Fuck Yeah Consciousness

A Momentary Flow: Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com

m1k3y — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:00:42 -0400

A Momentary Flow: Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com:

wildcat2030:

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

The fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience have had some rough sledding in recent years.

The bumps have come from high-profile fraudsters, concerns about findings that can’t be replicated, and criticism from within the…

"it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The scientists found that..."

catvincent — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:57:45 -0400

“

it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The scientists found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques (g-tummo) which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.

The findings from the study showed that specific aspects of the meditation techniques can be used by non-meditators to regulate their body temperature through breathing and mental imagery. The techniques could potentially allow practitioners to adapt to and function in cold environments, improve resistance to infections, boost cognitive performance by speeding up response time and reduce performance problems associated with decreased body temperature.

The two aspects of g-tummo meditation that lead to temperature increases are “vase breath” and concentrative visualisation. “Vase breath” is a specific breathing technique which causes thermogenesis, which is a process of heat production. The other technique, concentrative visualisation, involves focusing on a mental imagery of flames along the spinal cord in order to prevent heat losses. Both techniques work in conjunction leading to elevated temperatures up to the moderate fever zone.

Assoc Prof Kozhevnikov explained, “Practicing vase breathing alone is a safe technique to regulate core body temperature in a normal range. The participants whom I taught this technique to were able to elevate their body temperature, within limits, and reported feeling more energised and focused. With further research, non-Tibetan meditators could use vase breathing to improve their health and regulate cognitive performance.”

”

- Mind over matter? Core body temperature controlled by the brain (via myserendipities)

neurosciencestuff: Ability To ‘Think About Thinking’ Not...

m1k3y — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:00:47 -0400

neurosciencestuff:

Ability To ‘Think About Thinking’ Not Limited Only To Humans According to New Research

Humans’ closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, have the ability to “think about thinking” – what is called “metacognition,” according to new research by scientists at Georgia State University and the University at Buffalo.

Michael J. Beran and Bonnie M. Perdue of the Georgia State Language Research Center (LRC) and J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo conducted the research, published in the journal Psychological Science of the Association for Psychological Science.

“The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution,” the research team noted.

Metacognition is the ability to recognize one’s own cognitive states. For example, a game show contestant must make the decision to “phone a friend” or risk it all, dependent on how confident he or she is in knowing the answer.

“There has been an intense debate in the scientific literature in recent years over whether metacognition is unique to humans,” Beran said.

Chimpanzees at Georgia State’s LRC have been trained to use a language-like system of symbols to name things, giving researchers a unique way to query animals about their states of knowing or not knowing.

In the experiment, researchers tested the chimpanzees on a task that required them to use symbols to name what food was hidden in a location. If a piece of banana was hidden, the chimpanzees would report that fact and gain the food by touching the symbol for banana on their symbol keyboards.

But then, the researchers provided chimpanzees either with complete or incomplete information about the identity of the food rewards.

In some cases, the chimpanzees had already seen what item was available in the hidden location and could immediately name it by touching the correct symbol without going to look at the item in the hidden location to see what it was.

In other cases, the chimpanzees could not know what food item was in the hidden location, because either they had not seen any food yet on that trial, or because even if they had seen a food item, it may not have been the one moved to the hidden location.

In those cases, they should have first gone to look in the hidden location before trying to name any food.

In the end, chimpanzees named items immediately and directly when they knew what was there, but they sought out more information before naming when they did not already know.

The research team said, “This pattern of behavior reflects a controlled information-seeking capacity that serves to support intelligent responding, and it strongly suggests that our closest living relative has metacognitive abilities closely related to those of humans.”

wildcat2030: Survival of the Friendliest Did dogs...

m1k3y — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:45:11 -0400

wildcat2030:

Survival of the Friendliest

Did dogs “self-domesticate”? Did humans?

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The wolves that were social enough to approach human settlements and eat our ancestors’ scraps evolved into man’s best friend. Evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare tells Tiffany O’Callaghan what dogs reveal about our own evolution. Hare runs Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center. He is co-author with Vanessa Woods of The Genius of Dogs. They recently launched the website dognition.com.

Tiffany O’Callaghan: You set out to study human evolution. How did you end up studying dogs?

