By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16436 - Posted: 02.27.2012

Ewen Callaway Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex — an African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) trained to count objects — have just been published. They show that Alex could accurately add together two Arabic numerals to a sum of eight and the total number of objects under three cups, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates. The work appears in the journal Animal Cognition. Alex gained world renown for his ability to learn and voice labels for dozens of different objects and concepts, such as colour, size and quantity. His primary trainer, Harvard University psychologist Irene Pepperberg, even reported that Alex understood a “zero-like” concept. In early September 2007, Alex said to Pepperberg: “You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.” The next day, the 31-year-old parrot was found dead of what was determined to be a heart event, probably related to hardened arteries (see Farewell to a famous parrot). Pepperberg and her colleagues had been testing Alex on a series of tasks pushing the limits of his mathematic prowess. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16412 - Posted: 02.23.2012

by Jessica Hamzelou YOU'RE running late for work and you can't find your keys. What's really annoying is that in your frantic search, you pick up and move them without realising. This may be because the brain systems involved in the task are working at different speeds, with the system responsible for perception unable to keep pace. So says Grayden Solman and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. To investigate how we search, Solman's team created a simple computer-based task that involved searching through a pile of coloured shapes on a computer screen. Volunteers were instructed to find a specific shape in a stack as quickly as possible, while the computer monitored their actions. "Between 10 and 20 per cent of the time, they would miss the object," says Solman, even though they picked it up. "We thought that was remarkably often." To find out why, the team developed a number of further experiments. To check whether volunteers were just forgetting their target, they gave a new group a list of items to memorise before the search task, which they had to recall afterwards. The idea was to fill each volunteer's "memory load", so that they were unable to hold any other information in their short-term memory. Although this was expected to have a negative effect on their performance at the search task, the extra load made no difference to the percentage of mistakes volunteers made. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16322 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Bruce Bower SAN DIEGO — Willpower comes with a wicked kickback. Exerting self-control saps a person’s mental energy and makes the next desire that inevitably comes along feel more compelling and harder to resist, a study of people’s daily struggles with temptation found. But people best able to resist eating sweets, going out with friends before finishing work or other temptations find ways to steer clear of such enticements altogether, so that they rarely have to resort to self-control, psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago reported January 28 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. “Willpower fluctuates throughout the day, rather than being a constant personality trait,” said psychologist and study coauthor Roy Baumeister of Florida State University in Tallahassee, who also summarized at the meeting his recent lab experiments on willpower’s mental effects. “Prior resistance makes new desires seem stronger than usual.” Hofmann and his colleagues contacted 205 adults in a German city at various times of day for a week. Using handheld devices provided by the researchers, volunteers furnished 10,558 reports about desires they encountered or thought about. Most self-reported desires didn’t create problems for participants. When desires conflicted with other goals and called for resistance, volunteers’ willpower failed 17 percent of the time, on average. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 16318 - Posted: 01.31.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams Sit a dog in front of a television screen, and it may not always look intently at what it sees. But show a person on that screen who looks directly at the dog and says "hello," and the canine will pay attention. In fact, a new study shows that a dog will go so far as to follow the gaze of the human on screen when he or she looks to one side or the other—something not even chimps can do. Researchers already knew that dogs were attuned to human communication signals. In addition to their obvious facility at learning commands, dogs, like young children, can signal where a human puts an object if the human feigns ignorance, even if it's been moved, and they follow the direction of our finger when we point at things, a task chimps fail at. But are dogs capable of following more subtle cues, such as our shifting gaze? To find out, cognitive scientist Ernő Téglás of the Central European University in Budapest adapted a technique that had previously been used only on children. In one example of the test, a child watches a woman on a video screen who has toys on either side of her. The woman then either looks straight toward the camera and says "hello" in a high-pitched voice known to engage children or looks downward and says "hello" in a more dull, low-pitched voice. Then the person looks to the toy on one side or the other for 5 seconds. Whether a child also looks at the toy on the same side is recorded. To modify this experiment for dogs, Téglás substituted empty plastic pots for the children's toys and had a stranger on the screen say "hi, dog!" in one of the two intonations while looking at the camera or downward. As each dog watches the video, a specially programmed camera below the television screen follows, and records, the dog's eye movements. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16226 - Posted: 01.07.2012

