“Few people would honestly argue that there is nothing worth improving about the way they live and the way they experience the world. Some people regard their own particular weaknesses and conflicting emotions as a valuable and distinct part of their ‘personality,’ as something that contributes to the fullness of their lives. They believe that … Continue reading “Neuroscience And Buddhism: On Improving The Mind”
“Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions.” Now it seems that this consensus among scientists was, if not wrong, greatly oversimplified.
In his new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford, endocrinologist and expert on baboons, sets out to ground morality in neurobiology as opposed to the pure reason of Kant’s “categorical imperative”. But unlike Kant (at least for me), Sapolsky is highly readable.
As well as the obligatory fMRI-based neuroanatomy, all contemporary meditations on empathy contain earnest accounts of mirror neurons, described as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience”. These cells were first described in the 1990s by the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who studied macaque monkeys. He found that some motor cells (involved in the control of … Continue reading “Neuro-bollocks: Neuroscience’s Clumsy Attempts To Explain Empathy (And Everything Else)”
“Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected events in music directly lead to pleasure. The second, the Contrastive-Surprise Hypothesis, proposes that the juxtaposition of unexpected events and subsequent expected events leads to an overall rewarding … Continue reading “How Big A Factor Is Surprise In Enjoyment Of A Pop Song? A Neuroscience Answer”
“I realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we … Continue reading “Neuroscience Is Confirming Why Some Buildings Work And Some Don’t”
Partly, but not by itself, argues researches Steven Phelps. “Touch embeds us in a social network. We choose what contacts we reveal and to whom, and those choices define us to a community.”
Daniel Suggs reviews the early history of the science of the soul in the Western world, from Vesalius to Donne to Marlowe to Overton to the New England doctor who determined (with methodology that wasn’t exactly rigorous or ethical) that the soul weighs 21 grams.
“We still don’t understand how the brain works because we’re still ignorant about the middle ground between single neurons and behavior, which is the function of groups of neurons—of neural circuits.” And that’s because of “the methodological shackles that have prevented investigators from examining the activity of entire nervous system. This is probably futile, like … Continue reading “Is Neuroscience Getting In The Way Of Figuring Out How Our Brains Behave?”
“It’s the rare neuroscience finding that’s immediately applicable to everyday life: By knowing the way the brain is disposed to behaving or misbehaving in accordance to your goals, it’s easier to get the results you’re looking for, whether it’s avoiding the temptation of chocolate cookies or the pull of darkly ruminative thoughts.”
