Encefalus

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 [...]

What do you really know about your subconscious mind?
Subliminal Learning Demonstrated In Human Brain
The above link is from Science Daily. It reports of the findings of this paper Subliminal Instrumental Conditioning Demonstrated in the Human Brain published in Neuron magazine. 

Although the idea that instrumental learning can occur subconsciously has been around for nearly a century, [...]

Science Daily has a very interesting research
One Sleepless Night Increases Dopamine In The Human Brain
The study reports 

Just one night without sleep can increase the amount of the chemical dopamine in the human brain, according to new imaging research in the August 20 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Because drugs that increase dopamine, like amphetamines, [...]

Is he self-aware?
Today we’re dealing with some revolutionary research concerning the subject of self-awareness in birds.
 
Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition Prior H, Schwarz A, Güntürkün O PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 8, e202 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202
The above research was published a few days ago in PLoS Biology. It is the research that I believe will [...]

Remember what we were saying at How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this had to do with the Flynn effect. I found more proof to support my theories!
Take this link I found in Sharp Brains: Videogames for Cognitive Training?
It commented on this report Playing Video [...]