It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

Two distinct and perhaps mutually exclusive understandings of utilitarianism have emerged in the ethics literature. Utilitarianism is typically regarded as an approach to determine ethicality by focusing on whether or not actions produce the greater good, but has also been conceptualized as a set of traits to which individuals might be predisposed. This paper is designed to clarify the meaning and implications of such utilitarian traits as “results-oriented,” “innovative,” and “a winner.” Although the Janus-headed model of ethical theory from which (...) these traits emerged had been acknowledged by its developer as possibly misrepresenting typical views of utilitarianism, much research using these traits appears to have been conducted without clear recognition of this. If the conceptual foundation underpinning hypothesis development is disconnected from the measure used to test them, then little support for relevant predictions should emerge. A review of the literature which featured utilitarian traits generally confirmed this. This paper also explored the origins and emergence of these traits and suggested that existing evidence that these measure utilitarian ethical predispositions is not especially persuasive. Understanding what utilitarian traits do not assess is critical in order for knowledge about this potentially useful measure to advance. (shrink)

Immersive virtual reality (VR) emerges as a promising research and clinical tool. However, several studies suggest that VR induced adverse symptoms and effects (VRISE) may undermine the health and safety standards, and the reliability of the scientific results. In the current literature review, the technical reasons for the adverse symptomatology are investigated to provide suggestions and technological knowledge for the implementation of VR head-mounted display (HMD) systems in cognitive neuroscience. The technological systematic literature indicated features pertinent to display, sound, motion (...) tracking, navigation, ergonomic interactions, user experience, and computer’s hardware that should be considered by the researchers. Subsequently, a meta-analysis of 44 neuroscientific or neuropsychological studies involving VR HMD systems was performed. The meta-analysis of the VR studies demonstrated that the new generation HMDs induced significantly fewer dropouts and VRISE. Importantly, the commercial versions of the new generation HMDs with ergonomic interactions had zero incidents of adverse symptomatology and dropouts. Solely, HMDs equivalent to or greater than the commercial versions of contemporary HMDs accompanied with ergonomic interactions are suitable for implementation in cognitive neuroscience. In conclusion, researchers’ technological competency, along with meticulous methods and reports pertinent to software, hardware, and VRISE, are paramount to ensure the health and safety standards and the reliability of neuroscientific results. (shrink)

Neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero proposed the HEAVEN procedure – i.e. head anastomosis venture – several years ago, and has recently received approval from the relevant regulatory bodies to perform this body-head transplant in China. The BHT procedure involves attaching the donor body to the head of the recipient, and discarding the body of R and head of D. Canavero’s proposed procedure will be incredibly difficult from a medical standpoint. Aside from medical doubt, the BHT has been met with great resistance from (...) many, if not most bio- and neuroethicists.Given both the known challenges and unknown outcomes of HEAVEN, several important neuroethical and legal questions have emerged should Canavero be successful, including: What are the implications for transplantology in the U.S., inclusive of issues of expense, distributive justice, organizational procedures, and the cost of novel insight? How do bioethical and neuroethical principles, and legal regulations of human subject research apply? What are the legal consequences for Canavero performing a BHT? What are the tentative implications for the metaphysical and legal identity of R should they survive post-BHT? These questions are analyzed, issues are identified, and several solutions are proposed in an attempt to re-configure HEAVEN into a safe, clinically effective, and thus realistically viable procedure.Notably, the permissibility of conducting the BHT in China fosters additional, important questions, focal to whether Western ethics and professional norms be used to guide the BHT – or any neuroscientific research and its use - in non-Western countries, such as China; if the models of responsible conduct of research are identical, similar, or applicable to the intent and conduct of research in China; and what economic and political implications are fostered if/when such avant garde techniques are successful.These questions are discussed as a further impetus to develop a globally applicable neuroethical framework that would enable both local articulation and cosmopolitan inquiry and oversight of those methods and approaches deemed problematic, if and when rendered in more international settings. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify and resolve issues surrounding the so-called formal linking problem in interpreting the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese, a problem that has been identified in recent E-type pronominal treatments of the construction (e.g., Hoshi, K. (1995). Structural and interpretive aspects of head-internal and head-external relative clauses. PhD dissertation, University of Rochester; Shimoyama, J. (2001). Wh-constructions in Japanese. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst). In the literature, this problem refers to the difficulty (...) of capturing the delimited semantic variability of the E-type pronoun present in the embedding clause of the construction. I show that the E-type pronoun at issue is subject to a different licensing condition from a typical E-type pronoun and therefore presents a different linking problem. More specifically, it requires that the embedded clause describe a state of its antecedent and its descriptive content be supplied by a salient property represented in the logical form of the embedded clause. I propose an event-based semantic analysis that derives the effects of this novel generalization by establishing a binding relation between the event structure of the embedded clause and the denotation of the E-type pronoun. (shrink)

