Related papers: Serotonin as a Creativity Pump
Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large…
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…
We introduce a new concept for stable spatial soliton formation, mediated by the competition between self-bending induced by a strongly asymmetric nonlocal nonlinearity and spatially localized gain superimposed on a wide pedestal with…
Molecule generation requires satisfying multiple chemical and biological constraints while searching a large and structured chemical space. This makes it a non-binary problem, where effective models must identify non-obvious solutions under…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
The brain achieves stability and plasticity in a topologically complex, shifting world through Metric-Topology Factorization (MTF), separating discrete topological indexing for context selection from continuous metric condensation for local…
Linking the microscopic and macroscopic behavior is at the heart of many natural and social sciences. This apparent similarity conceals essential differences across disciplines: while physical particles are assumed to optimize the global…
In this paper, we argue that some fundamental concepts and tools of signal processing may be effectively applied to represent and interpret social cognition processes. From this viewpoint, individuals or, more generally, social stimuli are…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
Interstellar exploration will advance human knowledge and culture in multiple ways. Scientifically, it will advance our understanding of the interstellar medium, stellar astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition,…
We often associate compound growth with the Anthropocene and our overwhelming economic impacts on the Earth. Today our actual choices for future society appear to lie with studying the class of emergent natural systems that first develop by…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word ``intelligence'' is being used as a North Star for the development of…
Recent work [Hazy 2012] has demonstrated computationally that collectives that are organized into networks which govern the flow of resources can learn to recognize newly emerging opportunities distributed in the environment. This paper…