Role of the Vestibular System in the Construction of Self
How do we construct a unified self-identity as a thinking and feeling person inhabiting a body, separate and unique from other entities? A “self” with the capacity for autobiographical memory and complex thought? Traditionally, the field of cognitive science has been concerned with explaining the mind in isolation from the body.The growing field ofembodied cognition, on the other hand, seeks to rejoin them. One major strand has focused ongrounding higher-order semantics and language understanding inperceptual and sensory-motor representations. This view is distinct from theories of knowledge based on abstract, amodal r...
Source: The Neurocritic - July 16, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

What Is Thought?
Is that some sort of trick question?Everyone knows what thought is. Or do they...  My questions for you today are:How do you define “a thought” (yes, a single thought)? Where is the boundary from one thought to the next?What is “thought” more generally? Does this cognitive activity require conscious awareness? Or language? We don ' t want to be linguistic chauvinists, now do we, so let ' s assume mice have them. But how about shrimp? Or worms?What is “a thought”?Can you define what a discrete “thought” is?  This question was motivated by a persistent brain myth:You have an estimated 70,000 thought...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 30, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

The Big Bad Brain
I ’m high, staring at the ceilingSending my love, what a wonderful feelingWhat comes next, I see a lightI ’m along for the ride as I’m taking flight-Sir Sly,HighPlus a cool brain tattoo to boot. AND the song is anearworm (at least it is for me).It feels good to be running from the devilAnother breath and I ' m up another levelIt feels good to be up above the cloudsIt feels good for the first time in a long time now-Sir Sly,HighA monument to love unspokenCarved into stone “Unwilling to come undone”-Sir Sly,HighHere ' s what singer Landon Jacobshad to say about those specific lyrics:“in the face of what I incorre...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 19, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Terrorism and the Implicit Association Test
Induced Stereotyping?Imagine that you ' re riding on a very crowded bus in a busy urban area in the US. You get on during a shift change, when a new driver takes over for the old one. The new driver appears to be Middle Eastern, and for a second you have a fleeting reaction that the situation might become dangerous. This is embarrassing and ridiculous, you think. You hate that the thought even crossed your mind. There are1.8 billion Muslims in the world. How many are radical Islamist extremists? For example, in the UK at present, the number comprises maybe0.00000167% of all Muslims?1Language matters.Theresa May:“First, w...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 8, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Gaslighting in the Medical Literature
Have you felt that your sense of reality has been challenged lately? That the word “truth” has no meaning any more? Does the existence ofalternative facts make you question your own sanity? In modern usage, the termgaslighting refers to  “a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making him/her doubt his/her own memory and perception”.Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, m...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 25, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Looking for Empathy in All the Wrong Places: Bizarre Cases of Factitious Disorder
art byZdzis ław BeksińskiFactitious disorder is a rare psychiatric condition where an individual deliberately induces or fabricates an ailment because of a desire to fulfill the role of a sick person. This differs from garden varietymalingering, where an individual feigns illness for secondary gain (drug seeking, financial gain, avoidance of work, etc.). The primary goal in factitious disorder is to garner attention and sympathy from caregivers and medical staff.The psychiatric handbookDSM-5 identifiestwo types of factitious disorder:Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (formerly known asMunchausen syndrome when the feign...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 14, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

The Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience, Explained
Are emergent properties really for losers? Why are architectures important? What are “mirror neuron ensembles” anyway? Mylast post presented an idiosyncratic distillation of theBig Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience symposium, presented by six speakers at the 2017 CNS meeting. Here I ’ll briefly explain what I meant in the bullet points. In some cases I didn ' t quite understand what the speaker meant so I used outside sources. At the end is a bonus reading list.The first two speakers made an especially fun pair on the topic of memory: they held opposing views on the “engram”, the physical manifestation of a memory ...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 18, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

What are the Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience?
This year, the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute (CNI) and the Max-Planck-Society organized a symposium on Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience. I enjoyed this fun forum organized by David Poeppel and Mike Gazzaniga. The format included three pairs of speakers on the topics of memory, language, and action/motor who “consider[ed] some major challenges and cutting-edge advances, from molecular mechanisms to decoding approaches to network computations.”Co-host Marcus Raichle recalled his inspiration for the symposium: a similar Big Ideas session at the Society for Neuroscience meeting. But human neuroscience was absent from...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 4, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

What's Popular at #CNS2017?
Memorywins again!Word cloud for 835poster titles at CNS 2017.The 2017Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting will start tomorrow, March 25. To no one ' s surprise, memory is the most popular topic in the bottom-up abstract submission sweepstakes.In contrast, the top-down selections of theCognosenti are light on memory, with a greater emphasis on attention, speech, mind-wandering, and reward.Word cloud for 16 titles/abstracts in fourInvited Symposia.The member-generatedSymposium Sessions are once again memory-centric, but with the key additions of speech, learning, information, and oscillations.Word cloud for 43 title...
Source: The Neurocritic - March 24, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

A brain-enhancement amusement park mockumentary
“There was a level of undefined brain activity, about 30% higher, than the kids who stayed on the ground.”The Centrifuge Brain Project is an awesome short film by Till Nowak, featuring a deadpan performance by Leslie Barany.The fictitious website of theInstitute for Centrifugal Research (ICR) is one of the best since LACUNA Inc. (which lives on atarchive.org):Welcome to the homepage of ICR - the world ' s leading research laboratory in the highly specialized field of spinning people around.We are proud of our history - a chronicle of passion and pioneering achievements in the realms of brain manipulation, excessive G-F...
Source: The Neurocritic - March 11, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Patent for Stimulation of Brodmann Areas 1-48 and all other structures
Fig. 1 (Roskams-Edriset al., 2017). The number of patents implicating specific brain regions has risen from 1976 to the mid 2010s. Results were obtained by searching The Lens patent database (http://lens.org/). “What is the ethical value of awarding patent rights that implicate regions of the brain?” Do the applicants intend to patent the function of specific brain areas? This absurd (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - March 5, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Neurofeedback Training For Insomnia No Better Than Sham
Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a procedure that tries to shape a participant ' s pattern of brain activity by providing real-time feedback, often in the form of a video game combined with other sensory stimuli that provide rewards when the “correct” state is achieved. The most common form of NFT uses EEG (brainwave) activity recorded non-invasively from the scalp. The EEG is a complex mixture (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - February 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Using Discourse Analysis to Assess Cognitive Decline
Figure from Gauthier et al. (2005). Alzheimer ' s Disease (AD) and other dementias are progressive neurodegenerative conditions that unfold over time. Subtle symptoms such as forgetfulness and word finding problems may progress to mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and then escalate to full-blown dementia. Recent efforts to classify prodromal states have included automated analysis of spontaneous (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - February 17, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Distortions of Reality
President Trump this week repeated an assertion he made shortly after his election: that millions of ballots cast illegally by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote. If true, this would suggest the wholesale corruption of American democracy. Not to worry: As far as anyone knows, the president ’s assertion is akin to saying that millions of unicorns also voted illegally. - In a (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - January 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs

Why Do Political Figures Lie So Blatantly?
Are They Pathological Liars? Narcissists? Psychopaths? “Masterful Manipulators”?  Trump Spokesman’s Lecture on Media Accuracy Is Peppered With Lies Nearly all American politicians lie, but few as blatantly as those affiliated with the present administration. How do they do it? Are they lacking a conscience? Do they believe their own lies? Do they start with small falsehoods, stretch the (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - January 21, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs