21–23 of 23 posts
Having spent some time in meditation practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is true (maybe not literally, but at least in effect). We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter. Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying. It's quite a…
No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.
How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests. It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off. Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. T…
It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.
I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a scientific theory, at best it's folk wisdom. This article is pointing out that there is no scientific basis for it. The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.
Yes. As a PhD neuroscientist, I use reference to the triune brain as a sort of shibboleth: If someone mentions it, I can tell they don't know any neuroscience.
I read The Brain that Changes Itself recently and it markedly reinforced certain suspicions I had. Which other areas of are most active in neuroscience at the moment that might one day be related to human/computer interfaces?