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themathblogofsashanova · 2 years

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September 6, 2022: My Post to Coursera's Constructivism in STEM Class (I pulled in my previous blog on mathematical notation for inspiration)

Standstills in Mathematics Education: Getting Past the Intimidation of Mathematical Notation

In this paper, I will discuss Two Conceptions of Mathematical Notation by Anna Sfard at the University of Jerusalem. The environment in which the use of operational versus structural understandings of mathematical notation were used was a secondary school environment. Specifically for this paper, this secondary school constituted 96 students, ages 14-17. They were asked to “translate four simple word problems into an equation”. They were also “asked to come up with verbal prescriptions (algorithms) for calculating the solutions of the same problem”, respectively. Finally, the environment is one where the notion of concept is just developing. Operational proceduralism, or the use of the program, is the earlier stage of development that is installed as an avoidance mechanism according to the hypothesis of Sfard as a substitute for the nonverbal, spatial crystallized concepts behind mathematics. Computer programs often supplant symbolic algebraic notation for the students, who have trouble understanding the full static picture of “operations of the named sort occurring in all pasts, presents, and futures” represented by the mathematical notation. Therefore, the only further characteristic is an avoidance of the next developmental stage, a stage where many students often get stuck (including myself).

The learning environment for the student must be avoidant for a reason. From my interaction with students in my extensive experience as a math educator, I know that avoidance in mathematics often comes from insufficient understanding. As these students are clearly still in the procedural explication/operational stage of understanding mathematics (they are still in the maze running it out), they have not yet themselves devised the full concept of the complete map of the system of many of the algebraic symbols. Therefore, though the symbols may be used, they are still trying to conceive of them verbally. We hear such understandings when math is compared to a language. However, we can see that math is explicitly stated to be nonverbal in the following; “Italians and Arabs in the 1600’s used ‘syncopated’ or verbal descriptions of functions up to that point, at which point a transition to symbolic algebra [which therefore is specifically and definitively nonverbal] began.” Slowly the transition from word to function, function and its product to operation, and operation to atemporal spatial representation of a “crystallized” function begins. What is often left behind in teaching, according to Sfard–being in particular an opinion with which I professionally concur–is the constructivity of the situation. Notations are presented erroneously in two ways, as 1) frozen, perfect facts and 2) as verbal statements. Both of these are in error. Notations are often still heated “under the hood”, where the name of the representation is still having its analytic “gerrymandered constituencies” voting self-elements in and out in the halls of mathematics according to their comprehensive powers when put into rigorous practice.

Additionally, verbal statements usually are these very analytical definitions that are verbal and therefore do not challenge the student to engage in the nonverbal, spatial reasoning that makes symbolic reasoning so difficult. Essentially, the issue here is students do not know there is a sort of “code switching” going on in learning types, and therefore think their verbal comprehensive mechanisms are inadequate, when instead teachers should be teaching nonverbal/spatial through visuals like the unit circle, physical puzzles such as Hanayama lock puzzles, and other methods that introduce this type of reasoning. Therefore, to improve the environments for conceptual, representative, and symbolic understanding, procedural/algorithmic understandings should slowly be transitioned out of support and replaced with symbolic/spatial/visual reasoning. This means creating environments that are visually and symbolically rich, emphasizing maps as third order representation, like concept maps, electoral maps, or even watching auctions or real estate price changes in real time. In addition, physical puzzles like Hanayama brand lock-and-key type puzzles are very much encouraged.

By emphasizing the development instead of the “immediate perfect comprehension” of mathematical symbols, such immediate comprehension of words can be expected of words but not of “named crystallized functions”. Once this is established as being the nature of a symbol in a developmentally patient and educated manner, students can begin to form the correct understanding and mode of approaching mathematical notation. They will stop being so frightened, scared, and without tools when they know their verbal reasoning is not insufficient, but simply the wrong mental position for the task. Specifically, classrooms must be designed to acknowledge the verbal shared ground, incubate from within the operational dance, and fly up with a freed a novel conception into the symbolic view constitutive of the mathematical heights.

Works Cited

Sfard, Anna. (1987). Two conceptions of mathematical notions: Operational and structural. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. 3.

