Viewing entries in
writing

The Neural Mechanisms and Purposes of Randomness in Consciousness

The Neural Mechanisms and Purposes of Randomness in Consciousness

Do you believe in free will or determinism?   Either way,  imagine you are creating a life form, and that you want it to have free will.  You figure out that you need to design an organ that would be responsible for this.  You decide to call it the "free willer".

What would this organ do?

Why The DLPFC is The Coolest Part of The Brain

Why The DLPFC is The Coolest Part of The Brain

Want to learn about why the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the coolest part of the brain?  With the onset of modern neuroscience a common question often discussed is: where in the brain are self-regulation, executive control, free will, volition, selection, short-term memory, attention, planning, and overall consciousness located and by what neurological processes do they occur.

Flow, Education, and Ritalin: The Missing Link Between Addiction And Learning

Flow, Education, and Ritalin: The Missing Link Between Addiction And Learning

My eyes are glued to the screen. They rarely blink. They become irritated but I do not notice. I am in the zone. The force is with me. I feel it flow through me. I am coding. Even though the coding paradigm may not apply to everyone, we all know that feeling of hyper-attention. When an activity is so engrossing that the rest of the world fades away, we are left mano-a-mano, tête-à-tête, our ego and the task battling together for mutual gain.

A Moment in the Life of Camus' Sisyphus

A Moment in the Life of Camus' Sisyphus

I watch my cursed boulder tumble down my mountain. I heave a sigh of relief; my aching muscles allowed a brief respite. As I stand on its majestic craggy peak, I survey my mountain beneath me. My boulder is now far out of sight, but I can feel it down below in the darkness waiting for me.

Fear, Happiness

Fear, Happiness

What is the mind when it is happy and when it is unhappy? Most likely the answer is different for each person, but to understand it for myself I first need to discern when it is that I am happy.

Geopolitical Representations in a Networked World: current and future

Geopolitical Representations in a Networked World: current and future

There have been studies done of the effects of decentralized social networks in terms of geopolitics and global civil society, however not as much work has been done on the analysis of the content of the citizen media for the purposes of breaking through imagined geographies. As of 2010, BlogPulse reports that there are more than 144 million blog sites. Because the the interconnected nature of blogs (bloggers will often link to posts in other blogs) a hierarchy of blogs develops, with a trickle up effect of opinion from smaller blogs up toward bigger blogs with more readership (Drezner, D, & Farrell, H. 2004). The blog hierarchy aggregates public opinion (at least the opinion of the online public) and presents it to the rest of the world. The opinions may be biased, one-sided and ignorant, however, they are reflecting of a side of societies that before now has gone unheard or has been repressed.