Denyse O'Leary
Neuroscientist vows post-wager: We’ll nail consciousness yet!
Anil Seth, proponent of the “hallucination” theory of consciousness, vows that researchers will find that consciousness spot or circuit in the brainWhen You Sync With Someone, Your Brains Wave Together
Neuroscientists have found that co-operation results in brain wave synchronyAt Scientific American, Lydia Denworth brought up an interesting topic earlier this month: The way that brain waves synchronize between two people who are communicating successfully: Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together. Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard. The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain.” – Lydia Denworth, “Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact,” Scientific American, July 1, 2023 For example, Read More ›
Can Science Escape Faith-Based Beliefs? Maybe It Needs Them!
Marcelo Gleiser insists, for better or worse, science is a faith-based enterprisePhysicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser (pictured) offered some thoughts recently on faith and science, noting that the scientific revolution has hardly changed the picture of faith much: “the great scientific advances of the past four centuries have not radically diminished the number of believers” in transcendent realities: If science is to help us, in the words of the late Carl Sagan, by providing a “candle in the dark,” it will have to be seen in a new light. The first step in this direction is to admit that science has fundamental limitations as a way of knowing, and that it is not the only method of approaching the unattainable truth about reality. Science should be seen as the practice of Read More ›
It’s Becoming Clearer That the Mind Is Not the Brain
The “science of consciousness” not only has no workable materialist theory but it’s unclear what such a theory should look like or explainNot surprisingly, given that philosopher David Chalmers won the famous wager with neuroscientist Christof Koch last month, the topic of consciousness has been in the news a lot. In 25 years of research, no one has found a specific consciousness circuit, spot, wave, or whatever in the brain. Consciousness is still the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” At Vox, Oshan Jarow, a writer who knows the field, tells us that the bet has been renewed for another 25 years and offers an interpretation of why scientists haven’t “cracked” consciousness so far: “we still lack a definitive, falsifiable explanation. We even lack consensus on whether one may ever exist.” Eventually, in this view, the field might coalesce around a unified theory and Read More ›
How Can a Woman Missing Her Olfactory Bulbs Still Smell?
The brain’s plasticity intrigues and puzzles researcher, and it also raises a larger issueEven since neuroscientists started imaging the brain, they’ve been turning up cases where people are missing brain parts we would expect them to need in order to do something — but they are doing that very thing anyway. One example, written up in LiveScience in 2019, concerns women who are missing their olfactory bulbs (illustrated) but can still smell: Researchers have discovered a small group of people that seem to defy medical science: They can smell despite lacking “olfactory bulbs,” the region in the front of the brain that processes information about smells from the nose. It’s not clear how they are able to do this, but the findings suggest that the human brain may have a greater ability to Read More ›
Is There a Boom in Research Dishonesty?
Or do some academics just feel sure they won’t get caught? Or that, if they do, it somehow doesn’t matter?What to make of this news stream? ● Distinguished Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School was recently accused by other academics of falsifying data in a number of studies, including one on dishonesty, where she was a co-author, Professors Joseph Simmons, Uri Simonsohn and Leif Nelson of University of Pennsylvania, Escade Business School in Spain, and University of California, Berkeley, respectively, accused Gino of the fraud on their blog Data Colada. “Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud,” they wrote, stating they shared their concerns with Harvard Business School. Therese Joffre, “Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple behavioral science studies” at The College Fix, June 28, 2023 Gino, currently Read More ›
Our Ancestors Are Constantly Evolving, Just to Keep Up!
Negative biases about our forebears have long been part of science, education, and popular culture. Why?Recently, archeologists came up with an interesting find from 30,000 years ago in what is now Moravia, part of the Czech Republic: Ravens lived among humans. over 30,000 years ago, during the Pavlovian culture, ravens helped themselves to people’s scraps and picked over mammoth carcasses left behind by human hunters. This took place in the region known today as Moravia, in the Czech Republic. Ravens live in human settlements today, of course, with one notable difference: The archeologists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution noted that “The large number of raven bones found at the sites suggests that the birds, in turn, were a supplementary source of food, and may have become important in Read More ›
That “Mirror Image” Myth About Identical Twins… What Happened?