This article outlines three interlocking and mutually reinforcing registers in Giorgio Agamben’s work: the law, the apparatus, and the anthropological machine. While Agamben is clear that rules render inoperative laws and counter-apparatuses suspend the functioning of apparatuses, that which neutralizes the anthropological machine remains undisclosed. To explore this messianic opening, the author moves beyond Agamben and posits the possibility of a shift from an anthropological machine to a phytological machine. Whereas the former functions through the production of binary oppositions that (...) divide life from its form, the latter yields to the internally generative potentiality of lifeforms. In conclusion, the article proposes an alternative reading of several of Agamben’s key examples, including his references to Tiananmen Square, as manifestations of a phytological machine emerging from within the composting of anthropological divisions. (shrink)

The Trikaranos, a work of Varro's preserved only by title in Appian's Bellum Civile, has usually been considered a satirical attack on the alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 59 b.c.e. as a "three-headed monster." However, a re-examination of the evidence reveals that the Trikaranos was instead a pseudonymous satire directed not at the political alliance of the three men, but at Caesar alone, who was attacked as the single autocrat who spoke for all three members of the so-called (...) "first triumvirate.". (shrink)

A recent paper in this journal (1) suggests that involving terminally ill patients in choices concerned with Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) produces 'psychological pain' and therefore is ill-advised. Such a claim rests on anecdotal observations made by the authors. In this paper I suggest that drawing conclusions in ethics, no less than in science, requires a rigorous framework and cannot be relegated to personal observation of a few cases. The paper concludes by suggesting that patients, if we acknowledge their valid interest (...) in making their own choices, must themselves be allowed to make a prior choice about choosing. Those who may not wish to choose may properly be relieved of this burden and may allow another to choose for them. Routinely allowing others to make choices for competent adults, however, is likely to decrease communication with the dying patient and to introduce an atmosphere of suspicion and fear and to exclude the competent patient from his/her rightful place in the community. (shrink)

Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were “talking in our head”, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system absent the overt articulation of the expressions. In this paper, I argue that inner semiotics allows (...) us to bootstrap our way into entertaining thoughts about exact numbers and quantities that we couldn't prior to our competence with a numeric code. I establish that our arithmetic thoughts literally occur as (internal ‘articulations’ of) expressions in a numeric code. However, a problem arises for my view: just as we can slip in overt speech, producing an utterance that deviates from what we mean to say, there is very good evidence that we can slip in inner speech as well. If our arithmetic thought occurs in a numeric code, it's far from clear how we determine when a covert utterance constitutes a slip. In closing, I provide an account of what makes an inner speech utterance a slip. (shrink)

In a realistic steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) application like driving a car or controlling a quadrotor, observing the surrounding environment while simultaneously gazing at the stimulus is necessary. This kind of application inevitably could cause head movements and variation of the accompanying gaze fixation point, which might affect the SSVEP and BCI’s performance. However, few papers studied the effects of head movements and gaze fixation switch on SSVEP response, and the corresponding BCI performance. This study (...) aimed to explore these effects by designing a new ball tracking paradigm in a virtual reality (VR) environment with two different moving tasks, i.e., the following and free moving tasks, and three moving patterns, pitch, yaw, and static. Sixteen subjects were recruited to conduct a BCI VR experiment. The offline data analysis showed that head moving patterns [F(2, 30) = 9.369, p = 0.001, effect size = 0.384] resulted in significantly different BCI decoding performance but the moving tasks had no effect on the results [F(1, 15) = 3.484, p = 0.082, effect size = 0.188]. Besides, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and filter bank canonical correlation analysis (FBCCA) accuracy were better than the PSDA and MEC methods in all of the conditions. These results implied that head movement could significantly affect the SSVEP performance but it was possible to switch gaze fixation to interact with the surroundings in a realistic BCI application. (shrink)

