Category: Biology of Information
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Exploite to explore mentation while growing old
Changes in cognition, affect, and brain function combine to promote a shift in the nature of mentation in older adulthood, favoring exploitation of prior knowledge over exploratory search as the starting point for thought and action. In humans, the exploration versus exploitation trade-off has been extensively studied in young adults. Yet there is growing evidence that the determinants and…
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Offline memory consolidation during waking rest
People spend approximately half of their waking hours in a so- called offline state — daydreaming, mind wandering or otherwise inattentive to their surroundings. These activities are often viewed as a waste of time, perhaps as moments of lost productivity. However, periods of offline waking rest can facilitate the consolidation of newly formed memories. Even…
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Are Dogs outsmarting human primates?
I just love the intelligence of nature, behaving as a complex adaptive system, working with minimal effort to a beneficial solutions. As such, nature often behaves smarter than self-conscious human primates, without going into difficult reasoning and decision making processes. A great text putting this fact into evidence is the 2012 lecture “The dog and…
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Where the senses fail us, reason must step in
It is true that the unique human ability to reason is what allows for science, technology, and advanced problem-solving. But there are limitations to reason. Highly deliberative people tend to be less empathetic, are often perceived as less trustworthy and authentic, and can undermine their own influence. Ultimately, the supposed battle between head and heart is overblown.…
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task-related information and form functional networks encode both sensory input and behavioral choice.
Cortical processing of task-relevant information enables recognition of behaviorally meaningful sensory events. How task-related information is represented within cortical networks by the activity of individual neurons and their functional interactions was investigates. A subset of neurons transiently encode sensory information used to inform behavioral choice. These neurons form functional networks in which information transmits sequentially.…
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Information perspective helps overcome the challenge of biology to physics
Keith D. Farnsworth uses the concept of “formal, efficient and material causes“, to become the foundation for considering living systems as causal systems Living systems have long been a puzzle to physics, leading some to claim that new laws of physics are needed to explain them. Separating physical reality into the general (laws) and the particular…
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Plan with “value-guided construal”
When people plan, they do so by constructing a simplified mental representation of a problem that is sufficient to solve it—a process that we refer to as value-guided construal. An ideal, cognitively limited decision-maker should construe a task so as to balance complexity and utility. Preregistered predictions of this model explain people’s awareness, ability to…
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Will it ever happen?
Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken – Can machines ever achieve true intelligence? , is a perspective article in entropy by Ricard Solé and Luís F. Seoane, has a great discussion on intelligence. When computers started to become a dominant part of technology around the 1950s, fundamental questions about reliable designs and…
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Metacognition accompanying decision-making
Decision-making is usually accompanied by metacognition, through which a decision maker monitors uncertainty regarding a decision and may then consequently revise the decision. These metacognitive processes can occur prior to or in the absence of feedback. The neural mechanisms of metacognition remain controversial. A novel “decision–redecision” paradigm to investigate the neural metacognitive processes involved in…
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