MachineMachine /stream

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As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It…

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My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only…

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Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page…

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A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel…

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Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?…

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Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to…

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You've been singing the theme to The Love Boat for hours now, and you're becoming unmoored. If a song is on an unfinished loop, "sing it through all the way,…

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Boston University neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has an interesting evolutionary theory of dreaming. McNamara’s theory draws from the well-known “handicapping principle” in evolutionary biology, where some organisms have been observed to…

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Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world,…

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A few years ago Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett opined that the idea of natural selection - proposed 150 years ago in Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" - was…

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Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision…

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A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights,…