Category: Neurobiology/psychology

• The computational power of the human brain

  Peter J. Gebicke-Haerter published a great review article with this title. I selected some snippets and the key conclusion: At the end of the 20th century, analog systems in computer science have been widely replaced by digital systems due to their higher computing power. Nevertheless, the question keeps being intriguing until now: is the brain…

  walterstiers

  2023-08-28

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Conducting unveiled

  “Conducting unveiled: Sharing Simon Rattle’s Vision through Revolutionary EyeTracking Glasses” is a wonderfull story, I would like to share. “Split second shifts give the conductor and musicians a chance to anticipate the next move, but on a much larger, integrally collective scale.” This story brings together some together some topics already touched before, like conducting…

  walterstiers

  2023-08-27

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• A top-down, bottom-up model of circuit function for anxiety and depression.

  A great review article describes the bottom-up and top-down processing from Marr’s computational-algorithmic-implementation perspective to understand depressive and anxious disease states. The review illustrate examples of bottom-up processing as basolateral amygdala signaling and projections and top-down processing as medial prefrontal cortex internal signaling and projections. Understanding these internal processing dynamics can help us better model…

  walterstiers

  2023-08-06

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Design for Well-Being and Sustainability

  Design for Well-Being and Sustainability: A Conceptual Framework of the Peer-to-Peer Sharing and Reuse Platform in the Circular Economy investigates how to infuse well-being components into the circular economy. Based on the literature review, it organized and analyzed the extant evidence of related well-being-based research to develop an ecosystem model of a sustainable product–service system…

  walterstiers

  2023-08-06

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• “Fitness” Beats “Truth”

  The “Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem” provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception. The Interface Theory of Perception is discussed and described in detail in 2015 by…

  walterstiers

  2023-07-23

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• The Physics of Survival

  Please enjoy the fascinating discussion of the free energy principle with Dr. Maxwell Ramstead, a leading thinker exploring the intersection of math, physics, and philosophy and Director of Research at VERSES. The 2 hour discussion includes great details on FEP. The FEP was proposed by renowned neuroscientist Karl Friston, this principle offers a unifying theory…

  walterstiers

  2023-07-17

  Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Uncategorized

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• The IDEA (Internal Dominance over External Attention )

  Sam Verschooren and Tobias Egner published “ When the mind’s eye prevails: “The Internal Dominance over ExternalAttention (IDEA) hypothesis“. The IDEA hypothesis asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. Mine inner sense predominates in such a way over my five senses…

  walterstiers

  2023-06-22

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ProblemSolvingMind

• The self is an illusion

  The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.  “Why are you unhappy?Because 99.9 percent of…

  walterstiers

  2023-06-16

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Decoding reward–curiosity conflict in decision-making from irrational behaviors

  Humans and animals are not always rational. “Decoding reward–curiosity conflict in decision-making from irrational behaviors” discusses the fact humans not only rationally exploit rewards but also explore an environment owing to their curiosity. However, the mechanism of such curiosity-driven irrational behavior is largely unknown. The article develops a decision-making model for a two choice task…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-19

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Creativity in Motion

  Some publications related to this topic: Embodiment and Human Development It is becoming increasingly accepted that the study of cognitive, social, and emotional processes must account for the embodiment of these processes in living, acting people. Within cognitive science, how bodily factors play a role in mental life is often considered through the lens of…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-09

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Uncategorized

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Legs move, thoughts flow : Physical exercise influences creative thinking

  I only give a summary of the article, lacking the capability to understand and read the native language. Still, the summary is very interesting: Creative thinking is the ability to generate novel and useful solutions to a problem, of which divergent and convergent thinking are two common types. Evidence shows that physical exercise may influence…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-09

  Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Walking

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence

• Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction

  I found – rather serendipitous – this recent, open access and very interesting book “Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction“, edited by Springer 2023. This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. Some highlights as appetiser: Molecular Imaging of the…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-09

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Walking

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Avoid the Hijack – Be Emotionally Intelligent

