Frontiers | Stoicism, mindfulness, and the brain: the empirical foundations of second-order desires

Jobs | City University of New York

Encoding human experience: Study reveals how brain cells compute the flow of time

A landmark study has begun to unravel one of the fundamental mysteries in neuroscience -- how the human brain encodes and makes sense of the flow of time and experiences.

Centering cognitive neuroscience on task demands and generalization - Nature Neuroscience

Task demands are a primary determiner of behavior and neurophysiology. Here the authors discuss how understanding their influence through multitask studies and tests of generalization is the key to articulating novel cognitive neuroscience concepts.

A Short Exploration of the Correlation between Neuroplasticity and Musical Brain - Thomas Alexander Kolbe

Neuroplasticity, the brain's remarkable ability to rewire itself by forming new neural connections, is a captivating subject. Music, a universal aspect of human experience, profoundly influences neuroplasticity. This essay delves into how various forms of music—including classical, modern, contemporary, and traditional music from China, Japan, and Korea—affect the brain. It also examines the impact of musical keys on neural activity

Zero-shot counting with a dual-stream neural network model

Deep neural networks have provided a computational framework for understanding object recognition, grounded in the neurophysiology of the primate ventral stream, but fail to account for how we process relational aspects of a scene. For example, deep neural networks fail at problems that involve enumerating the number of elements in an array, a problem that in humans relies on parietal cortex. Here, we build a 'dual-stream' neural network model which, equipped with both dorsal and ventral streams, can generalise its counting ability to wholly novel items ('zero-shot' counting). In doing so, it forms spatial response fields and lognormal number codes that resemble those observed in macaque posterior parietal cortex. We use the dual-stream network to make successful predictions about behavioural studies of the human gaze during similar counting tasks.

Should we use the computational or the network approach to analyze functional brain-imaging data—why not both?

Emerging methods make it possible to combine the two tactics from opposite ends of the analytic spectrum, enabling scientists to have their cake and eat it too.