Consciousness and Cognition: Fragments of Mind and Brain

292 Pages·2007·7.94 MB·English

by  Henri Cohen

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CONSCIOUSNESS AND
COGNITION
FRAGMENTS OF
MIND AND BRAIN
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Consciousness and Cognition
Fragments of Mind and Brain
Edited by
HENRI COHEN and BRIGITTE STEMMER

AMSTERDAM (cid:127) BOSTON (cid:127) HEIDELBERG (cid:127) LONDON (cid:127) NEW YORK (cid:127) OXFORD
PARIS (cid:127) SAN DIEGO (cid:127) SAN FRANCISCO (cid:127) SINGAPORE (cid:127) SYDNEY (cid:127) TOKYO
Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier
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Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier
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First edition 2007
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The image on the front cover is reproduced with permission from an artwork (acrylics and
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Contents
Contributors viii New version – it was in the brain all
Introduction xxvi along 46
Early studies of patients with brain
1. How Did Modern Human Cognition
damage 47
Evolve? 3
Alittle Latin to help sort out the puzzle 48
Ian Tattersall
Information flow – making the model
Our large brain: does size matter? 5
dynamic 48
Tools, decoration and art 7
The brain’s control of movement 50
Where did modern human consciousness
Asummary and outline 51
come from? 12
Conclusion 17 5. Can Evolution Produce Robots? 53
Manfred Hild and Brigitte Stemmer
2. Taking Up Arms 19
Artificial intelligence 53
Michael Corballis
Thinking big 19 How does artificial evolution work? 56
The question of language 20 How artificial neurons work 58
Language is a hand-me-down! 21 How to get robots to behave 58
Convincing myself 21 What artificial neural nets can do 59
Book for sale 22 Auseful application: getting rid of
Objections 22 trash 61
When did autonomous speech emerge? 23 Learning and evolution 61
Not with a bang, but with a whimper 26 What is the current state of things? 62
Of what importance is evolutionary
3. Celebrating 300 Million Years of the Mind: robotics? 64
ABird’s Eye View 29 Future visions 64
Peter J. Snyder
What do we mean by ‘the mind’? 30 6. The Thought-Translation Device 69
Flying without frontal lobes 31 Niels Birbaumer &
What is intelligence, and how can this be Frank Appletree Rodden
measured in birds? 31 Using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)to
Birds, like humans, learn from careful translate thoughts into action 70
observation 33 Communicating with slow cortical
How is this possible with so little potentials 71
neocortical tissue? 34 The origin of slow cortical potentials in
From stories to controlled experiments 35 the human brain 72
Talking with Alex 38 The TTD in a nutshell 72
Bird play 39 Setting up and using the TTD 74
If my bird looks happy, is she really How the language support program
happy? 40 works 74
Anthropomorphism 41 The training procedure 76
Conclusion 42 The training of patient E.M. 77
TTD – visions for the future 80
4. Was Medieval Cell Doctrine More Modern
Than We Thought? 45 7. Babes in Arms: Studies in Laterality 83
Harry Whitaker Lauren Julius Harris
Abrief historical sketch – the standard The left side rules 83
view 45 Abias rediscovered 85
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vi CONTENTS
Is the bias just a matter of handedness? 88 11. Where’s the Missing Body? APuzzle for
Some things to know about handedness 89 Cognitive Science 149
What handedness could explain Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
about the holding-side bias 90 Act I 149
Problems for a handedness explanation 91 Act II 151
Is the bias a matter of posture? 93 Act III 153
What’s the difference between babies and Act IV 157
books? 95
Types of holds and their functions 97
12. Whose Free Will is it Anyway? or, The
States of ‘action-approach’ 97
Illusion of Determinism 163
The anatomy of emotion 101
Sidney J. Segalowitz
Emotions, attention, and side of
Is free will more than a feeling? 163
holding 102
Neuroscience, neural reductionism and
Can the attention hypothesis account for
determinism 164
other details of the holding-side bias? 103
The implications of reductionism
An exception to the left-side rule 105
and determinism for society and
Why don’t left-hand prohibitions decrease
psychology 165
left-side holding? 107
Psychology and materialism of the
In Sum 108
mind 166
Modern neuroscience and non-determinism:
radical changes of the late twentieth
8. Why a Creative Brain? Evolutionary century 167
Setups for Off-Line Planning of Coherent
The crux of the free-will debate: is brain
Stages 115 activity predictable? 168
William H. Calvin Future perspectives 170
Creativity is an evolutionary
newcomer 115
13. Affective Neuroscience and the Ancestral
Creativity for language instead? 116
Sources of Human Feelings 173
When an advance plan is needed 117
Jaak Panksepp
Innovation during get-set 118
The Darwinian process 119 Some personal lessons and LESSNS about
Speeding up the Darwinian process 120 the evolved nature of emotions 173
New uses for old things 121 Archaeology of mind: the affective sources
Long sentences and coherence 122 of consciousness 175
Creating new levels of organization 123 Five distinctions between affective con-
sciousness and cognitive consciousness 177
The emotional underpinnings of human
nature – toward a neuroevolutionary psy-
9. Creativity: Method or Magic? 127
chobiology 179
Stevan Harnad
Learning in emotional systems and more
What is not creative? 128
on the pervasive emotion-cognition
Creative trait or creative state? 131
interactions 182
Underlying mechanisms 131
Development of new psychiatric
Conclusions 137
medications 183
Mind views: emotional states and
cognitive information processing 184
10. The Cross-Cultural Brain 139
In sum 185
Eran Zaidel and Jonas Kaplan
Alexithymia 140
The laterality hypothesis of alexithymia 14. The Funny Meat Behind Our Eyes 191
141 Frank Appletree Rodden
A‘flashy’ way to do experiments 141 Humor and laughter for fun and (maybe)
The experiments 143 health 193
An invitation to participate in our online Humor and laughter from a biological
experiments 146 perspective 194
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CONTENTS vii
The functional cognitive anatomy of a 16. Petrol Sniffing, the Brain, and Aboriginal
joke 200 culture: Between Sorcery and
Where do we go from here? 202 Neuroscience 225
Sheree Cairney and Paul Maruff
Petrol sniffing 225
15. Practicing Safe Stress: ASelective Overview
Aboriginal culture 228
of the Neuroscience Research 205
Neuroscience 231
Cheryl M. McCormick
Both ways 238
Stress and stressors 205
Conclusion 242
Acute stress and memory 210
Chronic stress, brain structure, and 17. Chatting with Noam Chomsky 245
function 213 Noam Chomsky
Stress and mental health 215
How stress sculpts the developing Index 255
brain 218
Gender, stress, and the brain 220
Coping with stress 221
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Contributors
Niels Birbaumer (PhD)
Institute of Medical Psychology
and Behavioral Neurobiology
University of Tübingen
Germany
and
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
University of Trento
Italy
After being baptized three times in exchange
for food during the last days of World War II,
Niels started a career as a street criminal
in Vienna and later changed into a radical
member of left-wing political movements.
Returning to normality at the age of 18, Niels
studied experimental psychology, statistics,
and art history at the University of Vienna, Tübingen, Germany. Combining brain physi-
Austria. After obtaining his PhD (‘The EEG in ology with behavioral principles, Niels
blind borns’) and getting fired from Austrian developed new psychophysiological treat-
universities in 1969 during the students’ rev- ments for intractable epilepsy, chronic pain,
olution, he became a behavior therapist in attention deficit disorders, and Parkinson’s
Middlesex Hospital, London, andlater at the disease and a Thought TranslationDevice for
University of Munich, Departmentof Clinical completely paralyzed, locked-in populations.

