Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Studies show bilingualism entails an advantage in cognitive control tasks. There is evidence of a bilingual advantage in the context of aphasia, resulting in better cognitive outcomes and recovery in bilingual persons with aphasia compared to monolingual peers. This bilingual advantage also results in structural changes in the right hemisphere gray matter. Very few studies have examined the so-called bilingual advantage by reference to specific anomia therapy efficacy. This study aims to compare the effect of French-Phonological Component Analysis (Fr-PCA) (...) in monolinguals and bilingual persons with aphasia, both at the linguistic and cognitive control level, and to examine the structural impact of left hemisphere lesion location and right hemisphere structural data. Eight participants with chronic aphasia received Fr-PCA for a total of 15 h over 5 weeks. The results showed improved accuracy for treated words and generalization to untreated items and discourse in both groups, and improved Flanker task performance for some participants. Bilingual participants improved more than monolinguals for picture-naming tasks and narrative discourse. Damage to the left postcentral gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus was associated with less therapy-induced improvement. Additionally, left hemisphere damage to the inferior parietal gyrus and postcentral gyrus was associated with reduced cognitive control pre-therapy. Undamaged right hemisphere cortical thicknesses were significantly different between groups; the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus were greater for the bilingual participants and correlated with cognitive control skills. These results suggest a bilingual advantage in anomia recovery following Fr-PCA, potentially resulting from enhanced cognitive control abilities that could be supported by right hemisphere neural reserve. (shrink)

How does conscious experience arise out of the functioning of the human brain? How is it related to the behaviour that it accompanies? How does the perceived world relate to the real world? Between them, these three questions constitute what is commonly known as the Hard Problem of consciousness. Despite vast knowledge of the relationship between brain and behaviour, and rapid advances in our knowledge of how brain activity correlates with conscious experience, the answers to all three questions remain controversial, (...) even mysterious. This important book analyses these core issues and reviews the evidence from both introspection and experiment. To many its conclusions will be surprising and even unsettling: * The entire perceived world is constructed by the brain. The relationship between the world we perceive and the underlying physical reality is not as close as we might think * Much of our behaviour is accomplished with little or no participation from conscious experience. * Our conscious experience of our behaviour lags the behaviour itself by around a fifth of a second - we become aware of what we do only after we have done it. * The lag in conscious experience applies also to the decision to act - we only become aware of our decisions after they have been formed. * The self is as much a creation of the brain as is the rest of the perceived world. Written by a leading scientist, this accessible and compelling analysis of how conscious experience relates to brain and behaviour will have major implications for our understanding of human nature. (shrink)

A study of the political philosophy of the Russian born thinker explains how Isaiah Berlin came to reject ideological frameworks in favor of a pluralism that acknowledges the inevitable diversity of human values.

Anger, disgust, elevation, sympathy, relief. If the subjective experience of each of these emotions is the same whether elicited by moral or nonmoral events, then what makes moral emotions unique? We suggest that the configuration of moral emotions is special—a configuration given by the underlying structure of morality. Research suggests that people divide the moral world along the two dimensions of valence (help/harm) and moral type (agent/patient). The intersection of these two dimensions gives four moral exemplars—heroes, villains, victims and beneficiaries—each (...) of which elicits unique emotions. For example, victims (harm/patient) elicit sympathy and sadness. Dividing moral emotions into these four quadrants provides predictions about which emotions reinforce, oppose and complement each other. (shrink)

Shaw explores the concept of the ego and its role in human psychology and philosophy. He discusses different theories of the ego and its relationship to the self and society. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in psychology or philosophy. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly (...) other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this paper, we pay attention to the impact on staff of what was a new place, Ko Awatea, within a large New Zealand hospital. The place became a space from within which a particular mood arose. This paper seeks to capture that mood and its impact. Using a Heideggerian hermeneutic approach, the study reported on drew on data from interviews with 20 staff. Philosophical notions about the nature and mood of place/space are explored. As staff claimed this space, the (...) mood that emerged was of liveliness, buzz and comfort. It became a space where people wanted to be, where they met others, where conversations unfolded, where thinking happened in new ways. Staff places tend to be sacrificed or poorly resourced in resource-tight environments. We argue that creating a space that feels home-like, where staff come, linger and engage in community is a priority for generating the mood and thinking of an organization. Such spaces do not happen by chance; it takes forethought and intentionality. The gift of such space is the thinking that is sparked and grown. (shrink)

