Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

The government shutdown….

I haven’t written yet about this partly because, as a scientist, I’m so frustrated with the quite real effect on research, particularly at the NIH. But science has become truly global and, as a result, if its not done here in the States, it will get done elsewhere–although the results may then not accrue to advantage of the US.

I’m even more concerned about the debt ceiling issue. I’ve written about that issue before in the context of sequestration. I’ll simply reiterate that the brinksmanship is a very bad thing for the global economy.

Ultimately what I’m most worried about is the political dysfunction in governance at the federal level. This has manifested throughout the Obama Presidency in one form or another. Many others have written how the dysfunction we are seeing now is reminiscent of that seen before the American Civil War. That’s not a good precedent.

K-12 performance: more testing

From my college classmate Zeke Emanuel in The New Republic, here. Money quote:

Done properly, testing is not inert. Rather, it can be much more like the physical phenomena underlying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the act of measuring students, you can actually affect how much knowledge they absorb and how well they retain it.

Zeke is raising a really important point. Learning outcomes are improved by the action of taking a test and getting the feedback of a grade. And increasing the frequency of testing actually improves those outcomes.

Mind and brain…

An excellent essay ultimately about consciousness and what neuroscience may reveal about it by Adam Zeman and Oliver Davies is here from the UK magazine, Standpoint.

Money quote:

Recent research, and the thinking that it has inspired, does not point to any simple reductive identity of mind and brain. An influential, and representative, theory of consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s theory of “integrated information”, suggests that all of nature has a – sometimes – hidden potential for mentality. The Canadian philosopher Evan Thompson has underlined the way in which the precursors of minds like ours can be glimpsed in even the simplest of organisms. Other contemporary philosophers, including Edinburgh’s Andy Clark, have emphasised that human minds are sustained by culture and community. The role of action and the body in forming and mediating consciousness has been a key theme in the work of the American neurologist Antonio Damasio, the Parisian psychologist Kevin O’Regan, the Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë and the Brighton-based psychiatrist Hugo Critchley. In the work of these thinkers, mind is understood to be “extended, embodied and embedded” – extended in its interactions with space and time, embodied through its dialogue with both the body and the brain, and embedded in human culture and society. 

Read it all. Very worthwhile.