#Georg Northoff

[philosophiesde]

Die Hypnose

Die Hypnose – als Beispiel für eine praktische Anwendung des Paradigmas des “embodiment” und “embededdness” Abstract Der folgende Essay soll die Hypnose als Beispiel für eine praktische Anwendung des Paradigmas des “embodiment” und “embededdness“ näher untersuchen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird versucht die Wirksamkeit des Hypnoseverfahrens mit Hilfe von empirischen Befunde aus den kognitiven…

[mahmou4d]

BIOPHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A FOUNDATIONAL APPROACH Hardcover – 26 Aug. 2016

by ROMAN R POZNANSKI (Editor), JACK A TUSZYNSKI (Editor), TODD E FEINBERG (Editor)

See all formats and editions

"The compelling argument put forward in this book is that without consciousness, the electrochemical signals that originate in the brain would not be able to function in the way they do — like a human would experience in comprehending the world subjectively."

A S Bazyan, DSc, PhD Head of Neurochemical Mechanisms of Learning and Memory Lab Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology Russian Academy of Sciences

"First book to go beyond a merely neural to an urgently needed truly biophysical and henceforth natural basis of consciousness."

Georg Northoff, MD, PhD, FRCPC Canada Research Chair in Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics ELJB-CIHR Michael Smith Chair in Neurosciences and Mental Health University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research Author of Unlocking the Brain, Vol. 1 Coding, Vol. 2 Consciousness

"The authors have done what philosophers were unable to do — to lay the groundwork for a fundamental theory of brain-based consciousness."

[brain-garden-blog]

   How your mind protects you against hallucinations

More than 300 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes asked a disturbing question: If our senses can’t always be trusted, how can we separate illusion from reality? We’re able to do so, a new study suggests, because our brain keeps tabs on reality by constantly questioning its own past expectations and beliefs. Hallucinations occur when this internal fact-checking fails, a finding that could point toward better treatments for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

The study is “very elegant,” and an important step toward identifying the brain regions that produce hallucinations—and keep them in check, says Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa who was not involved with the work.

We don’t always perceive the world as we see—or hear—it. In an experiment devised at Yale University in the 1890s, for example, researchers repeatedly showed volunteers an image paired with a tone. When the scientists stopped playing the tone, participants still “heard” it when the image appeared. A similar auditory hallucination occurs in daily life: when you think you hear your cellphone ring or buzz, only to find it’s turned off. “People come to expect the sound so much that the brain hears it for them,” says Albert Powers, a psychiatrist at Yale University and an author of the new study.

These examples suggest hallucinations arise when the brain gives more weight to its expectations and beliefs about the world than to the sensory evidence it receives, says study author and Yale psychiatrist Philip Corlett. To test that idea, he, Powers, and colleagues decided to apply a version of the 1890s experiment to four different groups: healthy people, people with psychosis who don’t hear voices, people with schizophrenia (a subtype of psychosis) who do, and people—such as self-described psychics—who regularly hear voices but don’t find them disturbing.

The researchers trained everyone to associate a checkerboard image with a 1-kilohertz, 1-second-long tone. As the team changed the intensity of the tone and sometimes tuned it out entirely, participants were asked to press a button when they heard it, increasing or decreasing pressure to indicate their level of confidence. Using magnetic resonance imaging scanners, the researchers captured a snapshot of the participants’ brain activity as they made their choices.

The team hypothesized that people who hear voices would be more likely to “believe” in auditory hallucinations. That’s precisely what they found: Both the schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls. They were also about 28% more confident that they had heard the tone when none was there, the researchers report today in Science.

Both self-described psychics and people with schizophrenia also showed abnormal neuronal activity in several brain regions responsible for monitoring our internal representations of reality. The more severe a person’s hallucinations were, for example, the less activity they displayed in the cerebellum, a wrinkled nodule at the back of the brain. The cerebellum plays a critical role in planning and coordinating future movements, a process that requires constantly updating one’s perception of the outside world.

The findings confirm that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses, Powers says. The work also suggests that the cerebellum is a key checkpoint against this distortion, he adds.

Northoff says future experiments should investigate whether there are any telling differences between the psychotic and healthy brain at rest. Such studies could guide still-experimental therapies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which aims to suppress or boost brain activity in targeted areas through electrical currents. Even more promising, says Corlett, is the prospect that studies like this one will help clinicians predict who is likely to develop schizophrenia, allowing them to seek early treatment.

By Emily Underwood at Science

[lost-at-seven-pm]

Bei psychischen Krankheiten verändert sich die Wahrnehmung. Das beschäftigt den Psychiater und Neurowissenschafter Georg Northoff. Im Gespräch mit Lena Stallmach erklärt er, wie seine Theorie des Bewusstseins ihn auf neue Behandlungskonzepte brachte.

[hamandheroin]

How your mind protects you against hallucinations

More than 300 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes asked a disturbing question: If our senses can’t always be trusted, how can we separate illusion from reality? We’re able to do so, a new study suggests, because our brain keeps tabs on reality by constantly questioning its own past expectations and beliefs. Hallucinations occur when this internal fact-checking fails, a finding that could point toward better treatments for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

The study is “very elegant,” and an important step toward identifying the brain regions that produce hallucinations—and keep them in check, says Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa who was not involved with the work.

We don’t always perceive the world as we see—or hear—it. In an experiment devised at Yale University in the 1890s, for example, researchers repeatedly showed volunteers an image paired with a tone. When the scientists stopped playing the tone, participants still “heard” it when the image appeared. A similar auditory hallucination occurs in daily life: when you think you hear your cellphone ring or buzz, only to find it’s turned off. “People come to expect the sound so much that the brain hears it for them,” says Albert Powers, a psychiatrist at Yale University and an author of the new study.

Continue reading here.

[philosophiesde]

Interview mit Prof. Dr. Georg Northoff

Interview mit Prof. Dr. Georg Northoff

Interview mit Prof. Dr. Georg Northoff zum Thema: “Eine Art von Bewusstsein”   Einleitung Es ist mir eine außerordentliche Ehre in diesem Interview mit Prof. Dr. Georg Northoff  Fragen zu  seiner ���Temporo-spatial Theory (TTC) in Bezug auf “Eine Art von Bewusstsein” stelen zu dürfen, da als Mediziner und Neurowissenschaftler auch als sehr bedeutender, international anerkannter Vertreter der…