Michael Gazzaniga; Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
Book	Page		Topic
Gazzaniga; Human	11		All mammalian brains have the same components.
Gazzaniga; Human	11		Evolutionary changes in cognitive capacity are the result of brain reorganization rather than changes in size alone.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	11		Many mammals have larger brains than humans in terms of absolute brain size.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	12		Human brains are four to five times larger than would be expected for an average mammal of comparable size.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	12		Chimp's brain weighs about 400 g; a human's brain is about 1300 g.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	12		Neanderthals had a body mass comparable to that of humans.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	12		Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago began to paint their bodies and inter their dead.  This may indicate some self-awareness and the beginnings of symbolic thought.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	12		Neanderthal material culture was not nearly as complex as that of contemporaneous Homo sapiens.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	13		For the past 45 years Michael Gazzaniga has been studying split brain patients.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	13		Split-brain patients have had the two hemispheres of the brain surgically separated in an effort to control their epilepsy.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	13		If a gene is recessive, in order for it to cause a visible or detectable characteristic, there must be a copy of it from both the mother and father.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	14		Some genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	14		One genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 30,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, and it increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with random genetic drift or population migration.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	14		The ASPM gene variant arose about 5,800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities, and the first record of written language.  It's high frequencies in the population indicates strong positive selection.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	17		Eminent experimental psychologist Carl Lashley once advised Michael Gazzaniga's mentor, Roger Sperry.		3
Gazzaniga; Human	17		Primate brains aren't easy to come by.  Chimpanzees are on the endangered species list.  It's hard to get a guerrilla to lie still.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	17		Cortex is highly interconnected.  Of all brain connections, 75% are within the cortex; the other 25% are input and output connections to other parts of the brain and nervous system.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	18		Neocortex is divided anatomically into four lobes.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	19		Frontal lobe has much to do with the higher functioning aspects of human behavior such as language and thought.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Frontal lobe may have had enlargement of selected, but not all, cortical areas.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Frontal lobe is richly interconnected.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Subsectors of the frontal lobe may have undergone a modification of local circuitry.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Distinction should be made between the frontal and prefrontal cortex.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Prefrontal cortex is the anterior part of the frontal lobe.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Prefrontal cortex is distinguished from the rest of the frontal cortex by having an additional layer of neurons, called an internal granular layer IV.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Prefrontal cortex is implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviors, in personality, in memory, and in aspects of language and social behavior.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Percentage of frontal to prefrontal cortex may have changed during evolution.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Motor cortex portion of a human's frontal lobe is smaller than a chimp's.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Area10 in the lateral prefrontal cortex, is almost twice as large in humans as in apes.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	20		Area10 in the lateral prefrontal cortex is involved with memory and planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out relevant information from what is perceived through the senses.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		White matter lies underneath the cortex and is made up of nerve fibers connecting the cortex with the rest of the nervous system.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	21		Prefrontal white matter is disproportionately larger in humans than other primates,  which suggests a higher degree of connectivity in this part of the brain.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		The more you know, the faster your brain works.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		Nonprimate mammals have two major regions in the prefrontal cortex, and primates have three.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		The original two regions of prefrontal cortex, which are present in other mammals and evolved earlier, are the orbital prefrontal region, which responds to external stimuli that are likely to be rewarding, and the anterior cingulate cortex, which process information about the body's internal state.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		Orbital prefrontal region and the anterior cingulate cortex, the two original regions of prefrontal cortex work together to contribute to the emotional aspects of decision making.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		The third and new region of prefrontal cortex is called the lateral prefrontal cortex and is where area 10 is.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		The new region of lateral prefrontal cortex is apparently unique to primates and is concerned mainly with the rational aspects of decision-making, which are our conscious efforts to reach a decision.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	21		Lateral prefrontal cortex is densely interconnected with other regions that are larger in human brains -- the posterior parietal cortex and the temporal lobe cortex -- and outside the neocortex, it is connected to several cell groups in the dorsal thalamus that are also disproportionately enlarged, the medial dorsal nucleus and pulvinar.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	22		What has enlarged in human evolution is not a random group of areas and nuclei, but an entire circuit.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	22		The lateral prefrontal cortex circuit has made humans more flexible and capable of finding novel solutions to problems.  Included in this circuit is the ability to inhibit automatic responses, thereby permitting novel responses.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	22		Cerebellum is enlarged in humans.  One part of the cerebellum, the dentate nucleus in particular, is larger than expected.  This area receives input neurons from the lateral cerebellar cortex and send output neurons to the cerebral cortex via the thalamus.  The thalamus sorts and directs sensory information arriving from other parts of the nervous system.  Growing evidence that the cerebellum contributes to cognitive as well as motor function.