“The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity — all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.”

- Inevitable Minds

“The CB2 baby robot has begun to grow up, and can now learn like a toddler. The two-year-old, four-foot-tall, 73-pound robot is now interacting with humans and “developing social skills,” just as its creators at Osaka University hoped it would.”

- Japan’s “Child Robot” Learns to Walk

“the same logic apply to allocating attention to the various stimuli that bombard us. Assuming a spotlight view of attention, and assuming that there are limited attentional resources, one is constantly faced with the problem of finding which stimuli in the world are salient and need to be attended to. Now, the leap I am making is that attention-allocation just like choosing to act volitionally is an operant and not a reactive, but pro-active process”

- Action-selection and Attention-allocation: a common problem and a common solution?

“Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence damaged his right eye in a childhood accident and was later given a prosthetic replacement. Like any other false eye, it was designed to be purely an aesthetic replacement, but he realised that the vacant bit of face real estate could be put to better use in his art. Now Spence is attempting to build a wireless video camera into his synthetic eye, turning himself into a self-proclaimed “Eyeborg”.”

- Bionic eye cam to shine a light on society

“in un era in cui il web 2.0 invade profondamente le nostre vite.. parimenti lo fa con la nostra morte. […] Ma se domani dovessi morire all’improvviso, cosa accadrebbe della mia vita web?”

- “Io sono i miei dati, voglio fare testamento digitale”

“As science and technology advance further, it will become increasingly possible to enhance basic human capacities to increase or modulate cognition, mood, personality, and physical performance, and to control the biological processes underlying normal aging. Some have suggested that such advances would take us beyond the bounds of human nature. These trends, and these dramatic prospects, raise profound ethical questions. They have generated intense public debate and have become a central topic of discussion within practical ethics. Should we side with bioconservatives, and forgo the use of any biomedical interventions aimed at enhancing human capacities? Should we side with transhumanists and embrace the new opportunities? Or should we perhaps plot some middle course? Human Enhancement presents the latest moves in this crucial debate: original contributions from many of the world’s leading ethicists and moral thinkers, representing a wide range of perspectives, advocates and sceptics, enthusiasts and moderates. These are the arguments that will determine how humanity develops in the near future.”

- Human Enhancement

“The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.”

- the Facebook Generation

“In a world without technology, we would not be living, and we would not be human.”

- The World Without Technology

“Researchers from the University of York and the University of Warwick, both UK, are working on plans for a device able to manipulate five of a person’s senses, to given them the sensation of being somewhere else. But while systems to control what a person sees and hears are well-established, touch, smell and taste are much harder to control realistically. The video above shows how the team intend to do that, for example by capturing smells from the real world to be “played back” later.”

- Ultimate virtual reality will trigger five senses

“She showed volunteers a computerised image of a right arm on a 3D display while their own right arm was stretched out in front of them but hidden from view. The volunteers felt as if the virtual arm was projecting out in front of them from their right shoulder. As in the rubber hand illusion, Slater touched and stroked the real arm with a wand that relayed images of a virtual wand performing the same touches and strokes on the virtual arm.”

- The virtual body

“Walter Goldschmidt, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles got in touch with us here at Neuroanthropology.net to give us a bit of a (friendly) hard time about unfortunate neologisms (touché) and to ask if we were familiar with his work. With my repeated posts on evolutionary psychology, he thought it might be of interest, especially his discussion of affect hunger.”

- Evolution of altruism: kin selection or affect hunger? « Neuroanthropology

“In his book Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark argues that since the dawn of civilization we have always been cognitive hybrids, using external objects and devices in our thinking and everyday activity. So by his reckoning we have been “Internet-ready” for millennia. Suddenly it becomes possible to imagine a cave man — a Neanderthal or even his predecessor Heidelberg Man with an iPhone!”

- Prehistory Prefigured Internet Use

“This can once again be the case for our larger intellectual property system, but the frame of the debate needs to be altered to attend to the social functions of culture and cultural goods-not just their ownership and property value.”

- Moving from Property towards Policy: Intellectual Property as Cultural Policy

“If you meet new friends, some of your older friends that you don’t see very much anymore falls out of your 150 circle.”

- Social networking beyond the Dunbar number of 150

“But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation.”

- The size of social networks

“Il divario tra i bambini e ragazzi di 3-17 anni - spiegano i ricercatori dell’Istat - dovuto al titolo di studio dei genitori è molto forte. Infatti, ha usato il personal computer negli ultimi tre mesi il 66,3% dei bambini e ragazzi con almeno un genitore laureato rispetto al 40,6% di quelli con i genitori con al massimo la licenza elementare con una differenza di 26 punti percentuali”.”

- l’uso del computer a scuola riduce il divario sociale

“I social network offrono un’esperienza svuotata di ogni coerenza narrativa e di significato profondo.”

- Repubblica.it - Blog - Scene Digitali

“It’s actually not only the future of the university that is in play. How we produce, organize, and distribute open education resources is at the heart of the future of education around the world”

- Lev Gonick: How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis

“Now surgeons Craig Senders and Travis Tollefson of the University of California, Davis, plan to change that by using artificial polymer muscles to reanimate the facial features of people suffering from severe paralysis.”

- Robotic faces… for humans

“Cosa succede nell’affermazione del sè quando il sè si scopre così mutevole e soggetto a cambiamenti rapidissimi? Quando si genera una memoria mediale ricchissima, quotidianamente aggiornata, di tracce lasciate da noi e pubblicate e taggate da altri? Cosa succede al senso di identità costantemente sottoposto a mediazioni e rinegoziazioni? E soprattutto mi interessa indagare quali caratteristiche avranno le identità da nativi digitali oltre alla loro incredibile attitudine globale?”

- la memoria e l’attesa