What Bateson had in Mind About ‘Mind’?

What Medicare's architects had in mind.

What do eyes reveal about the mind?

We address the question of inferring the search target from fixation behavior in visual search. Such inference is possible since during search, our attention and gaze are guided toward visual features similar to those in the search target. We strive to answer two fundamental questions: what are the most powerful algorithmic principles for this task, and how does their performance depend on the ...

When Religion Had a Mind

ritten in 1779 by the playwright and philosopher Gotthold Lessing, Nathan the Wise http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1463609019 /ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325& creativeASIN=1463609019&linkCode=as2&tag=thenewrep08!20 ranks among the most powerful arguments for religious tolerance in the entirety of the eighteenth century. Germany in the age of Enlightenment was still tre...

What Mind Wandering Reveals About Executive-Control Abilities and Failures

People’s minds sometimes wander from ongoing activities. Although these experiences can be pleasant and useful, they are often unintentional and precipitate mistakes. In this article, we adopt an individual-differences perspective in considering unwanted mind wandering as an indicator of both momentary failures of and enduring deficiencies in executive-control functions. We describe research th...

What Buddhism Taught Cognitive Science about Self, Mind and Brain

In the past twenty years, new optimism about the relevance of Buddhism to cognitive science has been expressed by a number of established researchers. In this article I ask what are the conceptual roots of this optimism, and which forms of development it inspired, with particular focus on selfhood, embodiment and meditation. The latter contains three distinct points of contact that are also rev...