Cognitive neuroscience

[Singu]

"The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time."

- Nancy Kanwisher, MIT professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences


Interesting article and a video. I would recommend watching it:

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/25/11163.full



Here are the keys:



RED = Facial recognition
LIGHT PURPLE = Color recognition
DARK GREEN = Perception of places and spaces
YELLOW = Visual motion/movement
LIGHT GREEN = Recognition body parts - but not other objects i.e. typewriter
DARK BLUE = Hearing of clear sounds i.e. sirens, horns, door bell bell ring - but NOT when the pitch is unclear i.e. toilet flushing, percussion/drum roll, foot steps
DARK PURPLE = Speech recognition - selective sounds of speech
PINK = Language recognition - processing of whole languages
TURQUOISE = RTPJ or what we think about other peoples thoughts (see Rebecca Saxe TED Talk)
WHITE = "Any difficult mental task"
Gray = Still unknown.

- They have scanned a bunch of people's brains and they all more or less activate in similar regions for each specific activities. They call this "Functional Specialization" or "localization". Not all mental functions are known to be localized, but only some.

"Indeed, these regions are found, in more or less the same place, in virtually every neurologically intact subject; they are part of the basic functional architecture of the human brain."

"Human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers."

[hatchback176]

Duh, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lane_Friesen
I am definitely at least 10 years ahead of you.

[Singu]

Good for you... dude. Post something interesting.

[wacey]

What selective pressures drove this localization.. and also very cool thanks for bringing this to attention. Will have to take a look at the video.

[Pallas]

knowledge that can't be acted upon is not knowledge at all. just a string of fashionable words

[hatchback176]

Linking to a TED talk because you've never picked up a Cognitive Neuroscience textbook doesn't make your post interesting. Get a clue.

[godslave]

[Metamorph]

There are... very obvious reasons that there hasn't been much progress in neuroscience. They boil down to 1. In a postreligious society, crazy is the replacement for evil, so people aren't allowed to understand crazy 2. Our best brain science really makes human minds look like a radio with all the kind of "psi" phenomena that implies.

Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information. | Picower Institute (mit.edu)

‘Traveling’ nature of brain waves may help working memory work | Picower Institute (mit.edu)

Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact - Scientific American

Researchers translate brain waves into scarily accurate images using Stable Diffusion AI (msn.com)

New AI decoder can translate brainwaves into text - study (msn.com)

The "neural portrait" is useless because the brain is, like, a wave, man. Get on the right frequency. Far out.

[godslave]

When you are not in 1921 anymore...

I was searching about "Social cognition" and I came across that video. It's good for reviewing our knowledge about the prefrontal cortex regions and functions and maybe learn some new stuff.

[godslave]

Before knowing about Donald Hoffman's Theory, I arrived to the a similar idea about the nature of reality vs the limitation of our perception of it. That's probably because the approach or pathway I was taking to reach it was based on the same principle namely that understanding reality depends on the accuracy of the tools we use to perceive it. It is indeed a fact that for the most part of our existence as a species we have tried to understand reality from the perspective of the only tool at our disposal namely our senses. I said it before, but each time human being reach the limit of a paradigm, intuition kicks in and tries to fill in the gabs of what we don't understand because we can't perceive it through our senses. That's imho inherent to the human condition, we want answers, we even demand it.

Anyways, when I come across this kind of stuff coming from science people I have to say that It boosts my self-esteem let's put it that way. This why I don't like what I call "spoilers" (which means looking for the answer in books or internet !) because it prevents you from exploring ideas on your own, even if it's a boggus idea, the exploratory journey is well worth it.