Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans

Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans – life – 12 November 2009 – New Scientist

It’s very exciting work,” says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. “The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new.” Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness .

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart – life – 02 November 2009 – New Scientist

The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands. This is a crucial distinction: as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University puts it, intelligence is about brain power whereas rational thinking is about control. “Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions,” explains Evans. “Other people will check out their gut feeling and reason it through and make sure they have a justification for what they’re doing.” An IQ test cannot predict which of these paths someone will follow, hence the George W. Bush incongruity of people who are supposedly smart acting foolishly.

The idea that Bush is just one foolish smart person among many, and that intelligence is a poor predictor of “good thinking”, comes from a series of recent experiments that compared the performances of people of a range of intellectual abilities on rational-thinking tasks. In a study published last year, Stanovich and Richard West of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, found there was no correlation between intelligence and a person’s ability to avoid some common traps of intuitive-thinking (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 94, p 672).

On certain types of thinking tasks, such as those involving number ratios, probabilities, deductive reasoning and the use of hindsight, intelligent people do perform better, Stanovich and others have found. This is particularly true when any intuitive pitfalls are obvious, especially if a correct answer depends on logic or abstract reasoning – abilities that IQ tests measure well. But most researchers agree that, overall, the correlation between intelligence and successful decision-making is weak. The exception is when people are warned that they might be vulnerable to a thinking bias, in which case those with high IQs tend to do better. This, says Evans, is because while smart people don’t always reason more than others, “when they do reason, they reason better”.
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For example, consider the following problem. Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? If asked to choose between yes, no, or cannot be determined, the vast majority of people go for the third option – incorrectly. If told to reason through all the options, though, those of high IQ are more likely to arrive at the right answer (which is “yes”: we don’t know Anne’s marital status, but either way a married person would be looking at an unmarried one). What this means, says Stanovich, is that “intelligent people perform better only when you tell them what to do”.
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kins explains this as follows: “IQ indicates a greater capacity for complex cognition for problems new to you. But what we apply that capability to is another question. Think of our minds as searchlights. IQ measures the brightness of the searchlight, but where we point it also matters. Some people don’t point their searchlights at the other side of the case much, for many reasons – entrenched ideas, avoidance of what might be disturbing, simple haste. A higher wattage searchlight in itself is no protection against such follies.” Indeed, it seems even the super-intelligent are not immune. A survey of members of Mensa (the High IQ Society) in Canada in the mid-1980s found that 44 per cent of them believed in astrology, 51 per cent believed in biorhythms and 56 per cent believed in aliens
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When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?

You can control your Marilyn Monroe neuron

You can control your Marilyn Monroe neuron

Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then looked for the neurons that fired when the subject was shown each image.

In each of the subjects they found individual neurons fired when the person looked at a specific image. So there was a “Michael Jackson neuron”, a “Marilyn Monroe neuron”, and others that fired when the person was shown an image of the Eiffel tower, a spider, or other familiar objects or places.

Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death

Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death: Scientific American

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

Brain is capable of ultra-precise time recognition

TG Daily – Brain is capable of ultra-precise time recognition

There’s a built-in stop-watch in the brain, according to MIT neuroscientists.

They have identified populations of neurons that code time with extreme precision in the primate brain. These neurons are found in two interconnected brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, both of which are known to play critical roles in learning, movement, and thought control.

Although daily life is extremely dependent on precise timing – whether it’s walking, speaking or playing the piano – surprisingly little has been known about how time is represented in the activity of brain cells.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake – Youtube

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake | Wired Science | Wired.com

By putting sensors in the brains of mice as they ran through a Quake-derived virtual reality, scientists have found a way to study neurological activity in moving animals.

The setup allows for real-time, almost-real-motion tracking of single neurons. That feat has eluded researchers who have a fuzzy, general understanding of brain systems, but little knowledge of how individual cells actually work. They hope that cell-level details will make sense of motion, cognition and other complex mental functions.

Brain Chip May Help the Blind See

Brain Chip May Help the Blind See

Brown University researchers have implanted the Utah array in seven paralyzed patients who are using the chip to “thought type.”

U of U researchers have implanted the chip in four others to study the causes of epilepsy and to gather data for the brain-control of prosthetic limbs. Greger says another four or five epilepsy patients have received the brain chip at Columbia University—and that’s it. “This is the only human-approved device of this type,” Greger says. “These are the very earliest human trials.”

The current chip is “wired.” That is, patients’ brains must be physically “plugged in” to a computer to harness its powers. Blackrock has a wireless prototype planned for submission to the FDA in the coming years, however. Removing the wires is important because wired devices leave an exposure of the brain to the outside world, creating a risk of infection.

But wireless communications present significant engineering problems. The brain produces so much data even for simple tasks—like controlling one arm—that transmitting wirelessly is not possible with current wireless modem technology of any size.

One small step for neurons, one giant leap for nerve cell repair

One small step for neurons, one giant leap for nerve cell repair

“We believe that within the next five years we will have a fully functional device that will be able to directly convey natural nerve cell signals from the nerve cell itself to an artificial matrix containing a mini-computer that will communicate wirelessly with target tissues,” says Dr. Colman.

Brain Waves Surge Moments Before Death

Brain Waves Surge Moments Before Death: Discovery News

The doctors believe they are seeing the brain’s neurons discharge as they lose oxygen from lack of blood pressure.

“All the neurons are connected together and when they lose oxygen, their ability to maintain electrical potential goes away,” Chawla said. “I think when people lose all their blood flow, their neurons all fire in very close proximity and you get a big domino effect. We think this could explain the spike.”

It’s possible a cutoff of oxygen would trigger a similar but recoverable event that becomes seared into memory.

“Not everyone reports this light sort of business. What you hear most often reported (in near-death experiences) is just a vivid memory,” Chawla said.

Brain researcher Kevin Nelson at the University of Kentucky, who studies near-death experiences, said it’s well known that when the brain is abruptly deprived of blood flow it gives off a burst of high voltage energy.

Geeks Weigh In: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?

Geeks Weigh In: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?

While many people stereotype geeks as only being interested in using the computer all day, the truth is that a geek is actually a person who often contemplates many of the deeper questions of the universe while busy installing the coolest new add-ons to Firefox or tweaking their mobile phone so that they can control it from their desktop. One of the universal debates many geeks have centers around an important question that involves neurobiology and the science of artificial intelligence, and that question is – Does a human think faster than a computer?