The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been

The biological basis of complex human social interaction and communication has been illuminated through a coming together of various methods and disciplines. Among these are comparative studies of other species, studies of disorders of social cognition and developmental psychology. The use of neuroimaging and computational models has given weight to speculations about the evolution of social behaviour and culture in human societies. We highlight some networks of the social brain relevant to two-person interactions and consider the social signals between interacting partners that activate these networks.Wemake a case for distinguishing between signals that automatically trigger interaction and cooperation and ostensive signals that are used deliberately.We suggest that this ostensive signalling is needed for ‘closing the loop’ in two-person interactions, where the partners each know that they have the intention to communicate. The use of deliberate social signals can serve to increase reputation and trust and facilitates teaching. This is likely to be a critical factor in the steep cultural ascent ofmankind

Draw like a builder, build like a writer. And the crack is in the detail

As the inevitable building by numbers ensues, London’s Thames Gateway becomes one of many playgrounds for bar charting enthusiasts. Houses measured by the thousands and little clues as to where it is, that ghost in the machine, what they are, the structures of everyday contemporary life, and who's life it is anyway. Fernand Braudel, Georges Perec, Jorge Luis Borges, amongst others, are employed to examine just how Wittgensteins radiators find their ways into Barratts South East catalogue. They supply the container for Dickensian content with Sinclairesque detail, while late Jan Turnovski's epic lunacy will help to once and for all allay widespread popular fears that Wittgenstein 1 and 2 may add up to one-and-a-half, simple as that. Never has the ideal of treating technology involved with building as an intellectual discipline been further removed from any notion of genius, loci or otherwise; housing policy housing, building policy building. Against the backdrop of mass housing and landmark buildings with little space or time for anything in between, five years of studio work with diploma students at the University of Greenwich, Vienna University of Technology and University Innsbruck, concerned themselves with the structural narrative of the Thames Gateway. This paper, as well as the projects presented through it, is a premature attempt at anchoring buildings on the words they are built on, technology on the sentence structure of its description, assembly instructions written in the most specific of dialects. It describes techniques, suggesting an architecture read backwards, sideways, horizontal and in parallel, free associative sequence, thus discussing issues of site, context, detail and conceptual adhesion. It also poses questions: concerning locality, history, ritual, conceptualisation and intellectual detachment. Above all, in view of the sheer relentlessness of commercially driven urban expansion, questions of soul and character, of design sustainability in terms of creating space to accommodate viable structures social, cultural, narrative. Allowing history to continue, creating place worth telling tales about

Making a case for introspection

Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence

The role of social cognition in decision making

Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people's motor actions and action intentions. ‘Empathy’ allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. ‘Theory of mind’ allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others. In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others. However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion. We consider four domains where such interactions occur: our sense of fairness, altruistic punishment, trust and framing effects. In these cases, social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases

The relationship between motor control and phonology in dyslexic children

Background: The goal of this study was to investigate the automaticity/cerebellar theory of dyslexia. We tested phonological skills and cerebellar function in a group of dyslexic 8-12 year old children and their matched controls. Tests administered included the Phonological Assessment Battery, postural stability, bead threading, finger to thumb and time estimation. Results: Dyslexic children were found to be significantly poorer than the controls at all tasks but time estimation. About 75% of dyslexics were more than one standard deviation below controls in phonological ability, and 50% were similarly impaired in motor skills. However, at least part of the discrepancy in motor skills was due to dyslexic individuals who had additional disorders (ADHD and/or DCD). The absence of evidence for a time estimation deficit also casts doubt on the cerebellar origin of the motor deficiency. About half the dyslexic children didn't have any motor problem, and there was no evidence for a causal relationship between motor skills on the one hand and phonological and reading skills on the other. Conclusion: This study provides partial support for the presence of motor problems in dyslexic children, but does not support the hypothesis that a cerebellar dysfunction is the cause of their phonological and reading impairment

Relationship between activity in human primary motor cortex during action observation and the mirror neuron system

The attenuation of the beta cortical oscillations during action observation has been interpreted as evidence of a mirror neuron system (MNS) in humans. Here we investigated the modulation of beta cortical oscillations with the viewpoint of an observed action. We asked subjects to observe videos of an actor making a variety of arm movements. We show that when subjects were observing arm movements there was a significant modulation of beta oscillations overlying left and right sensorimotor cortices. This pattern of attenuation was driven by the side of the screen on which the observed movement occurred and not by the hand that was observed moving. These results are discussed in terms of the firing patterns of mirror neurons in F5 which have been reported to have similar properties

Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome

Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults’ (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor’s behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning

Anticipation is the key to understanding music and the effects of music on emotion

There is certainly a need for a framework to guide the study of the physiological mechanisms underlying the experience of music and the emotions that music evokes. However, this framework should be organised hierarchically, with musical anticipation as its fundamental mechanism

Creating an entrepreneurial region: exploring the entrepreneurial capacity of the East Midlands

This paper explores the notion of the entrepreneurial region and, in particular, the relevance and appropriateness of this concept to the East Midlands. An outline framework is developed that depicts aspects and dimensions of an entrepreneurial region. This is then applied to the East MIdlands to gauge how entrepreneurial the region is