Posted in conference, emotions, neuroaesthetics, people, Web Resources on August 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »
In March, the Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny hosted a conference on the “Evolutionary Origins of Art and Aesthetics”. The list of speakers was pretty impressive. Luckily, the lectures were taped and are now available on You Tube. Here is a video with lectures by Antonio Damasio on emotion, Helen Fisher on love, and Isabelle Peretz on music. I will probably post some of the other talks at a later point.
-Martin
Posted in decision making, emotions, neuroeconomics, people on May 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Antoine Bechara, the inventer of the Iowa Gambling Task, and together with Antonio Damasio the architect of the “somatic marker hypothesis” is visiting the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School at the moment. Here he is explaining to Thomas the role of gut feelings in making a decision to drink the bad CBS coffee or not.
-Martin
Posted in decision making, emotions, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, people on April 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Antoine Bechara (left) and Antonio Damasio
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am currently giving lectures on an April course on neuroeconomics together with Prf.s Elke Weber and Eric Johnson. Needless to say, these lectures are probably as entertaining and useful for me, and my attending colleagues, as they are to the students.
However, change is coming to Copenhagen. Through our newly born Decision Neuroscience Research Group (homepage soon to come), we have additional high-profile researchers coming to Copenhagen to provide lectures and hopefully to be attracted to collaborations with us. In May, Antoine Bechara will be in our group for a couple of weeks. Bechara is well-known for his excellent work on decision making, and the role of emotions in decision making processes. Besides his decades of work on the Iowa Gambling Task, his recent publications are much about the role of the insula in emotions and decision making, in particular addiction. Therefore, our current project on loss/risk aversion in decision making (and in pathological gamblers) will definintely profit from his stay.
In the same vein, Copenhagen will see another great name in June: Antonio Damasio, who will become an honorary doctorate at the Copenhagen Business School. Damasio is well-known for his theory of (and work with Bechara on) somatic markers, and the role of emotions and the body in decision making. Recently, we have been attentive to his criticism to the discussion about mirror neurons, where he points back to his older papers on convergence-divergence zones in the brain, and how they may provide an alternative explanation (and a dethronement of) theories of mirror neurons.
This spring and summer, we therefore hope that anybody with interest in these researchers may consider coming to Copenhagen, even if it’s just for a brief visit.
The Decision Neuroscience Research Group is shaping up, and there is plenty of more to come.
-Thomas
Posted in book, consciousness, decision making, free will, neuroeconomics, people, politics, unconscious processes on July 25, 2008| 1 Comment »
Just noticed this very attractive title by the Brafman brothers- The book, Sway — the irresistable pull of irrational behavior, “will challenge your every thought”, according to a NY Times review. And it gets similarly good reviews from other prominent people, like Michael Shermer, the author of the recent book The mind of the market, which I blogged about recently.
I found a couple of good videos on this book that’s good to share:
A longer version with more nuances can be seen here:
So after this, you get the idea: unconscious, automatic thought patterns act out and cause irrational behaviours, sometimes at the worst possible time and place.The questions raised are, of course, interesting and important. Why do we sometimes make horrific decisions, despite having all the information available to make better ones? Why do prominent people, like George W. Bush, suffer from loss aversion, leading to billions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost? Because it’s “too late” to pull out? Because the pain of acknowledging defeat, error or insufficiency is bigger than the benefit of sparing yet more money and lives?
Other examples can be found at the Wall Street, military, aircraft captains, and even yourself. Maybe even on a daily basis. Taken together, the examples presented in these videos and the book demonstrate that we are all susceptible to make these kinds of errors. The next and better step is, of course, to identify these errors in ourselves (and others) and act upon them in time. Coaching, anyone?
I guess I should read the book, if the publishers will send me the book 8)
-Thomas
Posted in conference, neuroimaging, people, web resource on July 13, 2008| Leave a Comment »
If you didn’t go the HBM meeting this year you might be interested in hearing that the organizing committee now has put up most of the keynote presentations – for some reason, the talk by Michael Gazzaniga is missing – as well as all the talks from this year’s educational courses as podcasts. You can find them here.
The keynotes include talks by Mel Goodale, Mark D’Esposito (on the top-down modulation of FFA and PPA activation in visula perception), David van Essen (brain maps!, brain maps!), and Aina Puce (on social neuroscience). The educational workshops include talks on “Advanced fMRI”, “Basic fMRI/EEG”, “Diffusion Imaging and Tractography”, and “From Dynamic Modeling to Cognitive Neuroscience”. So, if you want to brush up your knowledge about neuroimaging methodology these podcasts offer a good opportunity.
By the way, I still plan to write a couple of posts about my impressions of the meeting. Stay tuned for that!