by Stephen Battersby TACKLING a crossword can crowd the tip of your tongue. You know that you know the answers to 3 down and 5 across, but the words just won't come out. Then, when you've given up and moved on to another clue, comes blessed relief. The elusive answer suddenly occurs to you, crystal clear. The processes leading to that flash of insight can illuminate many of the human mind's curious characteristics. Crosswords can reflect the nature of intuition, hint at the way we retrieve words from our memory, and reveal a surprising connection between puzzle solving and our ability to recognise a human face. "What's fascinating about a crossword is that it involves many aspects of cognition that we normally study piecemeal, such as memory search and problem solving, all rolled into one ball," says Raymond Nickerson, a psychologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In a paper published earlier this year, he brought profession and hobby together by analysing the mental processes of crossword solving (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol 18, p 217). 1 across: "You stinker!" - audible cry that allegedly marked displacement activity (6) Most of our mental machinations take place pre-consciously, with the results dropping into our conscious minds only after they have been decided elsewhere in the brain. Intuition plays a big role in solving a crossword, Nickerson observes. Indeed, sometimes your pre-conscious mind may be so quick that it produces the goods instantly. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16216 - Posted: 01.05.2012

By KAREN BARROW Imagine being unable to recognize your children or your closest friend. You can see their faces perfectly fine, but if you passed them on the street you wouldn’t be able to place their unique eyes, nose and ears. James Cooke, 66, and Dori Frame, 51, live with a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. They both suffered separate events that affected their brains and caused them to suddenly lose the ability to recognize the faces of even their closest family members. However, there are others born with this condition. While it is unclear how many people suffer from face blindness, researchers are beginning to make progress in understanding how the prosopagnosia works by clarifying how the brain processes the both the face and the voice to help them recognize someone. One of the keys to understanding face recognition, it seems, is understanding how the brain comes to recognize voices. Some scientists had believed that faces and voices, the two main ways people recognize one another, were processed separately by the brain. Indeed, a condition parallel to prosopagnosia, called phonagnosia, similarly leaves a person unable to distinguish a familiar voice from an unfamiliar one. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16188 - Posted: 12.27.2011

By KAREN BARROW Close your eyes. Picture your closest friend. Maybe you see her blue eyes, long nose, brown hair. Perhaps even her smile. If you saw her walking down the street it would match your imagined vision. But what if you saw nothing at all? James Cooke, 66, of Islip, N.Y., can’t recognize other people. When he meets someone on the street, he offers a generic “hello” because he can’t be sure if he’s ever met that person before. “I see eyes, nose, cheekbones, but no face,” he said. “I’ve even passed by my son and daughter without recognizing them.” He is not the only one. Those with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, can see perfectly well, but their brains are unable to piece together the information needed to understand that a collection of features represents an individual’s face. The condition is a neurological mystery, but new research has shed light on this strange malady. One of the keys to understanding face recognition, it seems, is understanding how the brain comes to recognize voices. Some scientists had believed that faces and voices, the two main ways people recognize one another, were processed separately by the brain. Indeed, a condition parallel to prosopagnosia, called phonagnosia, similarly leaves a person unable to distinguish a familiar voice from an unfamiliar one. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16187 - Posted: 12.27.2011