  An 80-Year Harvard Study Shows Emotionally Intelligent People Use the Wiser Model to Handle Strong Emotions Don’t let your emotions hijack your actions.Slow down and choose better with the Wiser model. What follows is based on the original text of an  Inc.com  article by Jessica Stillman, dated May 4, 2023.The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-05

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence

• Affect and Decision Making (computational models)

  Decision science evolve towards the use of formalized mathematical and computational models of choice (such as sequential accumulator or driftdiffusion models, DDMs). These may represent a key step forward, butonly if they properly incorporate the conceptual and theoretical richness of the affective sciences. Computational models increasingly inform our understanding of decision processes, but the influence…

  walterstiers

  2023-05-02

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking

  A new theory of embodied consciousness has been described by Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio  in Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking. Forget ‘I think therefore I am’.  feelings are the source of consciousness. Long dismissed as secondary to reason, feelings are where consciousness begins. Without them, consciousness is impossible – with radical implications for the ‘hard…

  walterstiers

  2023-04-21

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• States of Mind (SoMs): TD:BU balance

  Noa Herz, Shira Baror, and Moshe Bar discuss in a 2020 opinion article the Overarching States of Mind.We all have our varying mental emphases, inclinations, and biases. These individual dispositions are dynamic in that they can change over time and context. The opinion article proposes that these changing states of mind (SoMs) are holistic in…

  walterstiers

  2023-04-16

  Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Small steps

  Small steps for mankind: Modeling the emergence of cumulative culture from joint active inference communication discusses a testable deep active inference formulation of social behavior and accompanying simulations of cumulative culture in two steps: First: cast cultural transmission as a bi-directional process of communication that induces a generalized synchrony (operationalized as a particular convergence) between…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-28

  #sense-making, #stakeholder economy, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Peter Pan ?

  There is controversy around the mechanisms that guided the change in brain shape during the evolution of modern humans. It has long been held that different cortical areas evolved independently from each other to develop their unique functional specializations. Some recent studies suggest that high integration between different cortical areas could facilitate the emergence of…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-20

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Native language & connectome of the brain

  Investigation towards the question if the neuroanatomy of the language structural connectome is modulated by the life-long experience of speaking a specific language are presented. The current study compared the brain white matter connections of the language and speech production network in a large cohort of native speakers of two very different languages: an Indo-European…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-20

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Perceived time & heartbeat

  This blog entry about the Current Biology article “Perceived time expands and contracts within each heartbeat” relates perfectly to my previous blog on “cardiac activity: its role in perception and action“ Perception of passing time can be distorted. Emotional experiences, particularly arousal, can contract or expand experienced duration via their interactions with attentional and sensory…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-20

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Cardiac activity: its role in perception and action

  Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary with environmentaldemands, accelerating or decelerating depending on circumstances. Simultaneously, cardiac cycle affects a host of higher-order processes, where systolic baroreceptor activation largely impairs processing. However, a unified functional perspective on the role of cardiac signal in perception and action has been lacking. — Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-17

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #TheInformationLens

• Human innovation depends on our collective brains

  A recent study investigates hunters’ causal understandings of bow design and mechanics among the Hadza, one of the last remaining foraging populations. The results suggest that sophisticated technology can evolve without complete causal understanding. Human innovation depends not on our individual brainpower but on our collective brains, on networks of diverse minds sharing information, lucky…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-17

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• How Occam’s razor guides human decision-making

  A rather complex but very interesting article was published @PennLibraries and (somewhat more recent) @bioRXiv But for those who want to understand by a lecture, I can recommend the Simons Faoundation lecture from Joshua Gold (also available on Youtube: How Occam’s Razor Guides Human and Machine Decision-Making) Occam’s razor is the principle stating that, all…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-03

  #Wicked, AI, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Brain-Behavior relationships

  “Improving the study of brain-behavior relationships by revisiting basic assumptions” discusses how scientific communities tacitly agree on assumptions about what exists (called ontological commitments), what questions to ask, and what methods to use. All assumptions are firmly rooted in a philosophy of science that need not be acknowledged or discussed but is practiced nonetheless. In…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-21

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens