Tag Archives: cognitive science

Fake memories in the making

Fake news, fake photos, fake audio, fake videos… all very bad compared to our own real objective reports, real image perception, real conversation reconstruction, real memory of witnessed events, right?

Wrong.  All fake.  No one really know the whole thing, but science indicates that all stories are subjective, our eyes don’t capture 3D images, we guess and forget and great deal of what we hear, and impression of memories are live reconstructs that can be altered as the whim of your mood.  Which, by its turn depends on your gut bacteria health.

I am not saying all the new fake is welcome, nor that all innate fake is bad.  But when we get great articles such as We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video
By Brian Resnick @ Vox we must remember that what is at stake is the privileged status of faking reality.  Old ways, such as education and culture are in.  New such as fake video, is out.Continue reading→

Skip A.R. – Embodiment is the real thing

“Non‐invasive brain stimulation of motor cortex induces embodiment when integrated with virtual reality feedback”

by M. Bassolino ;  M. Franza ;  J. Bello Ruiz ;  M. Pinardi ;  T. Schmidlin ;  M.A. Stephan ;  M. Solcà ;  A. Serino ; O. Blanke @ European Journal of Neuroscience

Researchers tested feeling of embodiment by non-invasive brain stimulation.  Instead of traditional visual, tactile or spacial illusions, scientists used magnetic (TMS) and visual (BR) stimulus to interact directly with the body’s representation in the brain.Continue reading→

“20 Years Later, the Tetris Effect Has Turned Life into One Big Video Game” by Megan Gannon

“Some people credit Neil Gaiman with first describing the Tetris effect in a 1987 poem “Virus in digital dreams,” but the expression is usually traced back to a 1994 Wired article (…)

Over the last two decades, the Tetris effect has worked its way into gaming vernacular, but considering how many people play video games, it may be surprising how little the phenomenon has been studied.

(…) Perhaps the most famous example is a 2000 study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold. (…) As Stickgold told Australia’s ABC News in an interview, this made him think there must be something going on in the brain that is producing these intrusive images. (…)

He found that students who were made to play Tetris reported, quite consistently, that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep. Stickgold also included five amnesiacs in the experiment who could play Tetris just fine, but due to a specific brain damage, couldn’t later recall playing it. But they, too, said that they saw blocks floating or turning on their side—even though they couldn’t explain the origin of those shapes. One patient, for example, reported seeing “images that are turned on their side. I don’t know what they are from. I wish I could remember, but they are like blocks.”

Continue reading→

Your brain during orgasm – and how it relates to performance anxiety, by Max Plenke

Article by Max Plenke, featured in .Mic

“You are your own worst enemy in the bedroom. (…)  You can’t shut off a certain part of your brain. (…)

To understand performance anxiety, you first have to understand what orgasms do to the body — and why reaching them is so easy when we’re alone, but often harder with a partner.

When you orgasm, it takes near-total control of your brain and nervous system (…) from head to toe.

(…) activation in the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain, [and] the hypothalamus, which excretes oxytocin,(…) in the cerebellum, which is involved in muscle tension; we see activation in the insular and cingulate cortex, which are interesting because those same areas react to pain, so it may be inhibiting pain in its processes; we see activation in the amygdala, which increases heart rate and blood pressure and sweating. They’re all activated, and they’re all activated maximally.”Continue reading→

More on how brain adapts to internet

In “How has the Internet reshaped human cognition?“, Kep-Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai move forward the debate on how cognitive processes and brain structures are adapting to our interaction with the instant access to information through internet.

They study information processing, memory consolidation, brain circuitry, multitasking, distractions, addictive behavior, and other promising lines of research.  To their credit conclusions are often that more research is required.  Having such broad view on the matter is welcome.  There are signs of some precipitated condemnation as ‘internet is bad for people’ we expect from resistance to change.

 

Nicholas Carr book ‘The Shallows” was part of growing criticism on how the internet was affecting negatively our brains.  One typical culprit was the excessive multitasking.  When studies showed heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability those critics felt vindicated.  Then as studies with shorter titles are cited more often by other scientists more people were certain: ‘even’ scientists were affected by the shallow effect.

How can we tap this shallow information pool to go deeper into our minds?

Intelligence Design – natural selection and technology

Starting from a no-fun that more people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year as a anecdotal case for interaction between natural selection and technology.  It’s too far a shot, since anyone may well ponder that shark killing were never a key driver of human selection to begin with.