Researcher of identical twins hoped to prove that Genes Rule! But there were ethics slippages along the wayFor some decades, we heard claims from studies of identical twins (formed when one fertilized egg splits) that everything from exam results to homosexuality might hinge on genetics. Therefore, any similarity in later choices or behavior might be due to genetic factors (read “predetermined” or “inevitable” here). How has that assumption held up, especially in the age of genome mapping? Identical twins comprise roughly 1 in every 250 births. Studies of twins who were separated at birth, have been especially prized because the twins were assumed to grow up in different environments. Thus any significant similarities pointed to genetic influences. Several problems emerged though. For one thing, what about the assumption that separation at birth means that twins experience different Read More ›
The Philosopher Wins: There’s No Consciousness Spot in the Brain
After a 25-year search, dualist philosopher David Chalmers won the bet with neuroscientist Christof KochBack in 1998, premier neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next twenty-five years, a specific “signature of consciousness” would be found in the brain. In 2018, Swedish journalist Per Snaprud reminded the world of that fact at New Scientist. With five years to run, a countdown of sorts began. Snaprud’s article was titled “Consciousness: How we’re solving a mystery bigger than our minds,” telling readers that “we’re uncovering clues.” The five years are up and who won? Mariana Lenharo reports at Nature, “Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that Read More ›
The “Conscious Machine” Is Just Real Enough to Scare People
The ancient Greek hunk Narcissus could tell us about the risks — if he hadn’t been turned into a daffodil…Theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart turns to an ancient folk tale to explain the danger of coming to believe that artificial intelligence is real human intelligence. Narcissus, as he tells us, was a young Greek hunter who fell in love with his own reflection in still water. He was entranced by the image but frustrated by the fact that it never did anything he didn’t do himself. He pined away and was eventually transformed into a flower — still called narcissus today. His name also found its way into psychology as a term for extreme self-absorption, narcissism. And that’s where Dr. Hart fears that an attraction to AI products as “machine selves” is taking us. While we’ve always been Read More ›
Free Will: What Are the Real Reasons to Believe in It?
Some say that free will might be a useful delusion but neuroscience provides sound reasons to believe that it is real.University of Missouri psychology professor Kennon Sheldon’s message is neatly summed up in an opening statement: “Regardless of whether humans do or don’t have free will, psychological research shows it’s beneficial to act as if you do”. The author of Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live (Basic Books, 2022) responds to philosophers who say that we do not have free will: All my life, I’ve struggled with the question of whether humans have ‘free will’. It catalysed my decision to become a psychologist and continues to inspire my research to this day, especially as it relates to the kinds of goals people set for themselves, and the effects of goal-striving on Read More ›
Researchers: Neanderthals Invented Process to Produce Birch Tar
The tar can be used for glue, bug repellent, and killing germs. This finding tracks growing recognition of Neanderthals as intelligentMany of us grew up with “Neanderthal!” used as a term of abuse for a stupid person. A 2021 study from the University of Tübingen and others, dusted off at ScienceAlert, paints quite a different picture, in connection with Neanderthals’ manufacture of birch tar. The tar from burnt birch wood can be used as glue, insect repellent, and antiseptic. It can be scraped from a fire naturally or it can be produced in a controlled way. Which method Neanderthals used says something about the development of their culture. The study authors, Patrick Schmidt et al., went to a lot of potentially messy trouble to try to answer the question: Some think of black tar as a happy accident that Neanderthals Read More ›
All We Need To Do To Give a Robot a Soul Is… (Error 404)
The author of Robot Souls argues that programmers have failed to put the “junk,” that is, the soul, into machines — but that they could do soAcademic publisher Taylor & Francis asks in TechXplore, “Should robots be given a conscience?” (June 11, 2023). I spoil no surprise by revealing that we are meant to think that that is both doable and desirable. T & F is publishing Eve Poole’s Robot Souls later this year. Poole is a British writer and academic, and author of Capitalism’s Toxic Assumptions, Buying God, and Leadersmithing. Her thesis is that, in our quest for the most functional software, we left out the “junk,” which includes our “emotions, free will and a sense of purpose”: Our junk code consists of human emotions, our propensity for mistakes, our inclination to tell stories, our uncanny sixth sense, our capacity to cope with uncertainty, an Read More ›
Look Out! The “Reptilian Brain” Is Still Here!
