Interactive Curriculum Based on Models of Mind & Brain

What does it mean for curriculum to be interactive? It encourages student engagement and active participation in both individual and group work. It offers teachers a coherent set of materials to choose from that can enhance their classes. It is the product of on-going development and continuous improvement based on research and feedback from the field. This paper will introduce work in progress from the Center for Excellence in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST), an NSF Science of Learning Center. Among its many goals, CELEST is developing a unique educational curriculum, an interactive curriculum based upon models of mind and brain. Teachers, administrators, and governments are naturally concerned with how students learn. Students are greatly concerned about how minds work, including how to learn. CELEST aims to introduce curricula that not only meet current U.S. standards in mathematics, science, and psychology but also influence plans to improve those standards. Software and support materials are in development and available at http://cns.bu.edu/celest/private/. Interested parties are invited to contact the author for access.

Dynamics of brain networks in aesthetic appreciation

Neuroimage experiments have been essential for identifying active brain networks. During cognitive tasks as in, e.g., aesthetic appreciation, such networks include regions that belong to the default mode network (DMN). Theoretically, DMN activity should be interrupted during cognitive tasks demanding attention, as is the case for aesthetic appreciation. Analyzing the functional connectivity dynamics along three temporal windows and two conditions, beautiful and not beautiful stimuli, here we report experimental support for the hypothesis that aesthetic appreciation relies on the activation of two different networks, an initial aesthetic network and a delayed aesthetic network, engaged within distinct time frames. Activation of the DMN might correspond mainly to the delayed aesthetic network. We discuss adaptive and evolutionary explanations for the relationships existing between the DMN and aesthetic networks and offer unique inputs to debates on the mind/brain interaction.

Internal and external time conflicts in adolescents: sleep characteristics and interventions

Daytime fatigue and lack of sleep seem to increase throughout adolescent years. Several environmental, psychological, and biological factors have been associated with the development of sleep across adolescence. The aim of the present article is to summarize these factors and to give examples of various outcomes in sleep patterns among adolescents studied in different cultural settings. It is obvious from earlier work that many adolescents have displaced circadian rhythms and lack of adaptation to school hours due to an early school start or additional burdens for work. Several interventions have aimed to help the adaptation process by supporting sleep processes and changing scheduling, in this way promoting classroom alertness. In summary, adolescents worldwide shorten their sleep due to schoolwork hours and additional work, especially by disturbing their sleep due to circadian misalignment

Time Constraints in the School Environment: What Does a Sleepy Student Tell Us?

In this article, we discuss school schedules and their implications in the context of chronobiological contemporary knowledge, arguing for the need to reconsider time planning in the school setting. We present anecdotal observations regarding chronobiological challenges imposed by the school system throughout different ages and discuss the effects of these schedules in terms of sleepiness and its deleterious consequences on learning, memory, and attention. Different settings (including urban vs. rural habitats) influence timing, which also depends on self-selected sleep schedules. Finally, we criticize the traditional view of a necessary strict stability of sleep-wake habits.

Emociones y toma de decisiones éticas: desarrollo e implicaciones para la empresa

Los líderes organizacionales se deben enfrentar a retos ambientales del mundo de los negocios y diversas presiones que los ponen día a día en un alto riesgo ético. Sortear dichos riesgos ha demandado cambios sustanciales en las dinámicas de las organizaciones contemporáneas, por lo que las exigencias a los directivos de tomar decisiones acertadas en situaciones de alta complejidad moral son cada vez mayores. Estas decisiones involucran un comportamiento ético de quien las toma, lo cual a su vez está mediado por sus emociones.

Internal and External Time Conflicts in Adolescents: Sleep Characteristics and Interventions

Daytime fatigue and lack of sleep seem to increase throughout adolescent years. Several environmental, psychological, and biological factors have been associated with the development of sleep across adolescence. The aim of the present article is to summarize these factors and to give examples of various outcomes in sleep patterns among adolescents studied in different cultural settings. It is obvious from earlier work that many adolescents have displaced circadian rhythms and lack of adaptation to school hours due to an early school start or additional burdens for work. Several interventions have aimed to help the adaptation process by supporting sleep processes and changing scheduling, in this way promoting classroom alertness. In summary, adolescents worldwide shorten their sleep due to schoolwork hours and additional work, especially by disturbing their sleep due to circadian misalignment.

Construções com tópico marcado em cartas pessoais brasileiras dos séculos XVIII, XIX E XX

This dissertation is a research on the marked topic construction (CT) in Brazilian personal letters from eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goal of our research is to verify if CT are present in the writing of Brazilians born in the centuries in question. Our research focus is based on the assumptions of generative theory (CHOMSKY 1981; 1986), which states that grammar is internalized in the mind / brain of the writers, with the emphasis on studies of grammatical change, as pointed texts by Paixão de Sousa (2004), Carneiro (2005); Galves, Namiuti and Paixão de Sousa (2006) and Martins (2009). Our corpus was extracted from Projeto Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB) and Cartas Brasileiras coletânea de fontes para o estudo do português. We selected forty-six correspondents who should be inserted into the two criteria set out in this research: to be Brazilian and be born in the centuries mentioned above, so that we could find legitimate topic constructions of PB. This work is based on researches by Pontes (1987), Mateus et al. (2003), Araujo (2006, 2009), Berlinck, Duarte and Oliveira (2009), which actively support us in the study of this linguistic phenomenon in Portuguese. The results show that the marked topic construction in our corpus appear on the writing of Brazilians since the second half of the eighteenth century, while the typical constructions in Brazilian Portuguese locative topic, subject topic and copy topic - are already reflected in the I-language of the writers born in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth century

Estatuto biológico do processamento de informação mental

Raciocinando no contexto do programa neomecanicista para a Biologia, estudamos a natureza do processamento de informação no sistema vivo em geral, e no cérebro humano em particular, onde uma aplicação do modelo da Auto-Organização nos conduz à hipótese do Supercódigo. Este seria um programa mental, molecularmente codificado, responsável pelas competências inatas, como a competência lingüística. Fazemos também uma comparação entre nossa hipótese e a da Linguagem do Pensamento, proposta por Jerry Fodor.

O problema da consciência: a abordgem neurocientífica do problema-corpo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Evolução Nerd: sociedade digital e as mudanças nos paradigmas sociais dos Nerds e Geeks

Não disponível

O problema da relação mente-corpo e a consciência como sua manifestação

Pós-graduação em Filosofia - FFC

Livre-arbítrio e a relação mente e cérebro em Benjamin Libet

My purpose is to reflect critically on how Benjamin Libet interprets his experiments, which are focused primarily on the question of free will. These experiments have often been considered as scientific evidence against free will, to the extent that they would have shown that the intention and will result from conscious brain processes, which are unconscious and precedents. But that is not the position of Libet, which distinguishes intention and conscious will, arguing that only the first results from previous and unconscious brain processes, while the second is autonomous and able to act causally on brain. Thus, Libet choose to ignore the suggestion of its initial experiments, that is, that all mental events result of specific brain processes. I argue that Libet ignores it because he is not able to understand how mental events, being essentially separated and at the same time the result of brain activity, could act causally on the brain.

The 'hard problem' and the quantum physicists. Part 1:the first generation

All four of the most important figures in the early twentieth-century development of quantum physics-Niels Bohr, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli-had strong interests in the traditional mind-brain, or 'hard,' problem. This paper reviews their approach to this problem, showing the influence of Bohr's complementarity thesis, the significance of Schroedinger's small book, 'What is life?,' the updated Platonism of Heisenberg and, perhaps most interesting of all, the interaction of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli in the latter's search for a unification of mind and matter. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.