Consciousness and how it got to be that way

Showing posts with label senses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label senses. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Two Connections RE Psychopathy and Smell

You may already have seen the Chemosensory Perception paper linking poor sense of smell and high scores on psychopathy inventories.

Two speculations about this. First, moral disgust is increasingly seen as using the same structures in the brain as physical disgust, and oddly, some of the people who are most morally consistent - that is, the ones that most use reason when considering moral decisions - also have a lower capacity for disgust. Also, the same or similar genes control sexual development and smell, and both sets of structures are disrupted in Kallmann syndrome. There may be a broader link between the control of pre-rational impulsive behavior, i.e., sense-appetite driven goal-oriented behavior.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

In the Land of the Blind

...the one-eyed man must remember the majority is always sane. The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells explores how an entirely blind civilization might view the universe, and how sighted people might interact with them. The Churchlands' infra-people, while argumentative, seem quite diplomatic by comparison.