-Martin
Posted in book, neuroethics, people on April 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »
The New York Academy of Sciences runs a nice little website. Here, they offer a series of audio files with interviews and presentations which are available for download as podcasts. Recent editions I have enjoyed include a talk by Michael Schermer on his new book (on evolutionary approaches to economics) and a lecture by anthropologist Randall White on paleolithic body ornamentation.
Of the many, many interesting items – including podcasts with Steven Pinker and Craig Ventner, or Vittorio Gallese on mirror neurons and art – I want to highlight a recent edition which contains a highly interesting short presentation by neurophysiologist Donald Pfaff on neurobiological underpinnings of altruistic behavior. Pfaff has recently published a slim volume on this topic, The Neuroscience of Fair Play, which is notable for the fact that it deals mostly with very basic physiological processes underpinning motivational behavior – in contrast to most writings on moral neuroscience that (for good reasons) tend to focus on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the integration of emotion and cognition in moral behavior.
I plan to review Pfaff’s book later this spring, and also to write more on moral neuroscience.
-Martin
Posted in law, people, Web Resources on March 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Michael Gazzaniga is one of the directors of a very interesting new neuroethics project, The Law & Neuroscience Project, supported finacially by The MacArthur Fondation. The aim of the project is to convene experts from a number of disciplines (neuroscience, law, philosophy, etc.) to discuss how our understanding of the brain impacts – or, perhaps, should impact – our current legal system. It sounds like a very interesting project, and I think we here at BrainEthics will try to investigate what comes out of it as the project progresses.
In the meantime, go to bloggingheads.tv and watch Carl Zimmer interview Mike Gazzaniga about the project. As always, Zimmer asks very good and thoughtful questions.
-Martin
Posted in book, people, social neuroscience on May 20, 2007| 1 Comment »
The eminent neuropsychologist Chris Frith has recently retired from his job at FIL, the world famous factory for neuroimaging research in London. He is best known for his work on schizophrenia and, during the last ten years, mentalizing and social cognitive neuroscience. His many brillant reviews on these topics will probably be familiar to most of this blog’s readers. Now, Frith has written a book entitled Making Up the Mind – with the great subtitle “How the brain creates our mental world” – which, I suspect, will be widely reviewed and debated in the coming months. Certainly, we will have more to say about it later this summer here at BrainEthics. (Also, in a week or two I will put up a post about some recent papers on social cognitive neuroscience.)
-Martin
Posted in neuroethics, people on April 16, 2007| 1 Comment »
Living in Denmak I had never heard of The Agenda, a tv program broadcasted by Canadian network TV Ontario, undtil Wodek Szemberg, one of the program’s producers, contacted me last week. However, as it turns out, from time to time The Agenda covers topics of interest to those of us interested in neuroscience and neuroethics. Last Thursday’s program, for instance, contained a discussion on brain plasticity prompted by a new book by psychologist Norman Doidge: The brain that changes itself. In addition to Doidge, the guests on the show included Jordan Peterson, Robert Sawyer, Bruce Wexler, and Judy Illes. Illes, of course, debates the neuroethical concequences of brain plasticity research. You can even get the program as podcast and watch it at home at your own leisure.
– Martin
Posted in culture, evolution, intelligence, journals, people, social neuroscience on March 19, 2007| 1 Comment »
It was twenty years ago today. Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
Actually, last year it was 30 years ago that Nicholas Humphrey published his seminal paper “The social function of intellect” (pdf). Many people see this paper as the impetus to later work on the social brain hypothesis (pdf) and Theory of Mind. Humphrey suggested that, rather than the need for technology, it was in fact the need for advanced cognitive mechanisms for keeping track of conspecifics and interacting with other members of their social group that drove the expansion of brain and intelligence in hominids. This idea has provoked research into the role of cooperation and collaboration as well as deception and competition in primate social behaviour. It has prompted research into the importance of conspecifics being able to attend to a shared mental content. (Shared attention appears crucial to the transfer of knowledge in a social group, and is therefore probably a prerequisite for the establishment of cultural traditions.) Finally, it has been instrumental in getting neuroscientists interested in the neurobiological underpinnings of social cognition, including research into Theory of Mind and mirror neurons.
To commemorate Humphrey’s paper and track the above-mentioned ensuing research, the Royal Society of London staged a Dicussion Meeting last year. The papers presented at that meeting have now been published in the latest issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. It is a veritable smorgardsbord of big names: There’s papers on social intelligence in birds, hyenas, dolphins and apes by, inter alia, Nathan Emery, Nicola Clayton, Kay Holekamp, and Richard Connor. Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten discuss the animal cultures hypothesis. There’s papers by Michael Tomasello and Daniel Povinelli on ToM in primates. Vittorio Gallese explains the importance of mirror neurons, Chris Frith reviews what we know about the social brain, and Steven Mithen speculates that farming may have arisen from a misapplication of social intelligence. Naturally, Humphrey is also given the opportunity to revisit his 1976 paper.
If you are at all interested in the question of what makes some species social beings you will want to check out this issue.
-Martin
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