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  • Is the mind a machine?

    My latest 3QD essay explores the “mind as machine” metaphor, and metaphors in general. Putting the “cog” in “cognitive”: on the “mind as machine” metaphor Here’s an excerpt: People who study the mind and brain often confront the limits of metaphor. In the essay ‘Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory‘, the vision scientist John Daugman draws…

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  • Is there a ‘multi-dimensional universe’ in the brain? A case study in neurobabble

    I was asked a question on Quora about a recent study that talked about high-dimensional ‘structures’ in the brain. It has been receiving an inordinate amount of hype, partly as a result of the journal’s own blog. Their headline reads: ‘Blue Brain Team Discovers a Multi-Dimensional Universe in Brain Networks’ As if the reference to…

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  • Could every neuron be genetically unique?

    Years ago I asked what I thought might be a naive question, perhaps on Quora: how do we really know that every cell has the same genome? Was a random sampling of the body conducted? The impression I got was that such a sampling was not conducted, or at least not done regularly and systematically.…

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  • Ways of Knowing

    Here is an excerpt from my latest 3QD essay: “To attempt an understanding of understanding, I think it might make sense to situate our verbal forms of knowledge-generation in the wider world of knowing: a world that includes the forms that we share with animals and even plants. To this end, I’ve come up with…

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  • Wave goodbye to the “unconscious mind”!

    I came across a nice little presentation on certain problematic ways of thinking: Let’s Wave Goodbye to the Unconscious Mind Here’s are two excerpts:

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  • What neuroscience too often neglects: Behavior

    A Quora conversation led me to recent paper in Neuron that highlights a very important problem with a lot of neuroscience research: there is insufficient attention paid to the careful analysis of behavior. The paper is not quite a call to return to behaviorism, but it is an invitation to consider that the pendulum has…

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