January 2012
25 posts
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"Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and... →
Many sex offenders suffer from a paraphilia. Paraphilias are disorders characterized by recurrent and intrusive deviant sexual impulses. One paraphilia that shares some characteristics with psychopathy is sexual sadism.
Sadism, like psychopathy, is characterized by callousness, anger, and low empathy. Sadists derive sexual gratification from inflicting physical or emotional pain and suffering...
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5:48 am: Documenting Ah-ha moment.
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Are you on my wavelength? →
You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains. “The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus....
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"Cross-Cultural Variation and fMRI Lie-Detection" →
Welcome to a paper I’ll be referencing IRL. I was actually fighting with myself last night about populations to use for my fMRI study (I don’t want to use college students, since my study isn’t about college students), which Bruni brings up in the abstract:
On several basic features of perception and cognition, Western university students turn out to be outliers relative to the...
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Mathing a Serial Killer →
Researchers at UCLA have combined neuroscience and math in order to identify patterns in the acts of a notorious Russian serial killer, executed in 1994. The model makes several assumptions: 1) a certain threshold of neuronal firing has to be passed, at which point the desire to kill becomes impossible to ignore; 2) some time is subsequently required in order to plan and carry out a killing; 3)...
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All About Me, in 12 seconds →
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“…the influence of alcohol and other sharply controllable factors on our...”
– Einstein, 1931 as quoted in Home and Robinson, 1995.
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NEUROLAW Around the World (w. Daft...
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2012: Get rich or die Mayan
December 2011
31 posts
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The End of Free Will? This time w. Dr. Joy Hirsch.... →
If someone has a brain tumor in the frontal lobe (which we know is associated with areas involving judgment), is that person as responsible for a violent crime as someone with a brain that is not known to have a specific anomaly?
Hirsch responds: There is no black and white answer here. There are arguments that go back and forth – but I’m very comforted by the fact that the legal system is...
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“Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality...”
– The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)
— I was hoping the Atlantic actually did a piece on Joshua Greene. The Green/Cohen paper, For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything from 2004 is one of the most well known neurolaw papers out there. It definitely got me started...
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“In this post-Marxist age, in a profoundly anti-Marxist society, it seems no...”
– I’m pretty excited about finding Prof. Timothy Melley. I’ll be featuring some of his work about paranoia and culture, since it has a lot to do with my next KGB post about Mind Control.
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"Objectivity and the Law’s Assumptions About Human... →
This paper analyses a hitherto neglected aspect of the law’s objectivity: the epistemic and methodological character of the law’s assumptions about human behaviour. Taking H.L.A. Hart’s views on legal epistemology as a starting point, I suggest that the assumptions behind legal doctrines typically combine common sense factual beliefs, moral intuitions, philosophical theories of earlier...
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Phone call update: minute 32 of Mom's "I just want...
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"The Future of Neuroscience-Based Credibility... →
This Comment argues that while neuroscience-based credibility assessment methods are not currently admissible under on the Daubert standard, they may become admissible with more research, and the courts should avoid creating precedent that would preclude their admissibility once reliability issues are addressed. Specifically, credibility assessment should not be left entirely to the trier of...
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“I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.”
– Conversations with myself… but actually from Hercule Poirot, The Mysterious Affair At Styles - Agatha Christie, 1920
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"Drug hallucinations look real in the brain" →
[Researchers] asked the volunteers to look at images of people or animals while their brains were scanned using functional MRI, then asked the volunteers to close their eyes and imagine they were still viewing the image. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that neural activity in the primary visual cortex dropped off when volunteers imagined seeing the image rather than actually viewing it.
But...
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renaissance-gland asked: so, practically...what should i do? if i get a Ph.D. in a certain field, will that limit me in my capacity to still be the renaissance woman i wanna be? can i get a Ph.D. in philosophy and still write about neuroscience in some aspect?
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renaissance-gland asked: so should i assume you're a fan of david eagleman, or am i just new here?
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