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POPSthe Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind "To a certain extent, memories are societal properties," says Adam Kolber, a visiting professor at Princeton. "We really need to articulate a moral code that governs all this," warns Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.
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POPSDoes the Human Brain Possess Potential “Super Powers”? Mind expert Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney and director of Centre for the Mind, is certain that all people have these latent super abilities, but only some are able to express them through “malfunctions” of overriding brain functions.
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POPSThe Bottom is Not Enough I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence... It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.
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POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
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POPSMisreading the mind The mind is like music. While neuroscience accurately describes our brain in terms of its material facts -- we are nothing but a loom of electricity and enzymes -- this isn't how we experience the world. Our consciousness, at least when felt from the inside, feels like more than the sum of its cells. The truth of the matter is that we feel like the ghost, not like the machine.
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POPSMind Reading Is Now Possible "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.
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POPSIs Language a Window into Human Nature? the way it parses the world around us, the way it uses shortcuts and assumptions would have served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, but it is less than perfect for dealing with some of the problems we face in the 21st Century.
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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POPSWhat is Thought? (book review) "One thing that most impressed me about the book is the underlying theme that he refers to as his version of Occam's razor and summarizes as follows: mind is a complex but still compact program that captures and exploits the underlying compact structure of the world.To understand something about the world is to capture its features in a compact subroutine that allows one to effectively interact with it.
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POPSQuality of Sleep = Memory storage the Belgian study shows that getting a good night’s sleep the night after learning a new fact has a direct impact on the transfer process between the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex.
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POPSBaboon Metaphysics Under the right conditions, instinctive behavior would appear automatically, even if the animal had never before had the appropriate experience. When they act by instinct, then, animals are not behaving according to Lockean reason, carefully weighing the information acquired from experience. Instead, they are governed by “hereditary tendencies” acquired over generations.
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POPSWhen the Eyes Play Tricks on the Ears the implication is that it's possible that perception involves more interaction between the sensory pathways than we expected and, because they are happening in low-level areas, they may be more automatic,"
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POPSMusic in the Mind As he was struggling with physical therapy—and growing increasingly frustrated—his mind was inexplicably filled with the resonant strings of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto
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