The relative reinforcing value of food measures how hard someone will work for a high-energy-dense food when an alternative reward is concurrently available. Higher RRV for HED food has been linked to obesity, yet this association has not been examined in low-income preschool-age children. Further, the development of individual differences in the RRV of food in early childhood is poorly understood. This cross-sectional study tested the hypothesis that the RRV of HED to low-energy-dense food would be greater in children with (...) obesity compared to children without obesity in a sample of 130 low-income 3- to 5-year-olds enrolled in Head Start classrooms in Central Pennsylvania. In addition, we examined individual differences in the RRV of food by child characteristics and food security status. The RRV of food was measured on concurrent progressive-ratio schedules of reinforcement. RRV outcomes included the last schedule reached for cookies and fruit, the breakpoint for cookies in proportion to the total breakpoint for cookies and fruit combined, and response rates. Parents completed the 18-item food security module to assess household food security status and the Behavioral Activation System scale to assess reward sensitivity. Pearson’s correlations and mixed models assessed associations between continuous and discrete child characteristics with RRV outcomes, respectively. Two-way mixed effects interaction models examined age and sex as moderators of the association between RRV and Body Mass Index z-scores. Statistical significance was defined as p < 0.05. Children with obesity had a greater cookie Pmax [F = 4.95, p = 0.03], higher RRV cookie [F = 4.28, p = 0.04], and responded at a faster rate for cookies [F = 17.27, p < 0.001] compared to children without obesity. Children with higher cookie response rates had higher BMIZ ; and RRV cookie was positively associated with BMIZ for older children and boys, but not younger children or girls. The RRV of food did not differ by household food security status. Low-income children with obesity showed greater motivation to work for cookies than fruit compared to their peers without obesity. The RRV of HED food may be an important contributor to increased weight status in boys and future research is needed to better understand developmental trajectories of the RRV of food across childhood. (shrink)

"C.E. Emmer’s article addresses the ongoing debates over how to classify and understand kitsch, from the inception of postmodern culture onwards. It is suggested that the lack of clear distinction between fine art and popular culture generates 'approaches to kitsch – what we might call 'deflationary' approaches – that conspire to create the impression that, ultimately, either 'kitsch' should be abandoned as a concept altogether, or we should simply abandon ourselves to enjoying kitschy objects as kitsch.' The author offers critical (...) insight into 'kitschy' items made in response to 9/11 and tries to examine the reception of these products through scrutinizing a selection of remarks posted by the Internet commentators." Editor Justyna Stępień's summary from her introduction to Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 2. The final pages of the chapter analyze the seemingly sweet landscape paintings of Thomas Kinkade to show the spirit of revenge their Christian coding can conceal. (shrink)

Mele desires to believe that the self-deceived have consistent beliefs. Beliefs are not observable, but are instead ascribed within an explanatory framework. Because explanatory cogency is the only criterion for belief attribution, Mele should carefully attend to the logic of belief-desire explanation. He does not, and the consistency of his own account as well as that of the self-deceived, are the victims.

Observing averted eye gaze results in the automatic allocation of attention to the gazed-at location. The role of the orientation of the face that produces the gaze cue was investigated. The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise such that the eyes were gazing up or down. Significant cueing effects to targets presented to the left or right of the screen were found (...) in these head orientation conditions. This suggests that attention was directed to the side to which the eyes would have been looking towards, had the face been presented upright. This finding provides evidence that head orientation can affect gaze following, even when the head orientation alone is not a social cue. It also shows that the mechanism responsible for the allocation of attention following a gaze cue can be influenced by intrinsic object-based (i.e. head-centred) properties of the task-irrelevant cue. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva considers (...) the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

