Several themes can be identified in the commentaries. The first is that the climbing fibers may have more than one function; the second is that the climbing fibers provide sensory rather than motor signals. We accept the possibility that climbing fibers may have more than one function consequence(s)’ in the title. Until we know more about the function of the inhibitory input to the inferior olive from the cerebellar nuclei, which are motor structures, we have to keep open the possibility (...) that the climbing fiber signals can be a combination of sensory and motor signals. (shrink)

American football is played in a chaotic visual environment filled with relevant and distracting information. We investigated the hypothesis that collegiate football players show exceptional skill at shielding their response execution from the interfering effects of distraction ( interference control ). The performances of 280 football players from National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football programs were compared to age-matched controls in a variant of the Eriksen flanker task ( Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974 ). This task quantifies the magnitude of (...) interference produced by visual distraction on split-second response execution. Overall, football athletes and age controls showed similar mean reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates. However, football athletes were more proficient at shielding their response execution speed from the interfering effects of distraction (i.e., smaller flanker effect costs on RT). Offensive and defensive players showed smaller interference costs compared to controls, but defensive players showed the smallest costs. All defensive positions and one offensive position showed statistically smaller interference effects when compared directly to age controls. These data reveal a clear cognitive advantage among football athletes at executing motor responses in the face of distraction, the existence and magnitude of which vary by position. Individual differences in cognitive control may have important implications for both player selection and development to improve interference control capabilities during play. (shrink)

When we are fatigued, we feel that our performance is worse than when we are fresh. Yet, for over 100 years, researchers have been unable to identify an objective, behavioral measure that covaries with the subjective experience of fatigue. Previous work suggests that the metrics of signal detection theory —response bias and perceptual certainty —may change as a function of fatigue, but no work has yet been done to examine whether these metrics covary with fatigue. Here, we investigated cognitive fatigue (...) using SDT. We induced fatigue through repetitive performance of the n-back working memory task, while functional magnetic resonance imaging data was acquired. We also assessed cognitive fatigue at intervals throughout. This enabled us to assess not only whether criterion and d’ covary with cognitive fatigue but also whether similar patterns of brain activation underlie cognitive fatigue and SDT measures. Our results show that both criterion and d’ were correlated with changes in cognitive fatigue: as fatigue increased, subjects became more conservative in their response bias and their perceptual certainty declined. Furthermore, activation in the striatum of the basal ganglia was also related to cognitive fatigue, criterion, and d’. These results suggest that SDT measures represent an objective measure of cognitive fatigue. Additionally, the overlap and difference in the fMRI results between cognitive fatigue and SDT measures indicate that these measures are related while also separate. In sum, we show the relevance of SDT measures in the understanding of fatigue, thus providing researchers with a new set of tools with which to better understand the nature and consequences of cognitive fatigue. (shrink)

D. R. Bell; XI—Imperatives and the Will, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 129–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristo.

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

In this book, Anthony R. D'Augelli and Charlotte J. Patterson bring together top experts to offer a comprehensive overview of what we have discovered--and what we still need to learn--about lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities.

Humans and animals communicate in various non-linguistic modes of communication. This multi-channelled form of communication seems to be characteristic of humans, and involves facial expression, calls/gestures, music and dance, as well as symbolic language; and seems likely to depend, in part, on the psychological mechanisms of projection and projective identification. This article attempts to reflect on the relation between these evolved forms of human communication, both linguistic and non-verbal, in terms of the unconscious as discovered by Freud.

