mindlace

The extra amusing part about this article on hyperlexia is that the subject child has my name. Sounds awfully familiar, really.

The auditory system is interesting, especially relative to vision. Unlike vision, where you can look at something again if you weren’t sure what it was, something once heard is forever gone. This means that the auditory system has to do a good deal of processing and have what researchers call “sensory memory” to retain what […]

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

For my birthday, Vika got me Consciousness, an Introduction, by Susan Blackmore. Much of the text so far revolves around the purported mind-body problem, or the hard problem of consciousness. I’m not sure I have much patience for this alleged ‘hard problem’, and I think the fact that so much time has been […]

The ability of chimpanzees to track their relative status and standing with other members of the chimpanzee tribes, and to act upon it in various ways, including deception, deceit, collusion and war has been called [machiavellian intelligence][a].
It seems likely that our protohuman ancestor also had this trait. Let’s further assume that some band of […]

Eckhart Tolle is a man who was very unhappy and then figured out how not to
be. In [The Power of Now][] he writes about the truth that he discovered that
helped him to be that way, and kindly tries to share it with us.
Unfortunately, his understanding is tainted by his lack of understanding of
the brain, the body, […]

In the article Finding happiness the author discusses a Dr. Davidson who has put together enough fMRI and EEG recording to build an index to different moods, so you can look at a fMRI and say “This person is happy” or “this person is stressed”. More importantly, there’s a more crude left-right measure. The article […]