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Cortical areas in the frontal lobe are involved with impulse control, decision-making and judgment, language, memory, problem solving, sexual behavior, socialization, and spontaneity.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Frontal lobe is the location of the brain's "executive," which plans, controls, and coordinates behavior and also controls voluntary movements of specific body parts, especially the hands.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Cortical areas in the parietal lobe are involved with integrating sensory information from various parts of the body, with visual-spatial processing, and with the manipulation of objects.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Primary auditory cortex in the temporal lobe is involved in hearing.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		In humans, areas in the left temporal lobe are specialized for language functions such as speech, language comprehension, naming things, and verbal memory.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Prosody, or the rhythm of speech, is processed in the right temporal lobe.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	23		Areas in the ventral part of the temporal lobes also do some specific visual processing for faces, scenes, and object recognition.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	24		Medial parts of the temporal lobes are busy with memory for events, experiences, and facts.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	24		Hippocampuses, which are evolutionarily ancient structures deep inside the temporal lobes, are involved in the process whereby short-term memory gets transferred to long-term memory, and also spatial memory.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	28		For speech, each hemisphere is concerned with different aspects.  Wernicke's area in the left hemisphere recognizes distinctive parts of speech, and an area in the right auditory cortex recognize prosody, the metric structure of speech.		4
Gazzaniga; Human	28		A component of Wernicke'sarea is larger in the left hemisphere than the right. Microscopic architecture of Wernicke's area is different from the corresponding part of the right hemisphere -- many columns are wider, and the spaces between them are greater, and this lateralized change in architecture is unique to humans.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	31		Split-brain research has demonstrated that the left hemisphere has marked limitations in perceptual functions and the right hemisphere has prominent limitations in cognitive functions.		3
Gazzaniga; Human	32		Discovery of mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	34		FOX genes are a big family of genes that code for proteins that have a string of 82 to a 100 amino acids forming a specific shape that binds to a specific area of DNA like a key fitting into a lock.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	34		FOX proteins are a type of transcription factor.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	35		It is postulated that reduced amounts of FOXP2 protein at specific stages in neurogenesis led to abnormalities in the neural structures that are important for language and speech.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	35		FOXP2 gene is present in a broad range of mammals.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	48		Theory of Mind -- humans have an innate ability to understand that other humans have minds.		13
Gazzaniga; Human	49		First called Theory of Mind (TOM) by David Premack.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	49		Children and adults with autism have deficits in theory of mind and are impaired in their ability to reason about the mental states of others, yet their other cognitive abilities remain intact or increased.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	55		Language is a system of abstract symbols and the grammar (rules) in which the symbols are manipulated.		6
Gazzaniga; Human	55		Language does not have to be spoken or written.  It can be made with gestures, such as American Sign Language.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	55		Syntax is the pattern of formation of sentences or phrases that govern the way words in a sentence come together.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	55		Human language can string phrases together indefinitely to produce an unlimited number of sentences that are all different and have never been said before.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	56		Noam Chomsky, the distinguished linguist at MIT.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	56		fMRI studies have confirmed that both Broca's and Wernicke's areas, the two main language mediating areas in the left side of the brain that are activated when hearing people speak, are also activated in deaf signers while they watch sentences in ASL.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	62		When deaf subjects read, they do not activate the Broca's and Wernicke's areas.		6
Gazzaniga; Human	63		First discovered mirror neurons in the premotor area (area F5) of the brain of monkeys in 1996.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	63		It has been suggested that the mirror system was fundamental for the development of speech, and before speech, for other forms of intentional communication, such as facial expression and hand gestures.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	63		Individuals recognize actions made by others because the pattern of firing neurons made when observing an action is similar to the pattern produced to generate the action.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	64		Watching an action or getting ready to perform an action, the premotor areas are on alert.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	64		There is a system of inhibition to prevent observers of an action from emitting a motor behavior that mimics it.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	64		Voluntary control of the mirror neurons is a necessary foundation for the beginning of language.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	64		It has been surmised that the first gestures used from individual to individual were  orofacial.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	64		Jane Goodall states that long bouts of eye contact may accompany friendly interactions.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	65		Monkeys, apes, and humans still use orofacial gestures as their natural way to communicate.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	65		Lip smacks and tongue smacks persist in humans, where they form syllables in speech production.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	66		A simple gesture, accompanied by suitable facial expressions, can often take the place of a whole eloquent speech.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	67		Most cognitive processes have been found to occur subconsciously.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	67		One of the best-studied emotions is fear.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	67		Sensory inputs go to the thalamus.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	67		There is a shortcut through the amygdala which lies under the thalamus and keeps track of everything that is streaming through.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	67		If the thalamus recognizes a pattern that was associated with danger in the past, it has a direct connection to the brainstem, which then activates the fight-or-flight response and rings the alarm.   [Stereotyped motor programs]  [FAPs]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	67		The faster pathway through the amygdala, the old fight-or-flight response, is present in other mammals.   [Stereotyped motor programs]  [FAPs]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	72		Chimps are known to throw rocks and branches.		5
