The BBC is running a radio program called All in the Mind. Hosted by Dr. Raj Persaud, it explores current issues in cognitive science, psychiatry, psychology and neurology, bringing together experts and commentators in the study of mind. Here’s BBC’s plug by Persaud: "All in the Mind provides a unique chance to meet the people at the cutting edge of research and development on all aspects of the mind and brain from around the world. Please join me as we attempt to illuminate the most complex and least understood mechanism we have so far found in the Universe - the mind."

BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind
Listen to the lates episode (Doesn’t work? Download RealPlayer)

The OpenEEG project is encouraging independent research into electroencephalograms (EEG), which provide visual representations of the electrical activity in the brain, by providing instructions on how to get EEGs on your PC. The technology has been around for a while, but is not publically available because of standard IEC601, which requires medical devices to undergo specific tests before being made available, tests that are really expensive. Luckily, you can now build your own! All you need is a signal capture card, two electrodes and some software (which is available free on OpenEEG’s site along with comprehensive guides). Cheap capture cards are available through Olimex, electrodes are easy to find, and different software is readily available:

OpenEEG Project

Folksonomy is the practice of collaborative cateforization using freely chosen keywords. As an internet feature it was developed in 2004 with advances in social software. Some examples: del.icio.us, social bookmarking; Flickr, photo sharing; 43 Things, goal sharing; GenieLab, music recommendations/associations. Folksonomy stems from "folk classifications", how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them, which have long been studied in sociology and anthropology. The term is a portmanteau or frankenword (like brunch, smog, or infomercial), mixing folk and taxonomy (taxis=classification, nomos=management), hence people’s classigication management, coined by Thomas Vander Wal (wonderwall , an information architext working for the INDUS Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland. As with most things, the fastest way to learn is to do.

To use del.icio.us, type in del.icio.us/tag/(instert subject here) in the url. You’ll get a list of recent tags with that subject, as well as a list of related tags. Click on the tagger’s name to see of what else they’ve tagged. You can also subscribe to tags of interest, by clicking subscribe towards the top. If you have Firefox, here is an extension called Feedview that manages newsfeeds (you can have your tags fed through RSS [Really Simple Syndication]). If you use a different browser, but deep down feel unsatisfied with it, download Firefox.

A recent study detailed this week in Psychological Science, suggests that people with a good memory are also more likely to break under pressure. The study took 93 undergrads from Michigan State and devided them into two groups, a high working-memory group (HWM) and a low working memory group (LWM). When they all took a 24 problem math test in a low-pressure environment, the HWM did much better. When they cranked up the pressure by telling the groups that their performance will be evaluated by math professors, the score of HWM dropped to that of the LWM group. This is just one more study to challange the accuracy of high-pressure tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and MCAT in predicting who will succeed in acacdemics.

Choking Under Pressure, Sian L. Beilok (Miami U) and Thomas H Carr (Michigan State).

Transhumanism is a subculture/movement rallied under the idea "If the future can’t be now, it should be as soon as possible." Hence, it encourages research into life extension, cryonics, nanotech, physical/mental enhancements, megascale engineering and AI. T.S. Eliot wrote of the "process by which the human is Transhumanised", as the human journey towards illumination, in his comedy of manners The Cocktail Party. British biologist Julian Huxley in New Bottles For New Wine, had an essay "Transhunism" in which he argued how humans must establish better environments for themselves, and allueded to the new species that humans might eventually become. In 1990, Dr. Max More first published "transhumanism" as a philosophy, differing from Huxley in that he believed in "man remaining man but transcending himself."
Soon after, transhumanism took off as a social movement (casting off its capital T and quotation marks). There are two major types of transhumans:

Extropian, a transhuman who wants to live forevever, by means of cloning, cryonics, or genetic altering. Tries to augment his consciousness through technology and drugs, consequently often espousing libertarian political views.

Singularitarian, a transhuman who seeks immortality by merging with computers to become an immortal new life-form. This hypothesized future is the "singular" event in human history.

