One of the big complaints from academic (research) physicians is that their medical school debt acts as a financial deterrent to doing translational science. Apparently Cleveland Clinic is going to do something substantive about that.
Jim
Brooks on Neural Buddhism
David Brooks on the revolution going on within the neuroscience revolution–the notion that something mysterious emerges out of functional brain activity….
Money quote:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
I have a collaborator in India (we share a graduate student) who thinks along these lines. It’s quite exciting.
Jim
Final thoughts on Decade of the Mind 3
I left the conference with a tremendous appreciation for ape
research–particularly the complexities of their cognitive capabilities.
Having sponsored ape research in collaboration with the National Zoo, I
had thought I was fairly sophisticated in terms of understanding what is
going on in the field–I now know I'm not.
I think it is fair to say that ape research, both in the field and with
animals in captivity, is undergoing a similar revolution to what
happened in neuroscience over the past decade–the methodologies are
becoming ever more sophisticated which allow for asking more interesting
questions.
Our next Decade of the Mind symposium will be in January out at Sandia
National Laboratory. The focus will be robotics. Stay tuned.
Jim
Blogging from Decade of the Mind III
Things are about to get underway here in Des Moines. I’ll be blogging my way through it. This evening, Decade of the Mind steering committee member Giulio Tononi will be giving the keynote lecture, “Consciousness and the Brain”. For those of you who missed him last May at the first Decade symposium, this is a great opportunity. He is one of the very best scientist speakers in the world.
Jim
Future of Humanity and "The Great Filter"
A great article by Oxford’s Nick Bostrom from the MIT Technology Review. Following up on Fermi, why do we seem to be alone in the Universe? Is the “Great Filter” behind us or worse, ahead of us? Or both?
Jim
NY Times to higher ed: maybe smarter isn’t better
Actually the piece from today’s NY Times suggests that from an evolutionary standpoint, being smarter isn’t necessarily a winning strategy for animals. That idea may be worth bringing up in my talk at the Third Decade of the Mind symposium–I’m flying out to Des Moines this afternoon.
Jim
David Brooks: The Cognitive Age
From David Brooks’ column in today’s NY Times:
The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.
The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?
Read it all.
Jim
Decade of the Mind III–Des Moines
Here’s the EurekAlert from AAAS on the Decade of the Mind III Symposium coming up next week in Des Moines.
Jim
Decade of the Mind goes international
Manfred Spitzer at the University of Ulm issues a clarion call for the internationalization of the Decade of the Mind project in the on-line journal Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine.
Money quote:
Emphatically, the Decade of the Mind must be a global initiative, and certainly not merely a USA initiative concerning national (USA) science and medicine, the national (USA) economy, and national (USA) security and well-being. Just as global warming affects all of us and needs to be studied and dealt with on a global scale, the mind is something that should be studied from all angles of the globe and within all cultural backgrounds and contexts. Let’s not waste time and let’s ALL get started! All of humankind!
Jared Diamond on the cognitive need for vengeance
I’m up on Wintergreen mountain for the weekend–about the only time I can leisurely read The New Yorker–which I still believe has some of the best writing around. Jared Diamond’s latest anthropological piece about vengeance among New Guinea Highlanders makes for some powerful reading. He concludes that:
We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.
My question is what is the evolutionary fitness argument for this human trait? How did the need for vengeance get selected for?
Read the entire article. It opens up some interesting questions for neuroscientists.
Jim