Gazzaniga; Human	72		Antonio Damasio has studied a group of patients with damage to the ventromedial part of the prefrontal cortex.  They all lack initiative, can't make a decision and are unemotional.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	73		Pure reason is not enough to make a decision.  Reason makes the list of options, but emotion makes the choice.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	73		Emotions play a part in all decisions.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	81		Richard Dawkins built on the work done by William Hamilton in the early 1960s at the London School of Economics and the University College of London, who had established a Darwinian view of altruism.		8
Gazzaniga; Human	82		Edward O. Wilson has concluded that the last 40 years of research has provided new empirical evidence that supports the theory of group selection and its theoretical plausibility as an evolutionary force.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	84		For any characteristic to be selected in a competitive environment, it has to provide a survival advantage to the individual.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	85		Reciprocal altruism is very rare in the animal world.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	111		Becoming highly social is what human is all about.		26
Gazzaniga; Human	111		As the human brain became larger, so too did the social group size.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	112		Higher intellectual skills arose as an adaptation to our new newly evolved social needs.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	113		Six billion people on earth.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	114		For moral decisions, is it the rational self or the intuitive self?		1
Gazzaniga; Human	116		All cultures have incest taboos.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	119		Phineas Gage		3
Gazzaniga; Human	120		Antonio Damasio has Gage-like patients with similar lesions.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	120		Emotions play a major role in decision-making.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	122		Biased toward committing errors that are less costly.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	122		Pick angry faces out of a neutral crowd faster than happy faces.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	122		Extremely immoral acts have an almost indelible negative effect.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	122		Negative stimuli raise blood pressure, cardiac output, and heart rate.  They grab our attention (newspapers thrive on bad news).		0
Gazzaniga; Human	123		Incoming information passes first through the thalamus, then to the sensory processing areas, and then to the frontal cortex.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	123		There are shortcuts through the amygdala, which respond to patterns that were associated with danger in the past.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	123		Amygdala not only affects your motor system but also can change your thinking.  A quick emotional response of fear or disgust or anger will influence how you process further information.  It concentrates your attention on the negative stimulus.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	123		Emergency status given to negative stimuli.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	123		Automatic mimicry increases liking and serves the purpose of facilitating social interactions.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	124		When you first meet someone, you get an impression, and these first impressions are usually almost identical to ones formed with longer contact and observation.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	124		Mimicry is what makes a newborn baby copy her mother's expressions, smiling when she does.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	124		People tend to agree with others whom they like.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	124		Runaway trolley -- neurobiology of moral judgments.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	155		Many stimuli induce an automatic process of approval (approach) or disapproval (avoid).		31
Gazzaniga; Human	157		Some of our repugnance for killing, stealing, incest, and dozens of other actions is the result of our natural biology.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	157		Conscious rational mind and the unconscious emotional system.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	157		Moral emotions of guilt, shame, embarrassment, blushing, and crying.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	157		Purity of either mind or body, a uniquely human construct with its roots in the moral emotion of disgust.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	183		We can change our emotions and the way we feel by the way we think.  One way this is accomplished is by reappraisal.		26
Gazzaniga; Human	183		Conscious reappraisal of an emotion  -- reappraise the situation in a positive way.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	183		Reappraisal draws attention to the emotion and requires a voluntary cognitive assessment.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	184		Left hemisphere is known to be associated with evaluating positive emotions.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	184		People who show a higher resting activity in the left hemisphere have more resistance to depression, which may be because of their cognitive ability to decrease negative emotional processing.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	184		Suppression -- voluntarily not showing any sign of an emotion.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	187		Imagination		3
Gazzaniga; Human	189		Self-awareness		2
Gazzaniga; Human	190		People tend to think that others know and believe what they know and believe, and also tend to overestimate the knowledge of others.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	191		Junction of the right inferior parietal cortex with the posterior temporal cortex plays a critical role in the distinction between one's own action and another's.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	191		Temperoparietal junction (TPJ), a busy place, integrates input from many different parts of the brain, including the lateral and posterior thalamus; the visual, auditory, somesthetic and limbic areas; and reciprocal connections with the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	192		Neural systems that are impaired at an early age are critical for the acquisition of social knowledge.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	199		People are capable of voluntarily, deliberately switching from one abstract perspective to another with easy flexibility.		7
Gazzaniga; Human	205		Art is one of those human universals.  All cultures have some form of it, whether it is painting, dance, story, song, or other forms.		6
Gazzaniga; Human	206		Steven Pinker, who has penetrating ideas on just about everything.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	207		Pinker asks: what is it about the mind that lets people take pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths?		1
