Approaching Significance.

psydoctor8:

Check it out: The first neurobiological model for third-party punishment

Here’s a a very recent update to my last post on the Neurobiology of Punishment by Joshua W Buckholtz and René Marois, breaking down the events that take place in the brain when asked to make decisions regarding punishment. Of the five processes you have the frontal cortex (higher mental functions) the amygdala (emotional responses) and the intraparietal sulcus and temporal-parietal junction (interpreting the intent of others, thoery of mind).

In the modern criminal justice system, judges and jury members – impartial third-party decision-makers – are tasked to evaluate the severity of a criminal act, the mental state of the accused and the amount of harm done, and then integrate these evaluations with the applicable legal codes and select the most appropriate punishment from available options. (…) 

 [via] 

  One of the key take aways is that:

..it’s assumed legal decision-making is purely based on rational thinking, research suggests that much of the motivation for punishing is driven by negative emotional responses to the harm. This signal appears to be generated in the amygdala, causing people to factor in their emotional state when making decisions instead of making solely factual judgments.

Getting ahead of ourselves: glossy brain porn v. emotion  

What happens if the jury is presented with neuroscientific evidence suggesting what may have caused the accused to offend, e.g., a brain scan showing a tumor? This may challenge the negative emotional response since it’s been reported that this type of evidence is so seductive to juries. >law & order, donk donk<

Article here.

[Img: Parts of the brain involved in third party punishment. (Rene Marois, Deborah Brewington/Vanderbilt University)]

This is so fascinating. It will be amazing to see this progression from a neurological AND legal standpoint. 

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jtotheizzoe:

Brain scans + fMRI: What are we seeing and what are we missing?

Two new studies suggest that fMRI studies, the brain activity  scans that give us those “thermal blob” images we are so used to, might be the equivalent of cracking an egg with a sledgehammer. You’ll see an effect, but it’s kind of a brute force blunt object, considering the detail of the job. At the same time, when observations are made outside of “normal” experimental time frames, unexpected and interesting results can show up.

From Neuroskeptic:

As an analogy, suppose that all you knew about your neighbours was from the noises that you heard through the wall. The shouts and screams would be loud enough to reach your eyes; the normal conversations and whispers wouldn’t. If you concluded that all your neighbours did was shout, not talk, you’d get a misleading picture of their relationship.

That’s the bad news. On the other hand, fMRI is clearly more powerful than most neuroscientists have realized, and this holds out hope for cracking some of the trickiest questions facing the field in the future, with larger studies and more sensitive techniques

Does brain scanning show just the tip of the iceberg? We all know this answer is undoubtedly, a yes. Pretty nice article.

Remember neuroscience, you must first learn to walk, before you can run.

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I’ve never cared much for dream interpretation.  Most of our remembered dreams have always seemed like our minds filling gaps in dreams with our previous experiences and perceptions.  Sorry to the psychoanalytic/psychodynamic people out there, but I never bought into it.  

This is actually pretty amazing.  Scientists have begun to reconstruct images from dreams and hallucinations.

It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

The reconstructions are blends of the YouTube snippets, which makes them blurry. Some are better than others. If a human appeared in the original clip, a human form generally showed up in the reconstruction. But one clip that showed elephants walking left to right led to a reconstruction that looked like “a shambling mound,” Gallant said. The YouTube clips hadn’t shown elephants and so “we just had to make do with what we had.”

The quality could be improved by better techniques to blend human forms, as well as a bigger storehouse of moving images, he said.

Still, the overall results are “one of the most impressive demonstrations of the scientific knowledge of how the visual system works,” said Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University.

 Think about the possibilities.  How much would you pay to have your dreams reconstructed?  What about visual representations of schizophrenic hallucinations?  Could we apply this technology to coma patients and see what they are experiencing?  This is a peek inside the human mind AND the human visual system. 

Absolutely fascinating.

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