Metacognition is «cognition about cognition», or «knowing about knowing». It comes from the root word «meta», meaning beyond, and the word «cognition» that includes all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning, biological computation, problem-solving, decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Metacognition can take many forms; it […]
Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a complete readout of our DNA, unraveling that magic sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts that contained all the information for making one of us. Thanks to that, we now know that in that sequence only 1.5% has information to make proteins, a fact that […]
The lymphatic system performs important immune functions, and runs parallel to the blood circulatory system to provide a secondary circulation that transports excess interstitial fluid, proteins and metabolic waste products from the systemic tissues back into the blood. For centuries, it was thought that the central nervous system lacks a lymphatic drainage system and the […]
The sci-fi thriller Ex Machina (2015), directed by Alex Garland, has put into limelight the problem of consciousness: whether a machine can spontaneously develop a mind, mental states, and consciousness. Everyone recalls that IBM’s Deep Blue beat the chess world champion in 1997 and IBM’s Watson won the quiz show Jeopardy in 2011. However, some […]
The human brain continues its development postnatally. It is a long process that extends throughout, at least, the first two decades of life. Along these years, environmental factors influence brain functions and, not surprisingly because of its high plasticity, brain structure. Among the variables that may affect the cognitive development is the socioeconomic status. Three […]
True empathy is considered by most researchers to be an exclusive ability of primates, particularly humans and apes, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. However, empathy may be a phylogenetically continuous ability with particular types such as «emotional contagion» present in all classes of mammals. In fact, it has been shown that empathy […]
Blindness is a world wide problem. As of 2012 there were 285 million visually impaired people in the world, of which 246 million had low vision and 39 million were blind. Most people with poor vision are in the developing world and are over the age of 50 years. One basic aspect for quality of […]
Sensations which seem to come from limbs that had been amputated are called «phantoms». Most limb amputees report awareness of a phantom limb, i.e., the perceived presence of the missing arm or leg. Phantom sensations may also occur after the removal of body parts other than the limbs, e.g. after amputation of the breast, extraction […]
As we saw in the previous entry of this series, philosophers of mind usually distinguish between what (after David Chalmers) they called the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness. The ‘easy’ problem refers to how to explain the functioning of the brain: how does it manage to do things that seem to require some […]
One of the most strongly debated philosophical problems is that of the nature of consciousness. This is no surprise, since it is probably the most difficult question, at least apparently, for naturalistic or materialistic views of the world. After all, the necessity of having a spiritual cause of the existence and order of the cosmos […]