Thirteenth-century India saw a huge revival of religious devotion among the common folk, similar to the waves of religious fervor that swept over late medieval Europe. One of the pillars of this revival was the poet-saint Jnaneshwar, author of an exquisite commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Like his contemporary Dante, Jnaneshwar was a poet of the vernacular, who wrote in Marathi, the language of ordinary villagers, rather than the Sanskrit of the brahmin orthodoxy. Over the centuries, the Jnaneshwari, as his (...) commentary is known, has become a scripture in its own right. Expanding the Gita’s seven hundred verses to approximately nine thousand, and using the images of ordinary life to explain its lofty teachings, Jnaneshwar fashioned from human language one of the most sublime visions of the Absolute that has ever been put into speech. The Jnaneshwari is one of the marvels of world literature. The greatest study of the Jnaneshwar is still this work by the philosopher R. D. Ranade, originally published in 1933. In addition to being a renowned scholar, Ranade was also a mystic and an initiated disciple, and he brings all these broad currents of the Indian tradition to his analysis of the Jnaneshwari. Readers who are sometimes intoxicated by the richness of Jnaneshwar’s imagery, will appreciate the way Ranade has here uncovered the work’s inner structure, and how he has briefly summarized its approach to the Gita’s great themes: action vs. renunciation; devotion and dharma; the form and the formless aspects of God; and the subject dearest to Jnaneshwar’s heart, the nature of the spiritual Master. This book also includes Ranade’s study of Jnaneshwar’s abhangas, his religious songs, as well as an analysis of his magnificent Amritanubhav, “The Nectar of Self-Awareness,” an inspired synthesis of Samkhya and Shaivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 325-329 [Access article in PDF] Psychoanalysis as Natural Philosophy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords evolution, psychopathology, ethics, unconscious phantasy Andreas De Block has offered us a most fascinating paper. We do not have to agree with all his points to be profoundly stimulated by them. His core proposition is that Freud pathologizes ordinary psychology and personalities, as well as the abnormal. There has been (...) a perennial debate about whether, psychoanalytically speaking, there is a continuum from pathology to normality or if there is a discontinuity at some point between the two. Freud's famous quote—"much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness" (Breuer and Freud 1895, 305)—is ambiguous. Interestingly, De Block takes a hard stand on this; he not only assumes a continuum, but further he reads Freud as saying that all normality is neurotic. This is not a usual reading of Freud. De Block then expands this into a philosophical position. It is, he says, Freud's philosophy on the nature of mind.Freud himself was not interested in philosophy, and thought it largely irrelevant to psychoanalysis. In fact, he mused about the traffic being inevitably in the opposite direction—that philosophy might come to psychoanalysis. In discussing the work of a philosophically inclined analyst, he remarked, The decisive reason for the rejection of Putnam's proposals was the doubt as to which of the countless philosophical systems should be accepted, since they all seem to rest on an equally insecure basis.... It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself. (Freud 1921, 270) Psychoanalysis, Freud thought, might be the very substance from which a philosophical system could emerge. De Block has followed that route; he has gone to Freud's writing to discovery a weltanshaung on which we might develop a philosophy of life. He has come back from his intellectual expedition with Freud's fascinating paper, published only in 1987 (discovered in 1983), "A Phylogenetic Phantasy." This was actually written in 1914, but Freud never published it and in fact destroyed his own copy of the draft. The paper has been called a "metabiology" (Gubrich-Simitis 1987), and deals with Freud's speculation on how a threatened species during the ice age developed certain biological and biopsychological traits1 necessary to survive the harsh environmental conditions. These traxits, which included the repression of libido, had significant side effects, namely, the pathologies arising from repression: the neuroses, perversions and psychoses. Moreover, today the environmental conditions no longer apply, so we are left with the side effects of traits that are no longer biologically useful. [End Page 325]So, De Block indicates at least the possibility of an evolutionary theory of the nature of mind. Even if Freud's Lamarckianism makes his particular speculative metabiology implausible, it is a way of thinking that suggests that a theory of mind can arise from biological understanding of its evolutionary development. However, De Block goes further. As a corollary, because Freud's view of the evolution of mind is to involve the evolutionary nature of psychopathology, then Freud's psychoanalysis can suggest an evolutionary psychiatry—that is to say, psychiatry can look for distant causes of mental disturbance in the vagaries of evolutionary influence.This way of approaching philosophy is interesting because it starts with the outcome of a scientific investigation of the human mind, just as Freud suggested in the passage quoted (Freud 1921, 270). The prospect is for a natural philosophy of mind, just as the physics of fundamental particles and the "big bang" prompt us toward a kind of natural ontology of the universe and its contents, arising from empirically tested facts.However, De Block is on rather uncertain ground with the evidence for his argument; he commits Freud to this biological speculation on the basis of a paper that Freud did not in fact publish and tore up.2 Even if Freud's reading of the evolutionary origins of man... (shrink)

This paper first appeared in Modern Theology, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1989. Copyright (c) Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., Oxford. Reprinted by permission.

While Meinong makes scattered remarks about perception in various writings, the one text in which he makes a concentrated effort to work out a theory of perception is Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1905). This paper is a critical examination of the theory which is presented there, but also some other texts are taken into account. Special attention will be given to Meinong's views on the object (Gegenstand) of perception, both the propositional object (Objektiv) and the non-propositional object (Objekt) which (...) is allegedly "part" of the propositional object. Also, some contrasts and parallels between these views and those of other members of the Brentano School, e.g. Husserl's notion of categorial perception are discussed. (shrink)

Critics, once so busy with Manilius, have left him alone since Housman's edition was completed a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps I shall seem rash to break the silence by challenging a few of his verdicts. I do so in no spirit of iconoclasm, but rather believing that Housman wrote for readers who will occasionally call him wrong—at their peril, and on their knees.