One of the classic papers of Australian feminist philosophy is G. Lloyd's "The Man of Reason" (Lloyd, 1979). The main concern of this paper is the alleged maleness of the Man of Reason, i.e., the thesis that our philosophical tradition in some deep way associates the concepts rational and male. Lloyd claims that her main goal is to bring this "undoubted" thesis "into clearer focus" (p.18), and indeed she makes no strenuous effort to demonstrate that the to-be-clarified thesis is actually (...) true. There are however a few places where she advances material she seems to be taking as some kind of evidence that the Man of Reason is male. One is on the second page, where she quotes from Augustine: And finally we see man, made in your image and likeness, ruling over all the irrational animals for the very reason that he was made in your image and resembles you, that is because he has the power of reason and understanding. And just as in man's soul there are two forces; on which is dominant because it deliberates and one which obeys because it is subject to such guidance, in the same way in the physical sense, woman has been made for man. In her mind and her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man's, but in sex she is physically subject to him in the same way as our natural impulses need to be subjected to the reasoning power of the mind, in order that the actions to which they lead may be inspired by the principles of good conduct. Now an interesting feature of this passage is that it appears to directly contradict the thesis of the maleness of the Man of Reason. Far from saying that rationality is a male prerogative, Augustine claims that "in her mind and her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man's" (my emphasis). Certainly Augustine claims that in sex woman is subject to man, and he also claims that there is an analogy or parallel between the dominance of man over woman in sex and the dominance of the rational part of the mind over the natural impulses.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Gorgon’s Severed Head: Studies of Alcestis, Electra and PhoenissaeJustina GregoryC. A. E. Luschnig. The Gorgon’s Severed Head: Studies of Alcestis, Electra and Phoenissae Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995. xvi 1 255 pp. Cloth; Gld. 121, $78 (US). (Mnemosyne Supplement 153)Luschnig offers three self-contained essays, framed by an introduction and an epilogue. She derives her title from the circumstance that each of the plays (...) chosen for study contains a reference (in the case of Electra, two references) to the Gorgon’s head. Although she suggests (xiv) that the tragedies represent “different stages of Euripides’ career, one from each volume of the OCT,” she is not proposing to trace development, whether formal or thematic, from play to play. Her concern is with a constant: the plays’ mirroring of the redemptive power of art. On Luschnig’s account tragedy is fundamentally self- referential, urgently and repeatedly directing attention to “the human spirit at its most creative, creating a life and a story” (xv).The approach is not unfamiliar. Zeitlin (Ramus 1980) has described Orestes as the most extreme example of a theatrical self-consciousness that permeates all of Euripides, while Goldhill in Reading Greek Tragedy (1986) and Segal in Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow (1993) have explored metatheatricality in Electra and Alcestis respectively—two of the very plays chosen for discussion by Luschnig. Where Luschnig differs from Zeitlin is in viewing Euripidean self-reflexivity not as a symptom of the genre’s moribund condition, but as a way to “examine the traditional stories and to test them and to keep them alive” (243). She differs from Goldhill and Segal, who concentrate on the poet’s manipulations of mythical tradition and generic practice, in emphasizing how the characters within each play replicate the creative process as they vary well-established stories, conjure up imaginary scenarios, and try on roles, costumes and masks. For Luschnig, “not only the author and audience, but the characters are taking part in the debate with the tradition” (132). She maintains that this debate is pursued with especial vigor by female characters, whose social and theatrical roles tend to be more circumscribed.Luschnig begins her chapter on Alcestis by reviewing the generic problems presented by the play and then embarks on a scene-by-scene commentary which focuses on the “aesthetic choices” made by the principals. There are occasional lapses over details; at Alc. 1148, for example, Heracles does not tell Admetus “to treat strangers better,” as Luschnig translates (241), but to continue to treat strangers well in the future. Nevertheless her distinctive perspective on the action leads to some intriguing conclusions. Alcestis, she asserts, is not a helpless victim but a determined woman who selects her own role and “play[s it] to the hilt” (33). As for Admetus, he starts “as a shell” (74) but grows in self-awareness in the course of the play. He searches throughout for “other, grander story patterns” (72); thus he briefly contemplates, only to reject, the possibility of playing Orpheus to Alcestis’ Eurydice. That role is reserved for Heracles, who succeeds in rescuing Alcestis from Hades. But Admetus, Luschnig asserts, [End