If you were to read the cognitive neuroscience literature, you might not be so quick to dismiss hypnosis as a scientific phenomenon.
For example, here's evidence that hypnotic suggestion can reduce the Stroop effect, an incredibly robust and well-established index of automatic cognitive processing. And a 1998 article from MIT Press's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that hypnosis is accompanied by "significant increases in both occipital regional cerebral blood flow and delta EEG activity."
To deny that hypnotic suggestion is real is nearly equivalent to denying that people can be persuaded to see things differently when they've been made very relaxed. That said, the study in question may be unscientific because of other methodological reasons, but the use of hypnosis does not immediately mean it's bad science.
What's really happening here is that consciously thinking about a problem usually entails a specific pattern of brain activity - rarely are you able to question even your most basic assumptions about a problem, unless you've spent significant time thinking about it without coming to a satisfactory answer. In contrast, sleep (and distraction, incidentally) allow these "problem constraints" to become more relaxed and hence more answers to be considered.
Similar mechanisms are at work during the process of insight, as shown in a recent PLOS biology paper (summary here). According to this research, insight is primarily a right-hemispheric process involving very "holistic" thinking about a problem. Interestingly, it is accompanied by suppression of incoming activity from the environment, as though giving the brain free reign to free-associate, we are able to more efficiently search the entire solution space.
"Intracranial electrodes can be used with fMRI, by the way; Nikos Logothetis's lab has shown that signals can be recorded using both at once. And they have no effect on EEG; in fact, you can get an EEG (ERP) from the electrode, so I'm not sure where you get your info"
I am surprised that intracranial electrodes can be used in fMRI, considering you're not allowed to have any metal on you when you enter the magnet, and last I checked the electrodes were made of metal?
And let me get this right: you're saying electrical stimulation via electrodes has no effect on electrode-based recording of electromagnetic activity?
Where do you get your information? j/k:)
Interesting idea, but if his goal is to infer the effects of direct neural stimulation on consciuosness, I'm surprised he doesn't just buy himself a big magnet and do some DIY transcranial magnetic stimulation.
I mean, how much is a single electrode or electrode array in IT likely to tell us about consciousness? Considering that an intracranial electrode would eliminate our chances of putting him in an fMRI magnet, and also that it would significantly complicate scalp EEG recordings of any resulting neural activity, his primary experimental method is introspection. Is that really a step forward from introspection without an intracranial electrode?
It seems much more safe and efficient to spend the time (and insurance money) on TMS self-experimentation.
As Steven Johnson points out in his book "Everything Bad is Good For You," the connection between video games and cognition (particularly conditions like ADHD) is a lot more complicated than the mainstream media makes it out to be. Then again, what isn't.
Michael Posner has developed a "game-like" interactive training scheme that has been shown to increase some measurements of working memory and increase nonverbal IQ scores. Other researchers (Cogmed) have followed suit, even going so far as to manufacture video games for kids with ADHD.
And it's no surprise the military is interested in video games (ever play "america's army?) given that other research has shown that habitual video game players have a shorter attentional blink (basically it's the "recovery" time you need to process multiple stimuli) and have a greater capacity for subitizing. See the excellent Mind Hacks chapter on video games, or this short article for more.
What's really amazing is that games may even be a universal phenomenon among more intelligent species - Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill recently observed dolphins playing over 317 distinct versions of various games, including easier versions for the younger dolphins. Whether they have underwater consoles remains to be seen...
"This is illustrated by the classic example: "Don't think of an elephant." Immediately after reading and comprehending the linguistic elements of the sentence, each and every reader of this post made the applicable associative connections resulting in the contemplation (even if minor and short-lived) of one of our long-nosed pachyderm friends
This is not as good an example as it might seem. Despite being counterintuitive, humans are actually able to voluntarily suppress memories in a way that makes it more difficult to retrieve them later (and this is confirmed through both implicit and explicit measures of memory).
It may sound Freudian, but this time the mechanism for "repressing memories" is backed up by evidence.
I think the military was curious about side-effects that were more serious than headache or nausea - given the otherwise amazing effects of provigil, they were very curious to figure out "the catch."
I have a friend who worked for a defense sleep research lab, before Provigil was available via prescription. They were dosing humans, monkeys, rats, mutant fruit flies, basically everything they could get their hands on just trying to find any possible side-effects. Despite a couple years of research with massive quantities of the stuff, they couldn't find a thing.
There are two remarkable qualities to the drug. First, you can use it for days at a time, and it only loses effectiveness after about 120 waking hours. At that point you need to sleep - but you never crash; you just sleep a normal 8 hours, wake up refreshed, and swallow the next pill.
One of the problems with a polyphasic sleep schedule is that it doesn't jive well with the normal structure of society. But with Provigil, you can still be fairly well synced-up with everybody else.
Besides, why change your behavior when you can just use drugs?
You would be surprised how well neural networks can model some aspects of cognitive development (see here for a summary of Elman's work).
In fact, a lot of NN researchers are now modeling child development, based on a growing consensus that true artificial intelligence will have to be capable of learning from its environment in much the same way human infants do.
---
Developing Intelligence: http://develintel.blogspot.com/
All they've determined is that nonverbal reasoning tests appear to be culturally neutral, which shouldn't be a surprise because this is precisely the part of IQ tests that was designed to be culturally neutral.
They even admit this test could have required only the concept of similarity; they proposed the 'map test' to rule out this alternative (but which suffers from the same problem, in my opinion).
Call it what you like - intrinsic geometric knowledge, nonverbal reasoning, or common-sense - I don't think anyone's surprised that humans can do this. But if this truly is intrinsic knowledge, as opposed to just the human ability for abstract reasoning, we should see similar results even in human infants, from discrimination studies with looking-time measures.
Far more interesting work could be done in animal experiments: what primates can do the same thing? If this is really a case of specific intrinsic knowledge, can we selectively disrupt 'geometric' abilities through brain lesioning? Or is this ability really just a by-product of more general-purpose cortical machinery?
The most important disctinction to be made between mind and computer is not what content they are capable of processing, or even what they are capable of producing, or even the platform (neurons vs. silicon) they use to accomplish it: the most important difference is architectural.
In minds, processing and memory is carried out by the same fundamental unit. There is no distinction between the two functions in neurons at a physical level, whereas in computers the distinction is very clear.
What other possibility was there? Since our circuitry is made to identify the faces, it's not exactly trained to say "60% that and 40% this."
I'm not sure you or anyone else is qualified to make comments about what our "circuitry" is made for.
Nonetheless, connectionist models suggest there are different neural activation patterns which encode Monroe and Thatcher. Contrary to your statement, a given image may indeed activate 60% of the Monroe network, and 40% of the Thatcher network. These activations may even be projected to the alleged "recognition" center if they are below 100% or some other critical threshhold.
What is interesting is that we are conscious only of this "sudden flip", suggesting that the cohesive human experience of facial recognition is in fact dependent on a single threshhold activation weight at some undetermined location.
If I read another "this is obvious" type of statement, I'm going to scream...
True it is no surprise that the three intuitive components of face recognition (see, recognize, identify) show activation in different regions of the brain.
But these type of "it's obvious & intuitive" comments follow many scientific discoveries, especially those in psychology, and entirely miss the point of the experimental method - to prove (or disprove) those intuitions.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, here's evidence that hypnotic suggestion can reduce the Stroop effect, an incredibly robust and well-established index of automatic cognitive processing. And a 1998 article from MIT Press's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that hypnosis is accompanied by "significant increases in both occipital regional cerebral blood flow and delta EEG activity."
To deny that hypnotic suggestion is real is nearly equivalent to denying that people can be persuaded to see things differently when they've been made very relaxed. That said, the study in question may be unscientific because of other methodological reasons, but the use of hypnosis does not immediately mean it's bad science.
Similar mechanisms are at work during the process of insight, as shown in a recent PLOS biology paper (summary here). According to this research, insight is primarily a right-hemispheric process involving very "holistic" thinking about a problem. Interestingly, it is accompanied by suppression of incoming activity from the environment, as though giving the brain free reign to free-associate, we are able to more efficiently search the entire solution space.
