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Binding-by-synchrony
The unity of consciousness and (cognitive) binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. The binding problem refers to the overall encoding of our brain circuits for the combination of decisions, actions, and perception. It is considered a "problem" because no complete model exists. The binding problem can be subdivided into the four areas of perception, neuroscience, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. It includes general considerations on coordination, the subjective unity of perception, and variable binding. General considerations on coordination Summary of problem Attention is crucial in determining which phenomena appear to be bound together, noticed, and remembered. This specific binding problem is generally referred to as temporal synchrony. At the most basic level, all neural firing and its adaptation depends on specific consideration to timing (Feldman, 2010). At a much la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion. To understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, economics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neuron, neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sensory Perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.Goldstein (2009) pp. 5–7 Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Gregory, Richard. "Perception" in Gregory, Zangwill (1987) pp. 598–601. Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge) with restorative and selective mechanisms, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Raymond Smythies
John Raymond Smythies (30 November 1922 – 28 January 2019) was a British neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist and neurophilosopher. He had a long academic career at institutions such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Edinburgh. Biography Early life and education Smythies was born on 30 November 1922 in Nainital, United Provinces, British India, where his father, Evelyn Arthur Smythies, a philatelist, was employed by the Department of Forests. His brother Bertram Evelyn (“Bill”) Smythies became an ornithologist. His cousins on the Smythies side include Yorick Smythies, Richard Dawkins (a first cousin once removed), Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood. In 1932 Smythies enrolled at Cheltenham College Junior School, transferred to Rugby School in 1936, and thence to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1940 (18) and to University College Hospital, London in 1942 where he studied medicine (19). He graduated M.B., B.Chir. (Cantab) in 1945. Fir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mechanism (biology)
In biology, a mechanism is a system of causally interacting parts and processes that produce one or more effects. Phenomena can be explained by describing their mechanisms. For example, natural selection is a mechanism of evolution; other mechanisms of evolution include genetic drift, mutation, and gene flow. In ecology, mechanisms such as predation and host-parasite interactions produce change in ecological systems. In practice, no description of a mechanism is ever complete because not all details of the parts and processes of a mechanism are fully known. For example, natural selection is a mechanism of evolution that includes countless, inter-individual interactions with other individuals, components, and processes of the environment in which natural selection operates. Characterizations/ definitions Many characterizations/definitions of mechanisms in the philosophy of science/biology have been provided in the past decades. For example, one influential characterization of neu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synchronization
Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the Conductor (music), conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronous or ''in sync''—and those that are not are ''Asynchronous system, asynchronous''. Today, time synchronization can occur between systems around the world through satellite navigation signals and other time and frequency transfer techniques. Navigation and railways Time-keeping and synchronization of clocks is a critical problem in long-distance ocean navigation. Before radio navigation and Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based navigation, navigators required accurate time in conjunction with astronomical observations to determine History of longitude, how far east or west their vessel traveled. The invention of an accurate marine chronometer revolutionized marine navigation. By the end of the 19th cent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Connectionism
Connectionism is an approach to the study of human mental processes and cognition that utilizes mathematical models known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks. Connectionism has had many "waves" since its beginnings. The first wave appeared 1943 with Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts both focusing on comprehending neural circuitry through a formal and mathematical approach, and Frank Rosenblatt who published the 1958 paper "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model For Information Storage and Organization in the Brain" in ''Psychological Review'', while working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. The first wave ended with the 1969 book about the limitations of the original perceptron idea, written by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, which contributed to discouraging major funding agencies in the US from investing in connectionist research. With a few noteworthy deviations, most connectionist research entered a period of inactivity until the mid-1980 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Astonishing Hypothesis
''The Astonishing Hypothesis'' is a 1994 book by scientist Francis Crick about consciousness. Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, later became a theorist for neurobiology and the study of the brain. ''The Astonishing Hypothesis'' is mostly concerned with establishing a basis for scientific study of consciousness; however, Crick places the study of consciousness within a larger social context. Human consciousness according to Crick is central to human existence and so scientists find themselves approaching topics traditionally left to philosophy and religion. Synopsis ''The Astonishing Hypothesis'' posits that "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them." Crick claims that scientific study of the brain during the 20th century led to acceptance of consciousness, free will, and the human soul as subjects for scientific investigation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perceptual Asynchrony
Perceptual asynchrony refers to the phenomenon of two simultaneously presented attributes of the visual world being perceived by humans asynchronously instead of simultaneously. Perceptual asynchrony was first demonstrated in 1997 by Konstantinos Moutoussis and Semir Zeki. The Moutoussis and Zeki provided evidence that people perceive the color and direction of motion of a visual stimulus with a time lag - they may perceive the color before the direction of motion. They quantified this time gap to be between 70 – 80 milliseconds. Description The experiments through which perceptual asynchrony was derived were pairing experiments in which subjects are asked to determine the color and direction of a single stimulus that is moving up and down (or right and left) and changing its color from, say red to green, while doing so – the change in the color and direction of motion being in and out of phase with respect to each other. Minor variations of the 1997 experiment have yi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Integrated Information Theory
Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a mathematical model for the consciousness of a system. It comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious, and to be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular experience it has; why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky), and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole universe be?). According to IIT, a system's consciousness (what it is like subjectively) is conjectured to be identical to its causal properties (what it is like objectively). Therefore, it should be possible to account for the conscious experience of a physical system by unfolding its complete causal powers. IIT was proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett was a member of the editorial board for ''The Rutherford Journal'' and a co-founder of The Clergy Project. A vocal atheist and secularist, Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers". He was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Early life and education Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, the son of R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume ''Principia Mathematica'' (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. ''Principia Mathematica'' is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library."The Modern Library ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers and is often dubbed the "father of American psychology." Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James. James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, but never practiced medicine. Instead, he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. He wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are '' The Principles of Psychology'', a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology; '' Essays in Radical Empiricism'', an important text in phil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