Having sex, tho, have always been a key driver.  And looking good to potential mates does have a play in this.  In this light the selfie-selection link start being not so naive.  Even then, selfie is too short a fling to make an impact in the big picture.  As a further analogy, though, it is arguable that selfie is the current mode of a mediated relation that has for a long time being around in human kind reproduction.

If we consider the big impact some fundamental technological innovations such as tool making, language, and culture have had in human survival and reproduction abilities, then the evidence turns around; it is very hard to deny technology has not been one of the key drivers of evolution even before homo sapiens.

A few short, recent articles on this discuss Is Technology Unnatural—Or Is It ‘What Makes Us Human’? makign the point that technology is part of us.  Looking forward, A Genomics Revolution: Evolution by Natural Selection to Evolution by Intelligent Direction points to the fact that if in the role of technology in human evolution was rather passive, genomics can shift that into a very active designing.  But then if Science Says the Internet Is Turning Us into Shallow Thinkers, what sort of evolution would technology-driven world lead us to?

 

“The Case for Teaching Ignorance” By JAMIE HOLMES

From NY Times Op-Ed

“In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” (…)

(…) She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”

Classes like hers remain rare, but in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.

 (…)  By inviting scientists of various specialties to teach his students about what truly excited them — not cold hard facts but intriguing ambiguities — Dr. Firestein sought to rebalance the scales.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

 (…) Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

(…) The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” (…)

The study of ignorance — or agnotology, a term popularized by Robert N. Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford — is in its infancy. (…)

 Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.”  Read full story

Plurality of the self

Seth R. Bordenstein and Kevin R. Theis’s “Host Biology in Light of the Microbiome: Ten Principles of Holobionts and Hologenomes” combines impressive qualities.  It suggests no less than a holistic redefinition of zoology, botany, and biology.  And they are careful to re-state historical achievements of Darwin, Mendel and modern scientists in this new framework; animals and plants are more appropriately understood as a mutli-species association than autonomous individuals.  Both at biologic and genetic level.

As a sense of justice welcome the new status of our former ‘junior’ associates, I wonder how the implosion of the self into a multitude of beings fits well in a society that may overvalue individuality.  Instead of a dissolution of the self into a common spirituality, we see the multiplication of ‘I’ into multiple individuals.  The untold story of mitochondria et alii paints egocentric narrative in a more altruist light.

This does not take the great service such reconstruction may do to science.  Excerpts below:

Continue reading→

Computers outrunning our brain. What about choice?

About when people would seem enough to think of computing capacity in terms of FLOPS, supercomputers development makes the point that a better measure is TEPS.  TEPS stand for Traversed edges per second, which is sort of FLOPS weighted by communication cost.

Anyway, fact is AI Impacts produced estimates for our Brain performance in TEPS.   Next thing was the ubiquitous, of course.  It would seem we can hire this computational power in the next decade by $ 100/hour.  But for the time being this cost is estimated to be around $4,700 – $170,000/hour.  So go to your boss and tell him he’s renting your brain for a bargain.

IF you do so, your odds are better if you skip the info below and make it simple.  New studies show that our brains do consider cognitive effort when making choices.  This ‘TLDR’ feature of brain wiring may be the culprit in preventing you to go through the paper “Separate and overlapping brain areas encode subjective value during delay and effort discounting” that says so.

monkeys enjoy cookery and tools – and perhaps would like to talk about it too

Covering the historical gap mankind has put between itself and the (rest of the) animals, studies now show (other) monkeys have more capabilities than previously thought of.

BBC’s Collin Barras presents us to the case of “Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age“.  Evidence of stone tool usage being passed through be many generations has been found in many species.  And apparently they are prepared to enjoy and use cookery.

In another article, Natalie Shoemaker reports that “Koko the Ape Learns to Speak Using Basic Vocal Controls“.

I wonder what they have to way about global warming.

Modafinil corroborated as cognitive enhancer

Modafinil has been used to enhance cognitive functions such as concentration and alertness.

This drug was originally designed to help sleeping disorder (narcolepsy).

“Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: a systematic review” by R.M. Battleday, A-K. Brem presents a new study corroborating those cognitive functions benefits.

