Category: Learning

Auditory neurons learning to hear

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s recent business report (January 2008) had an interesting research report on auditory neurons and the perception of complex sounds. (Science Daily has a short report on the longer piece available here). (The BBSRC is the UK’s principal funder of basic biological research.)

As the BBSRC piece discusses, sound perception is extremely difficult because similar objects often make quite different sounds, and the medium (typically air) through which we hear does not allow for the spatialization or easy decomposition that, say, light allows in vision. The Oxford-based research team is using neural imaging to try to figure out how the brain makes sense of sound, and one thing that they’re finding is that background noise appears to be extremely important to sound processing. The auditory cortex does not simply respond to isolated qualities of specific sounds but to variations in the statistical properties of the entire sound scape. As the article reports: ‘Cortical neurons appear to anticipate this particular level of statistical regularity, and respond best to sounds that vary in pitch and intensity according to this natural rate of ebb and flow, which is found in many natural scenes and most musical compositions.’

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Will Power as Mental Muscle

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchThere’s an interesting blog post here about “How to Boost Your Willpower,” which tells us that “researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.”

 Well, how about a cultural muscle too?  After all, we’re talking about a cultural trait too!  In my research in Colombia, knowing how to manage limits and having reasons to say no help explain lower rates of illegal drug use there, despite plenty of risk factors and access to drugs. 

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Monkey Makes Robot Walk!

Where does this leave the evolution of human bipedalism?  Is there some mystery “bipedal instinct”?  A bipedal “organ” in the brain?  I’ll let you decide… 😉 

Here’s the article.  It’s a great piece about the importance of training, the relevance of a body (build it and the brain will come…), and the management of different tasks by different areas of the brain that work in conjunction.  For the culturally inclined, the study authors argue that for Idoya, the monkey in question, her “motor cortex, where the electrodes were implanted, had started to absorb the representation of the robot’s legs — as if they belonged to Idoya herself.”

Re-training the damaged brain

There’s a good article today, “Coaching the Comeback,” about an occupational therapist working with patients recovering from traumatic brain injuries.  From physical training, nerve stimulation and direct social interaction (e.g., maintaining eye contact, talking to them), the therapist helps her patients along.  It’s a nice summary of several themes that we’ve said in different ways about brains.  And, the therapist with her collection of skills, her education of families, her moral views on recovery also shows the importance of culture in interaction.  It’s also a nice story in itself…

Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

By Daniel Lende 

Steven Pinker is selling something.  Here’s what’s on the table: “the human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity.”  This organ has been built into our brains by evolution, culture-free except for how its five domains (harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity) are “ranked” and “channeled” in different places around the globe.  Ready to buy? 

Let’s sweeten the deal.  Pinker is offering his “deeper look” which will help you “rethink your answers” about life and morality.  He’s providing “a more objective reckoning” to help people get over their moral “illusions.”  And he’s got the data to show it, from people in the lab, Web sites, and brain scanners.  (I can’t help asking, these are his moral examples?  People in artificial situations, people who don’t physically interact, and a series of images?)  Continue reading “Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct”

Equilibrium, modularity, and training the brain-body

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchRetaining one’s balance in movement is one of the more complicated sensory and motor tasks that humans routinely accomplish.  Elite athletic activities make the task of maintaining bipedal locomotion all the more difficult; no other species, I would argue, not even the kangaroo or gibbon, engages in a repertoire of bipedal activities even remotely close to as varied as that of humans.  We walk, run, skip, hop, and combinations of all three; we kick while running, jump over a range of obstacles, cross balance beams and tight ropes, ride unicycles; some of our species even juggle soccer balls, play badminton and volleyball with our feet (no kidding, in Brazil I used to see futevolei — ‘foot-volleyball’ — on the beach… amazing), balance objects on our feet and a host of other activities.  And, in the example I want to start discussing, some of us even invert our bodies and become bipedal on our hands, sometimes to extraordinary effect.

In order to accomplish these sorts of tasks, we use our ‘sense of balance.’  I hesitate to call it a sense, though, because the systems of perception, forms of analysis that we do, and reactions that we use to preserve our equilibrium are actually a complicated system, a set of shifting constellations of interio- and exterioceptions, differently weighted and compared depending upon our environment and task, and a host of active patterns of physical compensation, most of them only vaguely conscious, at best, that keep us upright.  Equilibrium is a perceptual-motor system in the sense discussed by James J. Gibson (1979), perhaps even more baroque the visual perception system (his favourite example).

Minimally, a brief ecological psychology of balance would need to include at least the following: the vestibular system; information from the visual system including the horizon line, parallax, relation of centre of field of vision to visual references, and movement in peripheral vision; sensations on the soles of the feet as well as at joints and other forms of proprioception; sense receptors at the back of the neck as well as a sense of the head’s alignment in space and in relation to the body; the gravity-resisting muscles, usually those of the lower body, and the reflexes that move them to compensate for perturbations in balance.

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