Interior Traces - Devon

I'll be at Dartington Hall in the depths of Devon this Thursday evening (after first adding my democratic weight to the swing seat of Hampstead & Kilburn), taking part in a panel discussion on Interior Traces, a play written by my friend and collaborator Louise Whiteley and James Wilkes. It takes a look at how knowing about the brain shapes our views of responsibility, the self, volition and personality, and how this knowledge is shaping the relationship between society and the individual.

If you happen to be in Devon and would like to come along (or indeed to any of the other tour locations), tickets are available here.

I'll be putting a post up shortly on interesting points from the debate.

Introspection

Just read a very thought-provoking working paper on introspection posted by Eric Schwitzgebel:

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2010/03/introspection-what.html

It proposes that what we might call introspection arises from a family of both introspective and non-introspective judgments that probably interact in a myriad of complicated ways. So, if we can pick apart the (neural) processes underlying this family of computations, can we deconstruct introspection?

Paper out on the status quo bias

Our paper looking at mechanisms for overcoming a simple bias towards the default in difficult perceptual decisions is out in the Early Edition of PNAS (open access link can be found here).

And for a nice bite-size summary of the findings (better than I could muster here!) check out Deborah Franklin's article in NPR's health blog Shots:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/03/the_biology_of_dithering.html