Many psychology students are subjected to this day to an exploded pop neuroscience myth endorsed by celebrity scientist Carl SaganDo we have a three-part brain — reptilian, mammalian, and human? Curiously, psychology textbooks teach us that we do and neuroscience studies teach us that we don’t. Who to believe? And how did that happen anyway? In the 1960s, Yale University physiologist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007) offered the triune brain theory. On that view, the reptilian brain (brain stem) controls things like movement and breathing; the mammalian brain controls emotion (limbic system); and the human cerebral cortex controls language and reasoning (neocortex). That might have been just another theory except that it was widely promoted by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996) in his book, The Dragons of Eden (Random House, 1977). Praised in The Atlantic as “a rational, Read More ›
Cognitive Cells? A Newer Challenge to Neo-Darwinism
The origin of self-referential cognition is unknown, say a trio of researchers who call it “biology’s most profound enigma”In September 1957, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Francis Crick (1916–2004) announced the “Central Dogma” in biology, at a symposium at Oxford University. The dogma is currently given in the Biology Dictionary thus: “genetic information flows primarily from nucleic acids in the form of DNA and RNA to functional proteins during the process of gene expression.” This view that genes rule underpins mainstream assumptions about how traits are inherited; from there, it governs accepted assumptions about evolution. So the ground on which Darwin’s modern defenders stand, propounding the only true history of life, is narrow but it is firm. Sir Francis Crick is perhaps better known to laypeople for his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul, which he Read More ›
Near-Death Experience Research Is Slowly Filling In the Picture
When an 87-year-old man was having his brain scanned, he died — unexpectedly — of a heart attack. So, in a rare event, the scan recorded his unanticipated final brain activityIn a survey article at Business Insider, Erin Heger points to several studies that shed light on what happens when we die. She starts by referencing Julia A. Nicholson’s recent account of her own NDE when she was eighteen, as a result of a near-fatal car crash: I didn’t feel any pain but I heard voices around me. I could then hear my sister screaming, “She’s dead, my sister is dead.” So I believed that I must have died. I remember my sister, Allan, and John saying, “If you can hear us, move, or touch something,” but I couldn’t move at all. After I started to regain consciousness, I remember seeing the faces of the people that I loved flashing Read More ›
Finding From Recent Brain Research Supports Free Will
Researchers, altering Libet’s classical experiment, found that human brains show no “readiness potential” when a decision is importantPhilosopher Alessandra Buccella and experimental psychologist Tomáš Dominik, both at Chapman University, offer some interesting support for free will. Many commentators interpreted Benjamin Libet’s experiments that showed that the brain’s readiness to make a decision (readiness potential) often preceded the subject’s conscious awareness of the choice that had been made. There! they said, that proves that there is no free will: To many observers, these findings debunked the intuitive concept of free will. After all, if neuroscientists can infer the timing or choice of your movements long before you are consciously aware of your decision, perhaps people are merely puppets, pushed around by neural processes unfolding below the threshold of consciousness. Alessandra Buccella, Tomáš Dominik, “Free Will Is Only an Read More ›
Physicist: Life After Death Is Incompatible With Physics
In 2011, Sean Carroll wrote an essay for Scientific American on why — from a science perspective — our minds must be extinguished at deathBack in 2011, particle physicist Sean M. Carroll wrote a guest blog at Scientific American, dismissing the idea of life after death or the immortality of the soul. He began by responding to astrophysicist Adam Frank’s reflections at NPR: For myself I remain fully and firmly agnostic on the question. If ever there was a place where firm convictions seem misplaced this is it. There simply is no controlled, experimental verifiable information to support either the “you rot” vs. “you go on” positions. In the absence of said information we are all free to believe as we like but, I would argue, it behooves us to remember that truly “public” knowledge on the subject — the kind science exemplifies — Read More ›
A Game Developer Looks at Human Consciousness
Gino Yu tries to explain the Asian approach to consciousness to Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Closer to TruthA few years back, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed game developer Gino Yu at Closer to Truth on the topic, “What is Consciousness?” Consciousness is what we can know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. (Jan 18, 2016, 8:34 min) The interview raises some interesting issues. Yu is the founding head of the Multimedia Innovation Center at Hong Kong Polytechnic University: “His main area of research focuses on the application of media technologies to cultivate creativity and promote enlightened consciousness.” (Closer to Truth) So how does he understand consciousness? Selections from the transcript and some notes follow: Robert Lawrence Kuhn: you know I’ve Read More ›