The link has videos of all the presentations. The blurb: “NYU Stern’s Business & Society Program and the Evolution Institute co-hosted a one-day symposium ‘Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms, Societies’ featuring an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature. Participants and audience members assessed the possible applications of evolutionary thinking for business and business ethics.”
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
Subtitle: “Toward an embodied cognition framework for mind-body research,” by Osypiuk et al. in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, May 1, 2018. The abstract: “Dynamic and static body postures are a defining characteristic of mind-body practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong (TCQ). A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that TCQ may be beneficial for psychological health, including management and prevention of depression and anxiety. Although a variety of causal factors have been identified as potential mediators of such…
For something a little different to start your weekend, here is a glimpse into one man’s subjective world. He asks himself what consciousness is. He observes, “Life is fear,” yet his mind has found a way to peace. What is the adaptive significance of magical thinking? What is the value of cozying up to ambiguity? CUCLI from Xavier Marrades on Vimeo.
“Disentangling mechanisms, brain systems, and behavioral responses” by Johan F. Storm et al., Journal of Neuroscience 8 November 2017, 37 (45) 10882-10893. The abstract: “How consciousness (experience) arises from and relates to material brain processes (the “mind-body problem”) has been pondered by thinkers for centuries, and is regarded as among the deepest unsolved problems in science, with wide-ranging theoretical, clinical, and ethical implications. Until the last few decades, this was largely seen as a philosophical topic, but not widely accepted…
Their blurb: “Neuroscience of Consciousness is an open access journal which publishes papers on the biological basis of consciousness, with an emphasis on empirical neuroscience studies in healthy populations and clinical settings. The journal also publishes empirically and neuroscientifically relevant psychological, methodological, theoretical, and philosophical papers. As well as the primary phenomenon of consciousness itself, relevant topics include interactions between conscious and unconscious processes; selfhood; metacognition and higher-order consciousness; intention, volition, and agency; individual differences in consciousness; altered states of…
Indeed we should according to this recent Scientific American article. One thing I learned from Dennett in his new book is that according to him the scientific image uncovers an objective, underlying reality, while the manifest image is corrupted by our personal ontology. Not so according to quantum mechanics, which operates on the premise that our scientific results themselves are tied to our perceptions and constructed categories, not “a purely objective world out there.” There is a paradigm shift in…
Tony Zador of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory devised a new technique for mapping connections among neurons. It is much faster than other methods and at least as accurate as the most accurate competing methods, including fluorescence techniques. The technique, MAPseq, uses genetically modified viruses to insert unique RNA sequences (“bar codes”) into each neuron. Post-mortem DNA sequencing identifies connections among all neurons in the sample. The resulting model is structural, not functional. Derived models are not spatially accurate (i.e., not…
Torday and Miller, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 19 April 2016. The abstract: “Hobson and Friston have hypothesized that the brain must actively dissipate heat in order to process information (Hobson et al., 2014). This physiologic trait is functionally homologous with the first instantation of life formed by lipids suspended in water forming micelles- allowing the reduction in entropy (heat dissipation). This circumvents the Second Law of Thermodynamics permitting the transfer of information between living entities, enabling them to perpetually glean…
For a change of pace.