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+---- Thread: Is anyone stupid (/Thread-Is-anyone-stupid)
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 26-01-2010
[SIZE="6"]Never be afraid of looking stupid you are not, nor are your children, there may have been difficulties in your education and that of your children, but most probably your intelligence and level of knowledge and ability to think logically can be raised quite easily.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]Without good reading ability and perfecting of our natural appreciation of mathematics no human being can develop quite naturally. In normal physical health with concentrated assistance every human being is capable of knowing and doing anything within our immense human capabilities. [/SIZE]
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 29-01-2010
[SIZE="6"]Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also the director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France’s most advanced neuroimaging research center. He is best known for his research into the brain basis of numbers, popularized in his book, “The Number Sense.†In his new book, “Reading in the Brain,†he describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language.
He answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
COOK: How did you become interested in the neuroscience of reading?
DEHAENE: One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact.
As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process. [SIZE="7"]I began to wonder how it was even possible that our brain could adapt to reading, given it obviously never evolved for that purpose.[/SIZE] The search for an answer resulted in this book. And, in the end, reading forces us to propose a very different view of the relationship between culture and the brain.
COOK: What is this “new relationship�
DEHAENE: A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms.
What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle†a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, ANY systems -- all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.
Of course, this view of culture as a constrained “lego†game isn't that novel. It is deeply related to the structuralist view of anthropology, as exemplified by Claude Levi-Strauss and Dan Sperber. What I am proposing is that the universal structures that recur across cultures are, in fact, ultimately traceable to specific brain systems.
In the case of reading, the shapes of our writing systems have evolved towards a progressive simplification while remaining compatible with the visual coding scheme that is present in all primate brains. A fascinating discovery, made by the American researcher Marc Changizi, is that all of the world's writing systems use the same set of basic shapes, and that these shapes are already a part of the visual system in all primates, because they are also useful for coding natural visual scenes.
The monkey brain already contains neurons that preferentially respond to an “alphabet†of shapes including T, L, Y. We merely “recycle†these shapes (and the corresponding part of cortex) and turn them into a cultural code for language[/SIZE]
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 02-02-2010
[SIZE="5"]THIS IS WHERE WE ARE STARTING FROM
I have been researching the brain for over thirteen years now and still I only can realise just how little we know about our human brain and our individual mind. Our brains are our species brains, developed over millions of years , we have to consider that it is most likely that our species brains are very similar in their inherited abilities, considering research that proves every one living today is related directly to one woman living in Africa over two hundred thousand years ago now proven by DNA testing.
Allowing five generations per one hundred years that is one million generations of evolutionary history, where each of us has a proven connection, further research identifies the fact that our modern brain was already around, forty to fifty thousand years ago, given obvious physical differences which can be explained from evolving within differing physical conditions , and that children can be produced from any combination of human beings from all corners of the earth. I consider it is highly likely that our human brains are very similar concerning their physical abilities.
The physical common ability to use language and simply teach ourselves the non technical structures of language give ever indication that this is so.
It was from an instantaneous realisation that children could rapidly acquire a very early grasp, of simple arithmetic and a firm understanding of the way we use the decimal system, to build easily understood patterns of numbers, at very early ages, simply by repeated physical experience with an Abacus, that brought me to examine how these abilities to learn anything and everything we humans can achieve, given time and experience so quickly.
I asked myself the question how do we manage to do everything we can do. In order to understand just how quickly we can learn something , and examine whether or not we can all learn everything so quickly, that my research into human and animal brain function began.
There are two areas where we can gain insight into how the brain works. Directly studying human behaviour and trying to rationalise it, along side reading about brain research and trying to rationalise experimental findings and researchers hypothesise, regarding the
First of all let us first consider our conscious mind, just how many things are we aware of consciously. You will consider with your conscious mind everything you can remember from everything that you have read and learnt in any other manner.
[SIZE="7"]What we are not aware of is the knowledge we contain within our subconscious brain. Our subconscious brain ability is far in excess of our conscious brain Ability.[/SIZE]
To understand this, one simply has to understand that our subconscious brain is required to work without making mistakes. Our subconscious brain is in charge of all the physical abilities. Clearly therefore it is following our conscious requirements whenever it possible can, for instance we consciously chose which way we want to walk and at what speed we want walk , unless some other necessity is signalled to the subconscious brain consciously, even avoidance of objects in our way are taken care of subconsciously. We are therefore never totally in charge of what we are doing physically. In the case of sudden danger our subconscious brain will have already made the decision as to just what to do and be carrying it out before our conscious brain is hardly aware of it.
