Recent articles
Implant enables woman to control speech synthesizer with thoughts. The key benefit of the new system is that it is much faster than traditional methods, cutting the time from internal speech to audible speech to less than three seconds. Because a stroke took away her ability to speak, the researchers used her wedding video to synthesize a more natural-sounding voice.
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Chinese Neanderthal technology raises some interesting questions. The groups that made the distinctive Quina tools lived 7 to 8 thousand kilometers apart. Did they ever meet?
Can one person really have two different consciousnesses? The idea that split-brain surgery can create two separate minds is immortal — in science fiction. Real-world research shows the remarkable resilience of damaged brains housing single minds. Our brains are full of complexities and exceptions to rules.
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Near-death stories: Has an undiscovered country been discovered? A Catholic priest looks at ways we can understand these brushes with an unseen world. Fr. Martin Hilbert notes that such documented lucid experiences as he recounts can hardly be the mere outcome of a dying brain shutting down.
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Journalist: Seizures gave me a healthy respect for the brain. Wright learned to see himself not as the conductor, nor as the orchestra, but the music itself, which gave him the confidence he needed to move on with life.
Did the enlargement of the human brain depend on two genes? The genes, unique to humans, spurred brain growth when introduced in mice and chimpanzee stem cells. While it is quite true that the human brain is very large by animal standards, there is no simple one-on-one relationship between brain size and intelligence.
Clinical psychologist defends human exceptionalism. Gregg Henriques is responding to an evolutionary biologist who sees recognition of human uniqueness as “speciesism,” akin to racism and sexism. From a secular humanist perspective, he says roughly what Aristotle (384– 322 BC) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) would say about our unique human nature.
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Lifestyle factors associated with the risk of early dementia. Here are the factors that researchers found in a study of over 350,000 people to be significantly associated young-onset dementia (YOD). Correlations can provide valuable information but they are not causation and they need to be assessed carefully.
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5. NDEs: The enduring mystery of the Pam Reynolds case. There can be no question that Reynolds was dead when she had an NDE during an operation. To succeed, the risky procedure required her to be dead… As evidence for NDEs accumulates, we hear from cardiologists rather than mediums on the subject and that is a promising development for future research.
A Catholic priest talks about human evolution. Fr. Martin Hilbert approaches the topic from the perspective of evidence, reason, and faith — and realism about what is at stake in the discussion. Fr. Hilbert shows that we have not found anything that justifies a Darwinian approach to life as somehow more compatible with science than a Christian one.
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Science writing: Cat intelligence compared with baby intelligence. Cat intelligence is of a rather different kind from dog intelligence (to say nothing of human intelligence). Cat intelligence is often underrated but the human mind belongs to an entirely different order of being from the feline mind.
Babies learn much language in the first six months post-birth Even at that point they can tell sounds from languages they have never even heard apart
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Do animals really “take revenge”? Another look… Four animal behavior specialists offered some thoughts at Gizmodo. The world of right and wrong, crime and punishment, revenge and forgiveness, is a human one that requires the gift of abstract reason.
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Math prof: Monkeys can’t type out Shakespeare in our universe. University of Technology Sydney mathematicians Associate Professor Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta decided to test the oft-heard claim. If we want to play around with infinity concepts, we can have fun. But we can’t use them to decide what might or might not happen in our finite universe.
Did Stephen Hawking end his career by giving up on truth? A philosopher argues the case. But has rejection of truth in physics spread widely into popular culture? One element of getting to choose our private truths is that we need only notice or understand the significance of the things we want to notice or understand.
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Can brain structure alone explain why we have language? How human languages came to exist is an unsolved mystery within science.
This recent find in evolution studies is strikingly negative. There is no physical limitation to chimpanzee speech; rather, the limitation is a mental one.
Neuroscientist seeks the first spark of human consciousness. It's a challenge. Human consciousness is very hard to define for the purposes of this kind of research. If we have “prior models of how things ought to be” at birth, aren’t we already conscious?
Burials from 120,000 years ago: Was it Neanderthals vs. others? Did ancient peoples believe that the spirits of the dead were protecting the caves they were buried in?
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Researchers: Cats can eavesdrop on human conversations — sort of. The researchers were surprised that cats could learn speech sounds without any reward but then knowing what is going on is generally its own reward for the cat.
Study: Near-death experience — not mere danger — transforms lives. There is significantly more openness to discussing these questions seriously in publications like Psychology Today than there used to be.