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Could the brain be a radio for receiving consciousness?
Here’s an answer I wrote a while ago to the following question: Is there any conclusive proof that the brain produces consciousness? What rules out the case that brain acts as receptor antennae for consciousness? This is actually a fun question! Taken in the right spirit, it can be a good way to learn…
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“Conscious realism”: a new way to think about reality (or the lack thereof?)
Interesting interview in the Atlantic with cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman: The Case Against Reality “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious…
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What’s the deal with “brainwaves”?
I was asked this question on Quora recently: Why does the brain have waves? The brain has neurons which approximately perform function evaluations on their inputs. How would this cause brainwaves of different frequencies? Why are they related to the level of arousal in the brain (sleep/meditation etc)? Is there some sort of “controller” that…
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The Emotional Gatekeeper — a computational model of emotional attention
My paper is finally out in PLoS Computational Biology. It’s an open access journal, so everyone can read it: The Emotional Gatekeeper: A Computational Model of Attentional Selection and Suppression through the Pathway from the Amygdala to the Inhibitory Thalamic Reticular Nucleus Here’s the Author Summary, which is a simplified version of the abstract: “Emotional…