Pantheon Books, 2010

Conclusion In “Self Comes to Mind”, Damasio provides a neuroscientific account of consciousness. Despite being occasionally somewhat opaque, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in consciousness.

In his latest book, “Self Comes to Mind”, Antonio Damasio outlines his ideas about the neural basis of consciousness. This is not the first time (and probably not the last) that Damasio has dealt with this subject matter, but “Self Comes to Mind” is different from his previous books. First, the role of emotion is not quite as prominent. Second, “Self Comes to Mind” appears to be oriented towards people with some knowledge of neuroscience. The book is also perfectly suited for the interested layman, but those who are looking for light-weight popular science entertainment may be better off with, for example, recent books by Oliver Sacks or Victor Lamme.

According to Damasio, consciousness is all about neural maps. In order for an object to be consciously perceived, it needs to be represented in brain areas that are crucial for consciousness. This statement is a tad trivial when it comes to sensory perception (vision, hearing, etc.), but Damasio emphasizes that this principle extends to emotions as well, with one difference: Emotions are the result of maps of the body itself, rather than maps of the outside world.

Damasio already expressed these ideas about neural map-making before, but in “Self Comes to Mind” he goes a step further and provides a detailed account of how he thinks consciousness emerges …

This post has been moved to the OpenSesame documentation area: http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/getting-started/running-from-source

There is a new online tool available: the online spreadsheet merger. This simple tool allows you to merge multiple spreadsheets into one, select relevant columns and convert plain-text spreadsheets (.csv/.txt) into Excel format (.xls) and vice versa.

This tool has been created mostly as a convenience for users of OpenSesame, the graphical experiment builder, which outputs data as separate .csv files per subject. The online spreadsheet merger has been created to accommodate users who prefer to have all participant data in a single spreadsheet.

Check it out!

During our departmental "Christmas" dinner, yesterday evening, the subject of an automatic manuscript generator came up. I was kind of intrigued, so I looked it up and found SCIgen, an online tool created by three MIT graduate students.

And of course I couldn't resist.

Kind of cool, right? The manuscript contains graphs and everything. And although the content is totally incoherent (the creators prefer the term "context-free"), there are no screaming grammatical errors.

I was amazed, amused and shocked to learn that a few such generated papers have actually been accepted as conference submissions and by "peer-reviewed" journals. Perhaps it isn't terribly surprising that you can get a paper like that into a shady journal where you pay to publish. But I was shocked that even Elsevier, an established publisher, accepted a random paper for publication in the journal Applied Mathematics and Computation (impact factor 1.124). How on earth can …

Risk aversion is a well known feature of human decision making. It refers to our tendency to choose a certain payoff over an uncertain, but potentially higher payoff. For example, most people prefer getting E500 over a 50/50 chance of getting E1000. A more abstract form of risk aversion, usually called ambiguity aversion, is our tendency to avoid situations in which we don't know the odds of a good outcome at all, in favor of risky situations in which we do know the odds. For example, we like a 50/50 chance of getting E1000 better than an unknown chance of receiving E1500. In other words, we don't like risks, but we like unknown risks even less.

In a forthcoming paper in Biology Letters, Rosati and Hare show that chimps and bonobos are ambiguity averse as well. They let monkeys choose between a piece a food that they could have for sure (but wasn't always very tasty) and two pieces of food, of which they would get one (but they didn't know which). On some trials the monkeys could see these two pieces of food and on some trials they couldn't. The “sure thing” piece of food was always visible to the monkeys. What they found was that monkeys tended to stick to the sure thing if they weren't able to see the other two pieces of food, even if the sure thing wasn't very tasty.

Another cool finding was that this ambiguity aversion lasted only very briefly and …