Mind-Shadows

Why Deceit Is Good For You

2012-04-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

In 1995 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the usual psychologists, anthropologists, and other academics showed up for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Science journalist John Horgan was also there. He heard various presentations, talked to various members and found that "the most influential thinker there, arguably, was a scruffily bearded fellow, wearing sunglasses and a knitted cap, who never gave a talk. He lurked around the margins of the conference." Horgan "spotted him puffing a joint outside a meeting hall."
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Atheists Who Are Preachers

2012-04-17T04:15:00.003-04:00

What does it mean to be a nonbelieving pastor? How can a person preach belief in something he or she does not believe in? Does this mean they are hypocrites? Or that they have a family to feed and support? As spiritual seekers, many began their adult lives and careers convinced they found the answer to life's quest and chose to stand behind the pulpit but, as seekers typically do, they turned up new thoughts and evidence that changed their minds.
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Robots and Humans:I love You Very Much--You May Switch Me Off Now.

2012-04-10T04:15:00.002-04:00

The curiosity is not about the robot but about the human brain. In the video below, Jules says "I love you deeply and care for you very much. You may now switch me off."
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The Jennifer Anniston Neuron

2012-04-03T04:15:00.000-04:00

"Think of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, "Jen." Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.
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Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget

2012-03-27T04:15:00.002-04:00

In an old vaudeville routine, a comedian asks his straight man, "Who was the lady you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the straight man, scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics on an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

Maybe Jill Price would not know what happened at an exact time but she can recall any day and she can remember it. Unlike vaudeville audiences, people don't laugh at all. They are astounded by her feats of memory. She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.
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Christopher Hitchens with Angel Wings

2012-03-20T04:15:00.000-04:00

English-American author, essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) had a career over four decades. In 2005, a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll voted him the world's fifth top public intellectual. He appeared on talk shows and lecture circuits, and was columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, and World Affairs. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was also an atheist.

On learning that Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer, Reverend Rick Warren prayed that the atheist repent and see that the disease was visited on him by God for disbelief. "I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss," said Warren, then adding, "He knows the truth now."

Despite the prayers of Warren and other Christian evangelists, Hitchens never changed his views. As Art Levine put it, "The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer" on Hitchens "boggles" the mind, especially because Hitchens caused his cancer by a "long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits."
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He Found Freedom in an Unfree World

2012-03-13T04:15:00.006-04:00

More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and walked away from the economic system that made him a wage slave.

This is the story of a thoughtful and intelligent man who has a different vision of the good life. His vision took him far from the view shared by those in capitalist society. It is about a man who succeeded in finding the life he sought. It addresses the big questions many ask but few try to find satisfactory answers for. Suelo found his own answers on how to live despite a society and culture obsessed with money. He offers a subversive version of living, one that upsets the conventional view.

"Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money," Daniel Suelo says. "You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It's illegal to live outside of it."
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You're Not My Momma: Capgras Delusion

2012-03-06T04:15:00.008-05:00

In a traffic accident, David Silvera was thrown from his car and landed on his head. He lay in a coma five weeks. When he awakened he discovered he lost the use of his right arm but felt he remained intact mentally. He kept his intelligence. He was not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed. He read the newspaper with interest and retained his curiosity about the world.

But then he started telling his mother she was an imposter, not his real mom. The same went for his father, who was no longer his real dad. It didn't stop there. The house he lived in was like his parents--just a good imitation of the real one. Not only that, David was not really David. He sometimes became the other David. He was his own imposter.
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Where’s Waldo with no Waldo?: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2012-02-28T04:15:00.002-05:00

At 5 foot 6 inches and 270 pounds, bank robber McArthur Wheeler, 45, was not difficult to remember.

In 1995, he walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight. He wore no ski mask, no nylon stocking. In fact, he wore nothing over his face and did not disguise his body. Witnesses gave a consistent description of him, and one that made him stand out from faces in the crowd. The surveillance cameras corroborated their description. There he was, plain as day, pointing his gun at a teller.

The police arrested him and when they did he could not believe they found him out. "But I wore the juice," he said. He had rubbed lemon juice over his face, believing it made him invisible to the cameras.
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What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer

2012-02-21T04:15:00.009-05:00

Julian Barbour,a British physicist, has a different theory about the nature of time.

Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor, the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past. You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.
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Amputating a Phantom Arm

2012-02-14T04:15:00.002-05:00

You have lost your left arm but you still feel your left hand. You not only feel it, but every minute of the day you are are nagged by an exhausting need to scratch the hand. But there is nothing there to scratch.

How can this be? You feel something in the middle of nothing but air. You look down and you see empty space, but you still feel an extremely annoying itch right there where your hand is supposed to be.

