Mind Shadows

How to Whistle Through the Graveyard

2012-05-22T04:15:00.000-04:00

Woody Allen said he has nothing against death. He just doesn't want to be there when it happens. He also said he didn't want to achieve immortality through his work... He wanted to achieve it through not dying.

So what is all this fear of death? Why should we fear it so much?
Read more »

Are we governed by unconscious processes?: David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis

2012-05-15T04:15:00.003-04:00

First point, then counterpoint.

POINT. As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change.
Read more »

Stephen Pinker, Language, & Human Nature

2012-05-08T04:15:00.000-04:00

Named in 2004 by Time Magazine as one of 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world,Stephen Pinker's books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought. They combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. He was also named as one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. Above is an animation adapted from a speech on language and human nature given by Steven Pinker.
Subscribe in a reader

Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

2012-05-01T04:15:00.001-04:00

Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.

Both Murphy and Brown believe in God but hold that the world can be explained by a physical account of it. Still, they argue that a physicalist account alone cannot make sense of meaning. We find meaning in our lives and in the world, which cannot be explained by a resort to only physical explanations. More
More

Subscribe in a reader

Why Deceit Is Good for You

2012-04-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

In 1995 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the usual psychologists, anthropologists, and other academics showed up for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Science journalist John Horgan was also there. He heard various presentations, talked to various members and found that "the most influential thinker there, arguably, was a scruffily bearded fellow, wearing sunglasses and a knitted cap, who never gave a talk. He lurked around the margins of the conference." Horgan "spotted him puffing a joint outside a meeting hall."
Read more »

Atheists Who Are Preachers

2012-04-17T04:15:00.002-04:00

What does it mean to be a nonbelieving pastor? How can a person preach belief in something he or she does not believe in? Does this mean they are hypocrites? Or that they have a family to feed and support? As spiritual seekers, many began their adult lives and careers convinced they found the answer to life's quest and chose to stand behind the pulpit but, as seekers typically do, they turned up new thoughts and evidence that changed their minds.
Read more »

Robots and Humans: I love You Very Much--You May Switch Me Off Now.

2012-04-10T04:15:00.012-04:00

The curiosity is not about the robot but about the human brain. In the video below, Jules says "I love you deeply and care for you very much. You may now switch me off."
Read more »

The Jennifer Anniston Neuron

2012-04-03T04:15:00.011-04:00

"Think of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, "Jen." Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.
Read more »

Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget

2012-03-27T04:15:00.007-04:00

In an old vaudeville routine, a comedian asks his straight man, "Who was the lady you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the straight man, scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics on an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

Maybe Jill Price would not know what happened at an exact time but she can recall any day and she can remember it. Unlike vaudeville audiences, people don't laugh at all. They are astounded by her feats of memory. She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.
Read more »

Christopher Hitchens with Angel Wings

2012-03-20T04:15:00.001-04:00

English-American author, essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) had a career over four decades. In 2005, a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll voted him the world's fifth top public intellectual. He appeared on talk shows and lecture circuits, and was columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, and World Affairs. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was also an atheist.

On learning that Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer, Reverend Rick Warren prayed that the atheist repent and see that the disease was visited on him by God for disbelief. "I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss," said Warren, then adding, "He knows the truth now."

Despite the prayers of Warren and other Christian evangelists, Hitchens never changed his views. As Art Levine put it, "The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer" on Hitchens "boggles" the mind, especially because Hitchens caused his cancer by a "long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits."
Read more »

He Found Freedom in an Unfree World

2012-03-13T04:15:00.008-04:00

More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and walked away from the economic system that made him a wage slave.

This is the story of a thoughtful and intelligent man who has a different vision of the good life. His vision took him far from the view shared by those in capitalist society. It is about a man who succeeded in finding the life he sought. It addresses the big questions many ask but few try to find satisfactory answers for. Suelo found his own answers on how to live despite a society and culture obsessed with money. He offers a subversive version of living, one that upsets the conventional view.

"Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money," Daniel Suelo says. "You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It's illegal to live outside of it."
Read more »

You're Not My Momma: Capgras Delusion

2012-03-06T04:15:00.008-05:00

In a traffic accident, David Silvera was thrown from his car and landed on his head. He lay in a coma five weeks. When he awakened he discovered he lost the use of his right arm but felt he remained intact mentally. He kept his intelligence. He was not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed. He read the newspaper with interest and retained his curiosity about the world.

But then he started telling his mother she was an imposter, not his real mom. The same went for his father, who was no longer his real dad. It didn't stop there. The house he lived in was like his parents--just a good imitation of the real one. Not only that, David was not really David. He sometimes became the other David. He was his own imposter.
Read more »

Where’s Waldo with no Waldo?: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2012-02-28T04:15:00.013-05:00

At 5 foot 6 inches and 270 pounds, bank robber McArthur Wheeler, 45, was not difficult to remember.

In 1995, he walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight. He wore no ski mask, no nylon stocking. In fact, he wore nothing over his face and did not disguise his body. Witnesses gave a consistent description of him, and one that made him stand out from faces in the crowd. The surveillance cameras corroborated their description. There he was, plain as day, pointing his gun at a teller.

The police arrested him and when they did he could not believe they found him out. "But I wore the juice," he said. He had rubbed lemon juice over his face, believing it made him invisible to the cameras.
Read more »

What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer

2012-02-21T04:15:00.009-05:00

Julian Barbour,a British physicist, has a different theory about the nature of time.

Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor, the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past. You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.
Read more »

Amputating a Phantom Arm

2012-02-14T04:15:00.023-05:00

You have lost your left arm but you still feel your left hand. You not only feel it, but every minute of the day you are are nagged by an exhausting need to scratch the hand. But there is nothing there to scratch.