Gazzaniga; Human	208		Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Beauty is a judgment.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	210		Some objects are processed more easily than others because they contain certain features the brain is hardwired to process, which it does quickly, such as symmetry.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	210		Ease of processing can be influenced by perceptual or conceptual priming.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	210		When we perceive something we processed easily, we get a positive feeling.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	210		Positive feeling contributes to our value judgment as to whether something is pleasing or not.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	211		Even though there are hardwired preferences due to ease of processing, different experiences can influence processing fluency in novel areas, and new neural connections can affect asthetic judgment.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	211		Processing fluency can be enhanced by experience.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	214		Stone hand axes have been found with the remains of Homo erectus dated from 1.4 million years ago, and examples have been found dating until about 128,000 years ago.		3
Gazzaniga; Human	214		Basic design of the early hand ax and its production technique remained stable over many thousands of years.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	215		In the last 40,000 years there was an explosion of artistic and creative activity that included cave paintings and engravings found from Australia to Europe.  As many as 10,000 sculpted and engraved objects made from ivory, bone, antler, stone, wood, and clay found across Europe to Siberia, and sophisticated tools, such as sewing needles, oil lamps, harpoons, spear throwers, drills, and rope.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	216		Suddenly about 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern Homo sapiens produced an unprecedented burst of creative anesthetic activity, began painting pictures, wearing jewelry, and coming up with a host of new useful items.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	216		Song, dance, storytelling, and painting are universal in all cultures.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	216		Arts give pleasure -- our motivation system seeks them out because they reward us by making us feel good.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	216		Making something special, as distinguished from something ordinary, appeals to the emotions through the rhythms and textures and colors that it employs.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	216		A cohesive group might want to make something special out of the ordinary, having to do with magic or the supernatural world, in the form of rituals.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	217		Whatever we call art, we are acknowledging that it is special in some way.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	217		Creation of art in terms of human evolution is to facilitate socially important behavior, especially ceremonies, in which group values often of a sacred or spiritual nature are expressed and transmitted.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	218		When goals are attained, the body rewards us with a pleasure sensation.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	218		We get a pleasure signal when we need something sweet and full of fat.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	218		In our ancestral environment, it would have been fitness-enhancing to have the motivation to find any sweet food (ripe fruit) and fats.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	219		Attraction to fictional experience.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	219		Brain contains reward systems that make fictional experiences enjoyable.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	219		Children with autism have severely limited imagination, although the general intelligence is usually normal.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	219		In children, pretend play begins to appear about 18 months.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	220		Reward system that allows us to enjoy fiction.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	221		We are born with brains that have a lot of hardwired systems.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	222		Baby babbles to develop a language system.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	223		Our evolved inheritance is very rich compared to a blank slate, but very impoverished compared to a fully realized person.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	223		Many natural phenomena are considered beautiful, such as a starry night, natural landscapes, the pattering of rain, and running water.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	224		Lean back from the campfire and gaze up at the desert sky, or lean back in our chair while gazing up at a leafy plane tree.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	224		Pretend play can develop skills that are better learned in a play situation rather than when they made need to be actually used.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	225		Human ability to use contingently true information is unique.  Our brains store not just absolute facts but information that may be true only temporarily, or locally, or to a specific individual.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	225		Humans can mix and match information from different times, places, and input types, and we can make inferences based on the source. This allows us to separate fact from fiction.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	226		Arts may be a useful form of learning.  It has been suggested that arts help us to categorize, increase our predictive power, react well in different situations. Thus, arts do contribute to survival.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	226		Every decision is funneled through the approach-or-withdraw module in the brain -- Is it safe or not?  And these decisions happen fast.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	226		People will judge whether they like or dislike a webpage in 0.5 seconds.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	226		More is known about the visual system than about other systems.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	226		Certain elements can be extracted from an image extremely quickly.  A preference for symmetry has been shown to exist cross-culturally.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	227		People like curved objects better than angular ones.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	228		A shape or form is aesthetically pleasing because it is more effectively and more easily processed.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	228		People recognize objects faster when there is a high contrast between an object and its background.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	228		Contrast makes identification easier.  Objects are more easily processed with higher contrast.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	228		People like higher contrast pictures.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	228		Innate preference for natural landscapes.  In urban landscapes, people prefer those that contain some vegetation.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	228		People always prefer to have water in their landscapes.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	229		Many natural objects have fractal geometry, consisting of patterns that recur at increasing magnifications.  Mountains, clouds, coastlines, rivers with all of their tributaries, and branching trees all have fractal geometry. Also our circulatory system and our lungs.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	230		Humans generally prefer scenes with a D (fractal density) of 1.3 and low complexity.