Subjects perceived touch sensations as arising from a table (or a rubber hand) when both the table (or the rubber hand) and their own real hand were repeatedly tapped and stroked in synchrony with the real hand hidden from view. If the table or rubber hand was then ‘injured’, subjects displayed a strong skin conductance response (SCR) even though nothing was done to the real hand. Sensations could even be projected to anatomically impossible locations. The illusion was much less vivid, (...) as indicated by subjective reports and SCR, if the real hand was simultaneously visible during stroking, or if the real hand was hidden but touched asynchronously. The fact that the illusion could be significantly diminished when the real hand was simultaneously visible suggests that the illusion and associated SCRs were due to perceptual assimilation of the table (or rubber hand) into one’s body image rather than associative conditioning. These experiments demonstrate the malleability of body image and the brain’s remarkable capacity for detecting statistical correlations in the sensory input. (shrink)

Summary Apotemnophilia, or body integrity image disorder (BIID), is characterised by a feeling of mismatch between the internal feeling of how one’s body should be and the physical reality of how it actually is. Patients with this condition have an often overwhelming desire for an amputation- of a specific limb at a specific level. Such patients are not psychotic or delusional, however, they do express an inexplicable emotional abhorrence to the limb they wish removed. It is also known that such (...) patients show a left-sided preponderance for their desired amputation. Often they take drastic action to be rid of the offending limb. Given the left-sided bias, emotional rejection and specificity of desired amputation, we suggest that there are clear similarities to be drawn between BIID and somatoparaphrenia. In this rare condition, which follows a right parietal stroke, the patient rejects (usually) his left arm as ‘‘alien’’. We go on to hypothesis that a dysfunction of the right parietal lobe is also the cause of BIID. We suggest that this leads to an uncoupling of the construct of one’s body image in the right parietal lobe from how one’s body physically is. This hypothesis would be amenable to testing by response to cold-water vestibular caloric stimulation, which is known to temporarily treat somatoparaphrenia. It could also be investigated using functional brain imaging and skin conductance response. If correct our hypothesis not only suggests why BIID arises, but also, in caloric stimulation a therapeutic avenue for this chronic and essentially untreatable condition. (shrink)

Here we outline a simple method of using two mirrors which allows one to stand outside oneself. This method demonstrates that registration of vision with touch and proprioception is crucial for the perception of the corporeal self. Our method may also allow the disassociation of taste from touch, proprioception, and movement.

How the brain constructs one's inner sense of gender iden-tity is poorly understood. On the other hand, the phenomenon of phantom sensations-- the feeling of still having a body-part after amputation--has been much studied. Around 60% of men experience a phantom penis post-penectomy. As transsexuals report a mismatch between their inner gender identity and that of their body, we won-dered what could be learnt from this regarding innate gender-specific body image. We surveyed male-to-female transsexuals regarding the incidence of phantoms post-gender (...) reassignment surgery. Addition-ally, we asked female-to-male transsexuals if they had ever had the sensation of having a penis when there was not one physically there. In post-operative male-to-female transsexuals the incidence of phan-tom penises was significantly reduced at 30%. Remarkably, over 60% of female-to-male transsexuals also reported phantom penises. We explain the absence/presence of phantoms here by postulating a mis-match between the brain's hardwired gender-specific body image and the external somatic gender. Further studies along these lines may provide penetrating insights into the question of how nature and nur-ture interact to produce our brain-based body image. (shrink)

Издание содержит: научное изучение времени и информации; философское изучение времени и информации; практическое применение знаний о времени и информации и др.