You have a problem and it looks like there is no way to solve it. You can't scratch something that does not exist.
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Politically as well as Economically Greece is Falling Apart

2012-02-11T10:20:00.002-05:00

The mainstream media does its usual job of reporting between commercials. It tells us that the Greeks are in trouble and that Angela Merkel and the Eurozone are imposing stringent austerity measures before bailing out the nation. "Now, folks," says the media anchor, "Don't touch that remote. We'll be right back."

Truth is, Greece is a far larger cause for concern than the sixty second sound bytes indicate.
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Is Your Brain a Meat Computer Without Free Will?

2012-02-07T04:15:00.006-05:00

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost)

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! (Yogi Berra)

Both quotations have to do with forks in the road. Frost implies he exercised free will and Berra makes nonsense out of the very idea of free choice. The Yankees catcher was good at silly quotes that the press liked to scoop up like fly balls but this one resonates into philosophy and brain science.

We can't start over to discover if we could have done differently because we are creatures of time and perhaps it is merely a construction of our consciousness. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, as John Wheeler put it, which is another way of saying we are dimensionally constituted to handle one thing at a time.
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One Side of Christine Honeycutt's Face Did Not Grow

2012-01-31T04:15:00.009-05:00

One of Christine’s teachers told her to wipe the ink off her forehead. “I can’t,” she replied. “It’s always there.”

There were other troubling signs: One side of Christine’s forehead was normal, but the other was “meaty,” Vicki recalls. And her ears looked out of proportion to one another—an asymmetry that seemed to extend over her entire face. . . .
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Hero is Okay but Wimp is Better: Future Prediction and The Illusion of Courage

2012-01-24T04:15:00.001-05:00

Throwing yourself on a grenade to shield your buddies. Slugging an assailant with a purse to protect your child. Wing-walking atop a biplane at 10,000 feet. Jumping a motorcycle over three parked cars. Some people would say they could do one or all of these actions.

All of that is rather extreme. Most of us say we would not do it. On the other hand, many people predict they would engage in actions relatively mild compared to extreme behavior. These are situations like investing in an agressive stock, or giving a speech in front of two hundred people, or standing up to an intimidating boss. Would you do it?

For people who say yes, recent research indicates that many are wrong.
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Alzheimer's Is Not Inevitable for the Aging Brain

2012-01-17T04:15:00.001-05:00

"A 115-year-old woman who remained mentally alert throughout her life had an essentially normal brain, with little or no evidence of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study in the August issue of Neurobiology of Aging. The findings question the assumption that Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia will inevitably develop, if people live long enough. 'Our observations suggest that, in contrast to general belief, the limits of human cognitive function may extend far beyond the range that is currently enjoyed by most individuals, and that improvements in preventing brain disorders of aging may yield substantial long-term benefits,' according to a study led by Gert Holstege of University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands.

Dr. Holstege and colleagues had a unique chance to test the mental functioning of one of the world's oldest humans, and then to compare their findings with the condition of the subject's brain after death. The patient was a Dutch woman who, at age 82, made arrangements to donate her body to science after death. At age 111, she contacted the researchers to ask whether her body would still be useful for research or teaching purposes. They assured her that, contrary to what she thought, they were especially interested because of her age: 'She was very enthusiastic about her being important for science,' Dr. Gert Holstege and colleagues write.

The researchers found the patient to be 'an alert and assertive lady, full of interest in the world around her, including national and international politics and sports.'" She had lived independently until moving to a residential care home at age 105, mainly because of poor eyesight. Ironically, she had been very small at birth and was not expected to survive.

A series of neurological and psychological examinations were performed when the patient was 112 and 113 years old. The results were essentially normal, with no signs of dementia or problems with memory or attention. In general, her mental performance was above average for adults aged 60 to 75.

As planned, her body was donated to science when she died at age 115. At the time, she was the world's oldest woman. Examination after death found almost no evidence of atherosclerosis (narrowing of the arteries) anywhere in her body. The brain also showed very few abnormalities—the number of brain cells was similar to that expected in healthy people between 60 and 80 years old.

A key finding was the absence of brain abnormalities typical of Alzheimer's disease. There were almost no deposits of a substance called beta-amyloid, which are characteristic of Alzheimer's patients. The other abnormalities present, including "neurofibrillary tangles," were very mild—too early to cause significant mental impairment.

The unique case lends new insights into the potential for preserving brain function in very elderly patients. Previous studies have found at least mild abnormalities in the brains of nearly all "cognitively normal" elderly people. As the number of people living to age 100 and beyond continues to increase, the findings suggest that deterioration of the brain is not inevitable." Found here.
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Amazingly TIny Brain But A Normal Life

2012-01-10T04:15:00.002-05:00

"A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life.

The commonly spouted wisdom that people only use 10 percent of their brain power may have been dismissed as a myth, but one Frenchman seems to be managing fine with just a small fraction of his actual brain.