#mathematics #math #higher math #mathematical education #math education #math teacher #math ed #education #educational psychology #constructivism #psychology of mathematics #representationalism #cognitive science #cognitive neuroscience #symbols #symbolic reasoning #math journal #math journaling

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veryangrysandwich · 2 years

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I am truly amazed with myself.

Although terrifying, I've started adopting a mentoring role as a research scientist in training. As I depart my old lab, I'm helping a very smart and talented undergraduate student become a project leader as I establish a program of research.

With these developments, I can't help to reflect back to my undergrad days were I was a shy, scared, and self-depreciating research assistant. Back then, I was convinced I would amount to nothing. Every day provides further proof of how wrong I was.

#gradblr #psychology #cognitive neuroscience

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blucacti · 2 years

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no you don’t understand it’s like so incredibly refreshing when you see “neural network” in a paper and they actually mean a NEURAL NETWORK like a network in the brain

#rage against the machine learning #cognitive neuroscience #phdblr #so sick of compsci taking over vocab for the brain

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roysexton · 20 days

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Latest "All the World's YOUR Stage" - Leaving the Margins and Grabbing the Spotlight with Aarash Darroodi

Latest episode here. At six months old, Aarash Darroodi’s parents, who were foreign students in the US, sent their son back to Iran to live with his grandparents so they could complete their graduate studies at the University of Houston. That was 1979. A year later, the Iran-Iraq War erupted. It took seven years and attempts in many countries to get a US visa before Darroodi would reunite with…

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primedeathreship · 1 month

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I am studying for my exam from Cognitive Neuroscience and what caught my eye is the fact that you would have to hit both sides of your head to get even temporal amnesia. I can only imagine how many fanfictions this fact could destroy

Also, that is my guilty pleasure: to take random facts from my studies and match them into fictional / fanfictonal world

Have a nice day!

#fanfiction #cognitive neuroscience #cognitive science #headcannons #amnesia

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jcmarchi · 3 months

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Study Reveals a Universal Pattern of Brain Wave Frequencies - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/study-reveals-a-universal-pattern-of-brain-wave-frequencies-technology-org/

Study Reveals a Universal Pattern of Brain Wave Frequencies - Technology Org

Throughout the brain’s cortex, neurons are arranged in six distinctive layers, which can be readily seen with a microscope. A team of MIT and Vanderbilt University neuroscientists has now found that these layers also show distinct patterns of electrical activity, which are consistent over many brain regions and across several animal species, including humans.

A brain 3D model – illustrative photo. Image credit: Lisa Yount via Unsplash, free license

The researchers found that in the topmost layers, neuron activity is dominated by rapid oscillations known as gamma waves. In the deeper layers, slower oscillations called alpha and beta waves predominate. The universality of these patterns suggests that these oscillations are likely playing an important role across the brain, the researchers say.

“When you see something that consistent and ubiquitous across cortex, it’s playing a very fundamental role in what the cortex does,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and one of the senior authors of the new study.

Imbalances in how these oscillations interact with each other may be involved in brain disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the researchers say.

[embedded content]

“Overly synchronous neural activity is known to play a role in epilepsy, and now we suspect that different pathologies of synchrony may contribute to many brain disorders, including disorders of perception, attention, memory, and motor control. In an orchestra, one instrument played out of synchrony with the rest can disrupt the coherence of the entire piece of music,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and one of the senior authors of the study.

André Bastos, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, is also a senior author of the open-access paper, which appears in Nature Neuroscience. The lead authors of the paper are MIT research scientist Diego Mendoza-Halliday and MIT postdoc Alex Major.

Layers of activity

The human brain contains billions of neurons, each of which has its own electrical firing patterns. Together, groups of neurons with similar patterns generate oscillations of electrical activity, or brain waves, which can have different frequencies. Miller’s lab has previously shown that high-frequency gamma rhythms are associated with encoding and retrieving sensory information, while low-frequency beta rhythms act as a control mechanism that determines which information is read out from working memory.

His lab has also found that in certain parts of the prefrontal cortex, different brain layers show distinctive patterns of oscillation: faster oscillation at the surface and slower oscillation in the deep layers. One study, led by Bastos when he was a postdoc in Miller’s lab, showed that as animals performed working memory tasks, lower-frequency rhythms generated in deeper layers regulated the higher-frequency gamma rhythms generated in the superficial layers.

