Dear all, Just a reminder that tomorrow at the Moral Sciences Club, Josh Greene (Harvard) will be giving a talk titled *How does the brain construct complex thoughts? *This talk will be at 2.30 in the Barbara White Room in Newnham College.
Note that there's a fee to attend MSC meetings. This can either be paid as a yearly membership (£7.50 for students, £15 for others) or a one-off fee for a single week's meeting (£2 students, £3 others). These can both be paid online at http://onlinesales.admin.cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 Alternatively, you can pay cash in person in the day (but if you choose to do so, please arrive a little early: any time from 2 o'clock). *Abstract* Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of ‘bite’, ‘dog’, and ‘man’, we can think about a dog biting a man, or a man biting a dog. This capacity for conceptual combination (“compositionality”) is essential for the mental processes that we think of as “thinking”—from everyday planning to mathematical reasoning to moral judgment. In this talk I’ll present some new research aimed at understanding, in a preliminary way, how our brains accomplish this remarkable feat. We find that patterns of activity in distinct sub-regions of left-mid superior temporal cortex dynamically represent the values of two abstract semantic variables: the agent (Who did something?) and the patient (To whom was something done?). This functional architecture, which in key respects resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role in enabling humans to flexibly construct complex thoughts. -- Daisy Dixon and Adam Bales Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
