This is from this week's New Scientist. I've shortened it and followed up the reference - it doesn't give a lot more other than experimental methodology.
The brain regions responsible for our ability to organise the world into separate concepts have been pinpointed. Forming a concept involves selecting the important characteristics of our experiences and categorising them. The degree to which we are able to do this effectively is a defining characteristic of human intelligence. The method here was about showing fractal patterns and getting people to forecast the weather on the basis of them. Conceptual rules based on the positions and combinations of the patterns governed whether the resulting outcome would be rain or sun, but the volunteers were not told this. Instead correct predictions were rewarded with cash prizes, encouraging the volunteers to deduce these conceptual rules. In an initial learning phase, the different possible combinations were repeatedly shown to the participants. While they could make their predictions by simply memorising previous outcomes, they could also begin to realise that rules based on the positions and combinations of the patterns governed whether the result would be rain or sun. In a second phase, the volunteers were provided with less information to encourage them to apply the rules they had identified. This enabled the researchers to separate those volunteers who had formed the concept in the learning phase from those who hadn't. During both experiments fMRI scanning was used to identify areas of brain activity. In the first phase, researchers could tell if a volunteer would go on to apply concepts in the second phase by the degree of activity in their hippocampus, which is known to be responsible for learning and memory. In the second phase, activity centred on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), important in decision-making, was active. The team concluded that the hippocampus creates and stores concepts, and passes this information onto the vMPFC where it is put to use during the making of decisions. Journal reference: Neuron, vol 63, p 889 Where the hippocampus is damaged, other brain areas may compensate if the damage occurs early enough in life. This work may have medical applications. I don't find it very interesting - but I do wonder whether a better understanding of what we can know about how the brain works might inform our discussions on such matters as consciousness, morality and just what the 'Mind's Eye' might be. My interest is in whether we could enter more democratic forms of decision-making by using reliable memory and concept storage outside individual brains. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
