Bioniczny mózg w robocie!

Zasadnicze pytanie, jakie stawiają sobie obecnie badacze z Uniwersytetu w Reading to kwestia: Jak powiązać aktywność pojedynczych neuronów z kompleksowymi zachowaniami całego organizmu. Między innymi dlatego prowadzą obecnie badania nad pierwszymi robotami z 'bionicznym mózgiem'. Zastosowano tu zalążkową postać neuronalnego mózgu, który sprzęgnięty z jednostką operacyjną robota uczy się i sam rozwija w interakcji robota z otoczeniem.

Ciekawe kiedy roboty będą miały sny...?

Intensive psychoanalytic therapy, the “talking cure” rooted in the ideas of Freud, has all but disappeared in the age of drug treatments and managed care.

But now researchers are reporting that the therapy can be effective against some chronic mental problems, including anxiety and  borderline personality disorder.

  Psychoanaliza Freuda jest szeroko nauczana na Uniwersytetach, za wyjątkiem Instytutów Psychologii

PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department.

A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.”

The study, which is to appear in the June 2008 issue of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assocation, is the latest evidence of the field’s existential crisis. For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor’s theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching.

Całość tego interesującego artykułu znajdziesz na stronie The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25cohen.html?scp=9&sq=psychoanalysis&st=cse