Onyango Makagutu replied to Dallas the Phallus's discussion Meet the World’s Largest Lethal Bird Trap in the group Animal | Vegetable | MineralWe are a worldwide social network of freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists.
THE NAKED APE: Exploring the science and cultural evolution of human psychology, behavior, cognition, language, memory, intelligence, emotion, and consciousness. (Uh, did I miss anything?)
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Those who’ve know me for some time know that I have a moderately strong interest in human consciousness and psychology. Although mind and body cannot exist without one another – and indeed they shape one another – it does seem that the very core of the human experience of ‘self’ exists in the brain alone.
We all know that much of the functioning and maintenance of our body is controlled covertly by the brain or by biological systems that work beneath our threshold of awareness. We do not consciously decide to sweat, or digest our food, or replace our cells.
And yet, in spite of the fact that we know this, we still cling to the illusion that the functioning of our thoughts, our decisions, our perceptions, our preferences, our memories, and our reasoning are under our direct, conscious control.
But neuroscience and psychology are now showing us that this simply is not the case—that the processes of mind and awareness function just as covertly as our biological systems.
That fascinates me!
How is it that the mind – that place of concealment – is also the one place in which awareness itself is known to exist?
The truth is that we don’t know ourselves as well as we’d like to believe. We don’t control our decisions, our perceptions, our motivations, or our memories as well as we think we do.
THE NAKED APE was created to explore these important topics. I welcome any post on human psychology, behavior, cognition, perception, language, memory, intelligence, emotion, and consciousness.
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Comment by Adriana on April 28, 2012 at 6:25pm Speak for yourself :-)
Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 28, 2012 at 6:22pm Then why are we still so stupid?
Comment by doone on April 28, 2012 at 1:30pm An estimate:
Most computational neuroscientists tend to estimate human storage capacity somewhere between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, though the full spectrum of guesses ranges from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes. (One terabyte is equal to about 1,000 gigabytes or about 1 million megabytes; a petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes.) The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.
Comment by Chris on April 26, 2012 at 4:07am Try speaking Creole Michel. If that doesn't cause problems nothing will.
Comment by Adriana on April 25, 2012 at 10:37am I must be extremely rational by that criterion, ha!
@Michel: I would bet that if you're really good at that foreign language, it feels like your mother tongue and then it won't influence decision-making positively :-)
Comment by Michel on April 25, 2012 at 10:35am Hey! I've been thinking in a second language (English) for half a century now... and I still make stupid decisions. Maybe I should learn Spanish.
Comment by doone on April 25, 2012 at 9:51am 
To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.
A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study
Comment by doone on April 24, 2012 at 10:49am Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 9:48pm Apr. 22, 2012
The more I look at this the more I see a map for a transit system.
-JH
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