Monday, 3 March 2014
The Various Speeds at Which We Perceive Time
Our perception of how fast time passes is amazingly subjective. When we are children, our summer vacations from school seem to stretch on forever. When we are grownups, we are often surprised to realize how long it has been since some major event occurred—Hurricane Katrina was over eight years ago, and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl almost 28 years ago!
Thus we frequently underestimate or overestimate elapsed time. But what are the factors that push our estimates in one direction or the other? Are there some time scales that are affected and others that are not? Are there certain areas of the brain that are associated with the way we estimate time? (more…)
From Thought to Language | Comments Closed
Monday, 10 September 2012
Why You Are Not Just Your Brain
In the introduction to their 1991 book The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch noted that as of that writing, the cognitive sciences had little to say about what it means to be human in the concrete situations of everyday life. This criticism was aimed directly at the prevailing paradigm, according to which the human brain worked somewhat like a computer, with input, information processing, symbolic representation, output, and so on.
In contrast, the approach proposed by Varela and his colleagues, to which they gave the name “enaction”, emphasizes how much our reasoning depends on our bodies and on the environmental context in which they are situated. (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain, The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed