, synesthesia as a metaphor for metaphor may not help us too much to understand the latter, and I seriously doubt that the two are linked in a more profound causal fashion (like a ‘gene’ for both synesthesia and metaphor). Similarly, attention-based failure to perceive something may be like blindness, but using one to try to explain the other is futile. In other words, not all metaphors are equally useful, and I’m concerned that the synesthesia metaphor for metaphor might do more harm than good.
Warren is an engaging field guide in these adventures, and The Head Trip will interest anyone curious about the black box of consciousness. In the interview below, he explains why “dreaming is bananas,” why we shouldn’t listen too seriously to the evolutionary psychologists’ Just-So stories, and why we should think more explicitly about our habits of mind.
High-end talking shop, TED, has a couple of video lectures on 'memes' - the supposedly self-contained units of information, ideas or actions that replicate through human culture and are selected by a process akin to natural selection.
Wha... | 19 | morewhere the power comes from Read an old article in Harper's Magazine about the rise of the megachurch (it's unfortunately behind a paywall). There was one passage of a minister talking to his flock that really struck me:
The Emotion Machine Twenty years after The Society of Mind, where he introduced the concept that "minds are what brains do," Minsky probes deeper into the question of natural intelligence. Don't look for simple explanations: he believes "we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events"; we need to break our thought processes down into the most precise steps possible. In fact, in order to truly understand the human mind, Minsky suggests, we'll probably need to reverse-engineer a machine that can replicate those functions so we can study it. Thus, he rejects the idea of consciousness as a unitary "Self" in favor of "a decentralized cloud" of more than 20 distinct mental processes. In this view, emotional states like love and shame are not the opposite of rational cogitation; both, Minsky says, are ways of thinking. 7 | entry | 31
On Being Certain Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not Robert Burton In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. [via mymindonbooks] 8 | entry | 84
Strangers to Ourselves Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious Timothy D. Wilson Freud introduced the West to the unconscious, but the last half-century of psychology has reinvented it, argues University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson. In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, Wilson attempts to explain why there's so much about ourselves that we fail to understand, which can lead to misdirected anger. He points to a revised, post-Freudian understanding of how the mind works: the reason that their own judgments, feelings, [and] motives remain mysterious to people is not repression, as Freud argued, but efficiency so that the mind can process and analyze multiple things at once. 8 | entry | 72
I Am a Strange Loop Douglas Hofstadter Hofstadter blends a surprising array of disciplines and styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness. Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task, he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops," which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993—and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another. 9 | entry | 108
The Case for Qualia Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of indirect realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be second-hand and, worse, hidden behind a "veil of sensation"--a position that would slide easily into relativism and solipsism, presenting an ethical dilemma. In The Case for Qualia, proponents of qualia defend the Indirect Realist position and mount detailed counterarguments against opposing views. 8 | entry | 2
Why We Believe What We Believe Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth When Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychiatry, and religious studies, ponders the nature of reality, it makes fascinating, mind-bending reading. What is reality, he asks, but a combination of the subjective vividness of an experience (strengthened by the continuity and duration of that experience) and the consensus of others that it is so? Expanding on a thread picked up before in Why God Won't Go Away (2001), he and Waldman examine the Liar's Paradox, assert the likes of "Truth cannot be entirely known, for no matter how much evidence you collect, your knowledge will always be incomplete," and maintain that individual reality is exclusively guided by a combination of sensory perceptions (which are prey to any number of distorting influences) and beliefs. 8 | entry | 20
Second Nature Burgeoning advancements in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousness—the very center of human concern—by scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: Does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description? 8 | entry | 39
Zen and the Brain Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness James H Austin Take a trip through the topography of the brain, and you're likely to get lost somewhere around the medulla oblongata. Zen can lose you before you've even pretzeled your legs into the lotus position. But a unique neurologist-Zen Buddhist has written a tome that is a map to all the mysteries of meditation and mind. Take breathing out, for example. We spend just over half of our breathing time exhaling. For meditating monks, it's a full three-quarters. EEGs show us that the act of exhaling helps physically quiet the brain. Many other causal connections can be found between Zen practices and the physiology of the brain, and James H. Austin lays them out one by one, drawing from his own Zen experiences and the latest in neurological research. 7 | entry | 38
MindReal - How the Mind Creates its Own Virtual Reality Robert Ornstein This is a book that shows, in simple detail, one of the most startling findings of modern science: We don’t experience the world as it is, but as virtual reality. And while much of the latest scientific work demonstrates this, as do many of the classical psychological illusions, it is an important meeting point for students of the mind, brain, philosophy and religion because, as we can now see in light of this book, all these disciplines begin at the same place. 8 | entry | 46
