Re: EMERGENCE SEMINAR V: Dennett et al; WAS: emergence seminar: what's next?

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on Oct 07, 2009; 6:53pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-EMERGENCE-SEMINAR-V-Dennett-et-al-WAS-emergence-seminar-what-s-next-tp3772391p3783759.html

And, to add to the confusion, there is the question of brain states vs. measured brain states.

Here's the Wired article about doing fMRI experiments on a dead salmon, and getting a result that could have been easily  published if the subject had been a live human being:

  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

And here's the poster that the researchers have been presenting:

  http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) uses treatment/control comparisons of brain imagery on the assumption that the active parts will have more oxygen in them so they can tell which parts of the brain are more/less active under the treatment condition.

In the experiment described the researchers asked the dead salmon to identify what the people in the pictures were feeling and compared the imagery taken during rest states to the imagery taken while the salmon was analyzing pictures.

So, whatever the relationship between brain states and mind states, the relationship between brain states and fMRI results is not obvious.  (To be fair, the point of the poster is that researchers should apply tests for chance correlations that they could but often don't bother with.)

-- rec --



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