Currently viewing the tag: "Mind"
Embodied cognition is the idea that my way of thinking is not independent of the body in which I live. My metaphors, imagination, and logical processes are influenced by my body’s position in space, relative height, closeness, or contact with other bodies and my perception of the environment. For those whose bodies have been modified [...]
Want to blow your brain today? Help Slate out with their historical retrospective here (it’s short and a cool way to remember bits of history you’d forgotten about). Then read Will Saletan’s outstanding and extensive discussion of the science of memory. I’m suddenly feeling very PKD.
A brutal exploration of what Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s dementia can wreak upon a person and the people trying to care for them:
“[Nancy, Andrea Gillies' mother-in-law] had one foot through the looking glass and she couldn’t make those two worlds – dementia reality, and normal life – gel at all,” [Andrea] Gillies says. “It [...]
Cold water in the lap of anyone hoping for the Singularity sometime this century:
The simulations of Modha and Markram are about as brain-like as one of those plastic brains that neuroscientists like to keep on their desks. The plastic brain has all the parts that a real brain does, it’s roughly the same [...]
You know how right when you get your bad habit under control, you let yourself indulge just a little bit as a reward and, BAM, you’re off the wagon? According to the SciAm, that’s because your brain is over estimating how much self-control you actually have. Northwestern researchers tested this on a group of [...]
UCLA researchers believe it could be a result of an altered, dysfunctional, or damaged visual processing center:
Now researchers at UCLA have determined that the brains of people with BDD have abnormalities in processing visual input, particularly when examining their own face. Further, they found that the same systems of the brain are overactive [...]
Garry Kasparov, the famed chess master who was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, on chess, A.I., and the human mind. I was caught in particular by this creative idea:
In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec’s Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and [...]
James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, [...]
Athena Andreadis’ article in h+ about the transhumanist fear of biology in general and their underestimation of just how complex and powerful biological systems is deliciously blunt:
And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
