Published on Apr 7, 2015 Keynote address recorded March 14, 2015 at the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science in Amsterdam. Saturday, 14 March 2015 George Lakoff Departments of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA How do we answer the question, “How are thought and language constituted by the brain’s neural circuitry?” … Read more
This is a very interesting article from Julie Sedivy at Nautilus that riffs on another article from Nautilus, by Elizabeth Svoboda, The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus. The latter article presents recent genetic research that weakens (at best) or refutes (at worst) Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar hypothesis (which, aside from Geoffrey Sampson, George Lakoff, and … Read more
Halfway through the year, almost, and there have already been some seriously good books published that will appear on a lot of top-ten lists in December. Some of those books are below, but there also a lot of books below no one will have heard of about side of their respective fields, books from academic … Read more
A long and interesting interview with Steven Pinker from the Harvard Gazette. Pinker is the author of a lot of really, really thick books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human … Read more
Here is a summary of some of the research presented at the 2014 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting. Daisy Yuhas at Scientific American Observations blog does the summarizing. Brains in Boston: Weekend Recap of Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s Annual Meeting By Daisy Yuhas | April 8, 2014 Greetings from Boston where the 21st annual meeting of … Read more
As my regular readers well know, I don’t think we will ever have human-like robots who can interact with us as though they are not machines. This article from Nautilus presents recent advances in what is known as subsymbolic approaches to AI, “Trying to get computers to behave intelligently without worrying about whether the code … Read more