Thursday, January 20, 2005

Can studying the human brain revolutionise economics?

The Economist Magazine surveys some of ongoing brain studies that might in the future be incorporate into governmental MacroEconomics calculations to more accurately maximize individual Utility (as in increasing Happiness). Maybe they have some insights that shows increasing happiness is not the same as decreasing misery.

The paradigm expressed is a tug between emotion and reason (or in brain-speak, the limbic system versus the prefrontal lobes)
David Laibson, an economist at Harvard University, thinks that such experiments underscore the big role that expectations play in a person's well-being. Economists have usually assumed that people's well-being, or “utility”, depends on their level of consumption, but it might be that changes in consumption, especially unexpected downward ones, as in these experiments, can be especially unpleasant.
link

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Addiction, Drugs, Homelessness, and Devastation

The San Francisco Chronicle had an incredible article on a set of homeless people. Its unflinching graphic narration of the lives of a group of homeless people is, well.... devastating. About drugs, addiction, sex, and life. I saved it and kept it tuck away in my computer scrapbook directory as a reminder of my blessings and of our shared humanity.

An excerpt:
"Make the pain go away! I want my daddy! Make it stop!" she moaned over and over, writhing along the 12th Street sidewalk, slamming hands against cement and walls as she made her way up to Market Street. She picked at abscesses on her arms and face, the blood mixing with dirt to leave brown smears wherever she rolled. She screamed and drooled.
SFGate link

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Eminent Scientists' Leap of Faith

The New York Times excerpts from The Edge which annually poses big questions to Eminent Scientists. This year's questions is "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The Times grabbed some of the notable interesting ones among the 120 answers. Among your usual scientific professions of atheistic faith are some pretty interesting answers (notably from, of course, a Cognitive Scientist and a Neuroscientist):
Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine;
author, "Visual Intelligence"


I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.

Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.

Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.
And
Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University;
author, "The Synaptic Self"


For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.

There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist.
NYTimes link
Edge link (120 Contributions)