by Nicholas Mackintosh NEUROSCIENTISTS seek to understand how the brain underpins our behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Given that the law is also concerned with human behaviour, albeit for quite different reasons, it is hardly surprising that remarkable advances in our understanding of the brain have led many to believe that neuroscience is becoming increasingly relevant to the law. In the US, a number of universities teach courses on the interface between neuroscience and the law, and the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation has invested several million dollars to fund research in this area. In the UK, the Royal Society has just published a report on neuroscience and the law. Some argue that neuroscience has already cast doubt on the idea of free will, and therefore raises questions about the legitimacy of punishing people for actions over which they had no control. In the US there is a steady increase in defence attorneys seeking to introduce neuroscientific evidence. So is "my brain made me do it" a legitimate defence in a criminal trial? There will surely be cases where such evidence is relevant. Most countries specify an age of criminal responsibility somewhere between 6 and 16; in England and Wales it is 10. Brain imaging studies have shown that the brain continues to develop throughout adolescence, with the prefrontal cortex, implicated in impulse control and decision-making, not reaching maturity until 20 or so. Such studies have also shown that there are huge individual differences. It is hard to believe that all 10-year-olds should be held fully responsible when they break the law. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16170 - Posted: 12.20.2011

By Christof Koch Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see. The first experiment is a collaboration among Filip Van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, Floris P. de Lange of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris. Dehaene, director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, is best known for his investigations of the brain mechanisms underlying counting and numbers. Here he explored the extent to which a simple sum or an average can be computed outside the pale of consciousness. Adding 7, 3, 5 and 8 is widely assumed to be a quintessential serial process that requires consciousness. Van Opstal and his colleagues proved the opposite in an indirect but clever and powerful way. A quartet of single-­digit Arabic numbers (1 through 9, excluding the numeral 5) are projected onto a screen. Volunteers had to indicate as quickly as possible whether or not the average of the four projected numbers exceeded 5. © 2011 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16153 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By Katherine Harmon Medical school might be a long, slow slog, but once doctors have their training, they can often make diagnoses in a matter of moments. New research suggests that doctors actually identify an abnormality in less than two seconds—not much longer than it takes them to name an animal or a letter of the alphabet. Twenty-five radiologists submitted to having their brains scanned while performing visual diagnoses of chest x-rays. Mixed in with images of abnormal chest x-rays were clean ones on which the outline of an animal or consonant had been superimposed to test the speed with which doctors recognized familiar objects. The researchers, led by Marcio Melo, of the Laboratory of Medical Informatics at the University of São Paulo, found that the same regions of the brain were active when doctors correctly identified any of the three objects. The findings were published online Wednesday in PLoS ONE. “Diagnostic hypotheses in medical practice are often made by physicians in the first moments of contact with patients; sometimes even before the report of symptoms,” Melo and the team wrote in their paper. Indeed, the doctors in the study—who had been prepared to see the variety of images—named the type of abnormality—such as cavitation or cardiomegaly—in an average of 1.33 seconds. Animals got named in 1.23 seconds. The well-trained brains still had to work a little harder to come up with the medical terms for the conditions than for the more common visual clues, according to the study. The fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans showed that although the diagnoses called on the same collection of areas around the brain as did animals and letters, they also put a much higher demand on the left inferior frontal sulcus and posterior cingulate cortex, which are areas of higher cognitive processing. © 2011 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 16152 - Posted: 12.15.2011