Brian Hare: One thing that equipped humans to acquire language was our ability to read gestures. My undergraduate adviser at Emory University, Mike Tomasello, was exploring the hypothesis that this might be unique to our species. He was telling me that our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, are not good at reading gestures the same way that we are in a cooperative context. I said, “Wait a second, I think my dog can pass the same test the apes are failing.” That’s how it got started.

TO: How can dogs teach us more about ourselves?

BH: The dog is the only species we’ve found that has some of the communicative skills that look like what infants need to acquire language and culture. So what in the world are they doing in dogs? And what evolutionary process allowed that to happen? If we can figure out how it happened in dogs, it helps us figure out how our own species evolved.

TO: Tell me about the similarities between dogs and human infants.

BH: Dogs are the only species that have been identified to date that learn words in the same way as human children—by using inferences. Show a child a red block and a green block, for example. If you then ask for “the chromium block, not the red block,” most children will give you the green block, despite not knowing that “chromium” can refer to a shade of green. The child infers the name of the object. Dogs have been found to learn in the same way. (via The genius of dogs: Brian Hare on friendliness, intelligence, and inference in dogs. - Slate Magazine)

"Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in..."

m1k3y — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:00:55 -0500

“Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams […] “If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.””

- Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests | LiveScience (via new-aesthetic)

teratocybernetics: joshbyard: More Proof of Animal...

m1k3y — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:00:28 -0500

teratocybernetics:

joshbyard:

More Proof of Animal Consciousness: Scientists Observe Theory of Mind Among Corvids

You might think that, to a bird, one meal is as good as any other. But at least for jays, you’d be wrong. The birds actually aim for variety when they make caches of food to eat later, trying to ensure they’ll have a mixture of food to enjoy the next day.

The researchers confirmed that Eurasian jays have a similar desire for variety. If researchers pre-fed the jays a meal of wax moth larvae and then offered them a mix of that and mealworm larvae, the birds preferentially ate the mealworms. If the researchers did that after a meal of bird food, the birds chose the wax moths at a greater frequency.

When males were given the chance to present foods to their mates, they acted as if the female had just been given bird seed—they gave their mates a mixture of wax moths and mealworms. But if the males had the chance to watch their partners being fed a bunch of wax moths, their gifts shifted, and mealworms were presented with a much higher frequency.

This eliminated the possibility that the female somehow signaled the male to indicate which treat she preferred (if that were the case, it wouldn’t matter whether the male watched her eat before hand).

The one remaining possibility the researchers considered is that the male ended up feeling satiated with wax worms just by watching the females chow down on them. But the males showed identical feeding behaviors whether they watched their partners eat or not.

The researchers conclude their experiments show these birds are capable of attributing a specific mental state to others (namely, desiring a mealworm). They base this on the fact that the males weren’t simply giving the females what they wanted. In other words, their frequency of gift types didn’t match the frequency at which they ate. In addition, they note the females didn’t provide any signals that the males used to determine what to feed them. With those two possibilities eliminated, the authors conclude that the males were inferring the desires of the females.

(via Birds infer their partner’s desires during bonding ritual | Ars Technica)

Non-human intelligence for the win.

thenearsightedmonkey: SOURCE: Nature.com The split brain: A...

catvincent — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:08:10 -0500

thenearsightedmonkey:

SOURCE: Nature.com

The split brain: A tale of two halves

In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley — but she couldn’t. “I’d reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they’d kind of fight,” she says. “Almost like repelling magnets.” Picking out food for the week was a two-, sometimes three-hour ordeal. Getting dressed posed a similar challenge: Vicki couldn’t reconcile what she wanted to put on with what her hands were doing. Sometimes she ended up wearing three outfits at once. “I’d have to dump all the clothes on the bed, catch my breath and start again.”

In one crucial way, however, Vicki was better than her pre-surgery self. She was no longer racked by epileptic seizures that were so severe they had made her life close to unbearable. She once collapsed onto the bar of an old-fashioned oven, burning and scarring her back. “I really just couldn’t function,” she says. When, in 1978, her neurologist told her about a radical but dangerous surgery that might help, she barely hesitated. If the worst were to happen, she knew that her parents would take care of her young daughter. “But of course I worried,” she says. “When you get your brain split, it doesn’t grow back together.”

