An scholarly article in a leading economics journal recently considered “the problem of a restaurateur who has to decide whether to provide customers with a written menu, a picture-based menu, or a desert tray.” Scientific experiments provide relevant evidence. Laboratory tests indicate that a picture of an item does not prompt a higher valuation for … Continue reading accessibility of a good increases its value
In her interesting book, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, Esther Sternberg describes how the brain’s hormonal stress response balances susceptibility to inflammatory and infectious diseases. Stress stimulates hormones that repress immune cell functions that cause inflammation. Hence a rat strain that reacts more to stress is less susceptible to a … Continue reading balances in stress responses
A person known as K.C. has contributed significantly to understanding narrative and sense of presence of another. In 1981, at age 30, K.C. received a major head injury in a motorcycle accident. Despite his injury, K.C. retained normal human adult language skills. He also retained common knowledge about the world and knowledge about causal relations … Continue reading presence doesn't require personalized narrative
Theory of mind backgrounds agents’ embodiment and social and ecological circumstances. That hinders truly understanding social behavior. … Read the post losing theories of mind
Multisensory processing in primates, like information processing on the Internet, is extensively decentralized. A recent neuroscience review article declared: The pervasiveness of multisensory influences on all levels of cortical processing compels us to reconsider thinking about neural processing in unisensory terms. Indeed, the multisensory nature of most, possibly all, of the neocortex forces us to … Continue reading multisensory processing