In addition to working memory, the brain’s cortex also is the seat of thought, planning, and high-level processing of emotion and sensory information. Throughout the regions involved in these functions, neurons are arranged in six layers, and each layer has its own distinctive combination of cell types and connections with other brain areas.

“The cortex is organized anatomically into six layers, no matter whether you look at mice or humans or any mammalian species, and this pattern is present in all cortical areas within each species,” Mendoza-Halliday says. “Unfortunately, a lot of studies of brain activity have been ignoring those layers because when you record the activity of neurons, it’s been difficult to understand where they are in the context of those layers.”

In the new paper, the researchers wanted to explore whether the layered oscillation pattern they had seen in the prefrontal cortex is more widespread, occurring across different parts of the cortex and across species.

Using a combination of data acquired in Miller’s lab, Desimone’s lab, and labs from collaborators at Vanderbilt, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, and the University of Western Ontario, the researchers were able to analyze 14 different areas of the cortex, from four mammalian species. This data included recordings of electrical activity from three human patients who had electrodes inserted in the brain as part of a surgical procedure they were undergoing.

Recording from individual cortical layers has been difficult in the past, because each layer is less than a millimeter thick, so it’s hard to know which layer an electrode is recording from. For this study, electrical activity was recorded using special electrodes that record from all of the layers at once, then feed the data into a new computational algorithm the authors designed, termed FLIP (frequency-based layer identification procedure). This algorithm can determine which layer each signal came from.

“More recent technology allows recording of all layers of cortex simultaneously. This paints a broader perspective of microcircuitry and allowed us to observe this layered pattern,” Major says. “This work is exciting because it is both informative of a fundamental microcircuit pattern and provides a robust new technique for studying the brain. It doesn’t matter if the brain is performing a task or at rest and can be observed in as little as five to 10 seconds.”

Across all species, in each region studied, the researchers found the same layered activity pattern.

“We did a mass analysis of all the data to see if we could find the same pattern in all areas of the cortex, and voilà, it was everywhere. That was a real indication that what had previously been seen in a couple of areas was representing a fundamental mechanism across the cortex,” Mendoza-Halliday says.

Maintaining balance

The findings support a model that Miller’s lab has previously put forth, which proposes that the brain’s spatial organization helps it to incorporate new information, which carried by high-frequency oscillations, into existing memories and brain processes, which are maintained by low-frequency oscillations. As information passes from layer to layer, input can be incorporated as needed to help the brain perform particular tasks such as baking a new cookie recipe or remembering a phone number.

“The consequence of a laminar separation of these frequencies, as we observed, may be to allow superficial layers to represent external sensory information with faster frequencies, and for deep layers to represent internal cognitive states with slower frequencies,” Bastos says. “The high-level implication is that the cortex has multiple mechanisms involving both anatomy and oscillations to separate ‘external’ from ‘internal’ information.”

Under this theory, imbalances between high- and low-frequency oscillations can lead to either attention deficits such as ADHD, when the higher frequencies dominate and too much sensory information gets in, or delusional disorders such as schizophrenia, when the low frequency oscillations are too strong and not enough sensory information gets in.

“The proper balance between the top-down control signals and the bottom-up sensory signals is important for everything the cortex does,” Miller says. “When the balance goes awry, you get a wide variety of neuropsychiatric disorders.”

The researchers are now exploring whether measuring these oscillations could help to diagnose these types of disorders. They are also investigating whether rebalancing the oscillations could alter behavior — an approach that could one day be used to treat attention deficits or other neurological disorders, the researchers say.

The researchers also hope to work with other labs to characterize the layered oscillation patterns in more detail across different brain regions.

“Our hope is that with enough of that standardized reporting, we will start to see common patterns of activity across different areas or functions that might reveal a common mechanism for computation that can be used for motor outputs, for vision, for memory and attention, et cetera,” Mendoza-Halliday says.

Written by Anne Trafton

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

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thebardostate · 4 months

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Is the Brain a Driver or a Steering Wheel?