Conceptually, as well as etymologically, the transhuman is very similar to the superman of German philosopher Fiedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s self-overcoming is rephrased, but with little change in meaning, in More’s ideas on man’s self-transcendance. The cutting-edge interdisciplinary interest in life-enhancing technology is in line with Nietzsche’s emphasis on life-enriching philosophy. Meanwhile, the underlying transhumanist search for immortality seems to be a manifestation of Nietzsche’s will to power.

Know Your Transhumanists, Wired.

Vatican archeologists believe that they have identified the tomb in Rome’s St Paul Outside the Walls [S. Paolo fuori le mura] basilica, following the discovery of a stone coffin during excavations carried out over the past three years. The effort was guided by 19th-century plans for the basilica, which was largely rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1823. An initial survey enabled archeologists to reconstruct the shape of the original basilica, built early in the 4th century. A second excavation, under the main altar of the basilica, brought the Vatican team to the sarcophagus, which was located on what would have been ground level for the original 4th-century building, brilliantly hidden behind a marble plaque that reads, "Apostle Paul, martyr."

"The tomb that we discovered is the one that the popes and the Emperor Theodosius (379-395) saved and presented to the whole world as being the tomb of the apostle," says archeologist Giorgio Filippi, but "nobody ever thought to look behind that plaque". I’m not sure if archeologists are getting lazy, or maybe all the good stuff has already been found, but I don’t know how finding a coffin where the tombstone is qualifies as news. Nor do I know why someone is digging up an apostle; fame, relics, DNA sample?

Archeologists discover St. Paul’s tomb, Catholic News.
Tomb of St. Paul found?

Recently, a piece of what is now the oldest throne was found in Mainz Roman-Germanic Museum. The funny thing is that it was brought there nearly a century earlier, in 1911, having been found during the construction of a clothing store. It was cataloged and stored away, until museum archeologist, Mechthild Schulzerrlamm showed that the object supported the royal arm in the year 790 at the latest, making it older than the marble throne in Aachen which dates from around 800. Aachen was the favorite residence of the emperor and served as the principal coronation site of Holy Roman emperors and German kings from the Middle Ages to the Reformation. All that tradition upstaged by an armrest, a left armrest at that.

Mainz’ throne may be older, but Aachen’s is actually a throne.
A Place to Sit for German Kings, DW-World.de.

The New Yorker recently ran an article about Albert Einstein’s relationship with Kurt Gödel (not that kind of relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking). While Einstein has entered our vocabulary synonymous with genius (as well as the radiant energy of a given frequency required to effect the complete photochemical transformation of one mole of a photosensitive substance being equal to about 0.004 erg second times the frequency in question), few know the name Gödel, and fewer still know that that’s an umlaut over the o. Gödel, Kurt (1907-1978) was a mathematical logician with a keen interest in philosophy with a Platonic twist. Famous for his incompleteness theorems, he was largely responsible for destroying the ideal of complete knowledge, held by most scholars for as long as they could remember. He did this by arguing that:
1. no logical system can capture all the truths of mathematics,
2. no logical system for mathematics could, through itself, be show to be free from inconsistency.
And all at age 24, younger than Einstein with his Theory of Relativity.

Read Time Bandits, New Yorker, by Jim Holt.

A logical fallacy is an argument based on a false or invalid inference, an incorrectness of reasoning or belief, or just plain old bad logic. Some of the more popular fallacies include ad hominem attacks against the source of an argument ("What do you know, you suck!"), ad misericordiam appeals to pity ("Won’t someone please think of the children!"), red herring, irrelevant arguments to distract from the one at hand ("I’m right because… look, a giant rouge herring!") and petitio principii or begging the question ("There is truth"). By knowing what the different fallacies are, one can take steps to prevent themselves from making them. So, as I only have your best interests in mind, here’s a site on fallacies and rhetoric.

Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate.

The note taking system was developed by Walter Pauk, an emeritus professor of education at (duh) Cornell.

When taking notes during a lecture, presentation, whatever, write in area C.
Area A is the cue column, where you put keywords to help clarify the meaning of the notes, as well as help establish connections and enhance memory.
Area B is the summary of what’s on the page, written afterwards from the complete notes. It helps memory and makes review easier.

Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System
Abstract: Understanding the intentions of others while watching their actions is a fundamental building block of social behavior. The neural and functional mechanisms underlying this ability are still poorly understood. To investigate these mechanisms we used functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twenty-three subjects watched three kinds of stimuli: grasping hand actions without a context, context only (scenes containing objects), and grasping hand actions performed in two different contexts. In the latter condition the context suggested the intention associated with the grasping action (either drinking or cleaning). Actions embedded in contexts, compared with the other two conditions, yielded a significant signal increase in the posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus and the adjacent sector of the ventral premotor cortex where hand actions are represented. Thus, premotor mirror neuron areas, "areas active during the execution and the observation of an action," previously thought to be involved only in action recognition are actually also involved in understanding the intentions of others. To ascribe an intention is to infer a forthcoming new goal, and this is an operation that the motor system does automatically.

According to this study by UCLA neuroscientists, specialized brain cells called mirror neurons work in our understanding of others. These cells behave the same when one is performing an action as when they are observing another do it. To identify which areas of the brain are most active for a given task, the study used a brain imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to subtract the activation patterns from two different stimuli, thereby highlighting brain regions that are activated differentially in response to the difference in stimulus. Basically, fMRI (ephemerai uses a machine that scans the blood flow to functioning areas of the brain and pops out a picture, like this one from the aforementioned study:

The rest of Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System, PLoSBiology.org.

The Cognitive Science Society has voted on a list of the top 100 most influential works in cogsci of the 20th century. This was part of the Millenium Project supported by the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary study of cognition (the processes of awareness, though, and mental organization) that intergrates cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

The List.
Cognitive Science, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, –
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

The first thing to be thought of in flight, and the last thing to still be done; is flapping winged flight. The first man-powered ornithopter was designed by Leonardo da Vinci, and while it didn’t fly, it showed ingenuity as it came close to optimizing the energy provided by the human engine. There have been many recent breakthroughs in "flapping wing" technology, particularly at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, under Prof. James DeLaurier. There are already several prototypes, mostly small-scale remote controlled ornithopters. DeLaurier plans to showcase his flying machine at the 2006 Turin Olympics in Italy. The flight will be the culmination of a decades-long drive for the aviation engineer, who began his career working on the Apollo project at NASA’s Ames Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. Below: a model made from da Vinci’s sketches; two action shots of DeLaurier’s prototype.

The Ornithopter Project

Researchers led by nanotechnologist Carlo Montemagno at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed microscopic robots made of silicon that are powered by muscle tissue. The microbots were created by allowing self-assembling cells to grow on a tiny robotic structure, less than one millimeter long. Each had two legs with feet, with cardiomyocytes (muscle cells from a rat’s heart in this case) growing on the silicon skeleton. Since the cells grow on their own, there is no need to graft muscle tissue. The structure can be powered by placing it in a system charged with glucose, like a living body. The muscles then contract in an organized manner, causing the microbots to "walk." "I can make hundreds of thousands as easily as I can make one" says Montemagno. Such devices could power computer chips like mini electrical generators or be used as a muscle-based way to stimulate nerves, allowing people who are paralysed to breathe without a ventilator. Below, watch that bad boy go!

Growing muscle cells power microbots, CBC.ca.
Microbots grow own muscles from cells, NerdShit.com

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)

Cult legend journalist Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson, 67, took his own life on Sunday, February 20th, with a bullet to the head in his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. He shot himself after weeks of pain from a plethora of physical problems including a broken leg and a hip replacement. Famous for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", Thompson was a founder of gonzo journalism, an extension of New Journalism, based around the notion that journalism can be more truthful without strict observance of traditional rules of factual reportage, often characterized by a novelistic twist, with accuracy subjugated to catching the mood of the place or event. The family is looking into whether Thomson’s ashes can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun loving writer often expressed.

In a library basement in Edinburgh, there is a plain-looking black box the size of two cigarette packs. Inside it there is a microchip, no more complex than a pocket calculators. However, what distinguishes the Edinburgh box is that it can tell the future.It apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but the claims were knocked back by sceptics. Last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy. "It’s Earth-shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University, NJ, who is heading the research project behind the "black box" phenomenon. The Global Consciousness project has attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations, making for the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.

The project has its roots in the work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University in the late 1970s, who was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Jahn used current technology to study paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis and ESP. One of these technologies was a Random Event Generator (REG), which generated ones and zeros in a random sequence, like an electronic coin-flipper. Then he checked if human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine’s usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator, trying to make it flip more heads than tails. Repeatedly, they were successful at the task. Dr Nelson, also at Princeton University, extended this approach to group meditations, which showed an increased influence over the REG. He then decided to connect 40 REGs from around the world to his computer lab in Princeton via internet. These ran day in day out, but most of the time the graph looked more or less like a flat line. Then September 6, 1997, the machines started reporting huge deviations. That was the day approximately one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Princess Diana.

Since then a total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes’ of the project. Thus far, the Eggs have "sensed" a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America’s hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year’s Eve.

Can this box see into the future? RedNova.com.
Global Consciousness Project

There is something unnatural about killing one’s own species. Though there exist territorial and mating battles in the animal world, they are usually relatively harmless when compared with how those animals would battle other species. Indeed there exists a strong psychological resistance to killing, the existence of which can be observed through the marked absence of it in sociopaths, who by definition feel neither empathy nor remorse for other people. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations in World War II, noticed that only 15 to 20% of the riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. The evolution of weaponry, therefore, depends on the circumvention of this resistance, accomplished through crew and ranged weapons.

Konrad Lorenz observed that "man is not a killer, but the group is." Marshall noted in World War II that the firing rates of individual soldiers was very low, but crew served weapons (primarily machine guns) almost always fired. Group weapons have done most of the killing throughout history, from the chariots of the Bronze Age, to the Greek Phalanx, to crewed canons that would evolve into modern artillery, as well as machine guns (fired by a "gunner" with the aid of a "loader"). By providing the soldier with a sense of group security, and by diffusing the responsibility for killing other people, crew weapons achieve a higher firing rate.

The psychological enabling aspect of distance, in short, means that the further away you are the easier it is to kill. Dropping a bomb or firing a missile is easy, hence there is little record of noncompliance in these situations. Stabbing somebody to death, however, can be psychologically difficult, as Keegan notes that in the Battle of the Somme, "edged-weapon wounds were a fraction of one per cent of all wounds inflicted in the First World War." So, the evolution of weaponry is closely related to the enabling aspect of distance, as can be seen in the graph below.

The only thing greater than the resistance to killing at close range is the resistance to being killed at close range. Close-range interpersonal aggression is the universal human phobia, which is why the initiation of midbrain processing is so powerful and intense in these situations. Thus, one limitation to killing at long range is that greater distance results in a reduced psychological effect on the enemy. This manifests itself in the constant thwarting of each new generation of air power advocates and other adherents of sterile, long-range, high-tech warfare and a constant need for close combat troops to defeat an enemy.

Evolution of Weaponry, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95% of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness (a change from the earlier 10% estimate).

Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Olson Zaltman Associates business consulting firm, came up with "a technique for eliciting interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior." U.S. Patent No. 5,436,830, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) uses research groups in which participants cut out pictures that represent their thoughts and feelings about a particular subject, even if they can’t explain why. The researchers then deduce the subject’s "core, a deep metaphor simultaneously embedded in a unique setting." Some are drawn to seasonal or heroic myths, or images like blood and fire and mother. Others to deep concepts like journey and transformation. Still it seems that the menu of these unconscious metaphors is limited and universal.