In June 1979, in a procedure that lasted nearly 10 hours, doctors created a firebreak to contain Vicki’s seizures by slicing through her corpus callosum, the bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of her brain. This drastic procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, disconnects the two sides of the neocortex, the home of language, conscious thought and movement control. Vicki’s supermarket predicament was the consequence of a brain that behaved in some ways as if it were two separate minds.

After about a year, Vicki’s difficulties abated. “I could get things together,” she says. For the most part she was herself: slicing vegetables, tying her shoe laces, playing cards, even waterskiing.

But what Vicki could never have known was that her surgery would turn her into an accidental superstar of neuroscience. She is one of fewer than a dozen ‘split-brain’ patients, whose brains and behaviours have been subject to countless hours of experiments, hundreds of scientific papers, and references in just about every psychology textbook of the past generation. And now their numbers are dwindling.

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a picture — presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. “You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing — you show him an image and he can’t say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag,” Gazzaniga says. “Your heart just races!”

Continue reading

thanks to neurosciencestuff for bringing this article to our attention

Brain waves synchronize to environmental sounds

catvincent — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:01:11 -0500

Brain waves synchronize to environmental sounds:

metaconscious:

Our world is full of cyclic phenomena: For example, many people experience their attention span changing over the course of a day. Maybe you yourself are more alert in the morning, others more in the afternoon. Bodily functions cyclically change or “oscillate” with environmental rhythms, like…

As Above, So Below: Why words are as painful as sticks and stones

catvincent — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 03:56:22 -0500

As Above, So Below: Why words are as painful as sticks and stones :

metaconscious:

Rejection and heartbreak can have effects every bit as physical as cuts and bruises, and understanding why could change your life.

It is only in the past 10 years that we have begun to unravel the basis of these hurt feelings in the brain. Scientists have found that the sting of rejection fires…

As Above, So Below: Synchronous Isopraxis

zerosociety — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 12:07:45 -0500

As Above, So Below: Synchronous Isopraxis:

metaconscious:

Human tendencies to imitate clothing styles and to pick up the nonverbal mannerisms of others are rooted in paleocircuits of the reptilian brain. Paleocircuits are subcortical nerve nets and pathways which link bodily arousal centers, emotion centers and motor areas of the forebrain and midbrain, with muscles for the body movements required by nonverbal signs. Imitation is a deep, reptilian principle of mimicry, i.e., of copying, emulating, or aping a behavior, gesture or accessories including impulsive tendencies to, e.g., clap as audience members nearby applaud. Researchers isolated specific “cute” features in the face, establishing the existence of an infantile cuteness schema and a set of features and proportions attractive both in male and female.

Isopraxis is behavior where people dress like their colleagues and adopt the beliefs, customs, and mannerisms of the people they admire or feel inferior too. Appearing, behaving, and acting the same way makes it easier to be accepted, looking alike suggests same views and feels safe. The highly ritualized and time-based practice of coded outfit and appearance is not only a social synchronization device but also a system of classification and identification of complex social strata and hierarchical uniformities. The element of choice appears to be mostly an illusion but as a dynamic instrument of control it is superior to passive cattle branding methods because patterns are internalized in the subjects. In contrast to its cheerful image, fashion is not only a very effective multilevel system of group cohesion but even more so an efficient tool of social disciplinary action.

Special Agents at USFBI report that they have found that getting people to breathe at the same rate, blink at the same rate, head nod, and do other gestures at the same time is very effective in establishing deep communication. This creates rapport by behavior feedback subtly matching non-verbal communication, especially voice patterns and eye contact patterns. Facial movements provide sufficient peripheral information to drive emotional experience. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that facial expression (smiling, frowning etc.) affects emotional expression and behavior, smiling produces a weak feeling of happiness. EEG-research proved a resonance-like rapport of brain waves upon external optical or acoustic stimulation. The brain’s own frequencies tune in with the frequencies of the stimulus, an effect called “photic driving” or “frequency following response” (FFR). The frequency bands from 0.1 ? 40 Hz are associated with psycho-physical states (Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta) although these categories cannot cover the complex spectrum of wave activities of the brain, and only offer a vague outline of psycho-physical effects.