This three part series summarizes what science knows, or thinks it knows, about consciousness. In Part 1 What Does Quantum Physics Imply About Consciousness? we looked at why several giants in quantum physics - Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Von Neumann and others - believed consciousness is fundamental to reality. In Part 2 Where Does Consciousness Come From? we learned the "dirty little secret" of neuroscience: it still hasn't got a clue how electrical activity in the brain results in consciousness.

In this concluding part of the series we will look at how a person can have a vivid conscious experience even when their brain is highly dysfunctional. These medically documented oddities challenge the materialist view that the brain produces consciousness.

Before proceeding, let's be clear what what is meant by "consciousness". For brevity, we'll keep things simple. One way of looking at consciousness is from the perspective of an outside observer (e.g., "conscious organisms use their senses to notice differences in their environment and act on their goals.") This outside-looking-in view is called behavioral consciousness (aka psychological consciousness). The other way of looking at it is the familiar first-person perspective of what it feels like to exist; this inside-looking-out view is called phenomenal consciousness (Barušs, 2023). This series is only discussing phenomenal consciousness.

Ready? Let’s go!

Source: Caltech Brain Imaging Center

A Hole in the Head

Epilepsy is a terrible disease in which electrical storms in the brain trigger seizures. For some people these seizures are so prolonged and frequent that drastic action is needed to save their lives. One such procedure is called a hemispherectomy, the removal or disconnection of half the brain. Above is an MRI image of a child who has undergone the procedure.

You might think that such radical surgery would profoundly alter the memory, personality, and cognitive abilities of the patient.

You would be wrong. One child who underwent the procedure at age 5 went on to attend college and graduate school, demonstrating above average intelligence and language abilities despite removal of the left hemisphere (the zone of the brain typically identified with language.) A study of 58 children from 1968 to 1996 found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality or humor, and minimal changes in cognitive function after hemispherectomy.

You might think that, at best, only a child could successfully undergo this procedure. Surely such surgery would kill an adult?

You would be wrong again. Consider the case of Ahad Israfil, an adult who suffered an accidental gunshot to the head and successfully underwent the procedure to remove his right cerebral hemisphere. Amazingly, after the five hour operation he tried to speak and went on to regain a large measure of functionality (although he did require use of a wheelchair afterwards.)

Another radical epilepsy procedure, a corpus collosotomy, leaves the hemispheres intact but severs the connections between them. For decades it was believed that these split-brain patients developed divided consciousness, but more recent research disputes this notion. Researchers found that, despite physically blocking all neuronal communication between the two hemispheres, the brain somehow still maintains a single unified consciousness. How it manages this feat remains a complete mystery. Recent research on how psychedelic drugs affect the brain hints that the brain might have methods other than biochemical agents for internal communication, although as yet we haven't an inkling as to what those might be.

So what's the smallest scrape of brain you need to live? Consider the case of a 44-year-old white collar worker, married with two children and with an IQ of 75. Two weeks after noticing some mild weakness in one leg the man went to see his doctor. The doc ordered a routine MRI scan of the man's cranium, and this is what it showed.

Source: The Lancet

What you are seeing here is a giant empty cavity where most of the patient's brain should be. Fully three quarters of his brain volume is missing, most likely due to a bout of hydrocephalus he experienced when he was six months old.

Last Words

Many unusual phenomena have been observed as life draws to an end. We're going to look at two deathbed anomalies that have neurological implications.

The first is terminal lucidity, sometimes called paradoxical lucidity. First studied in 2009, terminal lucidity refers to the spontaneous return of lucid communication in patients who were no longer thought to be medically capable of normal verbal communication due to irreversible neurological deterioration (e.g., Alzheimers, meningitis, Parkinson's, strokes.) Here are three examples:

A 78-year-old woman, left severely disabled and unable to speak by a stroke, spoke coherently for the first time in two years by asking her daughter and caregiver to take her home. She died later that evening.

A 92-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease hadn’t recognized her family for years, but the day before her death, she had a pleasantly bright conversation with them, recalling everyone’s name. She was even aware of her own age and where she’d been living all this time.