The recent discovery and translation of Herman Bavinck’s (1854–1921) Reformed Ethics and the ongoing work on the sources and contours of his organic ontology create the impetus to relate these two trajectories together. The twin questions this article will be asking, precisely, are these: what is the logical relationship between Bavinck’s organic whole federalism, where ethical ties are ontologically constitutive, with his claim in the Reformed Ethics that sin’s organizing principle is the prioritization of the ego above all else? Further, (...) how does that organic whole anthropology inform his vision of renewal and the subsequent ethical imperative that flow from the Spirit’s regenerative work? This article traces Bavinck’s logic through the Ethics on these twin questions, while being cognizant of the rest of his oeuvre. With this exposition in hand, this article then relates Bavinck’s outlook to current discussions in Protestant theological ethics. (shrink)

Mathematicians use the word ‘deep’ to convey a high appreciation of a concept, theorem, or proof. This paper investigates the extent to which the term can be said to have an objective character by examining its first use in mathematics. It was a consequence of Gauss's work on number theory and the agreement among his successors that specific parts of Gauss's work were deep, on grounds that indicate that depth was a structural feature of mathematics for them. In contrast, French (...) mathematicians had a less structural, more problem-oriented approach to mathematics and did not speak of depth so readily. (shrink)

Functionalism offers an account of the relations that hold between behavioural functions, information and neural processing, and conscious experience from which one can draw two inferences: for any discriminable difference between qualia there must be an equivalent discriminable difference in function; and for any discriminable functional difference within a behavioural domain associated with qualia, there must be a discriminable difference between qualia. The phenomenon of coloured hearing synaesthesia appears to contradict the second of these inferences. We report data showing that (...) this form of synaesthesia is genuine and probably results from an aberrant projection from cortical language areas to a region specialized for the perception of colour. Since functionalism purports to be a general account of consciousness, one such negative instance, if it can be further sustained empirically, is sufficient to invalidate it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 353-355 [Access article in PDF] Emotions and Narrative Selves Valerie Gray Hardcastle In their commentaries, both Phillips (2003) and Woody (2003) agree that the affective side of personhood needs to be better addressed in narrative views of self. In their arguments, they focus mainly on how a patient or a subject is here and now. In contrast, Kennett and Matthews (2003) take (...) a longer view and argue for the importance of a diachronic unity for selfhood. This commentary seeks to integrate these views by discussing how emotions are central to building our personal sense of unified agency. 1Phillips and Woody are right: most philosophical discussions of the narrative view of self are overly cognitive and focus too much attention on our linguistic story-telling abilities and not enough on what it is like to be a person experiencing the world. This is too bad, for it is our affective reactions that drive our personal life narratives. Consider: of all the experiences in the world, we only chose a small subset to become or represent who we are. I regularly eat cold cereal for breakfast before heading off to work, but if you ask me to describe myself, I describe my work or my children, not my breakfast-eating habits. Why is this? I identify with my work, my family life, or my play, but not with my sleeping patterns, the trajectories I chose when I drive, or how I brush my teeth. How is it that I have selected the former activities to highlight in my self-stories, but not the latter?I maintain that I choose the former because I have strong affective ties to them, ties that I do not have to driving routes or personal hygiene. And these ties are what determine what gets into our narratives of self. Actually, my claim is stronger than that. I believe that our emotions not only color what we do but they also allow us to act in the first place (this discussion is greatly expanded in my forthcoming book).Humans delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought. Since Plato at least we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.But what would life really be like with an overdeveloped forebrain and without emotion? Let us consider more carefully what it is we really prize about being human. We can rationalize well, it is true, but we do so in the service of personal goals. As Aristotle reminds us, we have practical rationality; we have means-ends reasoning with a point. This is just another way of saying that it is imperative that we identify what is important to us prior to cognizing.Obviously, one might scoff, we need an end to engage in means-ends reasoning. But often, I think, what having an end entails is not well appreciated. These days it is fashionable to believe that our fundamental ends—survival and reproduction—are set by our biology and that all [End Page 353] other ends (or most other ends) derive from them in some fashion. Maybe this story is true, but it obscures how ends—whether they be hardwired in or they come later—function in the human psyche.At a bare minimum, that we have particular ends tells us that we have to tag our abstractions, interpretations, and matched patterns with valances—some things are good, some things are bad, and some are indifferent. Tagging our experiences thus is just what it means to have emotions; we are reacting affectively to our world around us. And it is these reactions that determine which inputs we respond to and which we ignore. We literally cannot move about in our world without emotion. I think, perhaps, that this fact is what Phillips and Woody are... (shrink)

The first claim in the target article was that there is as yet no transparent, causal account of the relations between consciousness and brain-and-behaviour. That claim remains firm. The second claim was that the contents of consciousness consist, psychologically, of the outputs of a comparator system; the third consisted of a description of the brain mechanisms proposed to instantiate the comparator. In order to defend these claims against criticism, it has been necessary to clarify the distinction between consciousness-as-such and the (...) contents of consciousness, to widen the description of the neural machinery instantiating the comparator system, and to clarify the relationship between the contents of consciousness in the here-and-now and episodic memory. (shrink)