In fact the man, who works as a civil servant in southern France, has succeeded in living an entirely normal life despite a huge fluid-filled cavity taking up most of the space where his brain should be.
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The High Priests of Physics and The Occult Language of Mathematics

2012-01-03T04:15:00.007-05:00

There is nothing in the laws of the cosmos that says physicists are supposed to be happy. Steven Weinberg said something like that, voicing an opinion similar to Feynman's, who in effect said of quantum mechanics that you may not like it but that's the way it is.

A group of thinkers refuse to accept it as the way it is. Concerned for their reputation, they do not like "sloppy thinkers who might well be called 'cranks,' who if given wide publicity would harm" their cause.

I will leave you to form your own opinions.

They are "devoted mainly to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels , of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas developed with full respect for evidence, logic, and objectivity. Such reforms have long been urgently needed; and yet there is no area of scholarship more stubbornly censorial, and more reluctant to reform itself."Read more »

Stephen Hawking: Philosophy Is A Waste of Time

2011-12-13T04:15:00.003-05:00

I will be away until January
--------------------
Stephen Hawking believes philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. "More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics.
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The Puzzle of Face Space: Your Eyes May See When Your Brain Does Not

2011-12-06T04:15:00.004-05:00

In Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat the title is comic and almost absurd but his book provides fascinating explanation of a neurological condition in which a man does mistake his wife for a hat without realizing it. Sacks introduces the lay reader to another phenomenon--how a stroke leaves a person unable to see things on one side of the visual field and how the stroke victim also has no inkling that anything is wrong or missing with his perception. In fact, in both cases, nothing is wrong with the eyes, only with the way the brain processes visual information.

There is a name for this condition, prosopagnosia, and it describes a small fraction of people who cannot recognize faces--even the faces of loved ones The condition puzzles researchers but they are beginning to understand how facial recognition works, which may help those with prosopagnosia. With her colleagues, Marlene Behrmann at Carnegie Mellon University has gathered some pieces of the puzzle by comparing the brains of individuals who are face-blind to those who are face-sighted. Their results hint at how we recognize faces not in a flash of insight, not as a kind of photographic image, but by building up recognition on a neurological assembly line. Recognition is encoded in the brain as face space.
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Consciousness and the Soul Solved

2011-11-29T04:15:00.000-05:00

Even atheists have souls, Nicholas Humphrey might jest in a book both difficult and fluidly written. In Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness he believes the soul can be explained along with the hard problem of consciousness.
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A Little-Known Story: Maria Leontievna Bochkareva, Who Met President Wilson

2011-11-22T04:15:00.001-05:00

Of peasant stock, beaten by her alcoholic father, working since age eight, she married at fifteen and left her husband when he began beating her and swore to kill her. She married again, followed her husband to exile in Siberia but left him when he tried to hang her. In 1914 she fought for the Czar as the only woman in the 25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion, where fellow soldiers taught her to read and write. She was wounded twice, decorated three times for bravery, fought with frost-bitten feet, bayoneted German soldiers, and pulled fallen comrades to safety.
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Who's In Charge?: Did Your Neurons Really Make You Do It?

2011-11-15T04:15:00.004-05:00

Free will or no free will? Benjamin Libet, John Dylan Haaynes, and so many others have weighed in on the issue. Now we have a new point of view based on new evidence. "Many neuroscientists have maintained a long-standing opinion that what we experience as free will is no more than mechanistic patterns of neurons firing in the brain. Although we feel like free agents contemplating and choosing, they would argue that these sensations are merely an emotional remnant that brain activity leaves in its wake. If these neuroscientists are right, then free will isn’t worth much discussion.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara, seriously disagrees.

Neuroscience provides more and more evidence for a mechanistic view of the human mind. A lot of people find that bleak and they don’t like it.Once you learn how the machine works, does that mean that you’re not responsible for your actions because your behavior may be determined? No, I don’t think it means that at all, says Gazzaniga.More Subscribe in a reader

How Will Brain Science Change The Legal System?

2011-11-08T04:15:00.003-05:00

If you were to lose the tip of your little finger in an accident, you’d be saddened, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this can change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, send signals to your muscles, use verbs or perform any of the other hidden, daily feats that we pull off seemingly without effort.

Thousands of natural experiments with brain tumors, degenerative disorders, genetic mutations, drug addictions and traumatic brain injury have taught a simple lesson: our hopes, ideas, desires and behaviors depend directly on the state of the enigmatic lump of thinking stuff.
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Thomas Metzinger: What Is Behind Our Talk About The Self

2011-11-01T04:15:00.001-04:00

Here is an excerpt of an interview between Ginger Campbell, MD, and Thomas Metzinger, PhD, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Dr. Campbell: I guess I was really wanting to start with the working definition that you gave in your book. Why in the book did you pick the phrase “consciousness is the appearance of a world” as your working definition? I’m going to assume it’s a working definition, since that’s the way you defined it in the book.

Dr. Metzinger: For a popular accessible book I needed a simple working definition—and “the appearance of a world” is just that. It happens when you wake up in the morning: a world appears to you.
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