A young man suffering from AIDS-related dementia and blinded by the disease who regained both his lucidity and apparently his eyesight as well to say farewell to his boyfriend and caregiver the day before his death.

Terminal lucidity has been reported for centuries. A historical review found 83 case reports spanning the past 250 years. It was much more commonly reported in the 19th Century (as a sign that death was near, not as a phenomenon in its own right) before the materialist bias in the medical profession caused a chilling effect during the 20th Century. Only during the past 15 years has any systematic effort been made to study this medical anomaly. As a data point on its possible prevalence a survey of 45 Canadian palliative caregivers found that 33% of them had witnessed at least one case of terminal lucidity within the past year. Other surveys found have that the rate of prevalence is higher if measured over a longer time window than one year, suggesting that, while uncommon, terminal lucidity isn't particularly rare.

Terminal lucidity is difficult to study, in part because of ethical challenges in obtaining consent from neurocompromised individuals, and in part because its recent identification as a research topic presents delineation problems. However, the promise of identifying new neurological pathways in the brains of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients has gotten a lot of attention. In 2018 the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) announced two funding opportunites to advance this nascent science.

Due to the newness of this topic there will continue be challenges with the data for some time to come. However, its impact on eyewitnesses is indisputably profound.

Near Death Experiences

The second deathbed anomaly we will take a look at are Near-Death Experiences (NDEs.) These are extraordinary and deeply personal psychological experiences that typically (but not always) occur during life-threatening emergencies such as cardiac arrest, falls, automobile accidents, or other traumatic events; they are also occasionally reported during general anesthesia. Much of the research in this area has focused on cardiac arrest cases because these patients are unconscious and have little to no EEG brain wave activity, making it difficult to account for how the brain could sustain the electrical activity needed to perceive and remember the NDE. This makes NDEs an important edge case for consciousness science.

NDEs are surprisingly common. A 2011 study published by the New York Academy of Sciences estimated that over 9 million people in the United States have experienced an NDE. Multiple studies have found that around 17% of cardiac arrest survivors report an NDE.

There is a remarkable consistency across NDE cases, with experiencers typically reporting one or more of the following:

The sensation of floating above their bodies watching resuscitation efforts, sometimes able to recall details of medical procedures and ER/hallway conversations they should not have been aware of;

Heightened sensations, occasionally including the ability of blind and deaf people to see and hear;

Extremely rapid mental processing;

The perception of passing through something like a tunnel;

A hyper-vivid life review, described by many experiencers as "more real than real";

Transcendent visions of an afterlife;

Encounters with deceased loved ones, sometimes including people the experiencer didn’t know were dead; and

Encounters with spiritual entities, sometimes in contradiction to their personal belief systems.

Of particular interest is a type of NDE called a veridical NDE. These are NDEs in which the experiencer describes events that occurred during the period when they had minimal or no brain activity and should not have been perceived or remembered if the brain were the source of phenomenal consciousness. These represent about 48% of all NDE accounts (Greyson 2010). Here are a few first-hand NDE reports.

A 62-year-old aircraft mechanic during a cardiac arrest (from Sabom 1982, pp. 35, 37)

A 23-year-old crash-rescue firefighter in the USAF caught by a powerful explosion from a crashed B-52 (from Greyson 2021, pg. 27-29)

An 18-year-old boy describes what it was like to nearly drown (from the IANDS website)

There are thousands more first person NDE accounts published by the International Association for Near-Death Studies and at the NDE Research Foundation. The reason so many NDE accounts exist is because the experience is so profound that survivors often feel compelled to write as a coping method. Multiple studies have found that NDEs are more often than not life-changing events.

A full discussion of NDEs is beyond the scope of this post. For a good general introduction, I highly recommend After: What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson, MD (2021).

The Materialist Response

Materialists have offered up a number of psychological and physiological models for NDEs, but none of them fits all the data. These include:

People's overactive imaginations. Sabom (1982) was a skeptical cardiologist who set out to prove this hypothesis by asking cardiac arrest survivors who did not experience NDEs to imagine how the resuscitation process worked, then comparing those accounts with the veridical NDE accounts. He found that the veridical NDE accounts were highly accurate (0% errors), whereas 87% of the imagined resuscitation procedures contained at least one major error. Sabom became convinced that NDEs are real. His findings were replicated by Holden and Joesten (1990) and Sartori (2008) who reviewed veridical NDE accounts in hospital settings (n = 93) and found them to be 92% completely accurate, 6% partially accurate, and 1% completely inaccurate.

