But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; and the idea we can be categorised into left-brain and right-brain learners. Belief in such myths is rife among teachers around the world, according to several surveys published over the last ten years. But does this matter? Are the myths actually harmful to teaching? The researchers who conducted the surveys believe so… But now this view has been challenged by a team at the University Read More ›

From Laurel Hamers at ScienceNews: EmailPrintTwitterFacebookRedditGoogle+ Sluggish memories might be captured via RNA. The molecule, when taken from one sea slug and injected into another, appeared to transfer a rudimentary memory between the two, a new study suggests. Most neuroscientists believe long-term memories are stored by strengthening connections between nerve cells in the brain (SN: 2/3/18, p. 22). But these results, reported May 14 in eNeuro, buoy a competing argument: that some types of RNA molecules, and not linkages between nerve cells, are key to long-term memory storage. “It’s a very controversial idea,” admits study coauthor David Glanzman, a neuroscientist at UCLA. More. Yes. Here is where replication studies earn their keep. If such studies are allowed, that is. From Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For several decades, some researchers have argued that neuroscience studies prove human actions are driven by external stimuli — that the brain is reactive and free will is an illusion. But a new analysis of these studies shows that many contained methodological inconsistencies and conflicting results. … And this isn’t a problem solely within the neuroscience community. Earlier work by Dubljevic and his collaborators found challenges in how this area of research has been covered by the press and consumed by the public. “To be clear, we’re not taking a position on free will,” Dubljevic says. “We’re just saying neuroscience hasn’t definitively proven anything one way or the other.” Paper. (paywall) – Victoria Saigle, Veljko Dubljević, Eric Racine. Read More ›

Which, in the context, can only mean naturalist efforts to identify free will as an illusion, like consciousness, that evolved to help spread our selfish genes. From Ari N. Schulman at Big Questions Online: For example, let’s say I decide not to commit murder. My decision is rational not only because I have deliberated about the reasons not to do it, but also because my decision flows from a character that has been formed in a rational way. When faced with the choice to murder, my dispositions have already been shaped, e.g., by membership in a society that professes to value human life, by individual reflection, or by both. And if this is the case, then when confronted with the Read More ›

From Ari N. Shulman at Big Questions Online: Is human perception a controlled hallucination? That was the claim advanced in a pair of talks at the Human Mind Conference in Cambridge, England in June, one by Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, the other by Andy Clark, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. They were not advancing the radical thesis, made by some overeager neuro-philosophers, that all experience is an illusion. Rather, Seth and Clark made the case that there is no bright dividing line between hallucination and ordinary perception. … The terms “controlled hallucination,” and related ones like “inferred fantasy” and “virtual reality,” are useful rhetorical devices for illustrating what is distinctive about the theory Read More ›

Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch conveniently sums up the problem at Nautilus: Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Five neuroscientists argue that fancy new technologies have led the field astray. John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.” He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they Read More ›

At the Economist, anyway: One common tactic in brain science is to compare damaged brains with healthy ones. If damage to part of the brain causes predictable changes in behaviour, then researchers can infer what that part of the brain does. In rats, for instance, damaging the hippocampuses—two small, banana-shaped structures buried towards the bottom of the brain—reliably interferes with the creatures’ ability to recognise objects. When applied to the chip, though, that method turned up some interesting false positives. The researchers found, for instance, that disabling one particular group of transistors prevented the chip from running the boot-up sequence of “Donkey Kong”—the Nintendo game that introduced Mario the plumber to the world—while preserving its ability to run other games. Read More ›