Check out Nick Day’s documentary recorded at the annual Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.
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It was the sound that tasted different
Here’s an article from The Economist. More informative however is the work of V.S. Ramachandran and co. arguably the leading researcher in the field. See “The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia” and the recent “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why Do People Hear Colors and Taste Words?“
The Effects of Music on the Brain
Oliver Sacks is the test subject in looking at the effect of music on the brain.
Can science ever explain consciousness?
Anil Seth, Chris Frith and Barry Smith (of Birkbeck, not Buffalo!) outline the topography in a podcast.
Free will
Two articles on that old philosophical chestnut – free will: one from Intelligent Life (neurons v. free will) and one from the sister title, the Economist (Free will and politics).
Connectome
Here’s a recent WSJ article summing up the state of play in mapping brain connectivity. Here is Susan Bookheimer who holds the Joaquin Fuster Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience chair at UCLA – Fuster is off course a name many readers will recognise from my postings here and here. The images are from the Human Connectome Project.
“The study of connectivity is as hot as hot can get,” said Susan Bookheimer, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the new head of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping, a large international professional society of neuroimaging researchers.
Nature, nurture and liberal values
Roger Scruton weighs in on the nature/nurture debate via a threefold review. (Image another Steve Pyke portrait).
The neuroscience of happiness
Here’s an interview with Shimon Edelman whose The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life has just been published.
Patricia Churchland
Having missed Pat Churchland’s talk at NEI this past October, it was great that she was in town for a full week of speaking engagements not to mention interviews and other demands being made on her time (and she is supposedly retired!). It was a pleasure to meet her (finally!) having followed her work over the years, most notably her Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. I recall the outright hostility to this book when I very naively talked about it in a philosophy department. I asked her if she recalled this hostility – and she did – but soldiered on regardless. The book obviously made an impression on me and hence its title appears as the tag line to this website.
Here is a collection of my Churchland related posts. The Science Network has a superb collection of podcasts featuring not only Pat, but the rest of the Churchland “dynasty” including of course her husband Paul and their children Anne and Mark.
Music of the Hemispheres
Check out philosopher Dan Lloyd’s film project. On the film site there are several videos of different brain states worth watching. Dan is, of course, no stranger to using other modalities to communicate his thoughts on consciousness – his book Radiant Cool is a classic in the genre.
Inside each of us, at every moment, a symphony plays. It’s the symphony of consciousness, but at the same time it’s the symphony of the brain.
– Dan Lloyd
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Of the External Senses
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Why we still need a mark of the cognitive
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Steps to a “Properly Embodied” Cognitive Science
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Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl
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Epistemological Problems of Privacy and Secrecy
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Science, the Market and Iterative Knowledge
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The Goldilocks problem and extended cognition
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Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind
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Brain (call) box
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A liberal arts education