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	230		Preference for fractal patterns with a D of 1.3 extends from natural scenes to art and photography.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	230		The eye fixates predominately on the borders of objects while examining a scene.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	230		Edge contours play a dominant role in the perception of fractals.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	230		People like urban skyline scenes with fractal values of 1.3.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	230		There is plenty of evidence that there are some hardwired processes that are influencing our preferences and our visceral reactions.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	231		We like things that are familiar.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	231		Semir Zeki at University College London.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	232		When people viewed paintings, the orbitofrontal cortex, which is known to be engaged during perception of rewarding stimuli, was active, and was more active when viewing a beautiful painting.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	232		Motor cortex is also active, becoming more active when viewing an ugly painting, as with other unpleasant stimuli, such as transgressions of social norms, and with fearful stimuli, including scary voices and faces, and anger.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	232		We are directly wired to be best and fastest at avoiding danger, which our emotions categorize as unpleasant or negative.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	233		Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is known to be critical for the monitoring of events in working memory and, along with the cingulate cortex, is known to be active in decision-making.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	233		Cingulate cortex was active in deciding between beautiful and not beautiful, but the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex was active only when the decision was "beautiful."		0
Gazzaniga; Human	233		Left hemisphere is more active in aesthetic judgments.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	233		When something is deemed beautiful, we have more than an emotional reaction.    Other parts of our brain are engaged.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	233		Music is a uniquely human endeavor.  Only humans compose music, learn to play musical instruments, and then play them together in cooperative ensembles, bands, and orchestras.  None of the great apes create music or sing.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	234		Music as another one of those human universals.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	236		Babies can tell consonance from dissonance from the age of two months, and they preferr consonance and harmonic music to dissonant.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	236		Even fetuses respond to music with changes of heart rate.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	236		Music has proven to be a difficult research topic.  It has pitch, timbre, meter, rhythm, harmony, melody, loudness, and tempo.  These are part of musical syntax and also part of verbal syntax.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	237		Music can convey emotion.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	237		Music can convey meaning other than emotion.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	237		Like language, music has phrase structure and recursion.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	238		Noise with 1/f spectra; it is partially random and partially predictable.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	238		Amplitude and pitch fluctuations of natural sounds such as running water, rain, and wind, often exhibit 1/f spectra.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	239		Human listeners reportedly preferred 1/f-spectra melodies to melodies with faster or slower changes in pitch and loudness.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	239		Many auditory cortical neurons are tuned to the dynamical properties of the natural acoustic environment.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	239		Music can elicit emotions.  You can get so emotional that you get a physiologic reaction, such as the chill down your spine and changes in your heart rate.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	239		It is well established the body produces a natural high by releasing its own opioid when we listen to music that we like.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	239		Brain scans done on musicians as they listen to music that gave them the "chills," activated the same brain structures that are active in response to other euphoria inducing activities, such as eating food (fats and sugars), sex, and downing recreational drugs.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Researchers found a correlation between dopamine release and the response to pleasant music.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Dopamine is known to regulate opiod transmission, and increased levels are theorized to cause positive affect.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Release of dopamine also occurs as a reward when a person drinks water and eats food, and also is the reinforcing effect of addictive drugs.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Music does increase positive affect, just as some visual stimuli do.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Being in a good mood increases cognitive flexibility and facilitates creative problem-solving.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Having a positive affect makes tasks seem more rich and interesting.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	240		Listening to music you prefer puts you in a better mood.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	241		When you are in a good mood, you get aroused, and this can lead to enhanced performance on a variety of tests of cognitive ability.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	241		Music lessons in childhood are associated with small but long-lasting increases in IQ.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	241		Musicians are using many skills simultaneously.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	241		Musicians use intonation and timing to imply emotion.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	242		Musicians often sing and play at the same time.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	242		Certain brain regions in musicians are bigger than in nonmusicians.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	242		Violin players have a larger brain region for the fingers of their left hand.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	242		Professional musicians (keyboard players) have more gray matter volume in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial brain regions compared with amateur musicians and nonmusicians.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	242		Musical training can increase the size of certain neural structures.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	243		One aspect of attention, executive attention, concerns the mechanisms for self-regulation of cognition and emotion, such as concentration and impulse control.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	249		Intuitive biology		6
