Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"[Another way for scientists] to increase their chance of success is to try and find evidence that contradicts a commonly held view" - poor Neurology, not only it is painfully difficult to go forward, some of its practitioners are determined to go backwards.

"Participants have free will and they often do unexpected things" - particularly ironic in this context, their 'freedom' is merely our ignorance of how their brain's function is determined. The more we know about the brain, the less 'free' they would appear.

"And Athene and Apollo, god of the silver bow, settled down too, in the form of vultures, on a tall oak-tree sacred to father Zeus who holds the aegis, taking their pleasure in the doings of men" - it's religion, Jim, but not as we know it.

"The classic view is that the reduction is the magnitude of brain activity reflects more fluent or efficient processing for repeated events. Such reductions in brain activity occur whether or not the event is processed consciously..." - so learning can be passive, and attention helps, but how so: makes learning quicker, improves retention, makes stuff stick that otherwise wouldn't?

"The increases in activity likely reflected STRATEGIES that were employed to make a difficult manageable, such as chunking..." - again, the tendency to anthropomorphise the brain. 'Chunking' and it's connection to 'Miller's Law' is imho something fundamental to the functioning the brain. Why is our working memory limited to 7 'chunks' of information?

"The evidence reviewed above suggests that the contents of working memory are stored in the sensory cortex" - the contents of working memory are the contents of our present consciousness. Is that what self-consciousness is, the recognition that 'sensory' stimulation is coming from inside our brain rather than from the outside world?

"Like the air which spouts black from the clouds, when heat is burning and a violent wind blows up, such was the sight to Diomedes...as brazen Ares whirled up to the wide heaven wrapped in cloud. Quickly he reached the gods' home, steep Olympos..." - it's an 8 hour drive, or you could fly straight across the Aegean. How quickly do the gods travel?

"These results suggest that subsequent false memory for new unrelated shapes were mediated by verbal labels that were shared between these shapes and old shapes." - I wonder is a vebal label is doing the mediation, it might be a 'category' to which the verbal label is linked.

"Thus, although the brain can distinquish between true memories and false memories in these paradigms, the mind doesn't have access to this information". - would be more accurate to say "can be distinquished in the brain", but by far the most interesting thing in the book so far.

"Attention has been shown to be a key aspect of encoding...even when it is not known that memory will be tested later. For instance, if participants are asked to deeply process words, such as deciding whether each word in a study list is 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', their memory performance will be similar whether or not they know there is a subsequent memory test."

"As Mandelbrot succintly put it "Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in ivory tower and the factory" - whereas Aristotle's conception of gravity is just wrong.

"Perhaps, like the erroneous Aristotelian assumption the heavier things "obviously" fall faster, the Platonic ideal of smoothness..." - chalk and cheese?

The cognitive neuroscience of memory seems to be struggling so much with 'where' and 'when' to have any chance of answering 'what' or 'how'. So it strikes me more like astronomy than any branch of biology I am familiar with. One the problems researchers face is cost. On which do we spend more I wonder, astronomy or neurology?

"...recollection refers to retrieval of detailed information, whereas familiarity refers to retrieval of non-detailed information." - could be useful to define "detailed" here.

"Thus, as with the London taxi drivers, [the subject's] superior memory ability appears to have had a cost outside the domain of his expertise" - so much for those "we only use 10% of our brain" arguments.

"Almost all of the participants with superior memory reported using a memory straregy called the method of loci" - i.e. combining Item memory and Context memory

"Long-term memory encoding occurs with little if any effort in everyday life. If a person pays attention to something or it is meaningful, they will likely remember it later." - not me, I'm as likely to lose my keys as forget a Hungarian word. Is this because my memory formation is weak, or because my attention is poor?

"The findings of the studies provide evidence that slow wave sleep is important for long-term memory formation." - sleep your way to fluency?

"The hippocampus is thought to bind item infornation and context information together during episodic memory" - I don't think it's been explained how they become unbound, seeing as every item occurs in a context. I suppose this separation is a perception thing not a memory thing.

"...it takes years to become proficient using even a single cognitive neuroscience method such that very few laboratories employ multiple techniques." - and then there is the cost...

"..."remembering" and "knowing" are distinct types of memory" - In epistemology memory is treated as a source of knowledge.

"Behaviour neuroscience use invasive methods that can only be used with non-human animals, but they are interested in how their findings contribute to the understanding of brain processing in humans" - nice use of language; invasive methods = vivisection, non-human animals = cats, dogs, monkeys?

"So to ensure that that there is no energy loss via reflections as one progresses down the network, the radii of successive vessels must scale in a regular self-simular fashion, decreasing by a constant factor of the square root of two with each successive branching" - so that's way lungs look like trees, but why deciduous trees and not pines?

"...death is very likely the best single invention of life. It's life change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." (Steve Jobs) - magnanimous of him, he effected far more change alive than dead.

"In many ways it...[may provide] the very reason for our existence as the agents through which the universe would know itself" - high hopes for a "Grand Unified Theory", ones that include a physics of consciousness

"When he was confronted with a proposition, the Greek, being simple-minded, did not as a rule ask whether it was reactionary, or popular, or 'deviationist': he was inclined to ask if it was true" - Socrates wouldn't agree, sophism is a perennial problem.

"When he was confronted with a proposition, the Greek, being simple-minded, did not as a rule ask whether it was reactionary, or popular, or 'deviationist': he was inclined to ask if it was true" - Socrates wouldn't agree, sophism is a perennial problem.

"In the first place, civilizsation - to use the word for once in its improper sense - has made the physical differences between the sexes of very little political importance" - I think he means 'technology', but it seems absurd to argue the the rights of woman has more to do with technology that it does with the slow working out of The Enlightenment. I suppose to do so would cast the Athenian enlightenment in shade.

"It is orthodox to compare the repression of women in Athens with the freedom and respect they enjoyed in Homeric society - and in historical Sparta" - rather than explore these differences in 'Greek' society he spends the rest of the section exculpating Athens.

"It is not obvious that [the gods] are bound by the laws that govern human behaviour; in fact, it is obvious that some of them are not. That is to say, there is no essential connexion between theology and morality" - but this connexion is there in Plato, Socrates accuses the poets of misrepresenting the gods.