"Researchers publish largest-ever dataset of neural connections
A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous."
Seeing the Mind: Spectacular Images from Neuroscience, and What They Reveal about Our Neuronal Selves by Stanislas Dehaene, 2023
A lavishly illustrated and accessibly explained deep dive into the major new findings from cognitive neuroscience.
Who are we? To this age-old question, contemporary neuroscience gives a simple answer: we are exquisite neuronal machines.
If you’ve ever been out in the woods and sworn you’ve heard someone call your name, you might not be going crazy — just experiencing a condition called “auditory pareidolia.” Live Science explains more about this phenomenon of hearing intelligible voices or sounds in meaningless background noise. https://flip.it/KbQ8o- #Science#Hearing#Health#Mind#NeuroScience
Isn't the hippocampus where short-term memory is stored? Why did the #Kdrama#QueenOfTears#눈물의여왕 said it is for long-term #memory? It's also actually stored in parts of the brain, the hippocampus only acts as a catalyst to store, not access, right?
Have you ever noticed your heart rate increase while watching a scary scene in a movie? Or how one moment you feel totally fine, and the next moment there is a burning itch on your leg that you need to scratch? This all results from a sixth sense you may not know existed.
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’
"Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected."
@cogsci
The notion of role-filler binding as central to cognitive(ish) representations has been around for ages (possibly under different names, such as slot-value in GOFAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence)). This is hardly surprising because it's effectively the same as variable-value.
The role is generally treated as though it's an atomic symbol, whereas it's not uncommon for the filler to be taken as a composite value (e.g. a tree). I am toying with embracing the idea of roles also being composite representations.
In a cognitive-agent/robotic context, I think it might be useful for the role to be a "sensorimotor program" and the filler to be the sensory input arising from running the sensorimotor program specified by the role. (This is heading towards a Predictive State Representation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_state_representation).
(1) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of role-filler bindings as sensorimotor predictions (similar or related to the sense above).
"Attention" could be construed as a "run/don't_run" flag in the sensorimotor program. This is basically treating attention as a kind of action and "don't attend" as not doing that action. (If that were true it's possible that there may also be other attention mechanisms, e.g. the precision weighting posited by Predictive Coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding#Precision_weighting).
(2) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of attention as a kind of executable sensorimotor action.
The Tell-Tale Brain A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran
With a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions, Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in brain science, including language, creativity, and consciousness.
Domestic violence may leave telltale damage in the brain. Scientists want to find it.
@NPR reports: "Agencies including the [U.S.] Centers for Disease Prevention and Control now recognize intimate partner abuse as a leading cause of [traumatic brain injury]."
"Scientists have discovered a universal pattern of brain waves in multiple primate species, including humans."
LiveScience reports: "This pattern of electrical activity is seen in the six layers of tissue that cover the outside of mammals' brains, known as the cerebral cortex."
Take advantage of the Gate Control mechanism of Pain processing by ripping your nosehairs all out at once to distract you from your crippling dystopian moral injury.
Fundamentals of Brain and Behavior An Introduction to Human Neuroscience by William J. Ray
Fundamentals of Brain and Behavior provides an accessible introduction to the study of human neuroscience.The book has been carefully designed to accompany a typical entry-level course, covering core topics including the function and structure of the nervous system, basic human motivations, stress and health, and cognitive functioning.