Encefalus

Recently I read John Duncan’s "How intelligence happens". It was an interesting book, written from one of the world leading experts in the field.
I a few words, John Duncan believes that the root of intelligence lies mainly in the frontal and parietal complex, in a system he calls the "Multiple Demand System". This system is [...]

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot into the topic of intelligence. There are 3 things that interest me in this topic
1) How can human intelligence exist?
2) What makes a person more intelligent than another person?
3) How can we enhance our intelligence?

Concerning the first question, I am not seeking an evolutionary explanation of the sort "intelligence [...]

Lately I have started dabbling with fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory. You’ll probably start wondering what these are. I won’t try to give you a definition, but rather I’ll give you a few examples to help you understand yourself.
I don’t like the mathematical way that concepts like fuzzy logic are first presented. A mathematician [...]

I found this interview in scientific american the other day: Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker
This interview is with Daniel Tammet, a world-known savant.

Daniel Tammet
For those of you who don’t know what a savant is, they are autistic people with extraordinary abilities. If you’ve seen the film Rainman, then you’ll [...]

Lately I’ve been digging into the subject of agent based models of social sciences. Agent based models are defined by wikipedia as following

An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network, with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. [...]

Lately I have been reading this book: The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind. The book deals, quite obviously, with philosophy of mind and all the matters that touch this subject, including free will. The author is Ben Goertzel who happens to be a very interesting person. He holds a PhD in mathematics, but [...]

Mind Hacks: Through a lab darkly.
I stumbled upon this article the other day. It comments on some articles that criticize the current method of cognitive research. The current trend in cognitive research is based on lab research. We take the subjects, put them into the lab, strip out all the factors that could alter the [...]

Lately I have to deal with a lot of things in my life. So, I have been thinking about the relationship between information and the human cognitive system. How much information can we absord at a time? How can we filter the noise out of it and keep the useful stuff? How can we manage [...]

GeorgeLoewenstein
Remember the article Lotteries, poverty and social implications? I found this article in Scientific American : Lottery Tickets and Credit Cards: The Dangers of an Irrational Brain. It’s an interview with the researcher who’s work we commented in Lotteries, poverty and social implications. He is called George Loewenstein.
What I particularly liked about this interview is [...]

The Creation Simulation
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.
Remember what we were saying at How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this has to do with the Flynn effect and More proof that video games make you smart ?The above links will take you to two Seed Magazine [...]

Those of you who read this blog for sometime, already know some of my views concerning psychology. I am an avid supporter of "hard science". Science that is based on solid facts and follows the reductionist paradigm. Even though solid facts are not always the answer and reductionism could be replaced in the following decades [...]

I don’t know if you have noticed it, but there’s a site called Scholarpedia. It seems it was created in 2006, but I hadn’t found the site until recently. What is most interesting is that it’s a lot like Knol, since the articles are written by respectful authors with a scientific style. It seems that [...]