So there is an overriding control system acting to protect our welfare when we have made a conscious mistake within some or other physical activity.
So also you may then ask just who is in charge of yourself, obviously when ever danger threatens and action is needed your subconscious brain acts independently taking stock of as many other factors as it possibly can.
Ok your next question should be “if things are so well looked after between the subconscious and conscious brain†why does anyone need to know anything about it .
Obviously we have managed our human affairs without knowing everything or very little about our brain function for thousands of years, philosophers throughout our recorded history and most likely thousands of years before any recorded history was available, will have puzzled with the same questions that have kept me engrossed for over a quarter of my adult lifetime.
Just how can we, the only mammals on earth that can speak, achieve so much so slowly when our closest animal pet, the dog can hunt for itself at ten weeks of age, what is the difference between human beings and the rest of the worlds mammals .
Not many animals can walk on two legs no others have a discernable language that we have decoded even after hundreds of thousands of years.
For millions of years we have evolved along similar mammalian lines adapting to our environment utilising four legs but eventually we walked on two legs and developed language.
[SIZE="6"]It is language that has made us different, language that has created our advanced abilities, language that allows me to explain directly to my child what I think and mans development of written language that enables one man to speak to all men.[/SIZE]
The most important language of all has always been numerical and only within the last two thousand years have every race on earth utilised one standard set of symbols (only 10) utilising one pattern to create standard multiplication or division of ONE
[SIZE="7"]Our ingenuity knows no bounds our abilities are without any conceivable limit when we combine our knowledge and areas of expertise together.[/SIZE] What makes us so special? The inherited facility to remember virtually everything we ever see (In a positive or negative term) we all share this ability to recall “ as images in action†the things we have seen or heard of that are vital to us.
The positive memories are those we utilise consistently in explanation or consideration of ideas and concepts, the negative or passive memories return when we revisit something we may have only seen once or herd of imperfectly.
We use language to give explanation of ideas and concepts that are vital to us, store ideas as images in action and recall those ideas quite naturally again in spontaneous language, created at will subconsciously, only where further explanation is so complicated as to develop deeper explanation which may be required or that we intend to specifically mislead others, do we pass the words being utilised through our conscious mental processing chamber, we call it our MIND that ability to process information we use to reason with. I consider the mind to be singular, impossible to replicate, simply because of our ability to understand language, can we then utilise our massive natural memory abilities of what we see hear and think.
Simply because of our unlimited memory ability and the advanced processing abilities this gives us when combined with the physical ability to copy however imperfectly at first any physical procedures perfected by others which then allows us to eventually to do most things within the range of other humans.
Given the will and the training.
We all posses natural memory and the ability to copy.[/SIZE]
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 07-04-2010
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PROVING MY CONCLUSIONS REGARDING THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS THINKING
Alongside the understanding of building permanent memories within mathematics and reading abilities through simple repeated procedures easily carried out by any child, so developing perfection in basic skills.
PROVIDING ANY AND EVERY CHILD WITH THE TOOLS TO DEVELOP ITS OWN ABILITIES TO READ REASON AND CALCULATE AT WILL. [SIZE="6"]Here is a series of articles relating to subconscious learning. Unconscious learning is by far the greatest learning facility we are natural equipped with. Even the making of important decisions appear to best left to our subconscious mind, most probably we refer to decisions made in this manner as instinctive choices. Giving ourselves more time to consider anything important obviously gives more opportunity to consider and reason both consciously and subconsciously which in theory should allow ourselves the opportunity to make decisions we approve of. JN[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]Unconscious Learning Uses Old Parts of the Brain
ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2010) — A new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet provides evidence that basic human learning systems use areas of the brain that also exist in the most primitive vertebrates, such as certain fish, reptiles and amphibians. The study involved an investigation into the limbic striatum, one of the evolutionarily oldest parts of the brain, and the ability to learn movements, consciously and unconsciously, through repetition.
"Our results strongly substantiate the theories that say that the implicit, by which I mean non-conscious, learning systems of the brain are simpler and evolutionarily older," says Associate Professor Fredrik Ullén from Karolinska Institutet and the Stockholm Brain Institute.
