Mental states

Mental states of athletes are important for winning in real competitive situations. Testosterone, cortisol, and the testosterone-cortisol ratio (T/CORT) are strongly related to mental states. Therefore, we hypothesized that they would modify the performance of athletes in a real competitive situation. In this study, we examined the relationship between the testosterone, cortisol, and T/CORT levels and the performance of two professional formula car drivers, who were members of a team participating in Super Formula (a kind of formula race series in Japan). We measured the salivary levels of tes

In the science of consciousness, it’s often assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. I'll (1) argue that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, and (2) develop an analysis of degrees of consciousness. On my view, whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I'll also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness co

…knowledge, belief, desire, and similar mental states of others, is a key component of social reasoning and social interaction. While it has been studied by cognitive scientists for decades, none of the prevailing theories of the processes that underlie theory of mind reasoning and development explain the breadth of experimental findings. I propose that this is because theory of mind is, like much of human reasoning, inherently analogical. In this talk, I will discuss several theory of mind findings from the psychology literature, the challe

Identification of mental states in patients based on electrical activity is of interest for clinical neuroscience. While the problem has been successfully addressed for individual patients with multiple (up to 50) states identifiable for the purposes of communication, addressing the problem in a general sense is more difficult, as it requires understanding of the neural bases for successful classification. We used a range of well-established machine learning methods on a two-state classification problem based on EEG data with high success rate (>98%), and then applied Sparse Optimal Scoring

…same with regards to the posession of mental states and conscious experience. I will then argue that a robust functional equivalence between FFN and RN is akso not supported by the mathematical work on the Universal Approximator theorem, and is also unlikely to hold, as a conjecture, given data in cognitive neuroscience; I will argue that an equivalence of RN and FFN

Every thought is associated with a unique pattern of brain activity. Thus, in principle, it should be possible to use these activity patterns as "brain fingerprints" for different thoughts and to read out what a person is thinking based on their brain activity alone. Indeed, using machine learning considerable progress has been made in such "brainreading" in recent years. It is now possible to decode which image a person is viewing, which film sequence they are watching, which emotional state they are in or which intentions they hold in mind. This talk will provide an overview of the current s