Posts Tagged ‘neuroscience’
“Whatever is a reality today… is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow”*…
Marina Apollonio. Spazio Ad Attivazione Cinetica 6B, 1966-2015. El Museo del Barrio
Artists, like neuroscientists, are masters of visual systems. Through experimentation and observation, artists have developed innovative methods for fooling the eye, enabling flat canvases to appear three-dimensional, for instance. Neuroscience—and more recently the subfield of neuroaesthetics—can help to explain the biology behind these visual tricks, many of which were first discovered by artists. “I often go to art to figure out questions to ask about science,” says Margaret Livingstone, Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. “Artists may not study the neuroscience per se, but they’re experimentalists.”
During the 1960s, Op Art—short for “Optical art”—combined the two disciplines by challenging the role of illusion in art. While earlier painters had created the illusion of depth where there was none, Op artists developed visual effects that called attention to the distortions at play. Abstract and geometric, their works relied upon the mechanics of the spectator’s eye to warp their compositions into shimmering and shifting displays of line and color. The Museum of Modern Art announced this international artistic trend in 1965 in a seminal exhibition titled “The Responsive Eye.” Since then, neuroscientists have continued to probe the mechanisms by which the human eye responds to these mind-bending works…
More on this intersection of art and science at “The Neuroscience of Op Art.” (And click here for a re-visit to Victor Vasarely, one of the fathers of Op Art.)
* Luigi Pirandello
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As we cross our eyes, we might spare a thought for Leon Botha; he died on this date in 2011, at the age of 26. An important South African painter and DJ, Botha was one of the world’s oldest survivors of progeria.
“Neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track”*…
In 2009, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara performed a curious experiment. In many ways, it was routine — they placed a subject in the brain scanner, displayed some images, and monitored how the subject’s brain responded. The measured brain activity showed up on the scans as red hot spots, like many other neuroimaging studies.
Except that this time, the subject was an Atlantic salmon, and it was dead.
Dead fish do not normally exhibit any kind of brain activity, of course. The study was a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the problems with brain scanning studies…
More on why we should be cautious of the “breakthrough insights” in neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, et al. at “BOLD Assumptions: Why Brain Scans Are Not Always What They Seem.”
Pair with “Electrified- Adventures in transcranial direct-current stimulation.”
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As we practice phrenology, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to John Hughlings Jackson; he was born on this date in 1835. A neurologist, he was one of the first to observe that abnormal mental states may result from structural brain damage; and his studies of epilepsy, speech defects, and nervous-system disorders arising from injury to the brain and spinal cord remain among the most useful and highly documented in the field. Jackson’s definition (in 1873) of epilepsy as “a sudden, excessive, and rapid discharge” of brain cells has been confirmed by electroencephalography; his epilepsy studies initiated the development of modern methods of clinical localization of brain lesions and the investigation of localized brain functions.
Ye shall know them by the bumps on their heads…
In 1902, L.A. Vaught published Vaught’s Practical Character Reader. Writing at the beginning of a revival of interest in phrenology (which originally flourished in the early 19th century; was discredited; then rose again, encouraged by theories emerging at the turn of the 20th century in evolution, criminology, and anthropology), the author explains in his preface…
The purpose of this book is to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries. At least fifty thousand careful examinations have been made to prove the truthfulness of the nature and location of these elements. More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations. Therefore, it is given the world to be depended upon. Taken in its entirety it is absolutely reliable. Its facts can be completely demonstrated by all who will take the unprejudiced pains to do so. It is ready for use. It is practical. Use it.
Via the wonderful Public Domain Review. Full text and illustrations available at The Internet Archive, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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As we consume the “applied” findings of modern neuroscience with more than one grain of salt, we might pause to recall Pierre Jean George Cabanis; he died on this date in 1808. Trained as a physician, Cabanis concentrated on physiology, on which he became something of an authority– and of which, something of a philosopher. He is remembered as the French Enlightenment’s most ardent Materialists, as exemplified in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802; “Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man”), which undertook to explain the whole of reality, including the psychic, mental, and moral aspects of man, in terms of a mechanistic Materialism. Building on the thinking of La Mettrie, Cabanis argued that “to have an accurate idea of the operations from which thought results, it is necessary to consider the brain as a special organ designed especially to produce it, as the stomach and the intestines are designed to operate the digestion, (and) the liver to filter bile…”
… And in so doing, Cabanis contributed a few stones to the foundation on which the pseudoscience of phrenology was built.