I am surprised that intracranial electrodes can be used in fMRI, considering you're not allowed to have any metal on you when you enter the magnet, and last I checked the electrodes were made of metal? And let me get this right: you're saying electrical stimulation via electrodes has no effect on electrode-based recording of electromagnetic activity? Where do you get your information? j/k :)
I mean, how much is a single electrode or electrode array in IT likely to tell us about consciousness? Considering that an intracranial electrode would eliminate our chances of putting him in an fMRI magnet, and also that it would significantly complicate scalp EEG recordings of any resulting neural activity, his primary experimental method is introspection. Is that really a step forward from introspection without an intracranial electrode?
It seems much more safe and efficient to spend the time (and insurance money) on TMS self-experimentation.
Michael Posner has developed a "game-like" interactive training scheme that has been shown to increase some measurements of working memory and increase nonverbal IQ scores. Other researchers (Cogmed) have followed suit, even going so far as to manufacture video games for kids with ADHD.
And it's no surprise the military is interested in video games (ever play "america's army?) given that other research has shown that habitual video game players have a shorter attentional blink (basically it's the "recovery" time you need to process multiple stimuli) and have a greater capacity for subitizing. See the excellent Mind Hacks chapter on video games, or this short article for more.
What's really amazing is that games may even be a universal phenomenon among more intelligent species - Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill recently observed dolphins playing over 317 distinct versions of various games, including easier versions for the younger dolphins. Whether they have underwater consoles remains to be seen...
Fascinating. Even more surprising is that researchers from Purdue are just now learning how to control a microscope...
This is not as good an example as it might seem. Despite being counterintuitive, humans are actually able to voluntarily suppress memories in a way that makes it more difficult to retrieve them later (and this is confirmed through both implicit and explicit measures of memory).
It may sound Freudian, but this time the mechanism for "repressing memories" is backed up by evidence.
I think the military was curious about side-effects that were more serious than headache or nausea - given the otherwise amazing effects of provigil, they were very curious to figure out "the catch."
There are two remarkable qualities to the drug. First, you can use it for days at a time, and it only loses effectiveness after about 120 waking hours. At that point you need to sleep - but you never crash; you just sleep a normal 8 hours, wake up refreshed, and swallow the next pill.
One of the problems with a polyphasic sleep schedule is that it doesn't jive well with the normal structure of society. But with Provigil, you can still be fairly well synced-up with everybody else.
Besides, why change your behavior when you can just use drugs?
In fact, a lot of NN researchers are now modeling child development, based on a growing consensus that true artificial intelligence will have to be capable of learning from its environment in much the same way human infants do. --- Developing Intelligence: http://develintel.blogspot.com/
They even admit this test could have required only the concept of similarity; they proposed the 'map test' to rule out this alternative (but which suffers from the same problem, in my opinion).
Call it what you like - intrinsic geometric knowledge, nonverbal reasoning, or common-sense - I don't think anyone's surprised that humans can do this. But if this truly is intrinsic knowledge, as opposed to just the human ability for abstract reasoning, we should see similar results even in human infants, from discrimination studies with looking-time measures.
Far more interesting work could be done in animal experiments: what primates can do the same thing? If this is really a case of specific intrinsic knowledge, can we selectively disrupt 'geometric' abilities through brain lesioning? Or is this ability really just a by-product of more general-purpose cortical machinery?
The most important disctinction to be made between mind and computer is not what content they are capable of processing, or even what they are capable of producing, or even the platform (neurons vs. silicon) they use to accomplish it: the most important difference is architectural. In minds, processing and memory is carried out by the same fundamental unit. There is no distinction between the two functions in neurons at a physical level, whereas in computers the distinction is very clear.
Nonetheless, connectionist models suggest there are different neural activation patterns which encode Monroe and Thatcher. Contrary to your statement, a given image may indeed activate 60% of the Monroe network, and 40% of the Thatcher network. These activations may even be projected to the alleged "recognition" center if they are below 100% or some other critical threshhold.
What is interesting is that we are conscious only of this "sudden flip", suggesting that the cohesive human experience of facial recognition is in fact dependent on a single threshhold activation weight at some undetermined location.
If I read another "this is obvious" type of statement, I'm going to scream...
True it is no surprise that the three intuitive components of face recognition (see, recognize, identify) show activation in different regions of the brain. But these type of "it's obvious & intuitive" comments follow many scientific discoveries, especially those in psychology, and entirely miss the point of the experimental method - to prove (or disprove) those intuitions.