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I’m probably going to start with my Master Clinical Neuropsychology next year. I think they’re blowing this out of proportion right now. They can now find out with 70% accuracy if someone is going to add or subtract 2 numbers. It’s true that technological advancements are being made rapidly but sometimes people tend to forget how incredibly complicated the human brain really is. We are still very far off from understanding how it works exactly.
The debate is a good one though and I guess the whole idea of it can sound pretty disturbing. Not sure where it’s going but for now I’m not that worried. There’s still so much left to uncover. But it’s probably never too early to be cautious. 🙂
What? Of all people, Colin Blakemore shouldn’t have been willing to promote this nonsensical “predict crime” deal.
Approach it with basic logic:
There is nothing in that article that says anything about predicting crime.
Approach it with a minor background in neuropsychology:
There is nothing new in that article.
1). For YEARS we have used scanning techniques to see if things change as people think of stuff. That’s what we do with scans, you know. 2). For YEARS brain patterns have been known to change PRIOR to action. It’s called “thinking” and “planning.” 3). That article says that participants were told to think of something prior to acting on it. Is it any surprise that functional magnetic resonance imaging therefore discovered . . . what functional magnetic resonance imaging was INVENTED to do?
The only thing really stated in that article is that someone found that addition and subtraction affect the brain differently.
Now I feel a little annoyed that I’ve put so much stock in Blakemore’s research in my career. But then, he’s not the one actually spouting this nonsense, so I probably shouldn’t be hard on him.
From ‘Straw Dogs’ by John Gray, which is by the way HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
… In Benjamin Libet’s work on ‘the half-second delay’, it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves deliberating what to do, then doing int. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting. As Libet and his colleagues put it:
“… the brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place… cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act… can and usually does begin unconsciously.”
… When we are on the point of acting, we cannot predict what we are about to do. Yet when we look back we may see our decision as a step on a path on which we were already bound. We see our thoughts sometimes as events that happen to us, and sometimes as our acts. Our feeling of freedom comes about through switching between these two angles of vision. Free will is a trick of perspective.
Sure the technology isn’t much now, but imagine where it will be in another 20 or 30 years. And secondly this is unclassified technology, imagine what people have managed to make behind closed doors.
right here
I’m probably going to start with my Master Clinical Neuropsychology next year. I think they’re blowing this out of proportion right now. They can now find out with 70% accuracy if someone is going to add or subtract 2 numbers. It’s true that technological advancements are being made rapidly but sometimes people tend to forget how incredibly complicated the human brain really is. We are still very far off from understanding how it works exactly.
The debate is a good one though and I guess the whole idea of it can sound pretty disturbing. Not sure where it’s going but for now I’m not that worried. There’s still so much left to uncover. But it’s probably never too early to be cautious. 🙂
What? Of all people, Colin Blakemore shouldn’t have been willing to promote this nonsensical “predict crime” deal.
Approach it with basic logic:
There is nothing in that article that says anything about predicting crime.
Approach it with a minor background in neuropsychology:
There is nothing new in that article.
1). For YEARS we have used scanning techniques to see if things change as people think of stuff. That’s what we do with scans, you know. 2). For YEARS brain patterns have been known to change PRIOR to action. It’s called “thinking” and “planning.” 3). That article says that participants were told to think of something prior to acting on it. Is it any surprise that functional magnetic resonance imaging therefore discovered . . . what functional magnetic resonance imaging was INVENTED to do?
The only thing really stated in that article is that someone found that addition and subtraction affect the brain differently.
Now I feel a little annoyed that I’ve put so much stock in Blakemore’s research in my career. But then, he’s not the one actually spouting this nonsense, so I probably shouldn’t be hard on him.
–Rexfelum
From ‘Straw Dogs’ by John Gray, which is by the way HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
… In Benjamin Libet’s work on ‘the half-second delay’, it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves deliberating what to do, then doing int. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting. As Libet and his colleagues put it:
“… the brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place… cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act… can and usually does begin unconsciously.”
… When we are on the point of acting, we cannot predict what we are about to do. Yet when we look back we may see our decision as a step on a path on which we were already bound. We see our thoughts sometimes as events that happen to us, and sometimes as our acts. Our feeling of freedom comes about through switching between these two angles of vision. Free will is a trick of perspective.
Sure the technology isn’t much now, but imagine where it will be in another 20 or 30 years. And secondly this is unclassified technology, imagine what people have managed to make behind closed doors.