Two Minds Blog

  The corpus callosum  is a thick bundle of neural fibers that runs down the middle of the cortex, at the bottom of the longitudinal fissure (the long fold in the brain that divides its two hemispheres). Because of the longitudinal fissure, signal traffic between the left and right side of the cortex is limited. The corpus callosum is the superhighway through which most of that traffic flows. Signals can still get from one place to another using side routes, of course, again much like a road system. But it's a lot slower and less efficient to go the long way around, and fewer signals can make it through that way. Note that only the brain's cerebral cortex  is divided in this way -- the "gray matter" that forms the outside of the brain, and where we like to think that our "higher thinking" resides. The "white matter" on the inside of the brain doesn't have the same left/right dichotomy, only the cortex does.  You might recall that I argue for a...

Readers of my blog may be interested in this recent event from Valparaiso University’s Christ College, where students debated the proposition “on balance, the rise of Artificial Intelligence harms students more than it helps them.” (So the “pro” team was arguing against students using AI, and the “con” team was arguing that it’s OK). If you work in education, or are just an interested observer, you might be intrigued by what these bright students thought were the most compelling reasons for and against their own use of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I should note that both sides were explicitly instructed not to bring up the issue of reliability or AI-generated “hallucinations,” because it was felt that this would distract from the main question. That’s probably fair, as hallucinations have gotten a lot of press yet are also decreasing in frequency and severity with each new iteration of the technology. My daughter Ruth was one of the speakers for the “pro” side, but I ...

Here's a story about a very unusual experience that I had in connection with the Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM) technique that my research team is currently studying. It's a fish story, and like all good fish stories you can decide what you'd like to believe about it. At the end of the fall semester, when everyone was overwhelmed with final grades and holiday events, my colleague Laurra Aagaard led an activity in our monthly faculty meeting to help us manage our stress. After asking us to close our eyes and breathe deeply, she asked us to descend into whatever part of our body felt like a source of calm in the end-of-the-semester storm. For me, this felt like sinking deep into my chest, but also like I was going deep underwater. It was calm and cool there, far from the activity back up on the surface. Laurra suggested that a resource would appear to support us. Because I was underwater, what I noticed near me was a fish.  It wasn't just any fish. In fact, I realize...

This week I’d like to note the passing of psychology researcher, Princeton professor, and Nobel laureate in Dr. Daniel Kahneman on March 27, at the age of 90. Dr. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics (there is no Nobel prize in psychology) for essentially inventing the field of behavioral economics with his colleague Amos Tversky. Kahneman writes that his interest in understanding people grew out of childhood experiences as a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied France, for instance when a German SS soldier treated him well simply because he was wearing his sweater (with its identifying Star of David) inside-out. As his Nobel acceptance speech , Dr. Kahneman wrote a short treatise about the functioning of the narrative and intuitive minds, which he described as providing the underlying basis for his groundbreaking behavioral economics findings. He later expanded that speech to a book-length treatment titled Thinking, Fast and Slow , which popularized cognitive neuroscience. Kahnema...