Bioethics.net

February 7, 2013

AJOB Neuroscience 2013 issue 1 is here!!!

This year’s first issue of
AJOB Neuroscience includes:

COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT AND EMOTION

RECONSIDERING DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION

MINIMALLY CONSCIOUS AND END-OF-LIFE CARE…

January 3, 2013

Today’s most visually magnetic news stories

What’s catching your eye when you browse the web? On the highly crowded information highway of the Web, any web page only has a few seconds to attract attention. But how do you know what grabs people’s attention? Doing an eye-tracking exper...

January 3, 2013

Brain Control and Consumer Behavior

I teach a course on consumer irrationality and market failure at the Fuqua School of Business. I open up one of my lectures with a brief video demonstration of what psychologists call “the McGurk effect.” (See an example here.) In the video, a ma...

January 2, 2013

Visual magnetism – what draws you into an image?

Sample analysis of visual magnetism in an advertisement from Olay. Warmer colours denote more magnetic parts of the image, and are more likely to attract attention. In an ever increasingly complex and crowded visual environment, what do we actually pay...

October 28, 2011

Creative Machines: Tomorrow’s Possibilities, Today’s Responsibilities

The issue that lurks right over the horizon of possibility is whether increasing complexification in generatively encoded “intelligent machines” could instantiate some form of consciousness.  I argue that the most probable answer is “yes&#82...

October 18, 2011

Genetic Testing for the Injury Prone

Professional soccer teams (football to the rest of the world) are using high-powered science to give them a competitive edge. The most recent venture into the world of professional sport and science involves an “unnamed Premier League club” [that] has commissioned Yale University scientists to genetically test its players and attempt to identify genetic indicators that can serve as a warning sign to whether an athlete is prone to injury.” According to Bleacher Report, scientists claim that there are more than 100 genetic factors linked to being prone to injury.…

October 12, 2011

Creative Machines: Self-Made Machines and Machine-Made Selves

Could robotic systems create environments and bodies for themselves? To answer these questions, let’s start with something simple (and most probable), and then open our discussion to include a somewhat more sublime, and more futuristic vision. Le...

September 21, 2011

Creative Machines: On the Cusp of Consciousness?

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Lakshmi Sandhana as she was preparing her article, “Darwin’s Robots” that appeared in last week’s New Scientist. Lakshmi specifically addresses the work of Jeffrey Clune, of the HyperNEAT Project of C...

August 9, 2011

Icarus’ Folly: On the Need to Steward Neuroscientific Information…”Out of the Lab and into the Public Sphere”

The employment of basic neuroscientific research (what are known in government parlance as “6.1 Level” studies) in translational development (so-called “6.2 Level” work) and test and evaluation applications (“6.3 Level” uses) is not always ...

August 1, 2011

Neurolalia: Can We Talk Our Way Through the Forest and Trees of Neuroscience?

Neuro – see below Lalia – from the Latin, lallare – to sing “la la,” the use of language It was with great interest that I read Deric Bownds’ recent MindBlog re-post about representation of inner lives, and his curre...