Our brains are filled with billions of neurons. Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung explains how mapping out the connections between those neurons might be the key to understanding the basis of things like personality, memory, perception, ideas and mental illness.
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/29/147190092/the-man-working-to-reverse-engineer-your-brain
The Wheeler Centre is a new kind of cultural institution, dedicated to the discussion and practice of writing, books and ideas. The Centre is a cornerstone of Melbourne’s UNESCO City of Literature status.
It doesn’t come as news that we’re living in an age where technology is producing profound changes in the ways we live and communicate, remember and socialise.
One of the world’s most ground-breaking and thought-provoking writers on technology and its impacts, Nicholas Carr, talks to Gideon Haigh. The celebrated journalist and author of The Shallows presents his arguments about how the internet’s pervasive influence is fostering ignorance.
Haigh and Carr discuss how information overload affects reading, writing, learning and understanding. And Carr contends that more brain activity does not equate to better, more efficient brain function, cautioning against the idea that entertaining content and ‘rich media’ is enhancing our intellectual power.
http://wheelercentre.com/videos/video/rewiring-our-brains-nicholas-carr/
Professor Barry Smith delves into the mysteries of the mind and looks at what goes into making a decision. Plus, Professor Russell Stannard argues that we are reaching the limits of what humans can understand
Professor Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London explores what happens inside our heads when we recognise a friend or reach for a cup of coffee.
Professor Smith has just made a series of programmes for the BBC World Service called The Mysteries of the Brain, which starts today.
So that’s what the brain can do. We also look at what it can’t do …
We dial up Professor Russell Stannard, emeritus professor of physics at the Open University. He thinks humans are fast approaching the end of what it is possible for us to know and understand. Caspar Llewellyn-Smith asks him about some of the themes in his new book, The End of Discovery.
Tereza Coraggio interviews Phyllis Bennis
Phyllis Bennis is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow, and author of several books on Empire and conflicts in the Middle East. She is the author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer and Challenging Empire.
Read the show transcript while listening, and view our images, videos, and links on the Third Paradigm website:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, associate professor and director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Center at National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy discusses his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.
From http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/10/06/segments/142076
An interview with Dr. Terrence Sejnowski about theoretical and computational biology and neurobiology.
Guest: Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute
http://futuresinbiotech.com/blog/2009/9/8/futures-in-biotech-46-towards-computers-that-think.html
’ve heard Andrew Hinton give various talks on the problem of context, but he never fails to help me dive deeper into the problem. Simply put, digital spaces lack physical context, and frequently do a very bad job of substituting a digital context for the physical. This problem might seem a bit abstract, until we realize just how important context is to human cognition. Andrew has a number of great examples of this, but the one that resonates with me is role of context in social cognition. We have relationships with our families, our friends, our peers, our co-workers, and more, and we modulate both how we express our selves and how we process information based on which context we’re in. Digital social spaces tend to collapse these contexts, connecting us with all of our social circles through one channel, allowing us to express ourselves in one way. This gets worse as when we introduce aggregation into the picture, because we not only collapse social context but also “object” context. In some way, we can work around the problem of context by segregating our interactions across tools. Aggregators take away even that modicum of control.
Andrew asked us how we’re going to start to understand the ramifications of this shift in context, and to start thinking about how we’re going to understand the problem. Is this a fundamental behavioral shift? Is it a problem to be solved? Or is it an opportunity to create new kinds of contexts?
If it comes to you easily, being able to read is easy to take for granted. But reading is an extraordinarily complex process, one that researchers are still working to understand fully. On today’s Please Explain we look at the science of reading. Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz are professors in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-Directors of the Yale Center for Learning.
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