Neuroscience
A study of the phenomenon known as loss aversion in two patients with lesions to the amygdala, a region deep within the brain involved in emotions and decision-making, may help explain how we make decisions and what makes us dislike the thought of losing money.
Loss aversion describes the avoidance of choices which can lead to losses, even when accompanied by equal or much larger gains . Examples in the everyday life include how we make a decision on whether to proceed with an operation: the more serious the potential complications from the operation – even if the risk is low compared to the chances of success – the less likely we would be to proceed.
Research conducted by scientists at the Weizmann Institute and the University of Maryland reveals that bats, which 'see' with beams of sound waves, skew their beams off-center when they want to locate an object. The research, which recently appeared in Science, shows that this strategy is the most efficient for locating objects.
"We think that this tradeoff between detecting a object and determining its location is fundamental to any process that involves tracking an object whether done by a bat, a dog or a human, and whether accomplished through hearing, smell or sight," said co-author Cynthia Moss, a University of Maryland professor of psychology, who directs interdisciplinary bat echolocation research in the university's Auditory Neuroethology Lab.
I am not a big fan of morality, ethics or the philosophical discussions of the same. It all seems largely post-hoc rationalization, self-referential self-talk and popular myths hiding power relationships and personal putative feelings and impulses. This speaker calls them "power and conventions."
99% of the discussions are also Western, rich white folk, generally male dominant oriented. What about Muslim morality or multiple other cultures?
To me, we punish, as all social animals do, because it feels good to or feels bad not to. The feelings evolved to prevent social cheating,e.g. revenge.
Scientists at the University of California San Francisco say a majority of published studies analyzing the relationship between Alzheimer's disease and smoking indicates that the habit is a significant risk factor for the disease. Researchers also found that studies funded by the tobacco industry tended to conclude that smoking protects against the development of AD, while independent studies showed that smoking increased the risk of developing the disease. The findings were published online today in the January issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Our nervous system is really very mechanical. Microsopic and complicated but ultimately mechanical. I like to learn about the basic engineering aspects of our brains and it’s processing. Here are excerpts from a Discovery magazine piece:
Tiff
The Brain What Is the Speed of Thought? by Carl Zimmer December 16, 2009
“Faster than a bird and slower than sound. But that may be besides the point: Efficiency and timing seem to be more important anyway.
Through the use of sophisticated brain-imaging techniques, researchers at UCLA say they have been able to predict a brain's progression to Alzheimer's by measuring subtle changes in brain structure over time, changes that occur long before symptoms can be seen. The research appears in two separate papers published in Human Brain Mapping and Neurobiology of Aging.
The more I learn about the brain the more I feel we are just at
the very beginning of even describing things. However, what I took away
from this was:
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry have obtained 3-D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons. The effort was made possible a novel technique in electron microscopy, which cools cells so quickly that their biological structures can be frozen while fully active.
"We used electron cryotomography, a new technique in microscopy based on ultra-fast freezing of cells, in order to study and obtain three-dimensional images of synapsis, the cellular structure in which the communication between neurons takes place in the brains of mammals" Rubén Fernández-Busnadiego, lead author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Cell Biology
In a new article published in WIREs Congnitive Science, researchers from Duke University and the NIH suggest that the latest cognitive science research has the potential to fundamentally change how the legal system operates.
The team explains that Neurolaw, also known as legal neuroscience, builds upon the research of cognitive, psychological, and social neuroscience by considering the implications for these disciplines within a legal framework. Each of these disciplinary collaborations has been ground-breaking in increasing our knowledge of the way the human brain operates, and now neurolaw continues this trend.
I like guns and watch the handgun and tactical gun TV shows. Putting moral and political and public safety issues aside, and just focusing on the behavioral expression of strong emotions , tonight watching a personal defense show I noticed a few interesting things:
- Personal defense guns are a suddenly a very fast growing market. The guns, accessories and even newly designed bullets with more "killing power," are flying off the shelves. This is called the "concealed carry" market.
- The targets used in the training on the shows are about 10 feet away! Now THAT'S up close and personal. They are all human shaped. These are not bulls eye target or even rectangles.