NDEs are just hallucinations or seizures. The problem here is that hallucinations and seizures are phenomena with well-defined clinical features that do not match those of NDEs. Hallucinations are not accurate descriptions of verifiable events, but veridical NDEs are.

NDEs are the result of electrical activity in the dying brain. The EEGs of experiencers in cardiac arrest show that no well-defined electrical activity was occurring that could have supported the formation or retention of memories during the NDE. These people were unconscious and should not have remembered anything.

NDEs are the product of dream-like or REM activity. Problem: many NDEs occur under general anesthesia, which suppresses dreams and REM activity. So this explanation cannot be correct.

NDEs result from decreased oxygen levels in the brain. Two problems here: 1) The medical effects of oxygen deprivation are well known, and they do not match the clinical presentation of NDEs. 2) The oxygen levels of people in NDEs (e.g., during general anesthesia) has been shown to be the same or greater than people who didn’t experience NDEs.

NDEs are the side effects of medications or chemicals produced in the brain (e.g. ketamine or DMT). The problem here is that people who are given medications in hospital settings tend to report fewer NDEs, not more; and drugs like ketamine have known effects that are not observed in NDEs. The leading advocate for the ketamine model conceded after years of research that ketamine does not produce NDEs (Corraza and Schifano, 2010).

Summing Up

In coming to the end of this series, let's sum up what we discussed.

Consciousness might be wired into the physical universe at fundamental level, as an integral part of quantum mechanics. Certainly several leading figures in physics thought so - Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Von Neumann, and more recently Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp.

Materialist propaganda notwithstanding, neuroscience is no closer to identifying Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) than it was when it started. The source of consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in science.

Meanwhile, medical evidence continues to pile up that there is something deeply amiss with the materialist belief that consciousness is produced by the brain. In a sense, the challenge that NDEs and Terminal Lucidity pose to consciousness science is analogous to the challenge that Dark Matter poses to physics, in that they suggest that the mind-brain identity model of classic materialist psychology may need to be rethought to adequately explain these phenomena.

Ever since the Greeks, science has sought to explain nature entirely in physical terms, without invoking theism. It has been spectacularly successful - particularly in the physical sciences - but at the cost of excluding consciousness along with the gods (Nagel, 2012). What I have tried to do in this series is to show that a very credible argument can be made that materialism has the arrow of causality backwards: the brain is not the driver of consciousness, it's the steering wheel.

I don't think we are yet ready to say what consciousness is. Much more research is needed. I'm not making the case for panpsychism, for instance - but I do think consciousness researchers need to throw off the assumption drag of materialism before they're going to make any real progress.

It will be up to you, the scientists of tomorrow, to make those discoveries. That's why I'm posting this to Tumblr rather than an academic journal; young people need to hear what's being discovered, and the opportunities that these discoveries represent for up and coming scientists.

Never has Planck's Principle been more apt: science advances one funeral at a time.

Good luck.

For Further Reading

Barušs, Imants & Mossbridge, Julia (2017). Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness. American Psychological Association, Washington DC.

Barušs, Imants (2023). Death as an Altered State of Consciousness: A Scientific Approach. American Psychological Association, Washington DC.

Batthyány, Alexander (2023). Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death. St. Martin's Essentials, New York.

Becker, Carl B. (1993). Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death. State University of New York Press, Albany NY.

Greyson, Bruce (2021). After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. St. Martin's Essentials, New York.

Kelly, Edward F.; Kelly, Emily Williams; Crabtree, Adam; Gauld, Alan; Grosso, Michael; & Greyson, Bruce (2007). Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Rowman & Littlefield, New York.

Moody, Raymond (1975). Life After Life. Bantam/Mockingbird, Covington GA.

Moreira-Almeida, Alexander; de Abreu Costa, Marianna; & Coelho, Humberto S. (2022). Science of Life After Death. Springer Briefs in Psychology, Cham Switzerland.

