Related papers: Pain and Spontaneous Thought
Emotions play a crucial role in human life. The research community has proposed many theories on emotions without reaching much consensus. The situation is similar for emotions in cognitive architectures and autonomous agents. I propose in…
Bedside caregivers assess infants' pain at constant intervals by observing specific behavioral and physiological signs of pain. This standard has two main limitations. The first limitation is the intermittent assessment of pain, which might…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
In simple perceptual decisions the brain has to identify a stimulus based on noisy sensory samples from the stimulus. Basic statistical considerations state that the reliability of the stimulus information, i.e., the amount of noise in the…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
Studying psychiatric illness has often been limited by difficulties in connecting symptoms and behavior to neurobiology. Computational psychiatry approaches promise to bridge this gap by providing formal accounts of the latent information…
Chronic pain is a multi-dimensional experience, and pain intensity plays an important part, impacting the patients emotional balance, psychology, and behaviour. Standard self-reporting tools, such as the Visual Analogue Scale for pain, fail…
The brain did not develop a dedicated device for reasoning. This fact bears dramatic consequences. While for perceptuo-motor functions neural activity is shaped by the input's statistical properties, and processing is carried out at high…
Chronic pain affects about 100 million adults in the US. Despite their great need, neuropharmacology and neurostimulation therapies for chronic pain have been associated with suboptimal efficacy and limited long-term success, as their…
Objectives: This study aims to systematically review the literature on the computational processing of the language of pain, or pain narratives, whether generated by patients or physicians, identifying current trends and challenges.…
Learning requires the traversal of inherently distinct cognitive states to produce behavioral adaptation. Yet, tools to explicitly measure these states with non-invasive imaging -- and to assess their dynamics during learning -- remain…
Impaired postural control has been reported in patients with chronic neck pain of both traumatic and non-traumatic etiologies, but whether painful stimulation of neck muscle per se can affect balance control during quiet standing in humans…
The multifaceted nature of subjective experience poses a challenge to the study of consciousness. Traditional neuroscientific approaches often concentrate on isolated facets, such as perceptual awareness or the global state of consciousness…
In the science of emotion, it is widely assumed that folk emotion categories form a biological and psychological typology, and studies are routinely designed and analyzed to identify emotion-specific patterns. This approach shapes the…
A major unresolved question in Neuroscience is: What is the origin of the observed scale-invariant correlations in neural activity? Many researchers support the ``criticality hypothesis,'' which proposes that the brain operates near…
The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
Understanding of the phenomena of vision and thought require clarification of the general mechanism of perception. So far, philosophical inquiries and scientific investigations have not been able to address clearly the mysteries surrounding…
The cerebral cortex spontaneously displays different patterns of activity that evolve over time according to the brain state. Sleep, wakefulness, resting states, and attention are examples of a wide spectrum of physiological states that can…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
The activity patterns of highly developed cognitive systems like the human brain are dominated by autonomous dynamical processes, that is by a self-sustained activity which would be present even in the absence of external sensory stimuli.…