Gazzaniga; Human	250		If a way of thinking comes easily to us, we probably have some cognitive mechanism that is set up to think in that way.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	250		Intuitive biology refers to the way our brains categorize living things.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	250		Researchers have claimed there are domain-specific knowledge systems for animate and inanimate objects that have distinct neural mechanisms.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	250		There are patients with brain damage who are very poor at recognizing animals but not man-made artifacts, and vice versa.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	252		Studying babies helps us identify what knowledge is hardwired in humans.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	252		Babies have categorizing domain-specific neural pathways to identify human faces and also to register biological motion.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	252		Young infants have any abilities to distinguish animate from an inanimate objects.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	252		Automatically the brain bestows on animate objects some properties common to things that are alive.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	258		You can't actually feel another person's feelings, you infer them through perceptions, the observation of their actions and facial expressions.		6
Gazzaniga; Human	258		Your dog is loyal to the audible, visible, sniffable you, not the essence of you.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	258		Intuitive knowledge of physics.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	260		Motor regions of the brain activate when tools are the objects and when the artifact is manipulable, but not with man-made objects in general.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	261		We use our theory-of-mind systems (TOM) (our intuitive understanding that others have invisible states -- beliefs, desires, intentions, and goals -- and that these can cause behaviors and events) to ascribe the same characteristics not only to other humans but also to the animate category in general.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	261		We are wired to think animate objects have TOM.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	262		Teleological thinking explains a phenomenon by invoking an intended design.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	265		Intuitive psychology is a separate domain from intuitive biology and physics.		3
Gazzaniga; Human	266		The divide between domains is apparent in autism, in which the lack of social understanding is a prominent feature.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	266		Children with autism rarely engage in imaginative playing, and many do not speak at all.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	266		Autistic children do not possess a theory-of-mind; they lack an intuitive psychology.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	273		Much of the information that we use from memories and past experience is highly colored by our nonreflective intuitive beliefs, and some of it can be wrong.		7
Gazzaniga; Human	273		Very difficult to separate the intuitive from the verifiable.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	273		To separate the verifiable from the non-verifiable is a conscious, tedious process.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	273		Separating the verifiable from the non-verifiable takes energy and perseverance and training.  It is called analytical thinking.  It is what science is all about.  It is uniquely human.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	274		Current evidence suggests that humans are the only animals that reason about, unobservable forces.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	274		Humans alone form concepts about imperceptible things and try to explain an effect as having been caused by something.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	276		Conscious awareness		2
Gazzaniga; Human	278		Consciousness has been rather like the "Holy Grail" of neuroscience.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	278		Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).		0
Gazzaniga; Human	279		Antonio Damasio considers consciousness in two aspects -- core consciousness and extended consciousness.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	279		Extended consciousness is what we normally think of when we think of being conscious.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	279		Highest level of consciousness is knowing that one is aware of one's surroundings.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	279		Physical basis of conscious experience.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	280		All vertebrate animals have a brain stem.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	280		Brainstem is a complicated place.  It is like the subbasements in skyscrapers, full of pipes, events, wires, and gauges, which are connected to the rest of the building.  They keep everything running smoothly.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	280		Groups of neurons, known as nuclei.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	280		Main job of the brain stem nuclei is the homeostatic regulation of both body and brain.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	280		Some neurons in the brain stem are required for consciousness.  They are connected with the intralaminar nuclei (ILN) of the thalamus.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	280		Some brainstem nuclei are required to modulate consciousness, like a rheostat. They make up part of the arousal system.  They are connected to the basal forebrain, the hypothalamus, and directly to the cortex.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	281		Two INLs in the thalamus, one on the right side, one on the left.  Thalamus itself is about the size of a walnut and sits astride the midline in the center of the brain.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	281		First requirement for consciousness -- connection of the brain stem to the thalamus must be active, and at least one of the INLs must be up and running.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	281		Thalamus is well-connected.  Neural connections link the thalamus to specific regions all over the cortex, and these regions send connections straight back to the thalamus.  Thalamus has thalamocortical loops.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	281		INLs of the thalamus connect to the anterior portion of the cingulate cortex.  Lesions anywhere from the brain stem to the cingulate cortex can disrupt core consciousness.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		It appears that the cingulate cortex is where core consciousness and extended consciousness overlap.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	282		Cingulate cortex lies above the corpus callosum.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		Antonio Damasio reports that patients with lesions in their cingulate cortex have disruptions in both core consciousness and extended consciousness, but oftentimes can recover core consciousness.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		During conscious tasks, connections are active from the cingulate cortex to brain areas supporting the five neural networks for (1) memory, (2) perception, (3) motor action, (4) evaluation, and (5) attention.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		While engaging in a wide assortment of conscious tasks that require different types of brain activity, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is always activated along with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		The DLPFC and ACC have reciprocal connections, i.e. loops.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		The DLPFC is also a hotbed of connections to the same five neural networks for which the ACC is connected.