No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

Well, I warned you all. A shower of oxytocin, to fill all you bickering hordes with trust and mutual love.
Except, wouldn’t you know it, it’s never quite that simple.
You may remember oxytocin by one of its cutesy pseudonyms (“the cuddle hormone”, “the morality molecule”) if not by its technical handle. It’s the hormone [...]

So just a day or so after we revisit “A Word for Heathens“  — a story exploring the social ramifications of neurotechnology that induces Rapture On Demand — here comes a paper by Cosimo Urgesi and his buddies showing a relationship between the posterior parietal cortex and something called “Self-Transcendence” — an index, if we [...]

We’ve talked about free will on these screens before. We’ve referred to consciousness as the pointy-haired boss who takes credit for decisions made endless milliseconds before it was even aware of them; tumors that turn people into pedophiles, and do violence to the very concept of “culpability’; military hardware that bypasses conscious thought [...]

A single gene.   A single tweak.  Synapse speed boosted by perhaps a hundred milliseconds, tops.
Transgenic Genius rats.  (PopSci story here.)
Who’da thunk it would be so easy?  And how long before I can get these NR2B boosters in a nasal spray?

A couple of papers on the nature of religious belief came down the pike last week. One was high-tech, analytically complex, and neurological. The other was low-tech, analytically naïve, and all evo-psych handwavey. It also claimed to rebut the whole school of thought embodied in the first paper, although I don’t think [...]

I was going to devote today’s crawl to a recent study purporting to cast doubts on Libet’s notorious “no free-will” paper from the eighties— kinda pointless attacking that old study when more rigorous and recent studies have been so much more compelling on the same subject, and besides free will isn’t the same thing as [...]

Fascinating popsci piece on synaesthesia over at the BBC.  It turns out that your common garden-variety hearing-colors/seeing-music synaesthete is only the tip of the iceberg. There are people out there who can literally see time, as a multicolored ribbon winding about them in mid-air. There are folks who perceive letters or numbers as personality [...]

Most of you probably know about Turing machines: hypothetical gizmos built of paper punch-tape, read-write heads, and imagination, which can — step by laborious step — emulate the operation of any computer. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Sinclair ZX-80— a sad little personal computer so primitive that [...]

I was plenty pleased when little porridges of cultured neurons took their first baby steps towards running flight simulators or operating robots in the lab; I was downright smug when folks noticed that I’d got there first. Now, though, researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology are planning on putting head cheeses [...]

Yeah, I know. Merciful extended silence again.
Not that there’s nothing to talk about. There’s a paper just out in Consciousness & Cognition which purports to prove that logical thinking requires consciousness (which would seem to contradict other findings, but I haven’t read the paper yet so who knows). I’ve been ruminating on [...]