How do we know what other people are thinking? How do we judge them, and what happens in our brains when we do?   MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe is tackling those tough questions and many others. Her goal is no less than understanding how the brain gives rise to the abilities that make us uniquely human--making moral judgments, ...

Florida Atlantic University has filed a provisional patent for a unique robotic device to assist with the physical rehabilitation process of patients suffering from neurological damages to their upper extremities such as those due to stroke or Parkinson’s disease. Inventors, Dr. Oren Masory, chair and professor of mechanical engineering ...

 I just flew back Seoul where I attended the World Science Forum: Brain Power, an event sponsored by the S. Korean government. The new president , Lee Myung-bak ,spoke at the opening ceremony and reminded us his country now has the tenth strongest economy in the world. Not only do ninety percent of all Korean kids go on to college but S. ...

The scientists of the Russian Southern Federal University won 750,000 dollars award for the development of the systems of the mental computer control. For the next 18 months Rostov scientists together with their Taganrog and Saint Petersburg colleagues are going to develop programs and make a research that will help them to create such a ...

Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening -- emotion, body movement, pain. (In other words, you can literally see how you feel.) The applications for real-time fMRIs start with chronic pain control and range into the realm of science fiction, but this ...

The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08)- FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis - In cooperation with AAAI, March 1-3, 2008 - Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI -- to create intelligence as a whole, by exploring all available paths, including ...

In the opening instalment, Kaku explains how artificial intelligence will revolutionise homes, workplaces and lifestyles, and how virtual worlds will become so realistic that they will rival the physical world. Robots with human-level intelligence may finally become a reality, and in the ultimate stage of mastery, we'll even be ...

Google Techtalk. If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his ...

Cross-posted from Sentient Developments  Of all the celebrities and bigwigs I looked forward to meeting at TransVision 2007 there was only one person who I was truly nervous about running into – a person who gave me that 'I’m going to squeal like a little girl when I see him’ kind of ...

 (Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) This important article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (the full version of which has recently been published in Science, 18 May 2007) examines the psychological wellsprings of resistance to scientific explanations of the world's phenomena. More particularly, it discusses the ...