In remote areas of south-east Asia, certain species of firefly flash rhythmically in unison. The emergent synchrony of these fireflies which can number in the thousands differs markedly from many other forms of apparent synchronization in nature where perceived synchrony in these cases highlights the tendency of human observers to impose rhythmic patterns. After all, human behaviors are often characterized by synchronization and rhythm.

As Above, So Below: When You Inject Spirit Mediums' Brains with Radioactive Chemicals, Strange Things Happen

zerosociety — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:37:02 -0500

As Above, So Below: When You Inject Spirit Mediums' Brains with Radioactive Chemicals, Strange Things Happen:

metaconscious:

Are spirit mediums really communicating with the dead? My Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook not so good.”

But a new brain study of Brazilian mediums shows that something decidedly strange is occurring during the famous “trance state,” and no one has a ready answer to explain exactly what’s going on.

Ten mediums—five less expert and five experienced—were injected with a radioactive tracer to capture their brain activity during normal writing and during the practice of psychography, which involves allegedly channeling written communication from the “other side” while in a trance-like state. The subjects were scanned using SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to highlight the areas of the brain that are active and inactive during the practice.

The mediums ranged from 15 to 47 years of automatic writing experience, performing up to 18 psychographies per month. All were right-handed, in good mental health, and not currently using any psychiatric drugs.

As Above, So Below: How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

catvincent — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:52:38 -0500

As Above, So Below: How walking through a doorway increases forgetting:

metaconscious:

Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into…

Why Some People See Sound?

zerosociety — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:00:11 -0400

They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision —the more likely he or she experienced the illusion.

“If we both look at the same thing, we would expect our perception to be identical,” de Haas told LiveScience. “Our results demonstrate that this not quite true in every situation — sometimes what you perceive depends on your individual brain anatomy.”

The researchers suggest this illusion could reveal a way the brain compensates for imperfect visual circuitry.

“The visual brain’s representation of what hits the eye is very efficient but not perfect — there is some uncertainty to visual representations, especially when things happen quickly, like the rapid succession of flashes in the illusion,” de Haas said. “We speculate that this kind of uncertainty is bigger in brains that dedicate a smaller proportion of neurons to visual areas, just like a camera with fewer megapixels will give you a lower image quality.”

“If this speculation holds, it would make perfect sense for smaller visual brains to make more use of the additional information provided by the ears,” de Haas explained. “In the real world, sources of light and sound are often identical, and combining them will be advantageous. Imagine you take a twilight walk in a forest and scare up some animal in the undergrowth. The best strategy for finding out whether you are dealing with a hedgehog or a bear will involve combining visual information, like moving twigs and branches, with auditory information, like cracking wood.”

Much remains unknown about the roots of this illusion. For instance, only about a quarter of the individual differences regarding the illusion could be explained by brain anatomy. “We still haven’t explained the rest,” de Haas said.

Future research can also explore “whether the relationship between visual cortex size and audiovisual perception is specific to this illusion or holds for other audiovisual illusions as well,” de Haas said.

Other such illusions include the so-called McGurk effect, when the visual component of one sound is paired with the auditory component of another sound, leading people to mysteriously perceive a third sound — for instance, when the syllables “ba-ba” are spoken over the lip movements for “ga-ga,” the perception is of “da-da.”

Read the Rest at: http://www.livescience.com/24191-why-some-people-see-sound.html

As Above, So Below: Psilocybin and Personality: Psychedelics research sheds new light on the biological basis of personality

catvincent — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:18:29 -0400

As Above, So Below: Psilocybin and Personality: Psychedelics research sheds new light on the biological basis of personality:

metaconscious:

Recent research suggests fascinating connections between the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin and personality traits related to inner experience. Personality appears to influence response to psilocybin and psilocybin can promote changes in personality, suggesting a reciprocal…

Technoccult: The Dangers Of Meditation

zerosociety — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:43:11 -0400

Technoccult: The Dangers Of Meditation:

technoccult:

Klint Finley

Scott Carney wrote a long piece for Details about “India Syndrome” — one of may place specific menal disorders (see Wired’s coverage of Jerusalem Syndrome, which mentions that the majority of people dealing with these syndromes have pre-existing psychiatric issues).

