A couple of papers on the nature of religious belief came down the pike last week. One was high-tech, analytically complex, and neurological. The other was low-tech, analytically naïve, and all evo-psych handwavey. It also claimed to rebut the whole school of thought embodied in the first paper, although I don’t think it did— yet […]
Archive for neuro
26
Sep
2009
Physician, Heal Thyself.
I was going to devote today’s crawl to a recent study purporting to cast doubts on Libet’s notorious “no free-will” paper from the eighties— kinda pointless attacking that old study when more rigorous and recent studies have been so much more compelling on the same subject, and besides free will isn’t the same thing as […]
20
Sep
2009
Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Tones: or, an Rx for World Peace
Fascinating popsci piece on synaesthesia over at the BBC. It turns out that your common garden-variety hearing-colors/seeing-music synaesthete is only the tip of the iceberg. There are people out there who can literally see time, as a multicolored ribbon winding about them in mid-air. There are folks who perceive letters or numbers as personality types, […]
07
Jan
2009
Iterating Towards Bethlehem
Most of you probably know about Turing machines: hypothetical gizmos built of paper punch-tape, read-write heads, and imagination, which can — step by laborious step — emulate the operation of any computer. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Sinclair ZX-80— a sad little personal computer so primitive that it couldn’t […]
03
Oct
2008
Head Cheese Gone Wild
I was plenty pleased when little porridges of cultured neurons took their first baby steps towards running flight simulators or operating robots in the lab; I was downright smug when folks noticed that I’d got there first. Now, though, researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology are planning on putting head cheeses in […]
28
Sep
2008
Placeholder
Yeah, I know. Merciful extended silence again. Not that there’s nothing to talk about. There’s a paper just out in Consciousness & Cognition which purports to prove that logical thinking requires consciousness (which would seem to contradict other findings, but I haven’t read the paper yet so who knows). I’ve been ruminating on the inherent […]
19
Sep
2008
Avast! Here Be a Blindsightinator for Ye!
Aye me hearties, be ye rememberin’ that time in Blindsight when Rorschach, she be putting the sun in scurvy Szpindel’s eyes? “Argh, I be seein’ naught,” Szpindel be sayin’, his timbers a’shiver. “It be the EM fields,” James be barking. “That be how they signal. The briney deep, she be fulla words, she be—” “I […]
15
Sep
2008
Pedophilia in a Pill
You may remember the case a few years back of the Floridian hypersexual pedophile whose depravity hailed from a brain tumor; the dude (rightly) got off, since he wasn’t culpable for the wiring in his head. You may even remember me taking the next step (scroll down to June 30th on the right-hand side), and […]
22
Aug
2008
A Plague of Angels (or, Rorschach in your living room!)
Well, this is interesting. Intel has leapfrogged MIT on the whole magnetic-resonance schtick. They can wirelessly light a 60-watt bulb from almost a meter away, wasting only 25% of the broadcast energy in transit. This is a good thing, because “…the human body is not affected by magnetic fields,” Josh Smith from Intel reassures us. […]
28
Jul
2008
Got Another One!
Nature published “Hillcrest v. Velikovsky” last week — and the very next day, this cog-sci dude named Mike Meadon posted an erudite and outraged blog entry on the insanity of the kind of world we live in, that such things could actually happen. Evidently he didn’t realize that the work was fiction (until the famous […]
