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Joaquín Fuster

Happy birthday to Joaquín. Here is a bio-sketch of Joaquín’s life and a summary of his work. Also check out Joaquín’s “Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience” which he wrote for my edited collection in 2011. Some 20 years ago I gave a talk on Hayek’s philosophical psychology examining the continuities between Hayek’s social connectionism and…

T. E. Lawrence: Patron Saint of Motorcycling

Lawrence of Arabia’s last ride. Steve “On Any Sunday/The Great Escape” McQueen would be at his side as will Henry Cole. And if you’ve every wondered about the origin of motorcycle helmets, here’s a nice article from Neurosurgery entitled “Lawrence of Arabia, Sir Hugh Cairns, and the origin of motorcycle helmets“. Would I wear a…

False-positive neuroimaging

Here’s a piece courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s biology preprint server bioRxiv. Undisclosed flexibility in testing spatial hypotheses allows presenting anything as a replicated finding fMRI image of my own nut, 2001: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging Institute of Neurology, UCL bioRxivfmrineural correlatesNeurobiologyNeuroimagingneuroscience

Penrose + Rogan

I highly recommend Penrose’s classic The Emperor’s New Mind and the follow-up Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. I had the pleasure of meeting Penrose via an Imperial-based collaborator/chum of mine at an Imperial College lecture soon after the release of TENM. It’s quite extraordinary that Rogan as the proverbial geezer on…

Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

Published today — this should get some regressive knickers in a twist. In the past century, the tradition of Freudian psychology popularized the idea that our psychological dispositions could be traced to formative childhood experiences. In many areas of modern academic sociology and psychology this belief is still widespread, though it has been extended to…

The Evolution of Computationalism

A terrific discussion of computationalism by the very excellent Marcin Miłkowski, freely available in Minds and Machines. [i]t is less misleading to think of computationalism as a diverse research tradition composed of multiple, historically variable computational theories of mind (or brain). By conflating the research tradition with one of the early theories, one could be tempted…

From cybernetics to brain theory, and more: A memoir

My chum, Péter Érdi, editor of Cognitive Systems Research, has alerted me to the open access memoir (63 pages) by neuroscience grandee Michael Arbib. Giving me the opportunity to talk to these visitors was one of the ways in which McCulloch contributed more to my graduate education than any other professor at MIT. When I thanked him, he…