From the Dana Foundation: Dr. Pierre Magistretti and Dr. Francois Ansermet spoke with Dana Foundation Chairman William Safire about their book, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious, and the bridge between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. The event took place on November 14, 2007 at the Dana Center in Washington, DC. 

Click here for the audio archive.

From the Dana Foundation: The Dana Foundation released at a news conference on March 4, Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a three-year study at seven universities, which finds strong links between arts education and cognitive development. Speakers included Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D., UC, Santa Barbara; Michael Posner, Ph.D., University of Oregon;  Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D., Harvard University  and Brian Wandell, Ph.D., Stanford University.  Guy Mckhann, M.D., Johns Hopkins University gave a summary and Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts spoke of the study’s importance to the field of education.

Click here for the webcast archive.

Click here for the event transcript.

Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic

BY FREDERICK GRINNELL
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
248 PAGES

Reviewed by Alice Kim

From grade school onwards, I was taught that science follows a linear process.  The practice of science was equated to the scientific method.  During my undergraduate career I had the opportunity to get involved in research through independent research course projects, as well as summer student research programs.  Throughout these experiences I started to sense that there may be more to the practice of science than the scientific method that I was taught in school.  Now as a graduate student, I’m more aware of the ambiguity and passion that complements the objectivity and logic ingrained in the practice of science.  In his book Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic, Dr. Frederick Grinnell describes the practice of science, embracing the role of intuition and passion, as well as logic and objectivity, in the path to discovery.  Importantly, throughout his book Grinnell highlights the fact that scientists begin their work with particular interests and commitments.  He recognizes that the hegemonic views of society are not filtered out from the practice of science.  Instead, he emphasizes that the everyday practice of science seeks truth (small “t”) as we currently understand things, not Truth (capital “T”) that further experience cannot change.

Authored by Max Velmans

Understanding Consciousness, 2nd Edition provides a unique survey and evaluation of consciousness studies, along with an original analysis of consciousness that combines scientific findings, philosophy and common sense. Building on the widely praised first edition, this new edition adds fresh research, and deepens the original analysis in a way that reflects some of the fundamental changes in the understanding of consciousness that have taken place over the last 10 years.

The book is divided into three parts; Part one surveys current theories of consciousness, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Part two reconstructs an understanding of consciousness from first principles, starting with its phenomenology, and leading to a closer examination of how conscious experience relates to the world described by physics and information processing in the brain. Finally, Part three deals with some of the fundamental issues such as what consciousness is and does, and how it fits into to the evolving universe. As the structure of the book moves from a basic overview of the field to a successively deeper analysis, it can be used both for those new to the subject and for more established researchers.

Understanding Consciousness tells a story with a beginning, middle and end in a way that integrates the philosophy of consciousness with the science. Overall, the book provides a unique perspective on how to address the problems of consciousness and as such, will be of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and other professionals concerned with mind/body relationships, and all who are interested in this subject.

2009, 408 pp, paperback and hardback
ISBN: 978-0-415-42516-2

Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz
Article in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

Abstract
When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can think of it either from a functional standpoint or from a physical standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking difference between two kinds of states-those that involve phenomenal consciousness and those that do not. Specifically, it appears that ascriptions of states that involve phenomenal consciousness show a special sort of sensitivity to purely physical factors.

Click here for the complete article.

Michel Cabanac, Arnaud J. Cabanac, Andre Parent
Article in Behavioural Brain Research

Abstract
The brains of animals show chemical, anatomical, and functional differences, such as dopamine production and structure of sleep, between Amniota and older groups. In addition, play behavior, capacity to acquire taste aversion, sensory pleasure in decision making, and expression of emotional tachycardia and fever started also to be displayed by Amniota, suggesting that the brain may have began to work differently in early Amniota than in Lissamphibia and earlier vertebrates. Thus we propose that emotion, and more broadly speaking consciousness, emerged in the evolutionary line among the early Amniota. We also propose that consciousness is characterized by a common mental pathway that uses pleasure, or its counterpart displeasure, as a means to optimize behavior.

Roland D. Thijs, Bastiaan R. Bloem, J. Gert van Dijk
Article in Journal of Neurology

Abstract
In this practically oriented review, we will outline the clinical approach of patients with falls due to an impairment or loss of consciousness. Following a set of definitions, we describe the salient clinical features of disorders leading to such falls. Among falls caused by true loss of consciousness, we separate the clinical characteristics of syncopal falls (due to reflex syncope, hypovolemia, orthostatic hypotension or cardiac syncope) from falls due to other causes of transient unconsciousness, such as seizures. With respect to falls caused by an apparent loss of consciousness, we discuss the presentation of cataplexy, drop attacks, and psychogenic falls. Particular emphasis will be laid upon crucial features obtained by history taking for distinguishing between the various conditions that cause or mimic a transient loss of consciousness.

Click here for a preview of the paper.

