Neuroscience and Free Will

We have free will. We make our own deci­sions. We have long tak­en these basic assump­tions for grant­ed. But what does neu­ro­science make of this? In this excerpt from the BBC Hori­zon spe­cial, “The Secret You,” Mar­cus Du Sautoy (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty) par­tic­i­pates in a brain imag­ing exper­i­ment con­duct­ed by John-Dylan Haynes, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist based in Berlin. And the results? Well, they force us to rethink things a bit. Good­bye Descartes. Good­bye mind before mat­ter. Good­bye to con­scious­ness and free will, as we tra­di­tion­al­ly like to think about them. And wel­come to the world of neu­rons, to brain activ­i­ty that makes your deci­sions before your con­scious self is even aware of them. To delve deep­er into all of this, you can watch Haynes give a 90 minute lec­ture here called “Uncon­scious deter­mi­nants of free deci­sions in the human brain.”

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Five Minutes with Richard Dawkins

You’ll get the schtick pret­ty quick­ly. The BBC’s Matthew Stadlen spends five quick min­utes with celebri­ties, thinkers and news­mak­ers. And, above, he gets down to busi­ness with Richard Dawkins, with the con­ver­sa­tion touch­ing on reli­gion, the after­life, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, moral­i­ty, hap­pi­ness, and the whole point of life. Oth­er thinkers fea­tured in the series include Mar­tin Amis, AC GraylingAlain de Bot­tonBri­an CoxSir Ter­ry Pratch­ett and oth­ers.

via Metafil­ter

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Do Physicists Believe in God?

Every day, physi­cists and astronomers con­front the won­ders of the uni­verse. But does star­ing into the sub­lime abyss incline them toward a belief in God? Not if you ask the physi­cists at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham School of Physics and Astron­o­my, who answer big ques­tions on YouTube and Six­ty Sym­bols, includ­ing “What hap­pens if you stick your hand inside the Large Hadron Col­lid­er, the world’s largest par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor?

The Not­ting­ham physi­cists are in some good com­pa­ny. Accord­ing to a well-known 1997 study pub­lished in Nature, biol­o­gists with­in the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences reject­ed God and immor­tal­i­ty at rates of 65.2% and 69.0%. Mean­while, when phys­i­cal sci­en­tists were polled, the num­bers rose to 79.0% and 76.3%. The sum­ma­ry orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by Nature now appears here.

via PourMe­Cof­fee

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The Milky Way over Texas

This 45 sec­ond time­lapse video of the “Galac­tic Cen­ter of the Milky Way” ris­ing over Texas Star Par­ty (2009) just gets more spec­tac­u­lar as it rolls along. William Castle­man cre­at­ed this sequence using a Canon EOS-5D, with expo­sures at 20 and 40 sec­ond inter­vals. This com­ple­ments nice­ly Stéphane Guis­ard’s panoram­ic view of the Milky Way tak­en from the Ata­ca­ma desert in Chile. See the The Milky Way in 360 Degrees here.

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The Best American Science Writing 2010: Free Essays

Jerome Groop­man, the New York­er staff writer and Har­vard med school prof, has edit­ed The Best Amer­i­can Sci­ence Writ­ing 2010 - a new col­lec­tion that brings togeth­er “the most cru­cial, thought-pro­vok­ing, and engag­ing sci­ence writ­ing” dur­ing the past 12 months. The 368 page book runs $10.19 online. But before you run out and buy it, let me say this: you can read many of the col­lect­ed essays online for free. The Truth About Grit by Jon­ah Lehrer; My Genome, My Self by Steven Pinker; Are We Still Evolv­ing? by Kath­leen McAu­li­ffe – they’re among 16 essays avail­able online, and they’re all includ­ed in a handy list pulled togeth­er by Metafil­ter. Mean­while, if you want to read these essays lat­er on (when you have some time to delve into longer arti­cles) give Instapa­per a try. As I’ve men­tioned before, it’s a great way to read texts in a clean for­mat on the iPad, iPhone, and Kin­dle.

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The Milky Way in 360 Degrees

Stéphane Guis­ard trav­eled to the Paranal obser­va­to­ry, sit­u­at­ed in Chile’s remote Ata­ca­ma desert, in search of the “dark­est sky.” The result? Some amaz­ing zoomable, fish­eye images that reveal the dark­est of dark skies (includ­ing a glimpse of the Gegen­schein). And then also this “byprod­uct”: a 360 degree panoram­ic view of the Milky Way that lies on the dark sky hori­zon. You can view Los Cie­los de Chile here.

Please note that the page can take a lit­tle time to load. But once you’re there, you can tog­gle around the images and con­trol the views.

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The Dalai Lama on the Neuroscience of Compassion

Last week, the Dalai Lama spent sev­er­al days at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, where he made com­pas­sion his focus. He laid the foun­da­tion with a large pub­lic address before an audi­ence of 7,000. (Watch an excerpt above or the full talk below.) Then things got more focused when the spir­i­tu­al leader of Tibet par­tic­i­pat­ed in a day­long con­fer­ence about the neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings of com­pas­sion. Host­ed by Stan­ford’s Cen­ter for Com­pas­sion and Altru­ism Research and Edu­ca­tion, the con­fer­ence brought togeth­er impor­tant sci­en­tists from many dis­ci­plines – psy­chol­o­gy, neu­ro­science, med­i­cine, and eco­nom­ics. You can watch a record­ing of the con­fer­ence here. It’s all in video and ready to go.

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The Smallest Stop-Motion Animation Ever

From the mak­ers of Wal­lace and Gromit comes the small­est stop-motion ani­ma­tion ever. The lil­liput­ian main char­ac­ter, apt­ly named Dot, stands a mere 0.35-inch-tall. Accord­ing to Pop­u­lar Sci­ence, the ani­ma­tors “used a 3D print­er to make 50 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Dot, because she is too small to manip­u­late or bend like they would oth­er stop-motion ani­ma­tion char­ac­ters.” Then each print-up was hand-paint­ed by artists look­ing through a micro­scope. Once the set and char­ac­ters were ready to go, the direc­tors attached a CellScope (a cell­phone cam­era with a 50x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion micro­scope) to a Nokia N8 and let the cam­eras roll. You can watch the final cut above.

via Pop­u­lar Sci­ence

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