New Scientist has started a new feature series on people with bizarre and rare mind / brain disorders and predicaments. This article looks at Cotard’s syndrome. What is fascinating about this article and syndrome is the interplay between brain, consciousness and self-awareness. That these conscious states arise from brian patterns:
“When I was in hospital I kept on telling them that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good ’cause my brain was dead. I lost my sense of smell and taste. I didn’t need to eat, or speak, or do anything. I ended up spending time in the graveyard because that was the closest I could get to death.”
Category Consciousness
Check this New Scientist article out: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23401-emerging-consciousness-glimpsed-in-babies.html “A glimpse of consciousness emerging in the brains of babies has been recorded…
Humans’ closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, have the ability to “think about thinking” — what is called “metacognition,” according to new research by scientists at Georgia State University and the University at Buffalo.
Today at the White House, President Barak Obama unveiled the “BRAIN” Initiative — a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.
Here is a decent essay from author and philosopher Stephen Cave, twinned with his book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (Crown, 2012).
If you, like me, were at the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate, your jaw will have dropped when Craig, in defence of God vis-a-vis animal suffering and the problem of evil, claimed that animals don’t suffer pain.
He claimed that most animals didn’t have the conscious awareness of pain that humans and other primates do. He was solely relying on the work of Michael Murray in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. This book sets out that there are, broadly speaking, three levels of pain suffering and related awareness, amoebas in the first, humans in the last, and most higher animals in the middle. They feel pain but are not consciously aware of it in the same way as humans are.
This is a hilarious post from Less Wrong. Zombies, the Movie (philosophical zombies, of course). For those who are not familiar with philosophical zombies, here is wiki’s definition:
So you might well have caught this on various science websites, but the thoughts of a fish, a zebrafish, have been caught on camera. As Gizmodo report:
A team of Japanese researchers has achieved something incredible: they’ve captured, for the first time ever, a movie which shows how thoughts form in the brain.
This really is a fascinating article. Properly. Could it be that we are starting to unravel the neural basis…
I find this amazing. Language. I can have a 45 minute conversation with a friend. Neither of us consciously think up individual words. Our word choices (even as I am typing this) are non-consciously chosen. At 150 words a minute, that’s a lot of words decided upon non-consciously. I generally appear to be listening to my own words when they come out.
This is an interesting article from the New York Times. I like it – it is well written and thoughtful, making us ponder the reality of the selfish gene, and the idea that we could, at any time, be being manipulated by other organisms, unbeknownst to our humuncular selves.