Page 126] has laid the groundwork for Heracles’ intervention; when he proposes to commission a statue of Alcestis, and even when he equivocates to Heracles over whether she is alive or dead, he is doing his part to keep his wife alive in memory and story. Admetus thus emerges as a more decent and sympathetic character than is generally held to be the case.The chapter on Electra appeared previously in article form, and it struck me as the most polished of the three. Organized thematically rather than by scene, it focuses initially on Electra’s water jug as emblematic of Electra’s separation at once from her natal home and from her normal role in myth. The homely jug is contrasted to the “fine ware” (89) employed in the other Electra plays: the libation vessels that characterize the members of the chorus at the opening of Aeschylus’ Choephoroe, and the libation vessel and funerary urn that figure prominently in Sophocles’ Electra. The rest of the chapter... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry by Pauline A. LeVenTom PhillipsPauline A. LeVen. The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 377 pp. Cloth, $99.The “New Music” of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c.e. has been subject to a revival of interest in recent years. Most scholarship, however, has (...) tended to focus either on socio-historical aspects of performance culture or on the philological problems posed by texts such as Timotheus’ Persians. The corpus of fourth-century hymns by authors such as Aristonous and Philodamus has likewise been a minority pursuit, addressed in the main by historians of religion and epigraphers rather than literary critics. This monograph provides a welcome change in emphasis. Resolutely literary in her approach, LeVen elaborates readings that challenge assumptions about a qualitative decline in late classical literature, arguing instead for reading these texts in terms of their particular interpretative demands and situating them in a continuum of literary developments. The New Musicians emerge not as vapidly showy musical and dramatic virtuosos, but as composers of considerable verbal sophistication who developed and extended traditional poetic techniques while also demanding new kinds of emotional and interpretative engagement from audiences. The textual strategies at work in the hymnic corpus are also brought into sharper relief, particularly as regards the effects created by the interplay of performance and material inscription. The result is a valuable contribution to scholarship: as well as situating the New Music in relation to earlier song culture, LeVen shows how some of the strategies [End Page 357] employed by Timotheus and his contemporaries anticipate literary developments in the Hellenistic period. As such, this book will be of interest to all students of ancient Greek poetry.The book begins with an overview of poetic activity in the late classical period, including a useful set of tables that present the literary and epigraphic sources grouped by type. LeVen also surveys developments in scholarship on the New Music, recapitulating the case for caution when assessing the evidence of ancient critics and comedians, and making a strong case for the importance of engaging with the poems’ “dynamics of allusion, emulation, and intertextuality” (69). The rest of the book consists of case studies concerned with individual authors and corpora, and thematic chapters discussing the New Musicians’ linguistic innovations. The first group includes a chapter on Philoxenus of Cythera (chap. 3), a discussion of the Dinner Party attributed to Philoxenus (chap. 6), and readings of the inscribed hymns (chap. 7). The discussion of Philoxenus of Cythera focuses mainly on the anecdotes about his life preserved by Athenaeus, Machon, and other later authors. LeVen explores these texts’ persistent concern with the interrelated issues of food, xenia, and poetry, and their varying figurations of Philoxenus’ character. She also argues convincingly that the Dinner Party (PMG 836) should be attributed to Philoxenus of Cythera (114–18), and a good part of chapter 6 is devoted to an analysis of this text. Her readings emphasize the poem’s creation of an interpretative dialogue: the speaker presents not just an ekphrasis but also an “appeal to his own feelings and to those of his internal addressee” which underlines the “social dimension” of dining (257). More controversially, she also argues that it was performed as a dithyramb: as a text performed on the public stage, its detailed descriptions of fine dining “collaps[e] the distinction between... the public competitions at festivals and sacrifices and the private elegant home” (261).In her concluding remarks about the role played by the symposium in fourth-century poetic culture, LeVen sees the distinctiveness of the period not in poems being performed in multiple locations but in “the open traffic” between public and private performance settings, “the symposium importing passages from the dramatic stage and exporting some of its traditional motives and forms of expression to more public settings, dramatic and beyond” (268). The remainder of chapter 6 is concerned with the hymns to Virtue and Health of Aristotle and Ariphron, while chapter 7 deals with inscribed hymns such as the Erythrean paeans, Aristonous’ Hymn... (shrink)