How can this be? You feel something in the middle of nothing but air. You look down and you see empty space, but you still feel an extremely annoying itch right there where your hand is supposed to be.

You have a problem and it looks like there is no way to solve it. You can't scratch something that does not exist.
Read more »

Politically as well as Economically Greece is Falling Apart

2012-02-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

The mainstream media does its usual job of reporting between commercials. It tells us that the Greeks are in trouble and that Angela Merkel and the Eurozone are imposing stringent austerity measures before bailing out the nation. "Now, folks," says the media anchor, "Don't touch that remote. We'll be right back."

Truth is, Greece is a far larger cause for concern than the sixty second sound bytes indicate.
Read more »

Is Your Brain a Meat Computer Without Free Will?

2012-02-07T04:15:00.012-05:00

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost)

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! (Yogi Berra)

Both quotations have to do with forks in the road. Frost implies he exercised free will and Berra makes nonsense out of the very idea of free choice. The Yankees catcher was good at silly quotes that the press liked to scoop up like fly balls but this one resonates into philosophy and brain science.

We can't start over to discover if we could have done differently because we are creatures of time and perhaps it is merely a construction of our consciousness. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, as John Wheeler put it, which is another way of saying we are dimensionally constituted to handle one thing at a time.
Read more »

One Side of Christine Honeycutt's Face Did Not Grow

2012-01-31T04:15:00.017-05:00

One of Christine’s teachers told her to wipe the ink off her forehead. “I can’t,” she replied. “It’s always there.”

There were other troubling signs: One side of Christine’s forehead was normal, but the other was “meaty,” Vicki recalls. And her ears looked out of proportion to one another—an asymmetry that seemed to extend over her entire face. . . .
Read more »

Hero is Okay but Wimp is Better: Future Prediction and The Illusion of Courage

2012-01-24T04:15:00.018-05:00

Throwing yourself on a grenade to shield your buddies. Slugging an assailant with a purse to protect your child. Wing-walking atop a biplane at 10,000 feet. Jumping a motorcycle over three parked cars. Some people would say they could do one or all of these actions.

All of that is rather extreme. Most of us say we would not do it. On the other hand, many people predict they would engage in actions relatively mild compared to extreme behavior. These are situations like investing in an agressive stock, or giving a speech in front of two hundred people, or standing up to an intimidating boss. Would you do it?

For people who say yes, recent research indicates that many are wrong.
Read more »

Alzheimer's Is Not Inevitable for the Aging Brain

2012-01-17T04:15:00.065-05:00

"A 115-year-old woman who remained mentally alert throughout her life had an essentially normal brain, with little or no evidence of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study in the August issue of Neurobiology of Aging. The findings question the assumption that Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia will inevitably develop, if people live long enough.
Read more »

Amazingly TIny Brain But A Normal Life

2012-01-10T04:15:00.011-05:00

"A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life.

The commonly spouted wisdom that people only use 10 percent of their brain power may have been dismissed as a myth, but one Frenchman seems to be managing fine with just a small fraction of his actual brain.

In fact the man, who works as a civil servant in southern France, has succeeded in living an entirely normal life despite a huge fluid-filled cavity taking up most of the space where his brain should be.
Read more »

The High Priests of Physics and The Occult Language of Mathematics

2012-01-03T04:15:00.040-05:00

There is nothing in the laws of the cosmos that says physicists are supposed to be happy. Steven Weinberg said something like that, voicing an opinion similar to Feynman's, who in effect said of quantum mechanics that you may not like it but that's the way it is.

A group of thinkers refuse to accept it as the way it is. Concerned for their reputation, they do not like "sloppy thinkers who might well be called 'cranks,' who if given wide publicity would harm" their cause.

I will leave you to form your own opinions.

They are "devoted mainly to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels , of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas developed with full respect for evidence, logic, and objectivity. Such reforms have long been urgently needed; and yet there is no area of scholarship more stubbornly censorial, and more reluctant to reform itself."
Read more »

Stephen Hawking: Philosophy Is A Waste of Time

2011-12-13T04:15:00.005-05:00

I will be away until January
--------------------
Stephen Hawking believes philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. "More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics.
Read more »

The Puzzle of Face Space: Your Eyes May See When Your Brain Does Not

2011-12-06T04:15:00.007-05:00

In Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat the title is comic and almost absurd but his book provides fascinating explanation of a neurological condition in which a man does mistake his wife for a hat without realizing it. Sacks introduces the lay reader to another phenomenon--how a stroke leaves a person unable to see things on one side of the visual field and how the stroke victim also has no inkling that anything is wrong or missing with his perception. In fact, in both cases, nothing is wrong with the eyes, only with the way the brain processes visual information.

There is a name for this condition, prosopagnosia, and it describes a small fraction of people who cannot recognize faces--even the faces of loved ones The condition puzzles researchers but they are beginning to understand how facial recognition works, which may help those with prosopagnosia. With her colleagues, Marlene Behrmann at Carnegie Mellon University has gathered some pieces of the puzzle by comparing the brains of individuals who are face-blind to those who are face-sighted. Their results hint at how we recognize faces not in a flash of insight, not as a kind of photographic image, but by building up recognition on a neurological assembly line. Recognition is encoded in the brain as face space.
Read more »

Consciousness and the Soul Solved

2011-11-29T04:15:00.000-05:00

Even atheists have souls, Nicholas Humphrey might jest in a book both difficult and fluidly written. In Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness he believes the soul can be explained along with the hard problem of consciousness.
Read more »