Browsed by
Category: memory

Developmental cognitive neuroscience

Developmental cognitive neuroscience

Official journal of Flux: The Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Editor-in-Chief:Professor Beatriz Luna, Ph.D   The journal publishes theoretical and research papers on cognitive brain development, from infancy through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood. It covers neurocognitive development and neurocognitive processing in both typical and atypical development, including social and affective aspects. Appropriate methodologies for the journal include, but are not limited to, functional neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG), electrophysiology (EEG and ERP), NIRS and transcranial magnetic stimulation, as…

Read More Read More

The Cognitive Bias Codex

The Cognitive Bias Codex

Many (all?) cognitive biases are built-in features of the human attention-sensation-perception-memory-cognition chain of sense making processes. It would not be surprising to learn many of these biases have effects that are relevant to questions regarding how natural selection shaped humans for particular embodied functions in a particular environment. Much has been said and written about how the pre-modern environment evolution calibrated us to function within is in many respects quite different from our modern environment.

Book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

In his new book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David J. Epstein investigates the significant advantages of generalized cognitive skills for success in a complex world. We’ve heard and read many praises for narrow expertise in both humans and AIs (Watson, Alpha Go, etc.). In both humans and AIs, however, narrow+deep expertise does not translate to adaptiveness when reality presents novel challenges, as it does constantly.  As you ingest this highly readable, non-technical book, please add your…

Read More Read More

The info processing (IP) metaphor of the brain is wrong

The info processing (IP) metaphor of the brain is wrong

Psychologist Robert Epstein, the former editor of Psychology Today, challenges anyone to show the brain processing information or data. The IP metaphor, he says, is so deeply embedded in thinking about thinking it prevents us from learning how the brain really works. Epstein also takes on popular luminaries including Ray Kurzweil and Henry Markram, seeing both exemplifying the extremes of wrongness we get into with the IP metaphor and the notion mental experience could persist outside the organic body. The…

Read More Read More

Ultrasound stimulation to improve brain function

Ultrasound stimulation to improve brain function

Earlier this year I attended a presentation by Dr. Jay Sanguinetti, UNM, on using ultrasound stimulation of the brain to improve factors related to attention and clear thinking. His team published an article recently in Frontiers in Neurology describing their research.

Musk: merging of humans and technology essential to survival

Musk: merging of humans and technology essential to survival

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.17.6″] From Axios interview with Elon Musk: Musk said his neuroscience company, Neuralink, has about 85 of “the highest per capita intelligence” group of engineers he has ever assembled — with the mission of building a hard drive for your brain. “The long-term aspiration with Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” Wait. What? “To achieve a sort of democratization of intelligence, such that it is not monopolistically held in a purely digital form by governments…

Read More Read More

Book discussion event on embodied cognition

Book discussion event on embodied cognition

Our discussions all, to some extent, relate to cognition. An important area of inquiry concerns whether some form of physical embodiment is required for a brain to support cognition in general and the self-aware sort of cognition we humans possess. THE BOOK Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Please note, while the title includes “Philosophy,” we are not a philosophy group and the book and discussion will…

Read More Read More

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Kurzweil builds and supports a persuasive vision of the emergence of a human-level engineered intelligence in the early-to-mid twenty-first century. In his own words, With the reverse engineering of the human brain we will be able to apply the parallel, self-organizing, chaotic algorithms of  human intelligence to enormously powerful computational substrates. This intelligence will then be in a position to improve its own design, both hardware and software,  in a rapidly accelerating iterative process. In Kurzweil’s view, we must and…

Read More Read More

Newly discovered form of interneural communication

Newly discovered form of interneural communication

Two independent teams of scientists from the University of Utah and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have discovered that a gene crucial for learning, called Arc, can send its genetic material from one neuron to another by employing a strategy commonly used by viruses. The studies, both published in Cell, unveil a new way that nervous system cells interact. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/memory-gene-goes-viral