The anti-sceptic can try to argue that regardless of the strength of the epistemic factors that suggest live scepticism, positive epistemic factors such as evidence and reliability are sufficiently strong to defeat it head on, so to speak. This is the Defeated Threat strategy, which comes in three varieties. The Safety-Sensitivity solution is an attempt to solve the puzzle by claiming that worlds in which people falsely believe, e.g., that fire engines are red, are too metaphysically distant to sabotage their (...) knowledge. The Extreme Externalism solution says, roughly, that the reliability of people’s beliefs is enough of a factor to neutralize the sceptical hypotheses. The Tenacity solution insists that knowledge is not the kind of state that can easily be unseated; thus, since people once knew that fire engines are red, that knowledge stays with them even after they become mere mortals with regard to colour error theory. (shrink)

Some cognitive states — e.g. states of thinking, calculating, navigating — may be partially external because, at least sometimes, these states depend on the use of symbols and artifacts that are outside the body. Maps, signs, writing implements may sometimes be as inextricably bound up with the workings of cognition as neural structures or internally realized symbols (if there are any). According to what Clark and Chalmers [1998] call active externalism, the environment can drive and so partially constitute cognitive processes. (...) Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? If active externalism is right, then the boundary cannot be drawn at the skull. The mind reaches – or at least can reach --- beyond the limits of the body out into the world. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work-- _the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon ; the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

The explanatory challenge of sentience is known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: How does subjective experience arise from physical objects and their relations? Despite some optimistic claims, the perennial struggle with this question shows little evidence of imminent resolution. In this article I focus on the “why” rather than on the “how” of sentience. Specifically, why did sentience evolve in organic lifeforms? From an evolutionary perspective this question can be framed: “What adaptive problem(s) did organisms face in their evolutionary (...) past and how were those challenges met? I argue that sentience was a critical component of the adaptive solution (i.e., adopting an agentic stance) to increasingly complex and unpredictable demands placed on vertebrates approximately 500 million years ago (the so-called Cambrian explosion). One consequence of taking an agentic stance is that it freed the organism from its neural moorings, positioning it within phenomenal space outside its brain. (shrink)

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for (...) intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)

Some cognitive states — e.g. states of thinking, calculating, navigating — may be partially external because, at least sometimes, these states depend on the use of symbols and artifacts that are outside the body. Maps, signs, writing implements may sometimes be as inextricably bound up with the workings of cognition as neural structures or internally realized symbols (if there are any). According to what Clark and Chalmers [1998] call active externalism, the environment can drive and so partially constitute cognitive processes. (...) Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? If active externalism is right, then the boundary cannot be drawn at the skull. The mind reaches – or at least can reach --- beyond the limits of the body out into the world. (shrink)

The main goal of this article consists in addressing two fundamental issues of consciousness research and cognitive science, namely, the question of why declarative memory functions are inextricably linked with phenomenal awareness and the question of the physical basis of memory traces. The presented approach proposes that high-level cognitive processes involving consciousness employ a universal mechanism by means of which they access and modulate an omnipresent background field that is identified with the zero-point field (ZPF) specified by stochastic electrodynamics, a (...) branch of physics that deals with the universal principles underlying quantum systems. In addition to its known physical properties and memory capacities, the ZPF is hypothesized to be an immanently sentient medium. It is propounded that linking up to a particular field mode of the ZPF activates a particular phenomenal nuance, implying that the phase-locked coupling of a set of field modes, i.e., the formation of a so-called ZPF information state, constitutes an appropriate mechanism for the amalgamation of elementary shades of consciousness into a complex state of consciousness. Since quantum systems rest exactly on this mechanism, conscious memory processes in the brain are expected to differ from unconscious processes by the presence of the typical features of many-body quantum systems, particularly long-range coherence and attractor formation, which is supported by a huge body of empirical evidence. On this basis, the conceptual framework set out in this article paves the way for a new understanding of the brain as a write-read head interacting with the ZPF, leading to self-consistent interpretations of the neural correlates of memory formation and memory retrieval and explaining why these memory processes are closely intertwined with phenomenal awareness. In particular, the neural correlates suggest that the brain produces consciously perceived memory traces by writing sequences of information states into the ZPF and retrieves consciously experienced memory traces by reading sequences of information states from the ZPF. Using these theoretical foundations, altered states of consciousness and memory disorders can be traced back to impairments of the ZPF write-read mechanism. The mechanism should reveal itself through characteristic photon emissions, resulting in testable predictions. (shrink)