A TRADITIONAL VIEW OF UTILITY AND RIGHTS According to a conventional view, no project could be more hopelessly misconceived than the enterprise of attempting a utilitarian derivation of fundamental rights. We are all familiar – too familiar, perhaps – with the arguments that support this conventional view, but let us review them anyway. We may begin by recalling that, whereas the defining value of utilitarianism – pleasure, happiness or welfare – contains no mention of the dignity or autonomy of human (...) beings, it is this value which utilitarianism in all its standard forms invokes as the criterion of right action. Worse, insofar as utilitarian policy must have as its goal the maximization of welfare conceived as an aggregate summed over the utilities of everyone affected, legal and political utilitarianism seems bound to have a collectivist bias, trading on the dangerous fiction of a social entity and ignoring the distinctness of separate selves with their several incommensurable claims. It seems that, if individuals can appear in the utilitarian calculus at all, it will only be as ciphers, abstract place-holders for units of welfare. For, as an aggregative value, utility must be indifferent to distribution, and insensitive to the preeminently distributive considerations marked by claims about rights. So, if whatever has utility can be broken down into units or elements which are subject to measurement or at least comparison by a common standard, then it will always be possible that a very great loss of welfare for one man or a few men can be justified if it produces a great many small increments of welfare for a vast multitude of men. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Nicholas Humphrey is interested in illustrating how it is that the mind is the brain. We can think of him as taking up David Chalmers’ and Joe Levine's challenge to solve the so-called hard problem, to bridge the so-called explanatory gap. For after being convinced, as we surely are, that minds are housed in brains via the activity of neurons, we still need to explain why that should be the case. Why is it that our lumpy grey matter (...) should contain consciousness? Even if we agree that it does, we still need to arrange the facts so that having minded brains is a patently obvious truth. (shrink)

Although Redish et al. have pulled together a large number of approaches to understanding decision-making and common errors in cognition, they have outlined neither the necessary nor the sufficient attributes of addiction. They are correct in claiming that addiction is multifaceted and probably more akin to a syndrome than a genuine disease. But grasping what that multifaceted syndrome is still eludes us.

Jon Stewart often delivers the satire himself, but nearly every episode also features at least one of The Daily Show's numerous correspondents. This chapter focuses on Larry Wilmore, who as Senior Black Correspondent is able to discuss issues of race in ways that a white correspondent probably could not. For example, Wilmore has discussed how the election of Barack Obama could be perceived by the African‐American community in the United States, proposing that peer pressure creates a monolithic voting block among (...) African‐Americans. Other issues discussed by Wilmore include the Trayvon Martin case, whether the Congressional Black Caucus has “maxed out” the race card, and how Obama should “go blacker” in response to the US credit downgrade. (shrink)

The lives of few mathematicians offer the drama that is presented by the life of L. E. J. Brouwer, correctly identified on the cover of this book as a topologist, intuitionist, and philosopher, and before we go any further, it will be worth indicating why.It is not just that Brouwer would rank high among mathematicians for his work in topology alone: he set standards for rigour and created a theory of dimension for topological spaces, and his fixed-point theorem is of (...) great importance. Nor is it just that his philosophy of intuitionism created a new and vibrant branch of logic, that is, arguably, the only viable alternative to naïve, classical logic outside the enclave of professional logicians. Rather, it is that there is a tension, popularly taken to amount to a contradiction, in the fundamental ideas behind his topology and his intuitionism. Added to that, he took a highly principled stand on mathematical issues that led him into confrontations with major figures and a certain degre .. (shrink)

Bonaventure’s third distinction in the first book of his ’Commentary on the Sentences’ is the focus of argument, after situating the question within contemporary Bonaventure interpretation and current Trinity philosophy. It is argued that Bonaventure had sufficient philosophical grounds to conclude to the existence of Trinity from its image in memory, intelligence and will. Suggestions are made for why he did not do so.

As well as data indicating relationships (emphasised in the target article) (1) between dopaminergic transmission in the nucleus accumbens and positive incentive motivation, and (2) between dopaminergic transmission and extraversion, other data (not accounted for by the hypotheses developed in the target article) indicate relationships (3) between accumbens dopaminergic transmission and cognitive, especially perceptual, processes that are disrupted in schizophrenia, and (4) between dopaminergic transmission and psychoticism. The tension between relationships 1 + 2 and 3 + 4 is discussed and (...) a tentative resolution proposed. (shrink)