Cognition in underdeveloped countries

All previous posts seem to me brilliant in a sense that they involve spreading innovative ideas and evolutionary and state of the art research. While all of these are pretty, I was reading today of how 1.3 billion people in the world lack electricity and how nearly 40% of the world's population rely on wood, coal, charcoal or animal waste to cook, breathing in toxic smoke that causes lung disease and kills nearly two million people a year (i.e. more than AIDS: 1.8 million in 2010 and three times the number from malaria: 660,000 in 2010). [Engineering & Technology, volume 8, issue 3, April 2013]
This made me question about education and cognition in such environments.

Can We Predict Presidential Elections?

I came across this article last week as I was reading some material about machine learning. Chris Wilson holds that computers cannot predict the results of the presidential election. I believe the opposite but we probably cannot decide yet. Machine learning is a mathematical model that can perform tasks that are impossible to humans (coursera link).

Him, Cyborg.

"He's more machine now than man"—Obi-wan Kenobi

The augmentation of biology with technology is not a new concept—indeed such devices play an integral role in modern human existence. However, because these contraptions are external to cognitive systems, they are not utilized as efficiently as they could be. What if this limitation could be removed and cognition could be aided directly by technology? Kevin Warwick examined just this question in a set of experiments that has since been dubbed "Project Cyborg".

Cognition gone bananas

With so much financial turmoil in the past few years, the cognition of economics has become a popular topic. Research in this area has taken two approaches: 1. analyzing the cognitive system to understand why people make certain choices regarding economic theory; and 2. analyzing economic trends in the hopes of extrapolating the cognitive processes that produced certain consequences. While both strategies sound good in theory, what if neither is the correct approach? What if the economy is something other than some combination of environmental and cognitive factors?

Dream in code: 'Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep'

Lucid dreaming

fMRI/EEG combination used to decode dream images

 A study recently published in the journal Science described work on dream image mapping carried out by neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani and colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience labs in Kyoto, Japan.

 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan the brains of three young men as they drifted off to sleep inside an fMRI scanner, while simultaneously recording their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG).

When the men had entered a ' hypnagogic state' - when their brain wave patterns had begun to resemble those known to be associated with sleep - they were woken up and asked to describe their dreams, then allowed to go back to sleep. This procedure was carried in three-hour blocks, repeated 7 to 10 times (on different days) for each volunteer. Approximately 200 dream reports were recorded from each participant, and the reported images were then grouped into categories that were specifically oriented  to the individual's particular patterns of  repeatedly-occurring elements using the lexical database WordNet. A video montage of images from the ImageNet database corresponding to the keywords generated by the dream reports was presented to the wide-awake men while their brain activity was being monitored. An algorithm developed to recognise the brain activity ''signatures'' associated with various dream images separated non-visual brain activity from vision-related excitation patterns, to verify that dreaming involves some of the same brain areas that are associated with visual imagery. This algorithm was combined with machine-learning techniques that used the waking brain activity patterns as 'training' examples. After training the program, the researchers input patterns of sleeping brain activity - the 'test' examples - and were able to predict which category of image had produced that pattern of brain activity.

Humanoid Robot called NAO helps teach social skills to children with Autism

Autism is a group of developmental brain disorders, collectively called autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) vary from one child to the next, but in general, they fall into the three domains: (1) Social impairment (2) Communication difficulties and (3) Repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. Aiden, seen in the picture to the left, is a 3 year old boy who has ASD. 

Given that the 2nd of April 2013 is World Autism Awareness Day, I thought that it would be appropriate to publish this post today.

A World without Words

So much of what we have studied this year is bound to language. How humans communicate with each other and the world around them is fundamental to how we understand cognition. The role of language is central to almost everything we do, instead of “you are what you eat” it’s more a case of “you are your language”. Every debate we have had can be traced or linked to language; the mind-body problem, memory, problem-solving, visual perception, ...pretty much everything we share is recorded and communicated using language.  Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of our world while Ferdinand de Saussure said “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.” Just the other day we saw how language develops in an infant through Deb Roy’s charting of the first years of his son’s life. At the other end of the spectrum, thinking about not having any language is beyond the imagination of most of us. The closest we can get is imagining stories of children raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus but even that is shrouded in mythology and supposition.