Never bad to keep in mind all sorts of psycological, force of habit, social and other forms of potential addictive side effects…

 

“3D Computer Interfaces Will Amaze—Like Going From DOS to Windows” by JODY MEDICH

Article featured in Singularity Hub:

“Today (…) computer interfaces (…) force us to work in 2D rectangles instead of our native 3D spaces. (…)

All this, however, is about to change in a big way. (…) We are constantly creating a spatial map of our surroundings. This innate process is called spatial cognition; the acquisition of which helps us to recall memories, reveal relationships, and to think. (…)  It allows us to offload a number of cognitively heavy tasks from our working memory in the following ways:

Spatial Semantics: We spatially arrange objects to make sense of information and its meaning. (…)

External Memory: (…) space compensates for our limited working memory.

Dimension: Dimension helps us to immediately understand information about an object. (…)

Embodied Cognition: Physically interacting with space through proprioception (…)

(…)The Problem With Modern Operating Systems (…)  is 2D computing is flat. (…)

Limits our ability to visually sort, remember and access
Provides a very narrow field of view on content and data relationships
Does not allow for data dimensionality
This means the user has to carry a lot of information in her working memory. (…)

The good news is that spatial memory is free, even in virtual spaces. (…) ” read full article

Robots being bullied

This video show kids being bullies in a mall – victim this time was a robot.

 

It may relate to another recent case of a robot being vandalized in his hitchthiking trip.

For the time being such experiments are very useful to bring light to human behavior.  Let’s say someone argues that as many other human behaviour this might be one society opts to discourage.  And as in many other cases, way to set limits is to grant victims rights not be be molested.

As we are likely to see such events recurring more often, robot rights defendants may have a growing number of examples on their side.

Suspicion smells

Reading newspaper used to wrap fish may be useful to read news with less bias.  Your own bias.

“Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task” indicates that exposure to fish smells may bring people to have less memory illusion and reduced confirmation bias.

One of the researchers, Eunjung Kim, of above paper has also studied this topic in his previous “Fishy Smells Improve Critical Thinking: Explorations of the Embodiment of Suspicion” work.

 

Spontaneous thoughts processes study

Published in ScienceDirect, “The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes” researchers use neuroimaging analysis on spontaneous thoughts.

Cognitive functions in mind-wandering states links to brain activity in both default mode network and not directly related regions with comparable consistency.

Quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies bring light to neural correlates.

“These meta-analytic results indicate that DMN activation alone is insufficient to adequately capture the neural basis of spontaneous thought; frontoparietal control network areas, and other non-DMN regions, appear to be equally central. We conclude that further progress in the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of spontaneous thought will therefore require a re-balancing of our view of the contributions of various regions and networks throughout the brain, and beyond the DMN.”  check the full paper

And the whole earth was of one language… (Genesis 11:1)

Reserachers Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of MIT published a “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages“.

Words grammatically related tend to be closer to each other in sentences.  Across all languages, in what can be a case of a linguistic universal.  Linguistic universals are predicted by theories such as Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky and applied in many natural and formal languages.

Key novelty here is ‘Large-scale evidence’.  Since Noam Chomsky (among other linguists) language models and hierarchy studies apply theoretic universal properties.  More data and application of language parser made it possible to gather evidence of dependency length minimization.

Researchers Reveal Climbing a Tree Can Improve Cognitive Skills

From press release:

“Climbing a tree and balancing on a beam can dramatically improve cognitive skills, according to a study recently conducted by researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Florida.

The study (…)  show that proprioceptively dynamic activities, like climbing a tree, done over a short period of time have dramatic working memory benefits. Working Memory, the active processing of information, is linked to performance in a wide variety of contexts from grades to sports.

The results (…)  suggest working memory improvements can be made in just a couple of hours of these physical exercises. (…)

Proprioception, the awareness of body positioning and orientation, is associated with working memory. (…)
In the study, such activities included climbing trees, walking and crawling on a beam (…)  , and researchers found that their working memory capacity had increased by 50 percent, a dramatic improvement.

The researchers also tested two control groups (…)  in a lecture (…)  [and] a yoga class (…)  , neither control group experienced working memory benefits.

Proprioceptively dynamic training may place a greater demand on working memory than either control condition because as environment and terrain changes, the individual recruits working memory to update information to adapt appropriately. Though the yoga control group engaged in proprioceptive activities that required awareness of body position, it was relatively static as they performed the yoga postures in a small space, which didn’t allow for locomotion or navigation.(…)  ”

For more information about the study, visit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26029969.