neurodudes

This week’s Nature features an idea called “The Digital Universe,” which hopes to organize and present peer-reviewed content (especially science) for public consumption online.
Preview the actual site here .

There’s some important criticism, especially of the business model, in the article…and you have to wonder about the creator, a wiki-disser and alien-watcher: “The driving force behind the project is ManyOne, a company headed by Joseph Firmage, who made a fortune in the 1990s from an Internet consulting company. He resigned in 1999 after the fallout from his book claiming that he had encountered extraterrestrials. Firmage says he vehemently opposes the ‘anyone can edit’ vision of Wikipedia. ‘Wikipedia is a very uninviting place for most intellectuals,’ he adds.”

-davematthews

So, Edge has a new question for 2006 for its All-Stars of Academia to answer: What is your dangerous idea? (Suggested to Edge by Steven Pinker, who perhaps got the idea from a colloquium series at his old haunting grounds.)

Offhand, one might expect a broad range of perceived dangerous ideas, varying by research interests and such. What’s surprising is that many of the luminaries think that the “most dangerous idea” is this particular, same idea: As neuroscience progresses, popular realization that the “astonishing hypothesis” — that mind is brain — will create a potentially cataclysmic upheaval of society as we know and have profound (negative) moral implications as people claim less responsibility for their actions.

Of course, this just isn’t true. But, would you believe that
Paul Bloom,
VS Ramachandran,
John Horgan,
Andy Clark,
Marc Hauser,
Clay Shirky,
Eric Kandel,
John Allen Paulos,
and, in a more genetic context, Jerry Coyne and Craig Venter
are all very worried about this issue? (And I didn’t even read 50% of the Edge dangerous ideas… there might be even more… ) Is this really the most dangerous idea out there to all of these talented thinkers?

I feel strongly that science and morality have always been separate domains and that any worry that, by “debunking” the mind, we automatically become immoral machines is just ridiculous. Through this scientific knowledge, we might gain some humility, maybe better see our close relatedness to nonhuman primates and place in nature, etc., but we’re not going to flip out and become crazed zombies. This just isn’t going to happen.

Does anybody else think that this just isn’t a truly dangerous idea (although certainly an “astonishing” one, in the Crick sense)? Or am I wrong here?

Samples of academic worrying after the jump.
(more…)

Neurodudes reader John sent us this nice link to a high-resolution online atlas with human, macaque, and mouse brains.

I haven’t explored the site very much, but the quality seems very impressive and you really can’t beat the price. It also looks like the authors are planning to expand the atlas soon and have already started building desktop tools for easy 2D and 3D navigation. Thanks, John!

Here’s a database of ideas from biology that might be useful for engineering.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ensab/TRIZ/

(about)

Myomancy is my blog on research into ADHD, dyslexia and autism. Its aim is to take the scientific research and make it accessible for parents, sufferers and educators. My background is in computers but my interest in nueroscience comes from a lifetime of trying to understand how my dyslexic brain was different from everyone else. This interest grew into a hobby and it now threatens to become semi-professional involvement following my successful dyslexia treatment and the lauch on Myomancy.

Chris Tregenza

I [Eric Thomson] have started a new blog for discussion of Hille’s classic Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes:

http://neurochannels.blogspot.com

Participate, tell your friends, get the book.

[From Neville: Just a note for the guest posters. It's fine to promote neuroscience-related materials (well, nothing overtly commercial... unless it's *really* cool). Still, if you're making a guest post -- something which we encourage and have directions on how to do on the right sidebar of the screen -- please put your name in the post. If you feel so inclined, it also wouldn't hurt to put in a few sentences about where you're from and your relation to the field -- ie. grad student, postdoc, industry, prof, regular guy or girl interested in brain stuff, etc. Thanks!]