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		The long-distance neurons originate mostly from the pyramidal cells of Layers 2 and 3. These layers are actually thicker in the DLPFC and the inferior parietal cortex.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	282		There are areas in the brain that are more specialized.  Loss of a specific ability, not consciousness itself.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	283		Modules in the brain, each has its specific contribution.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	283		Many modules in the brain are all working automatically, below the level of consciousness.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	283		All of the unconscious activity is also contributing to and shaping what comes to the conscious surface.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	283		Human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, and each neuron on average connects to about 1000 other neurons.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	283		Brain has about 100 trillion synaptic connections.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	284		Some types of brain processing are called executive functions.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	284		Some control processing is going on, and there must be a mechanism that supports flexible links among the processing modules.  Many theoretical models of this mechanism have been proposed including the central executive, the supervisory attention system, the anterior attention system, the global workspace, and the dynamic core.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	285		Gatekeeper to consciousness -- Attention.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	286		Brain lesions in the parietal lobe that affect attention can also affect consciousness.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	287		Hemineglect -- lack of awareness for sensory events located towards the side opposite the side of the lesion.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	288		Joseph Ledoux		1
Gazzaniga; Human	288		What kinds of processes could go on subconsciously?		0
Gazzaniga; Human	289		Corpus callosum contains about 200 million neurons that originate in layers 2 and 3, where most of the long-distance neurons originate.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	289		Surgical procedure to cut the corpus callosum is the last-ditch treatment effort for patients with severe intractable epilepsy.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	289		Only 10 split brain patients had been well tested.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	289		First split brain procedure was in 1940.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	289		Epileptic seizures are caused by abnormal electrical discharges that in some people spread from one hemisphere to the other.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	290		Split-brain treatment was a great success.  Most patients' seizure activity decreased 60 to 70%, and they felt just fine; no split personality, no split consciousness.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	290		Why don't split-brain patients have dual consciousness?		0
Gazzaniga; Human	291		Left hemisphere is specialized for language, speech, and intelligent behavior, while the right hemisphere is specialized for such task as recognizing faces, focusing attention, and making perceptual distinctions.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	292		Reflexive (bottom-up) attention happens independently in the two hemispheres, while voluntary attention involves hemispheric competition, with control preferentially lateralized to the left hemisphere.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	292		Right hemisphere attends to the entire visual field, whereas the left hemisphere attends only to the right field.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	292		Left hemisphere is specialized for intelligent behavior.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	292		Although the right hemisphere remains superior to the isolated left hemisphere for some perceptual and attentional skills, and perhaps also emotions, it is poor at problem solving and many other mental activities.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	294		Left hemisphere engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos. Left hemisphere persists in forming hypotheses about the sequence of events, even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists.   [Gestalt laws]  [Bayesian inference]		2
Gazzaniga; Human	303		Memory stores two basic types of information -- procedural and declarative.		9
Gazzaniga; Human	303		Two types of declarative memory -- semantic and episodic.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	303		Sematic memory provides knowledge from the point of view of an observer of the world rather than that of a participant.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	303		Episodic memory retains events that were experienced by the self at a particular place and time.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	303		Episodic memory is uniquely human.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	304		Episodic memory always includes the self as the agent or recipient of some action.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	305		Children who are three to four years old include themselves as a part of the memory.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	305		Children less than four years old have no knowledge of timescales.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	305		Later-developing episodic memory explains why there is scant autobiographical memory from our very early years.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	306		Aspects of self-knowledge are distributed throughout the cortex.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	306		Frontal regions of the left hemisphere play a pivotal role for retrieval and reconstruction of autobiographical knowledge.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	307		Face recognition is typically reliant on structures in the right cerebral hemisphere.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	308		Sense of self arises out of distributed networks in both hemispheres.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	308		Both hemispheres have processing specializations that contribute to a sense of self.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	308		Sense of self is constructed by the left hemisphere interpreter on the basis of input from distributed networks.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	309		Basic step into extended consciousness is becoming self-aware to some degree.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	309		Self awareness means being the object of one's own attention.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	309		Animal self-awareness.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	310		All social, sexually reproducing organisms seem to be equipped with neural machinery for discriminating:    males from females,    juveniles from adults, and    relatives from nonrelatives.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	310		Your dog isn't all that interested when you try get him to look in the mirror.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	311		Some researchers have suggested that mirror self-recognition implies the presence of a self-concept and self-awareness.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	311		Some patients with prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces) cannot recognize themselves in a mirror.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	315		While birds lack the cortical structure of mammals, they have many brain structures that serve the same purpose as mammalian brain structures, and have similar thalamocortical loop connections.		4
