Yet another survey has revealed surprisingly large numbers of people using drugs to boost their mental powers. What should be done?
MOST of us want to reach our full potential. We might drink a cup of coffee to stay alert, or go for a run to feel on top of the job. So where’s the harm in taking a pill that can do the same thing?
The series Too Hard for Science? discusses ideas scientists would love to explore that they think are difficult or impossible to investigate.
The Scientist: Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School.
Conciousness and healthy brain function appear to emerge not from neurons, but from the networks linking them together. Scientists are only just beginning to map that complex network and understand how it works. Whereas previous studies have shown that some regions of the human brain have more connections than others, until now no one has known exactly how those “hubs” interact.
Like chimpanzees, dolphins are large-brained and highly social animals, but can they recognize themselves in a mirror? Psychologist and dolphin researcher Diana Reiss discusses her work with dolphin communication and cognition.
Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:
The cerebellum is far more intensively involved in helping us navigate than previously thought. To move and learn effectively in spatial environments our brain, and particularly our hippocampus, creates a “cognitive” map of the environment. The cerebellum contributes to the creation of this map through altering the chemical communication between its neurones. If this ability is inactivated, the brain is no longer able to to create an effective spatial representation and thus navigation in an environment becomes impaired. The details of these observations were recently published inScience by the Ruhr University neuroscientist, Marion André who is a student of the International Graduate School of Neuroscience( IGSN), along with her colleagues in France.