Penfield, Wilder (1975). Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain. Princeton Legacy Library, Princeton NJ.

Sabom, Michael (1982). Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. Harper and Row Publishers, New York.

van Lommel, Pim (2010). Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. HarperCollins, New York.

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kiranoad · 4 months

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I am a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of York. My research focuses on how we recognise people in naturalistic conditions.

I am currently running a fun experiment to address abilities in people with developmental prosopagnosia (face blindness, which around 1 in 50 people have) under naturalistic conditions (watching TV!). We have previously used TV watching to investigate prosopagnosia (using Game of Thrones) and found really interesting results; we are hopeful that using naturalistic experiments will be really useful for investigating prosopagnosia in real world situations.

I am now looking for participants with face blindness to take part this new TV watching study. It involves watching 20 minutes of a TV show, and can be completed entirely online.

If you think you might have developmental prosopagnosia (18+), I would be delighted if you might consider taking part! Please contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in participating in the study

#prosopagnosia #face blindness #psychology #cognitive neuroscience

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academicelephant · 3 months

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Dolphins can sleep with half of its brain being awake. This is necessary so that it can surface to breathe and not drown in its sleep. While humans can't do that, some of our neurons (i.e. brain cells) can sleep while others are still awake. When enough high number of neurons are asleep at the same time, the whole brain goes to sleep

#i actually learned this earlier maybe in my first year but i had forgotten the whole thing until it was brought up today #source: my professor #university #studying #student life #studyblr #psychology #cognitive neuroscience #science #brain #sleep #animals #dolphins

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gravitascivics · 5 months

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NATURE’S WORK

The last posting of this blog left the reader with the concern about how the natural development of the mind affects young people. It did this after introducing the field of study that looks at adolescence from the physical side of brain development. The posting relied, along with this one, on an article by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.[1]

She writes: “Given the fact that we know that social brain regions continue to develop, both in terms of structure and function, during adolescence, we were interested in how social cognitive behavior changes in adolescence.”[2] The first revelations found the consequence of this development was with young people.

That is, when confronted with difficult problems or tasks, adolescents were disposed to seek the help of others – not a trait observed in younger children. This finding was contrary to what had been taken to be the case. The belief was that children sought help. Such a finding, to the contrary, motivated study into related concerns such as risk taking and how peers influence young people in their decision-making.

Another area of interest is how genetic makeups influence brain development during those teen years. This research stretches into maladies such as schizophrenia mentioned in the last posting. Also, studies of excessive paranoia have been conducted. In those efforts, such imaging tools as fMRIs have been useful. More specifically, ways to measure blood flow have been relied upon because the telling fact is that neurons, to be active, need more energy and that is provided by blood. Or stated succinctly, when commenting on brain activity, what one is talking about is blood flowing to and in the brain.

Blakemore writes:

I think the area of adolescent brain development is one of the areas in cognitive neuroscience where actually brain imaging has completely revolutionized what we know. … We just didn’t know until 10 or 15 [today 20 or 25] years ago that the brain undergoes such dramatic development and even reorganization during the period of adolescence starting at puberty and continuing right throughout adolescence. … [I]t has revolutionized how we understand teenagers.[3]

And one very far-reaching finding is that no evidence – contrary to previous common belief – exists that the brain is fixed in a person’s early childhood. This was considered doctrine, but due to imaging studies, it is now considered totally wrong. Today, it is believed that significant change takes place throughout adolescent years and continues into a person’s 20s and 30s.

And this change doesn’t end there. The brain’s plasticity – that’s its baseline state of the brain – continues to change. And as such, that fact affects intervention and educational efforts directed to help teenagers. But there is one challenging fact related to this promising development.

Unfortunately, such analysis calls for the use of scanning techniques and they are expensive and long-lasting protocols. These treatments, to be effective, are large-scale studies that one can consider to be longitudinal in that they last a number of years. Blakemore suggests not longitudinal studies but cross-sectional ones in which comparisons among different teenagers, situated with different adults, can be conducted.