by Jesse Emspak Controlling computers –- or anything else -– with the brain has been done using electroencephalograms (EEGs) but they require a skullcap on the head. Now a small company in North Carolina says it has a way around that, and in the process created an tool for training people to stay alert when involved in important tasks. Freer Logic (named for its founder and CEO Peter Freer) came up with a system called BodyWave. It’s not dissimilar to an ordinary EEG, except it works with sensors that can be put around an arm rather than the head. While it is harder to pick up signals from further away form the head, Freer told Discovery News that the signal strength per se isn’t too much of a problem. “You wouldn’t use this for clinical applications,” he said. So this wouldn’t be any good for a scientist or doctor trying to get a picture of brain activity. But it is fine when trying to detect the activity, called beta waves, that indicates attention. BodyWave can detect when someone is paying attention to something. Freer noted that the system was used to train nuclear power plant workers as well as help understand the best way to design control systems. (For example: knowing what grabs a person’s attention can tell you where to put an alarm display). Connected to a computer, BodyWave can tell when someone is paying attention and sound an alarm when they aren’t. Something like this can also be used in cars -– for instance sounding an alarm if a drivers’ attention drifts. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16137 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Shaun Nichols It seems obvious to me that I have free will. When I have just made a decision, say, to go to a concert, I feel that I could have chosen to do something else. Yet many philosophers say this instinct is wrong. According to their view, free will is a figment of our imagination. No one has it or ever will. Rather our choices are either determined—necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past—or they are ­random. Our intuitions about free will, however, challenge this nihilistic view. We could, of course, simply dismiss our intuitions as wrong. But psychology suggests that doing so would be premature: our hunches often track the truth pretty well [see “The Powers and Perils of Intuition,” by David G. Myers; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007]. For example, if you do not know the answer to a question on a test, your first guess is more likely to be right. In both philosophy and science, we may feel there is something fishy about an argument or an experiment before we can identify exactly what the problem is. The debate over free will is one example in which our intuitions conflict with scientific and philosophical arguments. Something similar holds for intuitions about consciousness, morality, and a host of other existential concerns. Typically philosophers deal with these issues through careful thought and discourse with other theorists. In the past decade, however, a small group of philosophers have adopted more data-driven methods to illuminate some of these confounding questions. These so-called experimental philosophers administer surveys, measure reaction times and image brains to understand the sources of our instincts. If we can figure out why we feel we have free will, for example, or why we think that consciousness consists of something more than patterns of neural activity in our brain, we might know whether to give credence to those feelings. That is, if we can show that our intuitions about free will emerge from an untrustworthy process, we may decide not to trust those beliefs. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16130 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By ALVA NOë What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. “Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals. Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything. Leif Parsons What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 16110 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Alla Katsnelson Some people say they never forget a face, and they aren't alone — the golden paper wasp can also recognize the faces of other members of its species. In humans, this cognitive feat is thought to rely on specialized brain areas evolved specifically for the task, and work published today in Science1 suggests that the same may be true for these wasps. “Fifteen years ago, if people had claimed [face recognition] existed in insects, others would have thought they were mad,” says Lars Chittka, a behavioural and sensory ecologist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved in the study. But in 2002, Elizabeth Tibbetts, then a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, demonstrated that the golden paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, can recognize individuals of the same species from their facial markings2. However, scientists have long debated whether mental abilities such as face recognition are evolutionary adaptations or simply skills learned over an organism’s lifetime. So Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in Tibbetts' lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, explored this question by comparing two species of wasp. The faces of P. fuscatus have clearly variable features, and the organism’s social structure depends on individuals being able to tell one another apart. Often several queens form a nest together, and then establish a strict social hierarchy; individuals must be able to recognize each others’ status to avoid fights. Sheehan and Tibbetts compared this wasp’s face-recognition abilities with those of a closely related species, Polistes metricus. P. metricus wasps have much less recognizable facial markings and live a less socially complex lifestyle, with just one queen ruling a nest of underlings and no need to differentiate between one another. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16103 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By JENEEN INTERLANDI The moment she saw him, Judy Cox knew her son was dead. It was an October morning in 2008, and she had just stepped out the door to run an errand when she found him lying faceup in the driveway, ghost white, covered in purple splotches. He wasn’t breathing, and when she couldn’t revive him, she ran screaming into the house where her husband, Wayne, was still asleep. “Chris is dead,” she cried. “Call 911!” Wayne jumped out of bed and raced down to the driveway, where he knelt over his son’s limp frame and tried frantically to elicit a breath or a heartbeat. As he pumped Chris’s chest and scooped out the vomit that had collected in his mouth, Judy ran to the kitchen and steadied herself long enough to call for an ambulance. Chris was 26. He had not been well. An A.T.V. accident the previous August left him with debilitating back pain that physical therapy did nothing to alleviate. His doctor had recently prescribed Oxycontin. His parents learned later that he had taken too much. By the time the ambulance arrived, Chris’s heart had been still for at least 15 minutes. It took the paramedics another 15 to get it pumping again; even then, doctors had little hope he would survive. Brain cells begin dying off just five minutes after blood stops delivering oxygen. After 30 minutes, there is likely to be more dead tissue than living. Nonetheless, the emergency-room staff members at the local hospital did their best. They hooked Chris up to a tangle of tubes and machines and injected him with drugs to stabilize his heart rate. Wayne and Judy watched helplessly from the hallway. After four hours, a doctor finally summoned them to a secluded corridor. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16100 - Posted: 12.03.2011