Ken A. Paller, Joel L.Voss, Carmen E. Westerberg
Article in Perspectives on Psychological Science

Abstract
There is a marked lack of consensus concerning the best way to learn how conscious experiences arise. In this article, we advocate for scientific approaches that attempt to bring together four types of phenomena and their corresponding theoretical accounts: behavioral acts, cognitive events, neural events, and subjective experience. We propose that the key challenge is to comprehensively specify the relationships among these four facets of the problem of understanding consciousness without excluding any facet. Although other perspectives on consciousness can also be informative, combining these four perspectives could lead to significant progress in explaining a conscious experience such as remembering. We summarize some relevant findings from cognitive neuroscience investigations of the conscious experience of memory retrieval and of memory behaviors that transpire in the absence of the awareness of remembering. These examples illustrate suitable scientific strategies for making progress in understanding consciousness by developing and testing theories that connect the behavioral expression of recall and recognition, the requisite cognitive transactions, the neural events that make remembering possible, and the awareness of remembering.

Click here for the full paper.

(Original posted on 15 Nov. 2008)
Investigating Inner Experience
Brain, Mind, Technology

Hong Kong, China, June 11-14, 2009

www.asiaconsciousness.org/TSC

Long a meeting place for Eastern and Western ideas and the media capital of Asia, Hong Kong, China hosts the 15th in a series of Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences held yearly since 1994. The conferences are known for broad, interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approaches to the age-old question of how the brain produces consciousness awareness

Subjective inner experience has long been approached through introspection, mysticism, and meditative contemplation, and revealed through art, mythology and ritual. In the past half century, science has found computation among neurons to explain brain functions, and promoted the possibility of conscious machines. Now, various media technologies attempt to communicate, simulate and re-create inner experience. In a spirit of synergy, the conference is organized along three entwined themes.

Contribute, comment and collaborate

Nature Precedings is a free online service from NPG that enables researchers in the life sciences to openly share preliminary findings, solicit community feedback, and claim priority over discoveries by posting preprint manuscripts, white papers, technical reports, posters, and presentations.

Apologies for the confusion everyone.  It won’t be happening again for quite sometime.

In a recent study, Sheline and colleagues examined whether patients with major depression were impaired in their ability to regulate the activity of the default mode network, which is characterized by self-referential functions.  To do so, they used fMRI to measure changes in brain activity occurring within this network in 20 individuals with major depression and 21 demographically similar control participants.  The depressed and healthy control participants were asked to examine negative pictures passively and also to reappraise them actively. 

In contrast to the depressed participants, the healthy control participants demonstrated reduced activity in widely distributed regions of the default mode network (ventromedial prefrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, lateral parietal cortex, and lateral temporal cortex) while looking at the negative pictures and reappraising them.  Moreover, compared to the healthy control participants, the depressed participants demonstrated a larger increase in activity in other default mode network regions (amygdala, parahippocampus, and hippocampus) while they looked at negative pictures. 

Based on these data, Sheline and colleagues suggest that depression is characterized by both a stimulus-induced increase in brain activity and a failure to broadly decrease the activity of the default mode network.  Further, the authors suggest that these findings provide a brain network framework within which to consider the pathophysiology of depression.

Click here for full access to the study.

We often make social comparisons to evaluate others and ourselves.  In a recent study in Science, Takahashi and colleagues investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms of envy and schadenfreude (pleasure at another’s misfortune) using fMRI.  The researchers found that envy and schadenfreude are associated with different parts of the brain.  Whereas envy was associated with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, schadenfreude was associated with the ventral striatum. The dorsal anterior cingulate is involved in the processing of cognitive conflicts; envy-related activation in this region was greater when the envied person had superior and more self-relevant characteristics.  The ventral striatum is involved in processing reward and the schadenfreude-related activity in this region was stronger when misfortune befell an envied person more so than a neutral person.  Additionally, envy-related activity in the anterior cingulate predicted schadenfreude-related activity in the ventral striatum.  Takahashi and colleagues suggest that their findings document mechanisms of painful emotion, envy, and a rewarding reaction, schadenfreude.

Meditation can be conceptualized as a complex form of attentional and emotional training that promotes well-being and emotional balance.  In most meditation traditions, a common practice is to focus one’s attention to internal body sensations, and many traditions state that this practice results in an increased awareness of internal body sensations.  In a study by Khalsa and colleagues, two groups of meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) were compared to a group of nonmeditators on their ability to detect their own heartbeat.  (The meditators and nonmeditators were matched for age and body mass index.)  Although the investigators predicted that the experienced meditators would outperform the nonmeditators, no such evidence was found.  Compared to the nonmeditators, however, the experienced meditators consistently rated the difficulty of the heartbeat detection task as easier and their interoceptive performance as superior.  These results suggest that the practice of focusing one’s attention to internal body sensations (a core feature of meditation) does not enhance the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest, but it alters the subjective experience of it.

Why do some people succeed far more than others? Martin Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, tackles this question in his latest book Outliers.  Gladwell argues that the true story of success is much more complex than the story that is typically told about extremely successful people - one that centers on ambition and intelligence.  Click here for the table of contets.

Click here if you’re interested in knowing the most surprising pattern that Gladwell uncovered in his book, how he thinks Outliers compare to Blink and The Tipping Point and more.

Click here for a related article on genius by Gladwell in The New Yorker.