But…

Sceptics subconsciously repress supernatural thoughts

wolvensnothere — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:04:35 -0400

Sceptics subconsciously repress supernatural thoughts:

I would like to see the original research, as presented without a particular set of agenda, but, as I said a few weeks back: Reality is the biggest case of Confirmation Bias I have Ever Seen.

There’s another old saying, and I think it goes, “If you can’t see the Fnords they can’t eat you.”

Anyway, whatever.

(H/T @davidbmetcalfe).

Stress: The roots of resilience : Nature News & Comment

catvincent — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:44:08 -0400

Stress: The roots of resilience : Nature News & Comment:

Why do people react differently to traumatic stress?

cognizingconsciousness: Researchers Discover that the Sleeping...

zerosociety — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 02:21:02 -0400

cognizingconsciousness:

Researchers Discover that the Sleeping Brain Behaves as if it’s Remembering Something

UCLA researchers have for the first time measured the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer’s disease during sleep. They discovered that this part of the brain behaves as if it’s remembering something, even under anesthesia, a finding that counters conventional theories about memory consolidation during sleep.

The research team simultaneously measured the activity of single neurons from multiple parts of the brain involved in memory formation. The technique allowed them to determine which brain region was activating other areas of the brain and how that activation was spreading, said study senior author Mayank R. Mehta, a professor of neurophysics in UCLA’s departments of neurology, neurobiology, physics and astronomy.

In particular, Mehta and his team looked at three connected brain regions in mice – the new brain or the neocortex, the old brain or the hippocampus, and the entorhinal cortex, an intermediate brain that connects the new and the old brains. While previous studies have suggested that the dialogue between the old and the new brain during sleep was critical for memory formation, researchers had not investigated the contribution of the entorhinal cortex to this conversation, which turned out to be a game changer, Mehta said. His team found that the entorhinal cortex showed what is called persistent activity, which is thought to mediate working memory during waking life, for example when people pay close attention to remember things temporarily, such as recalling a phone number or following directions.

(read more)

Technoccult: U.S. Military Funding Research On "Spidey Sense"

zerosociety — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 20:01:43 -0400

Technoccult: U.S. Military Funding Research On "Spidey Sense":

technoccult:

Klint Finley

The Office of Naval research wants to fund more research on intuition:

esearch in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a “sixth sense” through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them….

"Could your unconscious mind be making you feel better or worse, based on cues you’re not even..."

catvincent — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:35:46 -0400

“Could your unconscious mind be making you feel better or worse, based on cues you’re not even aware of? At first blush, this notion sounds hard to believe. How can a placebo response happen without conscious awareness being involved? But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is suggesting a person can indeed have a placebo (or nocebo) response even when they’re unaware of any suggestion of improvement or anticipation of getting worse. (A nocebo response is an expectation that you’ll feel worse, not better.) A team led by Karin Jensen of the Department of Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) performed a two-phase experiment: Thermal pain stimuli In the first experiment, Jensen took 40 volunteers and administered heat stimulation to their forearms while simultaneously showing them images of human faces on the computer screen. For the first face, they were told to expect low pain stimulation, and for the second image, high pain stimulation. The volunteers were asked to to rate their experience of the pain on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the most painful. But what the patients didn’t know was that all heat simulations were the same medium temperature. Not surprisingly, the participants applied a low average rating of 19 when they saw the first face, and a high average of 53 when they saw the second face (classic nocebo effect). So far so good, but so far nothing new. But for the second experiment, everything was kept the same except for one thing: the images were shown in such rapid succession that the volunteers couldn’t possibly register them at the conscious level — what the researchers referred to as “masked exposures.” Yet, the participants recorded pain responses of 25 for the first face, and 44 for the second face. An automatic response What does this mean? It means that placebo and nocebo responses are not always elicited by what a person consciously thinks will happen, but what the unconscious mind anticipates will happen. Essentially, the researchers verified that subliminal stimuli has an influence on the placebo/nocebo response. Consequently, placebos should be understood as a mechanism that is automatic, fast, and powerful — and one that does not require conscious contemplation or judgement.”

- Placebo effect can be triggered by subliminal cues