Shakin’ All Over…
ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is used to refer to a self-diagnosed condition in which tingles radiate downward from the top of the head through the neck, spine, and limbs, accompanied by feelings of euphoria, in response to various sensory triggers, from whispered speech to tapping sounds to simply watching a person do something efficiently. Many of the triggers involve somebody playing close attention — to a task, to you, to a task involving you — which gave rise to early stabs at a name for the phenomenon like AIHO (Attention Induced Head Orgasm) or AIE (Attention Induced Euphoria)…
Sean T. Collins explains further in “Why Music Gives You the Chills” (with lots of nifty video examples). Readers might also consult “ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain” on Vice and ASMR-Research.org.
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As we drop the needle on some Radiohead, we might send stream of consciousness birthday greetings to William Cuthbert Faulkner; he was born on this date in 1897. A writer of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, screenplays, and one play, Faulkner is best remembered for his novels (e.g., The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August) and stories set in “Yoknapatawpha County,” a setting largely based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. They earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner
I’m relatively sure that this is reassuring news…
image: Paul Wesley Griggs
The quantum world defies the rules of ordinary logic. Particles routinely occupy two or more places at the same time and don’t even have well-defined properties until they are measured. It’s all strange, yet true – quantum theory is the most accurate scientific theory ever tested and its mathematics is perfectly suited to the weirdness of the atomic world. (…)
Human thinking, as many of us know, often fails to respect the principles of classical logic. We make systematic errors when reasoning with probabilities, for example. Physicist Diederik Aerts of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, has shown that these errors actually make sense within a wider logic based on quantum mathematics. The same logic also seems to fit naturally with how people link concepts together, often on the basis of loose associations and blurred boundaries. That means search algorithms based on quantum logic could uncover meanings in masses of text more efficiently than classical algorithms.
It may sound preposterous to imagine that the mathematics of quantum theory has something to say about the nature of human thinking. This is not to say there is anything quantum going on in the brain, only that “quantum” mathematics really isn’t owned by physics at all, and turns out to be better than classical mathematics in capturing the fuzzy and flexible ways that humans use ideas. “People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic,” says Aerts. “The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.” (…)
Why should quantum logic fit human behaviour? Peter Bruza at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, suggests the reason is to do with our finite brain being overwhelmed by the complexity of the environment yet having to take action long before it can calculate its way to the certainty demanded by classical logic. Quantum logic may be more suitable to making decisions that work well enough, even if they’re not logically faultless. “The constraints we face are often the natural enemy of getting completely accurate and justified answers,” says Bruza.
This idea fits with the views of some psychologists, who argue that strict classical logic only plays a small part in the human mind. Cognitive psychologist Peter Gardenfors of Lund University in Sweden, for example, argues that much of our thinking operates on a largely unconscious level, where thought follows a less restrictive logic and forms loose associations between concepts.
Aerts agrees. “It seems that we’re really on to something deep we don’t yet fully understand.” This is not to say that the human brain or consciousness have anything to do with quantum physics, only that the mathematical language of quantum theory happens to match the description of human decision-making.
Perhaps only humans, with our seemingly illogical minds, are uniquely capable of discovering and understanding quantum theory.
Read the article in its fascinating entirety at New Scientist (via Amira Skowmorowska’s Lapidarium Notes).
As we feel even more justified in agreeing with Emerson that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1692 that Giles Corey, a prosperous farmer and full member of the church in early colonial America, died under judicial torture during the Salem witch trials. Corey refused to enter a plea; he was crushed to death by stone weights in an attempt to force him to do so.
Under the law at the time, a person who refused to plead could not be tried. To avoid persons cheating justice, the legal remedy was “peine forte et dure“– a process in which the prisoner is stripped naked and placed prone under a heavy board. Rocks or boulders are then laid on the wood. Corey was the only person in New England to suffer this punishment, though Margaret Clitherow was similarly crushed in England in 1586 for refusing to plead to the charge of secretly practicing Catholicism.
Corey’s last words were “more weight.”
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