Human evolution: How we misread our own story

How we perceive our own retina

Ever since the days of René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, the search for the relationship between subjective perception and neural activity has been an ongoing challenge. In neuroscience, an approach to the problem via the visual system has produced a paradigm using perceptual suppression, changing with time. Cortical areas in which the neural activity was modulated in temporal correla...

Do we own our bodies?

Ageism: we are our own worst enemy.

In 1969, Butler (1969) first coined the term "ageism" to confront "prejudice by one age group toward other age groups" (pp. 243). As with other "isms," such as racism and sexism, ageism leads to bigotry and discrimination, though it is a very distinct beast in that, for the most part, other "isms" refer to those different from ourselves: distinct, mutually exclusive, and impervious groups. Conv...

How To Misread A Dictionary

A dictionary is an extremely valuable reference book, but its familiarity tends to blind adults to the high level of intelligence required to read it. This aspect becomes apparent, however, when school children are observed learning dictionary skills. Children do not respect syntactic category and often wander into the wrong lexieai entry, apparently in search of something they can understand. ...

How We Know Our Senses

I propose a new criterion by which, I hold, subjects recognize and distinguish their sensory modalities. I argue that, rather than appealing to one of the standard criteria (sense organ, proximal stimulus, phenomenal character, or representational content (Grice 1962, Macpherson 2011a)) or to O’Dea’s (2011) proprioceptive content, we need to introduce the criterion of location in the functional...