by Terrence W. Deacon IN A 1992 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, the philosopher Jerry Fodor famously complained that: "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious." In 2011, despite two decades of explosive advances in brain research and cognitive science, Fodor's assessment still rings true. Why is that? Is it just that cognitive neuroscience still has a long way to go? Or have we been looking in the wrong places for clues? For hints to this mystery, brain researchers and philosophers of mind have focused on brain processes, neural computations and their correspondences with the physical world. But what if we should be focusing on what is not there instead? This proposal is at the heart of my new book Incomplete Nature. I believe that in order to overcome this stalemate we need to pay more attention to what is intrinsically not present in everything - from life's functions and meanings to mind's experiences and values. This suggestion is not intended as an invitation to mysticism, rather it is a way of pointing to the importance of what the field of statistical mechanics calls "constraint": the degrees of freedom not realised in a dynamical process. To illustrate, consider how a quickly flowing stream forms stable eddies as it curls around a boulder, or how a snow crystal spontaneously grows its precise, hexagonally symmetric, yet idiosyncratic branches. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16095 - Posted: 12.01.2011

The thought of being trapped in a lifeless body, unable to communicate, is a terrifying prospect. It happened to Roy Hayim, a surveyor, who became dangerously ill after eating an airline meal. Mr Hayim contracted botulism, a rare bacterial infection. He was left paralysed and blind for several days, although he could hear everything that was happening - even a news report on the radio which said he was fighting for his life. After about 10 days Mr Hayim was able to move his thumb and for the next eight months he used this method to communicate with his wife Caroline and hospital staff. He spent nearly a year in hospital but made a full recovery. This all happened 20 years ago, but Roy remembers it vividly. Awareness "I felt trapped, afraid and terribly concerned. I didn't know whether I would survive or not," he said. I went to meet Mr Hayim to get his insight on what it is like to be unable to communicate. My visit was prompted by research in the Lancet which shows that electroencephalography - EEG - can be used to communicate with some patients who were diagnosed as vegetative. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16041 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By Laura Sanders WASHINGTON — Magic tricks prey on people’s subpar powers of perception, but new work finds that the brain has tricks of its own up its sleeve: People notice more than they think. In the research, presented November 12 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Luis Martinez of CSIC- Miguel Hernandez University in Spain and colleagues amazingly “read minds” with the Princess Card Trick, invented by magician Henry Hardin in 1905. Volunteers mentally chose a playing card from a panel of six cards, which then disappeared. When a second group of cards appeared, the researchers had miraculously figured out which card a person had in mind and removed it. Few people caught the trick: All the cards in the second set were different, not just the card people had chosen. A few seconds after viewing the two panels of cards, participants were asked which of two new cards was present in the first panel. None of the volunteers could consciously recall which card was present. Despite these avowals of ignorance, when forced to choose, people got the right answer about 80 percent of the time. “People say they don’t know, but they do,” Martinez said. “The information is still there, and we can use it unconsciously if we are forced to.” To see whether this unconscious knowledge works for objects other than cards, Martinez and his colleagues performed a similar experiment with pictures of men’s faces. A similar kind of visual short-term memory helped people choose which face they had seen before, even when volunteers didn’t perceive that they knew the correct answer. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16040 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By EDDY NAHMIAS Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.” Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.” Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. [1] So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16036 - Posted: 11.15.2011