Beau Lotto, Neuroscientist and Aritst, Founder of Lottolab Studio

Professor Beau Lotto, a researcher studying visual perception, spoke of the central role that context plays in human perception. “Context is everything” according to Lotto. To illustrate his point, he shared a very compelling illusion he had created:

In this illusion, the grey squares in both the left and right images are colored exactly the same color (in other words, their pigment is identical). When we introduce different contexts around these squares, however they are perceived as entirely different colors — blue squares on the left and yellow squares on the right.

Context is so important because the brain is constantly decoding meaning from the world, not the information itself. So the brain isn’t interested in knowing the light emitting from a point in the world, it’s interested in knowing what that light “means” about what’s going on in a scene. And context, or the global relationships present, play a central role in this task — even in tasks as basic as color perception.

VS Ramachandran, Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California – San Diego

Professor VS Ramachandran, a researcher in the field of behavioral neurology, draws insight into the brain by examining behavioral deficits arising from brain injuries. He spoke about an interesting phenomenon relating to mirror neurons, the neurons in the brain that literally mimic any behavior the subject sees. These neurons literally create a virtual reality simulation inside of any action being performed by another person … but something very interesting happens in the case of paralysis.

In this case, the patient has a paralyzed arm, and sees another person get pricked by a pin. This patient literally feels the pain as if she had been pricked!

This is happening because the brain, in a non-paralyzed patient, would receive feedback from the healthy arm that there’s no real pain. In other words, the healthy arm lets the brain know that the mirror neuron simulation is in fact, just a simulation. But in a paralyzed patient this feedback loop is thrown off and the patient feels the pain as if it’s her own. Ramachandran spoke about mirror neurons as “Gandhi Neurons” since they hook our brain up to the other brains in our vicinity allowing us to feel and experience what they are experiencing.

Laurie Santos, Associate Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Laurie Santos, a primate researcher at Yale, spoke about insights into human behavior gleaned from primate behavioral studies. Specifically she spoke into the phenomenon of “predictable irrationality” in economics. Human being’s have been shown to be predictably irrational with regards to spending decisions.

In a behavioral experiment, people are given $1000 and then given 2 options:
Do nothing and walk away with an extra $500 (for a total of $1500)
Flip a coin. If it’s heads, receive an extra $1000, it’s tails, receive nothing extra.

Human beings overwhelming choose option 1).

In another experiment, people are presented with a slightly different setup. People are given $2000, and given 2 options:
Do nothing and lose $500 (for a total of $1500)
Flip a coin. If it’s heads, lose $1000, it’s tails, lose $0.

If human beings were rational decision makers, we would choose option 1) in consistency with option 1) from the previous experiment for a guaranteed $1500. But we do not! Human beings are loss-averse and routinely choose option 2) as they have a chance in saving any loss.

Now they translated this experiment so that Capuchin monkeys could understand it. They first trained the monkey to trade in tokens for grapes, essentially training them to understand the concept of money. And then they created a version of the above experiments that worked with grapes to see what would happen. And the monkeys showed the same “predictably irrational” behavior as humans — they too had a bias for loss-aversion and made choices to avoid losing out on grapes. So the cognitive circuitry underlying our economic behaviors are rooted very far in our evolutionary past.

David Eagleman, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine

Professor David Eagleman, was interested in exploring what light neuroscience sheds on the structure of our legal system. Our legal system is currently centered around the notions that we are 1) Practical reasoners and 2) Our brains have equal capacity. Evidence from neuroscience suggests that these are poor assumptions.

A classic example of this is the case of a Phineas Gage, a railworker who suffered an injury where a metal rod penetrated his skull, lesioning the frontal lobes of his brain. Although he survived the accident, his personality was irrevocably different. He went from being well-balanced and normally behaved to being an extreme risk-taker, gambler using extreme profanity.

More recently, a man started being interested in child pornography without any prior provocation. He became alarmed at these new inclinations, and went to the doctor to get checked out. Upon getting tested, he learned that he had a tumor in his brain. The tumor was removed and these tendencies subsided.

Eagleman suggests that instead of using a legal system that’s centered around retribution, instead let’s use our modern day insights into the brain and behavior to find the best way forward given the situation.

(Production Team for ‘Hemp Can Save the World’ included Will Bystrov, Felipe Soares, JQuest Ionz, Mikki Willis and John Roulac)

Check out what Natural News had to say about the Video and Hemp: http://www.naturalnews.com/035244_hemp_save_the_world_music_video.html

(Production Team for ‘Hemp Can Save the World’ included Will Bystrov, Felipe Soares, JQuest Ionz, Mikki Willis and John Roulac)