Brain Hammer (Free subscription) | yesterday
One of the entries in the Brain Hammer PMS WIPS (Philosophy and/of Mind (and/or) Science Works In Progress Sessions) has recently been published: “The function of folk psychology: mind reading or mind shaping?” by Tadeusz W. Zawidzki in Philosophical Explorations. Links: [publisher’s page for the paper][further info on PMS WIPS][the original PMS WIPS discussion on Zawidzki’s [...]
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
I have discovered shocking evidence that computers are affecting the brain. After extensive research, I have discovered the problem is remarkably specific and I have isolated it to an individual brain area affected by one particular application. Microsoft Word is causing abnormal growth in the frontal lobes. The cingulate cortex is a part of the frontal lobe that is known to be involved with conflict...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
The September issue of The Psychologist has two excellent and freely available articles that smash the popular myths of scientific psychology. The first examines the widely mythologised story of hole-in-the head celebrity Phineas Gage, and the other tackles commonly repeated stories of famous studies that don't stand up to scrutiny. Gage , whose skull is pictured on the front cover, is legendary,...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Choreography and Cognition is a project examining the cognitive science of dance . Try this for some experimental data. Get down. The myth of undecided voters is tackled head on by Frontal Cortex . Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus. No, not a traditional English weekend, an Edge article by Clay Shirky on the internet and mental aggregators...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
Wikipedia has a short but fascinating page listing animals by the number of neurons they have. There's only about a dozen entries on there, but most interesting is that there is an animal with no nerve cells at all. It's called Trichoplax and apparently is a "a simple balloon-like marine animal with a body cavity filled with pressurized fluid". Apparently humans don't come top of the pile, as both...
The University of Chicago Law Schoo (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
This past May, then-Visiting Professor of Law Susan Bandes organized a fascinating conference that brought together scholars working in philosophy, neuroscience, neuroeconomics, sociology, psychology, and political science to consider the intersection of legal institutions and human emotion. For example, legal...
3quarksdaily (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
In the last decades of the twentieth century, constructivism became less dominant in the social sciences. Mead’s own work was brought into question, and evolutionary psychology gained credence, if not full acceptance, under the leadership of entomologist E. O. Wilson....
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
Neurophilosophy has a stimulating article on Wilder Penfield , the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery. Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
Today's New York Times has an interesting article on the tug-of-war over the cultural influence on paranoid delusions and whether contemporary-themed psychosis is a new form of mental illness or just a modern colouring of an old disorder. The article focuses on the recent interest in the 'Truman Show delusion', splashed over the media by two Canadian psychiatrists. It's quite hard to judge what they're...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
Today's Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin's new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic. I've not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author's musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world's leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
PLoS Biology has a cozy essay entitled "Is Sleep Essential?" that addresses the mystery of the purpose of sleep. The article looks at sleep across the whole of the animal kingdom to examine how different species sleep and whether there are any animals that don't sleep at all. There are no convincing cases of sleepless animals it seems, and the authors, neuroscientists Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their 'folly'. Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it's...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/26/2008
Somatosphere is an excellent new blog on medical anthropology , the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine. While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted 'things' that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill. Culture also shapes...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/26/2008
I cannot recommend strongly enough Goodale & Milner's book on vision 'Sight Unseen'. The title refers to the idea they pursue throughout the book that our everyday conception of vision is thoroughly misleading. Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/26/2008
I had the pleasure of seeing the initial run-through of the upcoming London play Reminiscence on Friday and was completely blown away. Inspired by a case study by world-renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks (from his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), Reminiscence is the story of Mrs O’Connor who, in a bizarre neurological twist is transported, via evocative music, to the surreal world of...
