Is mathematics invented or discovered?

Brain activity predicts errors

Posted by JayServ on Thursday April 24, @10:12PM
from the dept.
"A team of researchers from laboratories in America, Britain, Germany and Norway used an imaging machine to scan the brains of a group of volunteers who were set a “flanker” test. This measures performance in the presence of distracting information: they were asked to respond as quickly as possible to the direction of an arrow flanked by other arrows that point in the same or opposite direction. Although the task is simple and repetitive, to keep providing the right answer demands a fair bit of brain power: people make a mistake about 10% of the time. When performing correctly the volunteers' brains showed increased levels of activity in those parts associated with cognitive effort, as would be expected. However, these areas gradually became less active before errors were made. At the same time another set of regions in the brain became more active. These regions are part of a so-called “default mode network” and show increased used when people are resting or asleep. " http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11088585
Read More...   Add Comment...

When it comes to emotions, Eastern and Western cultures see things very differently

Posted by Keel on Friday March 07, @08:19AM
from the societal-influences dept.

Researchers from Canada and Japan have uncovered some remarkable results on how eastern and western cultures assess situations very differently. According to Takahiko Masuda, a professor from the University of Alberta: "Our results demonstrate that when North Americans are trying to figure out how a person is feeling, they selectively focus on that particular person's facial expression, whereas Japanese consider the emotions of the other people in the situation." This may be because Japanese attention is not concentrated on the individual, but includes everyone in the group, says Masuda. "East Asians seem to have a more holistic pattern of attention, perceiving people in terms of the relationships to others." (Alternative Article)

Chimp and human communication trace to same brain region

Posted by Keel on Monday March 03, @07:40AM
from the dept.

An area of the brain involved in the planning and production of spoken and signed language in humans plays a similar role in chimpanzee communication, researchers report online in the journal Current Biology. "Chimpanzee communicative behavior shares many characteristics with human language," said Jared Taglialatela of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. "The results from this study suggest that these similarities extend to the way in which our brains produce and process communicative signals." The results also suggest that the "neurobiological foundations" of human language may have been present in the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees, he said. www.physorg.com/news123423961.html

Doctors amazed by girl's ability to describe austism from the inside

Posted by Keel on Wednesday February 27, @06:25AM
from the communications dept.

Carly Fleischmann has severe autism and is unable to speak a word. But thanks to years of expensive and intensive therapy, this 13-year-old has made a remarkable breakthrough. Carly Fleischman expresses feelings by typing on her laptop computer. 

Arthur Fleischmann: "We were stunned. We realized inside was an articulate, intelligent, emotive person that we had never met. This was unbelievable because it opened up a whole new way of looking at her. Laypeople would have assumed she was mentally retarded or cognitively impaired. Even professionals labelled her as moderately to severely cognitively impaired. In the old days you would say mentally retarded, which means low IQ and low promise and low potential".

Carly Fleischmann: "It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can't talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them." http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4311223&page=1

Scientists "see" ghosts

Posted by Keel on Saturday February 23, @08:05AM
from the ghostbusters dept.

According to The Telegraph: Why do apparitions, bogeymen and phantoms like to lurk in the shadows? Scientists may have the answer. A team from University College London finds that when we gaze around in a poorly-lit context, it can fool our brains into seeing things that are not really there. Nobody has done a systematic study of ghosts, but computational biologists are convinced they are "all in the mind" and, in the light of the new work, it does not seem so surprising that they seem most often glimpsed in "spooky" dimly-lit circumstances. (Alternative Article)

Brain waves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature

Posted by Keel on Friday February 15, @03:15PM
from the dept.

The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain. University of Chicago mathematician Jack Cowan will offer this and related insights on the physics of brain activity this week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/uoc-bwp021208.php

Denial makes the world go round

Posted by Bollywood on Monday November 26, @06:57AM
from the I-never-bet-on-baseball-I-never-had-sex-with-that-woman dept.

(Article Link) Everyone is in denial about something; just try denying it and watch friends make a list. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships.

The Mind Of A Rock

Posted by Bollywood on Wednesday November 21, @08:46PM
from the ubiquitous-natural-dualism dept.

(Article Link) Confronted by the irritating problem of consciousness, some contemporary thinkers have resorted to what might seem lunacy. Did primitive mental experiences precede the evolution of brains, similar to how living cells and bodies required the existence of atoms beforehand? Or are "qualitative events" a completely brute emergent product of neural activity, without any non-biological causes whatsoever? Some skeptics respond with: Even if they did occur with matter interactions in general, how could such elemental mental states combine to form the kinds of complicated experiences we humans have? After all, when you put a bunch of people in the same room, their individual minds do not form a single collective mind. (Or do they?)

Robot consumers, grow up!

Posted by Bollywood on Thursday November 15, @12:27PM
from the to-serve-man dept.

(Article Link) Why can't American consumers handle the future that robotics is willing to offer? Our conception of consumer robotics is steered, almost entirely, by science fiction. Look at the best-selling book "How to Survive a Robot Uprising". With tongue firmly in cheek, Daniel H. Wilson warns that a robot uprising is inevitable. "How can all those Hollywood scripts be wrong?" he asks.

Part of the problem is the Western world's relatively short history with robots, with 1921 perhaps being the first use of the term and America's introduction to robots. Whereas automatons have been part of Japanese culture for hundreds of years, according to Timothy N. Hornyak. There they are seen as friends, helpers, entertainers, and companions. What the Japanese robot industry didn't anticipate was its target market's antipathy toward home robots. The more powerful and realistic the latter became, the less interest Americans showed.