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Cognitive Daily: Study finds some thoughts really do require language

Some research suggests that understanding the thoughts of others -- having a theory of mind -- is one such process. Many children who are late in learning language are also late in developing a theory of mind. This story illustrates the classic theory of mind test:

Tags: language, mind, psychology, brain, linguistics on 2008-05-31 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromscienceblogs.com

Some research suggests that understanding the thoughts of others -- having a theory of mind -- is one such process. Many children who are late in learning language are also late in developing a theory of mind. This story illustrates the classic theory of mind test:
Very young children will say box B, because that's where the cheese is now. But at around age 4, they'll correctly answer box A, since Mouse has no way of knowing that Cat moved the cheese. Older children have successfully developed an important aspect of theory of mind -- they understand that Mouse falsely believes the cheese is in box A. But does understanding false beliefs of others require language?
When the test was a true belief test, viewers were accurate, whether they were being distracted by the rhythm or the language activity. But viewers who watched the false-belief video while repeating words successfully completed the false-belief task less than half the time. People who repeated rhythms instead of words were nearly as accurate on the false belief task as they were on the true belief task -- indeed, there was no significant difference in their performance on the two tests, and they were significantly more accurate than those distracted by the language task.

So repeating words disrupts the false-belief test, not the true-belief test, while repeating rhythm disrupts neither test. Newton and de Villiers say there are a number of aspects of language processing that could be responsible for interfering with the false-belief test, but it's quite clear that some sort of language processing is necessary in order to reason about false beliefs. So while language isn't a requirement for all thought, it most definitely appears to be a requirement for some thought.

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Does your brain have a mind of its own? - Los Angeles Times

How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you've driven home and forgotten all about the groceries.

Tags: brain, psychology, evolution, language, mind on 2008-05-31 and saved by12 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.latimes.com

What gives? Why are we as a species so often so desperately poor at achieving our goals? If we are, as the selfish-gene theory would have it, organisms that exist only to serve the interests of our genes, why do we waste so much of our time doing things that are not, in any obvious way, remotely in the interest of our genes? How can one explain, for example, why a busy undergraduate would spend four weeks playing "Halo 3" rather than studying for his exams?
In practical terms, that means that evolution's products aren't always particularly sound. Truly dismal solutions are quickly weeded out; if someone has a genetic condition that brings them into the world without a functioning heart, they don't live long enough to reproduce. But merely adequate solutions (what engineers call "kluges") -- like the awkward, injury-prone human spine, good enough but far from perfect -- can stick around indefinitely if better solutions are too far away on the evolutionary landscape.
The problem is that evolution failed to realize that remembering goals is not like recognizing objects. When your brain sees a lion, the thing to do is to decide, lickety-split, to get out of the way. Run first; ask questions later. We're programmed for just that kind of split-second decision; just about every creature on the planet is built such that it can identify things like predators and prey very rapidly. We're not programmed to remember precise episodes from the past. Why not? Because remembering the exact date on which you last saw a lion is not particularly helpful when you're trying to get out of the way.
Still, all is not lost. Even though our short-term desires are pretty good at grabbing the steering wheel of our consciousness, our more recently evolved deliberate minds are powerful enough to regain at least some measure of control.
Our conscious, deliberate systems will never have total control, and our memories will never be perfect, but as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, recognition is the first step. If we come to recognize our limitations, and how they evolved, we just might be able to outwit our inner kluge.

Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, is the author, most recently, of "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind."
Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, is the author, most recently, of "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind."

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Carl Zimmer's Dissection: Your Brain Is a Mess, but It Knows How to Make Fixes

Tags: brain, neurology on 2008-04-24 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.wired.com

The trouble with neurons, as scientists from Cambridge University write in the new issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, is that the channels don’t always do what they’re supposed to. The channels are continually wobbling and twitching, and sometimes they open up a little earlier than they should, splitting a single wave in two. Sometimes they open late, or not at all. These delinquent channels can make a short, sharp wave blur into a longer, weaker one. Channels sometimes open up when there is no wave, creating an entirely false spike.
post by brianddrpm on 2008-04-07 03:10:48

The job of the brain is to make decisions. It takes in information from its senses, which it then processes in a vast network of neuron circuits, finally producing some kind of output. The output may be as abstract as casting a vote, or as basic as taking a breath. These decisions depend on handling signals with extreme precision. Errors that creep into those signals as they ricochet around the nervous system are called noise. Remarkably, the closer scientists look at the brain, the more noise they discover.
It turns out, however, that our neurons could be much smaller than they actually are. If you packed all material necessary for sending signals as tightly as possible, the branches of a neuron (called axons) would measure just .06 microns [about 2.3 millionths of an inch] across. In fact, the thinnest axons are about .1 microns [about 4 millionths of an inch]. Recent studies have shown that it's noise that prevents them from getting thinner. The thinner an axon gets, the noisier it becomes. Below .1 microns, the noise abruptly rises so much that it drowns out any signal. We might be far smarter if noise didn't keep us from growing more neurons.

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Mind Science Foundation

Tags: brain, mind, research, science, consciousness on 2008-04-14 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.mindscience.org

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A recent study shows that the human brain reacts differently... (kottke.org)

Tags: psychology, brain, neurology, neuroethics on 2008-04-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.kottke.org

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MIT World » : Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech

Tags: brain, decisionsystem, language, mit on 2008-02-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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MIT Computational Cognitive Science Group

Tags: brain, learning, mit, psychology on 2008-02-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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MIT : Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Tags: brain, mit, psychology, science on 2008-02-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Powell's Books - The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution by Pamela H. Smith

Tags: brain, psychology, science on 2008-01-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.powells.com

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Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times

Tags: brain, psychology, science on 2008-01-21 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.latimes.com

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
Add Sticky Note
- Thumbnail book review: Proust was a Neuroscientist Category: Opinion
  
  Posted on: December 21, 2007 11:47 AM, by Greta Munger
  
  
  
  I just finished reading Jonah Lehrer's book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
  
  Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I'm happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble. For the quibble to make any sense, you need to know something about
  my teaching. Students in all my psychology classes have to write a few
  paragraphs to earn "culture points." They must consider how psychology
  connects to art, though the social context surrounding the event is
  also fair game for analysis. So my students attend a concert, visit a
  museum, or go to a play or dance performance and then write a paragraph
  connecting some aspect of psychology to their experience. I get a lot
  of discussion of the Gestalt grouping principles with paintings, but
  every semester several students make more interesting connections:
  noticing how a theatrical production manipulated their attention using
  a sudden movement, or positive reinforcement at work between live
  performers and their audience, or discussing how a particular aspect of
  memory may explain a very surprising emotional reaction to a sculpture.
  
  posted by brianddrpm on 2008-01-21 23:01:59

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Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective

Tags: brain, philosophy, science on 2007-12-11 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Brian Dowling's Bookmarks tagged brain → View Popular

Cognitive Daily: Study finds some thoughts really do require language

Does your brain have a mind of its own? - Los Angeles Times

Carl Zimmer's Dissection: Your Brain Is a Mess, but It Knows How to Make Fixes

Mind Science Foundation

A recent study shows that the human brain reacts differently... (kottke.org)

MIT World » : Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech

MIT Computational Cognitive Science Group

MIT : Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Powell's Books - The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution by Pamela H. Smith

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Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times

Thumbnail book review: Proust was a Neuroscientist Category: Opinion

American Scientist Online - Brain-Based Values

Edge

MeaningofLife.tv

Vipassana Meditation Website

Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective

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