Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

Professor Austin explores four main areas in this paper. First of all he outlines the physical development of sex differentiation in the embryo. He develops this by describing the clinical manifestations of abnormality which can appear at that stage. Professor Austin points out that there are relatively few people with abnormalities and that those who do show homosexual tendencies are not noticeably different from the norm in terms of their sexual equipment and hormone levels. It is much more likely that (...) their psychological and social development has a greater influence in differentiating them sexually. The last section of the paper is a synopsis of society's reactions to homosexuality or bisexuality which term in Professor Austin's opinion is more accurate and descriptive of the condition. (shrink)

This article presents seven principles that have guided our thinking about emotional intelligence, some of them new. We have reformulated our original ability model here guided by these principles, clarified earlier statements of the model that were unclear, and revised portions of it in response to current research. In this revision, we also positioned emotional intelligence amidst other hot intelligences including personal and social intelligences, and examined the implications of the changes to the model. We discuss the present and future (...) of the concept of emotional intelligence as a mental ability. (shrink)

This paper, which gives continuity to another article, analyzes the content of I Dialogus V, 14-22 and, in an appendix, presents our Portuguese translation of this excerpt. In these chapters, the Inceptor Venerabilis discusses whether St. Peter and the Roman Church possess primacy over all other apostles and churches; andwhether this primacy is granted by God himself. Ockham first presents, not ad litteram, the opinion of those who refute the thesis that Christ did not give primacy to Peter and the (...) Roman Church. Then, because this thesis fully deflates papal power, he proposes a contrary thesis based on five proofs. We conclude that Ockham’s unnamed opponent is Marsilius of Padua, whose opinions are in his Defensor Pacis. (shrink)

The book describes three elementary units of action – the reflex, the oscillator, and the servomechanism – and the principles by which they are combined to make complex units. The combining of elementary units to make complex units gives behavior and the neural circuitry underlying behavior a hierarchical structure. Circuits at higher levels govern the operation of lower circuits by selective potentiation and depotentiation: by regulating the potential for operation in lower circuits – raising the potential for some and lowering (...) it for others – a higher unit establishes the overall pattern to be exhibited in the combined operations of the lower units, while leaving it to the lower units to determine the details of the implementation of this pattern. A theory of motivation of the kind long championed by ethologists and physiological psychologists grows out of the notion of the selective potentiation and depotentiation of hierarchically structured units of behavior. The question then becomes how this conception of motivation may be integrated with a conception of a learned representation of the world to yield a theory of how animals produce novel motivated behavioral sequences based on learned representations. The representation of space, which is central to the behavior of organisms at least as lowly as the digger wasp, is a promising domain for the investigation of this question. Another promising area is the representation of skilled movements, such as handwriting. A number of issues in cognitive and developmental psychology are illumined by this theory about the organization of action. Among these are the degrees-of-freedom problem, the role of practice in development and in the learning of skilled action, and the role of mental rotation of spatial representations. (shrink)

The Health Protection Agency has recently attempted to create a postmortem tissue archive to determine the prevalence of abnormal prion protein. The success of this archive was prevented because the Health Protection Agency could not convince coroners to support the study’s methodology and participate on that basis. The findings of this paper detail and support the view that the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales’s refusal to participate was misguided and failed to appreciate that coroners have a moral obligation to (...) protect public health. Measures to assist coroners in fulfilling this role are proposed. (shrink)

Abstract Physiological psychology has its conceptual roots in stimulus?response behaviourism. The resurgence of cognitive concepts in mainstream psychology has led to a separation between the two, largely due to the failure of most cognitive theories to specify how their explanatory processes could be realised in the nervous system. Connectionism looks as if it may be able to bridge this gap. The problem is that connectionism takes a radically different view of the brain from that adopted in traditional physiological psychology. This (...) paper looks at some of the implications of connectionism for how physiological psychology should develop. It also looks at the implications of the findings of physiological psychology for connectionism. (shrink)

A comparison is made between the Bohm trajectory and Feynman path approaches to the long-standing problem of determining the average lime taken for a particle described by the Schrödinger wave function ψ to tunnel through a potential barrier. The former approach follows simply and uniquely from the basic postulates of Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum mechanics; the latter is intimately related to the most frequently cited approaches based on conventional interpretations. Emphasis is given to the fact that fundamentally different transmission (...) (T)-reflection (R) decompositions, particlelike and wavelike respectively, are central to the two methods: ¦ψ¦2=[¦ψ¦2]T+[¦ψ¦2]R (Bohm trajectory approach); ψ=ψT+ψR (Feynman path approach). (shrink)

Ancillary care is care that research participants need that is not essential to make the research safe or scientifically valid and is not needed to remedy injuries that eventuate as a result of the research project itself. Ancillary care duties have recently been defended on the grounds of beneficence, entrustment, utility and consent. Justice has also been mentioned as a possible basis of ancillary care duties, but little attention has been paid to this approach. In this paper, the author seeks (...) to rectify this omission by arguing that ancillary care duties can be based on a principle of justice as rectification. (shrink)