Blakemore opines:

It would be ideal if you could scan a very large number of teenagers every couple of years as they go into adulthood. The icing on the cake would be to scan a sufficient number of individuals so that you track people who, for example, develop schizophrenia, and go back and look at their brain imaging data from when they were a teenager, and look at how it differs from teenagers who don’t develop schizophrenia. … [They] really need to be doing it [i.e., this type of analysis] for 20 years.[4]

And with that bit of insight, Blakemore ends with a hopeful observation. This type of research is new – as of the publishing of her article ten years ago – and promises to provide meaningful insights into various fields of behavior and development, such as psychiatric disorder and psychological disorder, where the lack of knowledge is significant.

[1] Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “The Adolescent Brain” in Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, edited by John Brockman (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2013), 115-131.

[2] Ibid., 121.

[3] Ibid., 128.

[4] Ibid., 130-131.

#brain development #adolescence #brain imaging #cognitive neuroscience #civics education #social studies

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meghanester · 7 months

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Cognitive Neuroscience Market 2023-2035 to Grow by a CAGR of ~5%; Growing Prevalence of Mental Disorders to Propel the Market Growth

Research Nester published a report titled “Cognitive Neuroscience Market: Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2035” which delivers detailed overview of the global cognitive neuroscience market in terms of market segmentation by type, application, and by region.

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The global cognitive neuroscience market is anticipated to attain a CAGR of ~5% over the forecast period, i.e., 2023-2035. The market is segmented on the basis of application into brain imaging, neurological research, neurological disorders, psychiatry, and others. Out of these, the neurological research segment is anticipated to hold a substantial share over the forecast period, on account of the growing need for new treatment methods for various mental disorders. Along with this, the high investment in the medical R&D activities is estimated to boost the segment growth.

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The global cognitive neuroscience market is estimated to grow on the back of growing prevalence of mental disorders, such as, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. According to the data by the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 55 million people live with dementia worldwide, while nearly 10 million new cases are reported every year. Moreover, the growing demand for new treatment approaches, such as, combination of psychology and neuroscience, is further estimated to drive the market growth.

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The research is global in nature and covers detailed analysis on the market in North America (U.S., Canada), Europe (U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands & Luxembourg, NORDIC [Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark], Poland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Rest of Latin America), Asia-Pacific (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Rest of Asia-Pacific), Middle East and Africa (Israel, GCC [Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman], North Africa, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa). In addition, analysis comprising market size, Y-O-Y growth & opportunity analysis, market players’ competitive study, investment opportunities, demand for future outlook etc. has also been covered and displayed in the research report.

Increasing Need for Advanced Treatment Methods for Mental Diseases to boost the Market Growth

Mental disorders can be complicated, and one treatment method may not be equally effective for every patient. Therefore, cognitive neuroscience uses a combination of both psychology, and neurology to obtain maximum positive results for patients. This is expected to boost the market growth. Moreover, rising awareness amongst patients about advanced technologies, is further estimated to boost the market growth.

However, non-availability of cognitive neuroscience in the underdeveloped and developing regions expected to operate as key restraint to the growth of global cognitive neuroscience market over the forecast period.

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This report also provides the existing competitive scenario of some of the key players of the global cognitive neuroscience market which includes company profiling of Alpha Omega Inc., Judges Scientific Plc, Laserglow Technologies, Biobserve GmbH, Medtronic Plc, Abbot Laboratories, Pear Therapeutics, Inc., Penumbra, Inc., Stryker Corporation, and Boston Scientific Corporation. The profiling enfolds key information of the companies which encompasses business overview, products and services, key financials and recent news and developments. On the whole, the report depicts detailed overview of the global cognitive neuroscience market that will help industry consultants, equipment manufacturers, existing players searching for expansion opportunities, new players searching possibilities and other stakeholders to align their market centric strategies according to the ongoing and expected trends in the future.

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Research Nester is a leading service provider for strategic market research and consulting. We aim to provide unbiased, unparalleled market insights and industry analysis to help industries, conglomerates and executives to take wise decisions for their future marketing strategy, expansion and investment etc. We believe every business can expand to its new horizon, provided a right guidance at a right time is available through strategic minds. Our out of box thinking helps our clients to take wise decision in order to avoid future uncertainties.

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#Cognitive Neuroscience Market #Cognitive Neuroscience Market 2023 #Cognitive Neuroscience

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