Interesting article about architecture, design and the brain.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
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| A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects–sofas, watches, etc.–subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. |
| A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we’re more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. |
| High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. |
| clutter increases the “memorability” of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. |
 When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.
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| Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn’t due to these signals. |
| The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. |
Dualist philosophers like Descartes believed that the mind and consciousness exist outside the physical world, producing our actions by interacting with the physical meat of our brains. The idea has become commonplace, but it’s challenged by neuroscientific studies like this one, which show that the conscious intention to move emerges from electrical activity in neurons, tangible objects that are all too real.
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| Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing have applied modular neural networks to model cognitive functions associated with awareness and time-delay neural networks to temporally model self-awareness. |
| This research represents a dual advance in the modelling of awareness-associated cognitive functions. On the theoretical side, it applies the theory of informons and holons to awareness structures. An informon is an information entity. It can take the form of data, news or knowledge. The term holon refers to autonomous entities that act both as a part and as a whole. |
| In the case of human beings, self-awareness does not imply just an abstract image of what one is, but also an image of one’s trajectory throughout time. |
| The proposed models and their neural network implementations have basically two possible fields of application. |
The intriguing title hides an interesting application of mathematical tools used in quantum mechanics to model decision making under condition of uncertainty.
Pothos and Busemeyer hope that further research on quantum probability models of human cognition could help answer fundamental questions about the nature of how we think. For example, what does it mean to be rational? Another example is Schrodinger’s equation, which predicts a periodic oscillation between choices after a minimum length of time. This oscillation matches with electroencephalography signals and may explain why the longer you debate on a decision, the more you fluctuate. Overall, if our brains use quantum principles, and quantum computation is known to be fundamentally faster than classical computation in computers, then perhaps quantum principles can even help explain the success of human cognition. | Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. |
| As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply “wishful thinking.” |
| This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. |
| scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making |
| While in the classical model an individual is committed to exactly one preference at any given time, in the quantum model an individual experiences a superposition of these preferences |
| While classical probability theory is too restrictive to fully describe human decision-making, this study shows that quantum theory provides a promising framework for modeling human cognition.Read more at www.physorg.com |
Nothing is going to have a greater impact on the fabric of society and our understanding of human identity more than a reliable tool of editing, erasing and amplifying memories. If not the first, this is one of the holy grails of brain research nd technology. The ethical and other philosophical implications are profound. Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit. |
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. |
| The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. |
The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells. The billion-dollar question is how? Read more at www.nytimes.com |
| “This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues,” |
| Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Interesting research. A point not mentioned in the article is that near misses represent a bias towards ‘analog perception’ over ‘discrete perception’. In many cases we process discrete information as if it is analog, as it is apparent from this research, even if we are fully aware that the relevant outcomes depend only on discrete values such as win no-win. | very casino game is a game of odds, but not always in the way you think. Work published this month in the journal Neuron shows that almost winning actually increases the odds - that we’ll keep playing. |
Gambling is a widespread cultural phenomena that has spanned thousands of years and almost every civilization that’s appeared on the face of the planet. And as long as gambling has been around the odds have always favored the house to win. Logically it has to be this way; otherwise casinos would have gone out of business millennia ago. But with the odds stacked against us and our rational brain aware of this, why do we bother to gamble at all? |
In the current study, researchers from Cambridge examined the brains of 15 people with a fMRI machine while they gambled on a slot machine. What they found was that brain activity for winning spins was greatly increased in the ventral striatum and anterior insula; part of a neuronal circuit that is well known as the reward system. |
In a nutshell the way our brain processes our feelings of reward and success at a job well done is: trigger > reward > reinforcement. In gambling the trigger is of course money, and this fires up the reward systems in your brain, which are largely governed by release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This feels great, you are rewarded and you want to do it again and the trigger is reinforced as something that’s good. |
This process isn’t limited to gambling or money of course; it’s also the same thing that happens when you eat delicious chocolate, or why I turn into a slobbering canine when I smell bacon. You might also have guessed that this is part of the mechanism behind addiction to heroin and other drugs of abuse, which we can define as uncontrolled reward and reinforcement. |
Close enough is good enough |
That gambling activates the reward system isn’t a surprise. But the astonishing observation from this study comes when we look at brain activity when the subjects “almost win”.
In this case “almost wining” was when the slot machine dials stopped tumbling and 2 out of the three symbols lined up on the payout line and the third matching symbol appeared just above the “win line”. When this happened, the pattern of activity was in the same brain areas as when they actually won. |
It seems that a near-miss is enough to trigger the reward > reinforcement cascade, and is effectively encouraging us to continue gambling. |
As if to drive the point home the brain pattern of near-miss activity was also very different from the patterns observed when the slot machine spin was still a losing spin but where none of the symbols were anywhere near close to matching - despite the economic result being the same: zero dollars won. |
While it wasn’t previously clear how it worked, the near-miss phenomena has been known for some time. What is perhaps more insidious though is that the optimum rate of near-misses to keep people gambling has been calculated at 30% and subsequently implemented into the programming of many slot machines.*** Read more at veryevolved.com |
The connection between I.Q and genetics is stronger than thought. THE first images to reveal the quality of the brain's wiring show that more aspects of intelligence are inherited than previously known. The finding hints at ways to boost intelligence. |
Now it seems that the quality of these connections, which is governed by the integrity of the protective myelin sheath that encases them, is also largely genetic, and correlates with IQ. |
Paul Thompson and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, scanned the brains of 23 sets of identical twins and the same number of fraternal twins, using a type of magnetic resonance imaging called HARDI. MRI scans typically show the volumes of different tissues in the brain by measuring the amount of water present. HARDI measures the amount of water that is diffusing through white matter, a measure of the integrity of myelin sheathing, and therefore the speed of nerve impulses. “It's like a picture of your mental speed,” says Thompson. |
By comparing brain maps of identical twins, which share the same genes, with fraternal twins, which share about half their genes, the team calculate that myelin integrity is genetically determined in many brain areas important for intelligence. This includes the corpus callosum, which integrates signals from the left and right sides of the body, and the parietal lobes, responsible for visual and spatial reasoning and logic (see above). Myelin quality in these areas was also correlated with scores on tests of abstract reasoning and overall intelligence (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212). |
Just because intelligence is strongly genetic, that doesn't mean it cannot be improved. “It's just the opposite,” says Richard Haier, of the University of California, Irvine, who works with Thompson. “If it's genetic, it's biochemical, and we have all kinds of ways of influencing biochemistry.” |
Myelin integrity is an especially promising target for manipulation, because, unlike the volume of grey matter, it changes throughout life. That it can change may seem surprising given its heritability. One explanation is that genes drive us to interact with our environment in ways that can lead to changes in myelin integrity, says Thompson. |
Identifying the genes that promote high-integrity myelin could lead to ways to enhance the genes' activity or artificially add the proteins they code for. This may in turn provide therapies for multiple sclerosis, autism and attention deficit disorder, which are associated with degraded myelin. Intelligence enhancement in people who just want help passing an exam, say, is also “within the realm of possibility”, Thompson reckons. |
Medical treatments are still a long way off, warns Naomi Friedman, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Colorado in Boulder: “There'll be interactions between genes and environment that are going to have to be disentangled.” Read more at www.newscientist.com |
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