Lifeboat Foundation

What if death isn’t the end? NDEs may complicate what science teaches us about death and consciousness.

Although we think we are fully aware and in control of our everyday decisions, we actually often follow a series of cognitive scripts. These cognitive scripts often develop in childhood and are personal to you. However, as they are commonly based on a sequence of events that we expect to occur in given situations, many scripts will follow a common theme.

For example, when meeting someone new, we know we are expected to give our name, ask the individual about themselves, partake in some small talk, and then move onto deeper topics. Although cognitive scripts can save time and reduce the mental effort of deciding how to behave, they can also negatively affect our decision-making and productivity.

Summary: Study reveals how reward enhances connectivity between the ventral striatum and the default mode network, impacting behavior.

Source: Kessler Foundation.

Researchers have reported findings that add to our knowledge of how human behavior may be shaped by the default mode network, a specific network of brain regions with both resting and task-related states.

The future of mind-controlled machines might not be as far away as we think.

As director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, Dr Justin Sanchez is part of a team that is looking at how to decode brain signals and use them to control robotic prosthetics.

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Optimizing Human-System Performance — Dr. Greg Lieberman, Ph.D., Neuroscientist / Lead, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, U.S. Army Futures Command

Dr. Greg Lieberman, Ph.D. (https://www.arl.army.mil/arl25/meet-arl.php?gregory_lieberman) is a Neuroscientist, and Lead, Optimizing Human-System Performance, at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory (DEVCOM ARL).

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Many have argued that free will is in illusion, but science does not support that. We should be grateful that free will exists.

Circa 2007 face_with_colon_three

The World Wide Brain—a hybrid human–digital intelligent network, spanning the globe and carrying out information processing different in extent and nature from anything that has come before—is as yet little more than a dream and a little less than a reality. It is coming into being, bit by bit, each year. This process of emergence is, as all Net-aholics know, a wonder to behold, and growing more wondrous all the time. This is an exploration in which human psychology and sociology interact in a fascinating way, with the psychology of an emerging, nonhuman organism. It is an exploration in which mundane technical issues such as groupware and server–server communication software rub up against concepts from transpersonal psychology, such as the Collective Unconscious and the Hierarchy of Being. It is, therefore, an exploration that not only transcends disciplinary boundaries but pushes the boundaries of human thought itself. The increasing integration of human activity with World Wide Brain operations may ultimately occur via body-modifying or body-obsolescing technologies a la Moravec, or it may occur without them, through the advent of more sophisticated noninvasive interfaces. One way or another, it will fuse the global Web.

At first glance, the human body looks symmetrical: two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, even the nose and mouth appear to be mirrored on an imaginary axis dividing the faces of most people. And finally, the brain: it is divided into two halves that are roughly the same size, and the furrows and bulges also follow a similar pattern.

But the first impression is deceptive: the different brain regions have subtle yet functionally relevant differences between the left and right sides. The two hemispheres are specialized for different functions. Spatial attention, for example, is predominantly processed in the right hemisphere in most people, while language is largely processed in the left. This way, work can be distributed more effectively to both halves and thus the range of tasks is expanded overall.

But this so-called lateralization, the tendency for brain regions to process certain functions more in the left or right hemisphere, varies from person to person. And not only in the minority whose brains are specialized mirror-inverted compared to the majority. Even people with classically arranged brains differ in how pronounced their asymmetry is.

Daniel Dennett explores the first steps towards a unified theory of information, through common threads in the convergence of evolution, learning, and engineering.
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Watch the Q&A now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beKC_7rlTuw.

Buy Daniel Dennett’s book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” — https://geni.us/pAyVW

Continue reading “Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design — With Daniel Dennett” »