Gazzaniga; Human	315		Birds have loop connections similar to the loop connections proposed to allow extended consciousness in humans.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	320		Current evidence suggests that animals do not have episodic memory and do not time-travel.		5
Gazzaniga; Human	335		Cochlear implant is the most successful neural implant.		15
Gazzaniga; Human	338		Locked-in Syndrome -- lesion to the ventral part of the pons in the brain stem.		3
Gazzaniga; Human	338		Locked-in syndrome patients are awake and conscious and intelligent but can't move any skeletal muscles.  They can't talk or eat or drink.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	338		The most that locked-in syndrome patients can do is voluntarily blink or move their eyes.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	343		Posterior parietal cortex is situated between the sensory and motor regions and serves as a bridge from sensation to action.		5
Gazzaniga; Human	343		Anatomical map of plans exist within the posterior parietal cortex, with one part devoted to planning eye movements and another part to planning arm movements.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	343		Action plans in the posterior parietal cortex exist in cognitive form, specifying the goal of intended movements rather than particular signals for the biomechanical movements. All the detailed movements are encoded in the motor cortex.   [Stereotyped motor programs]  [FAPs]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	344		Scalp-recorded EEG rhythms reflect in a noisy and degrading fashion the combined activity of many millions of neurons and synapses.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	344		Job of creating motor outputs is a concerted effort of the entire CNS from the cerebral cortex to the spinal cord.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	344		When you walk, talk, high jump, etc, there is a collaboration among areas, from the sensory neurons up the spinal cord to the brainstem and eventually to the cortex and back down through the basal ganglia, thalamic nuclei, cerebellum, brainstem nuclei, and spinal cord to the interneurons and motor neurons.   [Fuster's  perception-action cycle]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	344		Hippocampus is located deep in the brain and is evolutionarily old, which means that it is present in less evolved animals.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	344		Hippocampus connections are less complicated than other parts of the brain.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	358		The term artificial intelligence (AI) originated in 1956, when John McCarthy from Dartmouth, Marvin Minsky from Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon from Bell Telephone Laboratories, proposed a study of artificial intelligence to be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.		14
Gazzaniga; Human	360		John Searle maintains that all conscious states are caused by lower-level brain processes; thus consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, a physical property -- the sum of the input from the entire body.  Consciousness does not just arise from banter back and forth in the brain. Consciousness is not the result of computation.  You have to have a body, and the physiology of the body and its input, to create a mind that thinks and has the intelligence of the human mind.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	360		Bayesian logic, which determined the likeliness of a future event based on similar events in the past.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	360		Markoff models, which evaluate the chance that a specific sequence of events will happen and are used in some voice-recognition software.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	362		Turing Test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing.		2
Gazzaniga; Human	363		Neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle -- neocortex is remarkably similar throughout, and therefore all regions of the cortex must be performing the same job.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	364		Brain uses the same mechanism to process all information.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	365		All of the sensory information is arriving in the form of spatial and temporal patterns.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	365		Spatial position of the receptive cells in the cochlea.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	365		Every image that we perceive, the eye jumps three times a second to fixate on different points -- movements known as saccades.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Each pyramidal neuron may have up to 10,000 synapses.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Neocortex is divided into regions that process different information.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Brain treats information in a hierarchical manner.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Hierarchy of information processing is a hierarchy of connectivity.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Hierarchical region at the bottom of the hierarchy is the biggest and receives lots of sensory information.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		At the bottom of the hierarchy for visual processing, each neuron in V1 specializes in a tiny patch of an image.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		Area V2, the next region up in the visual hierarchy, starts putting the information from V1 together.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		From visual area V4, the information goes to the inferotemporal (IT) cortex, specializing an entire objects.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	366		When a human is shown a picture and asked to identify an object, it takes about half a second or less.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Neurons are much slower than a computer.  In a half second, information entering the brain can traverse a chain of approximately 100 neurons.		1
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Brain doesn't compute answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory.   [Perceptual categorization; Bayesian inference]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Entire cortex is a memory system.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Neocortex stores sequences of patterns.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Neocortex recalls patterns autoassociatively, which means it can recall a complete pattern when given only a partial one.   [Gestalt laws]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Neocortex stores patterns in invariant form. It can handle variations in a pattern automatically.  [ a priori estimate, Bayesian inference]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Neocortex stores memory in a hierarchy.		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Brain uses its stored memory to make predictions constantly.  When you enter your house, your brain is making predictions from past experience:   where the door is, where the door handle is, where the light switch is, which furniture is where, etc.  [Bayesian inference]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	367		Prediction is the primary function of the neocortex and the foundation of intelligence.   [Bayesian inference]		0
Gazzaniga; Human	389		Mirror neuron system seemed to be into everything, providing us with imitative abilities that may be the basis of all social abilities.		22