Summary Transsexuals are individuals who identify as a member of the gender opposite to that which they are born. Many transsexuals report that they have always had a feeling of a mismatch between their inner gender-based ‘‘body image’’ and that of their body’s actual physical form. Often transsexuals undergo gender reassignment surgery to convert their bodies to the sex they feel they should have been born. The vivid sensation of still having a limb although it has been amputated, a phantom (...) limb, was first described by Weir Mitchell over a century ago. The same phenomenon is also occurs after amputation of the penis or a breast. Around 60% of men who have had to have their penis amputated for cancer will experience a phantom penis. It has recently been shown that a significant factor in these phantom sensations is ‘‘cross-activation’’ between the de-afferented cortex and surrounding areas. Despite this it also known that much of our body image is innately ‘‘hard-wired’’ into our brains; congenitally limbless patients can still experience phantom sensations. We hypothesise that, perhaps due to a dissociation during embryological development, the brains of transsexuals are ‘‘hard-wired’’ in manner, which is opposite to that of their biological sex. We go on to predict that male-to-female transsexuals will be much less likely to experience a phantom penis than a ‘‘normal’’ man who has had his penis amputated for another reason. The same will be true of female-to-male transsexuals who have had breast removal surgery. We also predict that some female-to-male transsexuals will have a phantom penis even although there is not one physically there. We believe that this is an easily testable hypothesis, which, if correct, would offer insights into both the basis of transsexuality and provide farther evidence that we have a gender specific body image, with a strong innate component that is ‘‘hard-wired’’ into our brains. This would furnish us with a better understanding the mechanism by which nature and nurture interact to link the brain-based internal body image with external sexual morphology.. (shrink)

Compilation of articles and lectures; chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hindu rituals.

On the impact of Advaita Vedanta on the other schools of classical Indian philosophy.

Издание адресовано научным работникам, преподавателям, студентам и аспирантам, а также практикам, интересующимся вопросами философии.

Summary Ideomotor apraxia is a cognitive disorder in which the patient loses the ability to accurately perform learned, skilled actions. This is despite normal limb power and coordination. It has long been known that left supramarginal gyrus lesions cause bilateral upper limb apraxia and it was proposed that this area stored a visualkinaesthetic image of the skilled action, which was translated elsewhere in the brain into the pre-requisite movement formula. We hypothesise that, rather than these two functions occurring separately, both (...) are complementary functions of chains of ‘‘mirror neurons’’ within the left inferior parietal lobe. We go on to propose that this neural mechanism in the supramarginal gyrus and its projection zones, which originally evolved to allow the creation of a direct map between vision and movement, was subsequently exapted to allow other sorts of cross-domain mapping and in particular those sorts of abstract re-conceptualisation, such as metaphor, that make mankind unique. (shrink)

The relevance of the problem under study is due to the need to improve the practical skills and competencies of students in the course of training in order to prepare them for competition with other job seekers in employment. In this regard, this article is aimed at identifying the expediency of students’ participation in competitive selections and grants as a factor that creates conditions for effective practice-oriented learning. The leading method for the study of this problem is a pedagogical experiment, (...) which allows us to comprehensively consider the relationship between students’ participation in competitions and their further self-realization and development as young professionals. The article presents the results of monitoring the behavior of students who received an offer to participate in the university-wide competitive selection of student projects, implemented as part of the Program for Supporting Applied Research and Development of Students and Postgraduates of Petrozavodsk State University. The materials of the article can be useful for teaching staff in building a scheme for teaching students and services involved in the recruitment of personnel for large and medium-sized companies that require young professionals to have practical work skills, teamwork skills and creativity. (shrink)

Hegel's teachings on the state, law, and society constitute a philosophy of law and were developed by him as the philosophy of the objective spirit. In addition to providing a basis for historically concrete views on political matters, the Hegelian philosophy of law, as an application of dialectics to a specific realm of subject matter in societal, governmental, and political-legal phenomena, contains the logic of that realm of subject matter. The independent meaning of this domain of research transforms logic and (...) gives it politically significant features despite the conscious Hegelian attitude of "logicizing" politics. This is clearly manifested in the political and legal results of Hegel's employment of a conceptual apparatus and theoretical constructs in the dialectical investigation of the objective spirit. Therefore, it is valid to single out two aspects of the political content of Hegel's philosophy of law: the historically concrete political views developed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right; and the totality of politically meaningful propositions deriving from his application of dialectics to the sphere of politics — which we here call Hegel's dialectics of politics. (shrink)

An interview with Anthony Freeman, in which one of the original authors of ‘The Science of Art’ [JCS, 6, No. 6/7, 1999] responds to to ongoing commentary.