Many of the mundane skills that we apply every day, such as buttoning up a shirt or playing an instrument, comprise a sequence of discrete movements that must be carried out in the correct order. [COLOR="Red"]Scientists have long known that there are two learning systems for such patterns of movement; with the implicit system, we learn without being aware of the fact and without conscious training, such as through simple repetition. The explicit system, on the other hand, we use when we consciously train and are aware of what we are learning.
A brain structure that is involved in learning and motor control is the basal ganglia, which lie deep in the cerebral hemispheres. Dopamine, a substance used in the transmission of signals between neurons, is important for learning and the plasticity of the basal ganglia.
In the present study, which is published in PNAS, the journal of the American Academy of Sciences, researchers have examined both the implicit and explicit learning of motor sequences in relation to the number of dopamine D2 receptors in the basal ganglia. While they found a correlation between D2 receptor density and both forms of learning, they also noted that the evolutionarily oldest part of the basal ganglia the limbic striatum was only involved in implicit learning.
"In other words, we probably have certain fundamental learning systems in common not only with rats, mice and other mammals, but also with the most primitive vertebrates, which also have a limbic striatum," says Dr Ullén.[/COLOR]In the future, a better understanding of how these learning systems work can be of use in developing new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson s and Huntington s, which are characterised by disorders of basal ganglia function and impaired motor skills.[/SIZE]
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 07-04-2010
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Decision-Making May Be Surprisingly Unconscious Activity
ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2008) — Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, decision-making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity. A team of scientists has unraveled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions. Even several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="4"]This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings."
In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding.
This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.
"Most researchers investigate what happens when people have to decide immediately, typically as a rapid response to an event in our environment. Here we were focusing on the more interesting decisions that are made in a more natural, self-paced manner", Haynes explains.
More than 20 years ago the American brain scientist Benjamin Libet found a brain signal, the so-called "readiness-potential" that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argued that if our decisions are prepared unconsciously by the brain, then our feeling of "free will" must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief time delay between brain activity and the conscious decision.
In contrast, Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."
Journal reference: Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze & John-Dylan Haynes. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience April 13th, 2008.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="darkred"]Complex Decision? Don't Think About It
ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2008) — When faced with a difficult decision, we try to come up with the best choice by carefully considering all of the options, maybe even resorting to lists and lots of sleepless nights. So it may be surprising that recent studies have suggested that the best way to deal with complex decisions is to not think about them at all—that unconscious thought will help us make the best choices.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="4"][FONT="Comic Sans MS"]Although this may seem like an appealing strategy, new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, cautions that there are limitations in the efficacy of unconscious thought making the best decisions.
Duke University researchers John W. Payne, Adriana Samper, James R. Bettman and Mary Frances Luce had volunteers participate in a lottery choice task, where they had to pick from four various options, each with a different, but close, payoff. The volunteers were divided into three groups for this task: one group was instructed to think about the task for a given amount of time, another group was told to think about the task for as long as they wanted and the last group was distracted before making their selection (thus, unconsciously thinking about the task). A second experiment was similarly set up, except that there were substantial differences in the payoffs of the different options.
The researchers found that there are situations where unconscious thought will not result in the best choice being selected. The findings showed that in some instances (when the payoffs were similar), thinking about the task for as only as long as it takes to make a decision was as effective as unconscious thought, resulting in the most profitable options being chosen. However, when there were large differences in the amount of money to be won, mulling over the decision at their own pace led the volunteers to larger payoffs than unconscious thought.
The volunteers who were told to consciously think about the decision for a specific amount of time performed poorly in both experiments. The authors explain that those volunteers had “too much time to think†about the task and suggest that their attention shifted “to information of lesser relevance,†resulting in less profitable decisions.
These results suggest that although unconscious thought may help us make the right decision in some instances, it is often better to rely on self-paced conscious thought and really focus on the problem at hand.
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 07-04-2010
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible
ScienceDaily (Dec. 29, 2008) — Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="Green"]Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."
Pouget says that Kahneman's approach was to tell a subject that there was a certain percent chance that one of two choices in a test was "right." This meant a person had to consciously compute the percentages to get a right answer—something few people could do accurately.
Pouget has been demonstrating for years that certain aspects of human cognition are carried out with surprising accuracy. He has employed what he describes as a very simple unconscious-decision test. A series of dots appears on a computer screen, most of which are moving in random directions. A controlled number of these dots are purposely moving uniformly in the same direction, and the test subject simply has to say whether he believes those dots are moving to the left or right. The longer the subject watches the dots, the more evidence he accumulates and the more sure he becomes of the dots' motion.
Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.
"We've been developing and strengthening this hypothesis for years—how the brain represents probability distributions," says Pouget. "We knew the results of this kind of test fit perfectly with our ideas, but we had to devise a way to see the neurons in action. We wanted to see if, in fact, humans are really good decision makers after all, just not quite so good at doing it consciously. Kahneman explicitly told his subjects what the chances were, but we let people's unconscious mind work it out. It's weird, but people rarely make optimal decisions when they are told the percentages up front."
Pouget analyzed the data from a test performed in the laboratory of Michael Shadlen, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington. Shadlen's team watched the activity of a pair of neurons that normally respond to the sight of things moving to the left or right. For instance, when the test consisted of a few dots moving to the right within the jumble of other random dots, the neuron coding for "rightward movement" would occasionally fire. As the test continued, the neuron would fire more and more frequently until it reached a certain threshold, triggering a flurry of activity in the brain and a response from the subject of "rightward."
Pouget says a probabilistic decision-making system like this has several advantages. The most important is that it allows us to reach a reasonable decision in a reasonable amount of time. If we had to wait until we're 99 percent sure before we make a decision, Pouget says, then we would waste time accumulating data unnecessarily. If we only required a 51 percent certainty, then we might reach a decision before enough data has been collected.
Another main advantage is that when we finally reach a decision, we have a sense of how certain we are of it—say, 60 percent or 90 percent—depending on where the triggering threshold has been set. Pouget is now investigating how the brain sets this threshold for each decision, since it does not appear to have the same threshold for each kind of question it encounters.
The findings are published in the Dec 26 issue of the journal
Neuron[/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
Is anyone stupid - John Nicholson - 07-04-2010
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Eureka! How Distractions Facilitate Creative Problem-Solving
ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2008) — How many times have you spent hours slaving over an impossible problem, only to take a break and then easily solve the problem, sometimes within minutes of looking at it again? Although this is actually a common phenomenon, up until now the way that this occurs has been unclear.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]But new research in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, demonstrates the answer is more complex than simply having an “Aha!†moment.
The new research, led in part by Kellogg School of Management Professor Adam Galinsky, suggests that unconscious thought results in creative problem-solving via a two-step process.
According to Galinsky and fellow psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto and Ap Dijkstererhuis of Radboud University Nijmegen, distractions may be helpful in coming up with creative solutions to a certain problem, but must be followed by a period of conscious thought to ensure that we are aware of those solutions and can apply them. Likewise, while distractions are more useful in solving difficult problems, it may be better to stay focused on finding the solution when confronted with easier problems.
The researchers conducted two experiments to test their idea. In the first experiment, 94 subjects participated in a Remote-Association Test (RAT), which tests for creativity. In this test, participants were presented with three words (a triad) and were asked to come up with a fourth word that is linked with all three words. For example, if presented with the words cheese, sky and ocean, the correct answer would be blue (blue cheese, blue sky, blue ocean). Subjects were shown nine very difficult triads (but were instructed not to solve them yet) and were then divided into groups.
For five minutes following the RAT, participants were either concentrating on the triads they had just seen (the conscious thought group) or engaging in a test completely unrelated to the RAT (the unconscious thought group). Following the five-minute interval, all of the subjects participated in a lexical decision test. During this test, subjects were shown sequences of letters and had to indicate as quickly as possible if the sequences were English words or not. The sequences presented included answers to the RAT triads, random words and non-words. Finally, subjects were again shown the RAT items and had to write down their answers.
The second experiment involved 36 subjects and had a similar set up to the previous experiment, although the RAT triads presented were much easier to solve compared to those in the first experiment.
The results showed that in the first experiment, during the lexical decision test, members of the unconscious thought group had much faster responses to letter sequences which were answers to RAT items, compared to the conscious thought group. However, when it came time to solve the RAT problems, both groups had similar results. In the second experiment (using an easier set of RAT triads), the conscious thought group had more correct RAT answers compared to the unconscious thought group, but there was no difference in response time during the lexical decision test.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="7"]“Conscious thought is better at making linear, analytic decisions, but unconscious thought is especially effective at solving complex problems,†said Galinsky and his co-authors. “Unconscious activation may provide inspirational sparks underlying the ‘Aha!’ moment that eventually leads to important discoveries.â€[/SIZE]