The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (50 page)

BOOK: The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning
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Poor at matching their confidence to their accuracy
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Three or four conscious items
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Our working memory limit . . . same as the monkey’s
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Other species . . . same upper bound . . . honeybee
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3 or 4 items . . . maximum that can be practically sustained
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Each holder . . . cope equally well . . . simplest . . . most complex
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Say back a novel sequence that was 80 digits
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Presented volunteers . . . sequences of 4 double digits
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Chess masters . . . remember . . . whole board
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Increase the amount of information per item
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Greater the number, the less likely . . . identify each
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Attention has two clear stages
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Leonardo Chelazzi and colleagues used electrodes
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Michael Cohen and colleagues recently carried out
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Divert attention away . . . fails to enter consciousness
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Working memory . . . is limited to . . . 4 . . . items
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Psychologists assumed that our working memory capacity was around double this
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Douglas Hofstadter’s whimsical and influential book
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Prior expectations . . . guide our attention
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Other species can start to learn . . . grammatical language
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A “language instinct”
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Learning an artificial grammar . . . same brain areas . . . chunking task
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FOXP2
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The evolutionary advantage of awareness
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Stan Beilock and colleagues tested . . . goft-putting
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