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Tag Archives: the brain

Does the Mind’s System Reflect a Judeo-Christian View of Human Nature?

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Does the Mind’s System Reflect a Judeo-Christian View of Human Nature?

Tags

behaviorism, cognition, Freudianism, human nature, neuroscience, Psychiatry, psychology, science, Sigmund Freud, social constructionism, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the brain, the mind

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“The mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action.

It has distinct information-processing systems for filtering out distractions, learning skills, controlling the body, remembering facts, holding information temporarily, and storing and executing rules. Cutting across these data-processing systems are mental faculties (sometimes called multiple intelligences) dedicated to different kinds of content, such as language, number, space, tools, and living things.[…]

More generally, the interplay of mental systems can explain how people can entertain revenge fantasies that they never act on, or can commit adultery only in their hearts. In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

The idea from the cognitive revolution that the mind is a system of universal, generative computational modules obliterates the way that debates on human nature have been framed for centuries. It is now simply misguided to ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is universal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate, whether we are essentially good or essentially evil. Humans behave flexibly because they are programmed: their minds are packed with combinatorial software that can generate an unlimited set of thoughts and behavior. Behavior may vary across cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary. Intelligent behavior is learned successfully because we have innate systems that do the learning. And all people may have good and evil motives, but not everyone may translate them into behavior in the same way.”

__________

From Steven Pinker’s epochal The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

More from SP:

  • On Feminism
  • On the F-word
  • On Sarah Palin

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About Half of You Have Violent Genes

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

biology, crime, David Eagleman, genes, genetics, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, psychology, the brain, the mind

David Eagleman“Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong…

Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not:

Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed
Annually in the United States

Offense                     Carrying the genes            Not carrying the genes

Aggravated assault           3,419,000                           435,000

Homicide                           14,196                               1,468

Armed robbery                 2,051,000                            157,000

Sexual assault                   442,000                              10,000

In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.

About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.

We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.”

__________

From David Eagleman’s eye-opening and highly digestible Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. If you’re looking for a layman’s guide to the mind, fan through Incognito.

The photograph is of Eagleman at his laboratory and office in my hometown of Houston, Texas.

Check out a philosophical and a fictional work of Eagleman’s below:

David EaglemanWhat Is Happening When We See Someone Die?

Clouds and MetalIn the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

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The Function of Sleep

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2011 Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium, A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, Aliens, Allen Institute, biology, Craig Raine, dreams, Giulio Tononi, In Search of Sleep Function, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, sleep, the brain

Giulio Tononi

“Among the open questions in neuroscience, I believe the function of sleep remains perhaps the most embarrassing. We don’t know why every night our brain needs us – and presumably itself – to sleep for several hours. There is every indication that sleep performs an essential function, if we only knew which one.

The indications are that sleep is, first of all, dangerous. Obviously you are made vulnerable to predators if you fall asleep and don’t respond to stimuli. It is pervasive; we do it from the cradle to the grave. It is universal: every animal that has been carefully studied does so – from fruit flies to ourselves. There is no single exception. It is also irresistible, as we all know. If you do experiments to keep animals awake – or humans awake, for that matter – there is no way that you can overcome the need for sleep. You can even use pain, shocks — at some point the animal will fall asleep. It is also tightly regulated, with a big portion of the brain stem, the hypothalamus, all kind of complicated connectivity being set up to put ourselves to sleep and then wake us. And finally, if you don’t sleep, or sleep too little, it is clear there are serious consequences. In fatal familial insomnia, after a few months of lack of sleep, you die. Rats die after two weeks. But the most obvious consequences are cognitive consequences. There are all kinds of problems. We become extremely bad cognitively. We make mistakes of all sorts, and we become extremely irritable…

The enigma of sleep function has been around for a long time. All kind of ideas have been proposed. The theory I propose is the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, which is an attempt to understand what is the core function of sleep in every animal.

The idea here is, in short, that sleep is the price we pay for plasticity, which of course is a feature that is functional primarily when we’re awake, when we adapt to the external world.

In our brains, neurons either spike or they don’t — that’s how they communicate. Spikes are more expensive than non-spikes in terms of their synaptic consequences, in terms of the energy they use. So spikes should be reserved, and as far as we can tell they largely are, to signal important events — events that convey a lot of information. Now, when you need to adapt to a changing world — which is basically all the time, especially during development — what you need to do is shift strength of synapses or even add synapses to make sure you are firing for important events or important changes in the environment.

And every neuron does that, to make sure it signals important stuff downstream, in this complicated brain where every neuron is immersed in a sea of other neurons. It doesn’t know what it’s getting, or from where; it doesn’t know what it’s signaling, and it doesn’t know where it’s sending it.

So, in all of this uncertainty, for any learning system which is as complicated as a brain, there is a problem in the end, which is that neurons tend to strengthen to make sure they signal. But then that becomes biologically untenable, because stronger synapses consume more energy, occupy more space, require more supplies, and finally they saturate signal to noise.

Basically, then neurons start firing for everything, and that can’t be good. So there is a need for renormalization to make sure that total synaptic strength is constant.

And we think that that renormalization is not only essential, but it better happen offline, when you actually can sample in an unbiased way the environment of a neuron. And every neuron, by itself, does this in the course of a night’s sleep.

That’s what we think sleep is fundamentally for.”

__________

From Dr. Guilio Tononi’s recent talk on The Function of Sleep at the Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium.

I had never before seriously considered this question of the purpose of sleep, or the sheer strangeness of the fact that we don’t yet have a firm understanding of its biological function. It’s nothing less than absurd to ponder what happens to me, to you, to everyone as we spend one third of our lives unconscious.

As Neil deGrass Tyson observed, “Aliens might be surprised to learn that humans must lay semi-comatose on cushions for nearly a third of every Earth rotation.”

Craig Raine, in his poem “A Martian Send A Postcard Home,” mimics the voice of a martian who is noting different facets of human life and reporting them back to his kind. These take the form of riddles, the last one being a coded reference to human sleep and dreaming:

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Watch Tononi’s entire talk below.

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