Psychology, Germany. Despite his sinister Niels has received many awards for his
biography, the University of Tübingen made basic science and applied neuroscience con-
him Full Professor of Clinical and Biological tributions, particularly in the field of brain
Psychology and later he held a chair in psy- plasticity, among them the Leibniz Award of
chology at Pennsylvania State University, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and
USA. His Italian friends and his interest in the Einstein World Award of Science for sci-
wine and sausages and Italian poetry later entific contributions relevant to the develop-
brought him to a joint professorship for ing nations. He is currently president of the
Cognitive Neuroscience in Trento, Italy, and Society for Psychophysiological Research.
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CONTRIBUTORS ix
Sheree Cairney (PhD)
Research Fellow
Menzies School of Health Research
Charles Darwin University
Northern Territory
Australia
With a background in medical biophysics and
instrumentation, Sheree gradually migrated
to neurophysiological research at the Mental
Health Research Institute of Victoria. Here
she investigated the ocular motor and cogni-
tive functions associated with neurodegen-
erative and neuropsychiatric disorders. On
an extended backpacking journey through
Latin America, she followed her nose to the
Amazon regions and found herself attend-
ing shamanic ceremonies where indigenous shamans in Amazon regions to use medici-
spiritual and medicinal plants were used. This nal and spiritual plant hallucinogens. Her
began her fascination with the interaction lifetime passions include painting, hiking,
between drugs, culture, and the brain that led mountain climbing, swimming, 4WD-ing,
to her next migration, to northern Australia. pure time in the bush, and precious time
Here she completed her doctoral studies with her mates and family. Currently, she
workingamong Aboriginal Australians living is based in northern Australia, where her
in remote regions, investigating the brain– research focuses on understanding brain–
behavioral relationships associated with sniff- behavioral relationships associated with men-
ing petrol or drinking the plant medicine tal illness and drug use among Aboriginal
kava. Later she worked on an amateur docu- people and the development of creative and
mentary that investigated the process of appropriate means of communicating these
Western foreigners visiting local indigenous concepts with Aboriginal people.