The difficulty of the task that the authors of this book have posed themselves is due in the first instance to the fact that this period has been very little studied in the history of philosophy. In applying the term "early Russian philosophy" to the set of ideas, images, and conceptions of a philosophical order contained in the cultural texts of the tenth through the seventeenth centuries, M.N. Gromov and N.S. Kozlov see it not simply as a specific stage in (...) the development of Russian philosophy but as a "very particular phenomenon that is qualitatively unique and requires special study" . Thus the authors declare their own position in the far from finished debate about the specificity of Russian philosophy and the distinctive features of its historical development. They rely not only on the vast treasury of early Russian texts that have come down to us but also on the scholarship of historians of literature, language, painting, architecture, folklore, and other areas of culture. Of course, the book also gives careful consideration to the few studies that have been devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of early Russian culture, from the works of the Archimandrite Gavriil to the most recent works by Soviet and foreign authors published in decades just past. (shrink)

Neurological syndromes in which consciousness seems to malfunction, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, visual scotomas, Charles Bonnet syndrome, and synesthesia offer valuable clues about the normal functions of consciousness and ‘qualia’. An investigation into these syndromes reveals, we argue, that qualia are different from other brain states in that they possess three functional characteristics, which we state in the form of ‘three laws of qualia ’ based on a loose analogy with Newton’s three laws of classical mechanics. First, they are (...) irrevocable: I cannot simply decide to start seeing the sunset as green, or feel pain as if it were an itch; second, qualia do not always produce the same behaviour: given a set of qualia, we can choose from a potentially infinite set of possible behaviours to execute; and third, qualia endure in short-term memory, as opposed to non-conscious brain states involved in the on-line guidance of behaviour in real time. We suggest that qualia have evolved these and other attributes (e.g. they are ‘filled in’) because of their role in facilitating non-automatic, decision-based action. We also suggest that the apparent epistemic barrier to knowing what qualia another person is experiencing can be overcome simply by using a ‘bridge ’ of neurons; and we offer a hypothesis about the relation between qualia and one’s sense of self. (shrink)

First Published on: 21 June 2007 To cite this Article: Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., McGeoch, Paul D., Williams, Lisa and Arcilla, Gerard (2007) 'Rapid Relief of Thalamic Pain Syndrome Induced by Vestibular Caloric Stimulation', Neurocase, 13:3, 185 - 188 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13554790701450446 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13554790701450446..

Several recent lines of inquiry have pointed to the amygdala as a potential lesion site in autism. Because one function of the amygdala may be to produce autonomic arousal at the sight of a signi¢cant face, we compared the responses of autistic children to their mothers’ face and to a plain paper cup. Unlike normals, the autistic children as a whole did not show a larger response to the person than to the cup. We also monitored sympathetic activity in autistic (...) children as they engaged in a wide range of everyday behaviours. The children tended to use self-stimulation activities in order to calm hyper-responsive activity of the sympathetic (`¢ght or £ight’) branch of the autonomic nervous system. A small percentage of our autistic subjects had hyporesponsive sympathetic activity, with essentially no electrodermal responses except to self-injurious behaviour. We sketch a hypothesis about autism according to which autistic children use overt behaviour in order to control a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system and suggest that they have learned to avoid using certain processing areas in the temporal lobes. (shrink)

The target articles on sleep and dreaming are discussed in terms of the concept of search activity integrating different types of behavior, body resistance, REM sleep/dream functions, and the brain catecholamine system. REM sleep may be functionally sufficient or insufficient, depending on the dream scenario, the latter being more important than the physiological manifestation of REM sleep. REM sleep contributes to memory consolidation in the indirect way. [Nielsen; Revonsuo; Solms; Vertes & Eastman].