Maggie Boden died last month. I was lucky to go to university when I did. At the time Sussex courses ran as lectures, seminars, but also tutorials. Tutorials were made up of 3 or 4 students in the office of a professor, discussing the topic of study that week. For the courses I took, one of those professors was Maggie....

The answer is “yes”, if we have free will. This was Kevin J. Mitchell and Anil Seth chatting about free will. Are we programmed to inevitably act the same way based on some stimulus, or do we have a free choice? The problem, right from the start, is what “we” means in “do we have free will?”. After all, looking at the...

I dropped in to The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out Of The Stone Age, a talk by archaeologist Prof. Steven Mithen. He’s a very compelling speaker, and gave a tour of how he believes language got started. In outline: there was gradual word adoption, but a change in brain structure enabling a fully modern...

I was 50:50 about going to this event last night on “how quantum physics could help decode human behaviour”. My worry was that it’d be total woo-woo and a waste of time. It was not that: it was about the curious findings that some human behaviour can be modelled by the maths of quantum physics. There are some results in...

I’ve been trying to get my head around VSA (a.k.a hyperdimensional computing). The only way I know how to do that is to write some code, so that’s what I’ve done.The appeal of VSA  the combination of vector representations and an algebra to do some interesting reasoning. The “hyperdimensional” part comes everythng being...

Reading: Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning (Nature, news, 3 July 2024,) and the source article Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution (Jamali et al., Nature, same date). Thank you to those ten people who allowed electrodes to be implanted into their...

Reading: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought, Fedorenko et al., Nature, 19 June 2024. Do we use language to think? Reviewing research over the last twenty years, there are tests we can apply. If some forms of thought require language, then linguistic mechanisms should be obligatorily...

In why we speak and chimpanzees don’t, the argument goes that pointing and human language are related. In both cases, “a human is trying to communicate with another on the basis that the sign can be understood because of their common knowledge.” If you don’t have the mental machinery to get the intention behind...