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Showing posts from July, 2011

Hallucinating neural networks

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Hearing voices is a hallmark of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders , occurring in 60-80% of cases. These voices are typically identified as belonging to other people and may be voicing the person’s thoughts, commenting on their actions or ideas, arguing with each other or telling the person to do something. Importantly, these auditory hallucinations are as subjectively real as any external voices. They may in many cases be critical or abusive and are often highly distressing to the sufferer. However, many perfectly healthy people also regularly hear voices – as many as 1 in 25 according to some studies, and in most cases these experiences are perfectly benign. In fact, we all hear voices “belonging to other people” when we dream – we can converse with these voices, waiting for their responses as if they were derived from external agents. Of course, these percepts are actually generated by the activity of our own brain, but how? There is good evidence from neuroimaging

Environmental influences on autism - splashy headlines from dodgy data

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A couple of recent papers have been making headlines in relation to autism, one claiming that it is caused less by genetics than previously believed and more by the environment and the other specifically claiming that antidepressant use by expectant mothers increases the risk of autism in the child. But are these conclusions really supported by the data? Are they strongly enough supported to warrant being splashed across newspapers worldwide, where most readers will remember only the headline as the take-away message? The legacy of the MMR vaccination hoax shows how difficult it can be to counter overblown claims and the negative consequences that can arise as a result. So, do these papers really make a strong case for their major conclusions? The first gives results from a study of twins in California. Twin studies are a classic method to determine whether something is caused by genetic or environmental factors. The method asks, if one twin in a pair is affected by some disor

On discovering you’re an android

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Deckard: She's a replicant, isn't she? Tyrell: I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them? Deckard: I don't get it, Tyrell. Tyrell: How many questions? Deckard: Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced. Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn't it? Deckard: [realizing Rachael believes she's human] She doesn't know. Tyrell: She's beginning to suspect, I think. Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is? A very discomfiting realisation, discovering you are an android. That all those thoughts and ideas and feelings you seem to be having are just electrical impulses zapping through your circuits. That you are merely a collection of physical parts, whirring away. What if some of them break and you begin to malfunction? What if they wear down with use and someday simply fail? The replicants in BladeRunner rail against their planned obsolescence, believing in the existence of their own selves, even with the knowledge