Monday, August 27th, 2012
MO COSTANDI, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story
Stephan: Here is a report concerning what I believe is going to become not only a new form of addiction, but an entire industry, which will manufacture false memories and experiences. Its uses by the state security apparat are also obvious. As the report says, Inception come to life.
Reference: Suzuki, K., et al. (2012). Substitutional Reality System: A Novel Experimental Platform for Experiencing Alternative Reality. Scientific Reports, 2: 459. DOI: 10.1038/srep00459
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 blockbuster Inception is set in a distant future where military technology enables one to infiltrate and surreptitiously alter other people’s dreams. Leonardo Di Caprio plays Dom Cobb, an industrial spy tasked with planting an idea into the mind of a powerful businessman. The film has a complex, layered structure: Cobb and the other characters create dreams within dreams within dreams, but they cannot distinguish between reality and the dream states they fabricate.
Most of us distinguish between real and imagined events using unconscious processes to monitor the accuracy of our experiences. But these processes can break down in some psychiatric conditions. Patients with schizophrenia, for example, can experience auditory and visual hallucinations that they believe are real, while some brain damaged and delusional patients live in a world of perpetual false memories. Japanese researchers have developed an ‘Inception helmet
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Sunday, August 26th, 2012
ADAM PECK and IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is the reality. If you are a woman, or a man who supports women, this matters, it is not just political rhetoric, and one needs to think carefully about how to vote. To say this is not an assault on women is to lie to yourself.
esterday, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Todd ‘Legitimate Rape
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Sunday, August 26th, 2012
QUENTIN FOTTRELL, - Market Watch
Stephan: Here is a problem that has hardly been addressed, but which holds implications for many lives, perhaps yours.
Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.
And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. ‘I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,
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Sunday, August 26th, 2012
TIMOTHY EGAN, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is willful ignorance, this is what we are faced with in the government's leadership, and the potential effect it may have on your life can hardly be overstated.
The tutorial in 8th grade biology that Republicans got after one of their members of Congress went public with something from the wackosphere was instructive, and not just because it offered female anatomy lessons to those who get their science from the Bible.
Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.
On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers.
Let’s take a quick tour of the crazies in the House. Their war on critical thinking explains a lot about why the United States is laughed at on the global stage, and why no real solutions to our problems emerge from that broken legislative body.
We’re currently experiencing the worst drought in 60 years, a siege of wildfires, and the hottest temperatures since records were kept. But to Republicans in Congress, it’s […]
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Sunday, August 26th, 2012
Stephan: Is the mind just the brain? Increasingly research is suggesting that while part of the mind may be local to the brain, other aspects of the mind are not, and that even when the brain is damaged functions that should be gone can still be there.
Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to ‘know thyself’ as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self.
Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one’s traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this theory by showing that self-awareness is more a product of a diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain – including other regions – rather than confined to specific areas.
The conclusions came from a rare opportunity to study a person with extensive brain damage to the three regions believed critical for self-awareness. The person, a 57-year-old, college-educated man known as ‘Patient R,’ passed all standard tests of self-awareness. He also displayed repeated self-recognition, both when looking in the mirror and when identifying himself in unaltered photographs taken during all periods of his life.
‘What this research clearly shows is that self-awareness corresponds to a brain process that cannot be localized to a single region of the brain,’ said David […]
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