Research has shown that many people with schizophrenia can also suffer from "clinically meaningful olfactory impairment," which includes dysfunction in higher brain centers such as the parietal lobes–the part of the brain that’s responsible for integrating sensory output so as to understand something, like reading social cues or contextualizing those cues. Schizophrenics are unable to manage social relationships or summon a social context for whatever encounter they are experiencing.

Also, research on minimally conscious patients shows that there is significant activity in the language centers of the brain when they hear personal stories recounted by a family member.

Mysteries of the Mind, USNews.

Dark Matter: a hypothetical form of matter that is believed to make up 90 percent of the matter in the universe; it is invisible (does not absorb or emit light) and does not collide with atomic particles but exerts gravitational force

The first galaxy composed predominately of dark matter seems to have been discovered by a group of stronomers led by Dr. Robert Minchin at Cardiff University, UK, using a 76-metre Lovell radio telescope at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory VIRGOHI21, 50 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster, was visible at radio frequencies (despite the space.com article calling this invisible) through the emissions from clouds of hydrogen gas. The hydrogen observed seems to account for 1000 times less mass than the galaxy as a whole, as determined by the rotation rate of the hydrogen clouds; nevertheless, there’s nothing visibly present at that distance at all.

This was part of a search for “dwarf” galaxies, which are predicted to be present in the universe at much greater frequencies than so far observed. But while it has no stars, this galaxy is not a dwarf. Other “dark matter” galaxies have been found in the past, but all had at least a few stars, though in one case (dwarf galaxy I Zwicky 18) all the observed stars were less than 500,000 years old, a tiny fraction of the normal billions of years.
It’s possible this observation is just a coincidence caused by two hydrogen clouds passing one another at high speed, rather than a single rotating mass of hydrogen. Nevertheless, we know the universe is mostly made of dark matter - it’s got to be out there somewhere, and this may be the first real evidence where.

Atronomers claim first “dark galaxy” find, NewScientist.com
A galaxy with no stars, SciScoop.com

Morphic Resonance. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation states that the forms of self-organizing systems are shaped by morphic fields. Morphic fields organize atoms, molecules, crystals, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, planetary systems, solar systems, galaxies. In other words, they organize systems at all levels of complexity, and are the basis for the wholeness that we observe in nature, which is more than the sum of the parts.

According to the Hypothesis of Formative Causation, morphic fields also contain an inherent memory given by the process of morphic resonance, whereby each kind of thing has a collective memory. For example, crystals of a given kind are influenced by all past crystals of that kind, date palms by past date palms, giraffes by past giraffes, etc. In the human realm this is similar to Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

In the realm of developmental biology the morphic fields that shape the growing organisms are called morphogenetic fields; in social organization they can be called social fields; and the organization of mental activity they can be called mental fields. But all these kinds of fields are particular kinds of morphic fields, and all are shaped and stabilized by morphic resonance. For a fuller description of the Hypothesis of Formative Causation see Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life or The Presence of the Past.

sheldrake.org

Kurzweil’s Law, also known as the Law of Accelerating Returns, coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil. The theory that by building on past accomplishments, the pace of technological change doubles every decade, leading to a Moore’s Law vision of progress.

Moore’s Law, formulated in a speech by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that each new memory integrated circuit contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. As the trend continues, computing power rises exponentially.

In the early days of technology, advances like the wheel, fire, and tools, took tens of thousands of years to develop and spread. However, the massive paradigm shift brought about by the printing press took only about a century to sink in. While, modern shifts, such as cell phones and the internet, spread in but a few years’ time. Some remain skeptical of accelerating returns, arguing that the technological advancement this century doesn’t seem to have the momentum suggested by Kurzweil’s Law. But, then again, it is easier to recognize the significance of advancements in hindsight, than while absorbed in the present. Time will tell. The current century is slated to produce the technological achievements of the preceding 200 centuries, or everything since the dawn of the Pharaohs, plus 16,000 years.

The Future of the Future, Michael Kanellos.