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POPSMind, body and goal: the embodied cognition revolution "In one particularly striking study, Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it. They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it".
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POPSMind Beyond Brain Andy Clark’s new book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind), mentioned as a forthcoming title last March in David Chalmers’s blog, is now available. The foreword by Chalmers is online.
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POPS Scientist develops programme to understand alien languages All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases - words like "if" and "but" in English. According to Dr Elliott, such terms in any language, are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we are able to process at once. In an alien language, analysing these phrases might make it possible to gauge how clever the authors of the message are. If they are much smarter than us, there would a lot of words packed into the phrases. The programme should also be able to break a language up into crucial words such as nouns and verbs, even though their meaning is unknown.
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POPSBrain Blogging, Fortieth Edition Looking for the latest greatest info on your brain? In this issue of brain blogging we cover how to beat the aging process, what really is cognition, fooling the doctors, and many more topics.
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POPSApply a skeptic’s careful eye "1. Unnatural environment for cognition 2. Scans are indirect measurements of brain activity. 3. Colors exaggerate the effects in the brain. 4. Brain images are statistical compilations. 5. Brain areas activate for various reasons."
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POPS"Bees Can Count" continues: Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe. Next, they mixed things up on the bees: they varied the spacing of the stripes, and even replaced stripes with unfamiliar markers. The insects consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former reward site, demonstrating that they could count, up to four. The studies burnish the impressive list of honeybees' known cognitive abilities, all achieved with a brain the size of a sand grain. The studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.
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POPSLearning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests Is that difference between eight- and twelve-year-olds the result of experience, or does it have to do with the way the brain develops? As yet, nobody has the answer. 'This kind of brain research has only been possible for the last ten years or so,' says Crone, 'and there are a lot more questions which have to be answered. But it is probably a combination of the brain maturing and experience.'
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POPSCitation on gender page on gender, brain differences, cognition etc. and a citation of George Bush "this gender thing is history"
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POPSWhat Is Emotional Intelligence? can it measured? BBC Horizon program takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent?
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POPSBeauty and the Brain Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
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POPSDoing What Works Issues in Education that will eventually contain learning about the issues, best practices and how to incorporate into teaching practice.
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POPSChandelier Cells Unveil Human Cognition "By triggering specific chandelier cells, the authors were able to elicit a precisely timed chain of electrical events in the neocortex. Additionally, the authors found that the synaptic pathways between chandeliers and pyramid cells are incredibly strong – much stronger than has been recorded previously in other mammals. This suggests that humans do possess different types of cells, and that our higher cognition isn't due to having larger cells. Although chandelier cells have been found in other species, they are more complex in humans. This raises the possibility that there are many things which attribute to higher cognition – different types of cells, and a complex circuitry, perhaps. This study by Tamas, et al, furthers the search for the answers to higher cognition, and more fully opens the door to questions of how our brains compare to those of other species."
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POPSwe learn subconsciously in 0.05 seconds another unknown ability or is it a sense? I am also into pre-attention cognition which is about the way the brain can multi-task, working in parallel with higher level cognition. All to do with making road signs immediately understandable!
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POPSScientists Say We Can See Sound Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior. That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston. The study presents the first evidence that a sensory cell can process an alternative sensation, said head researcher Pascal Barone of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, who discovered a contender for the anatomical connection in 2002.
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POPSCooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature. The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.
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POPSCultural Neuroscience I do believe this attention to culture as every bit as important as brain activity, indeed inseparable from it, is crucial for the way we think about thinkinfg and how we think we think we are.
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