When you are dealing with a threatening situation, you need to do some serious risk assessment. Depending on your chances of survival, fear can make you run away or it can make you fight. This is the well known fight or flight response. But fear can also elicit the opposite response: If threat is relatively low, it’s better not to act at all. For example, a rat that encounters a predator usually shows freezing behavior, in which all movement except breathing is suppressed. This behavior improves the rat's chances of staying undetected and prepares it to act if necessary.

So what do humans do when they encounter mildly dangerous yet threatening events? In a recent study in Psychological Science, Roelofs, Hagenaars and Stins measured body sway while participants were standing on a force platform and viewed emotional faces. Their crucial finding was that passive viewing of angry faces (compared to neutral and happy faces) caused a significant reduction in body mobility: If you see an angry face, you sway less. This reduced mobility was accompanied by a reduced heart rate. Thus, involuntary bodily responses to social threat cues involve freeze-like behavior in humans, just like in animals. Interestingly, they also found that freezing behavior is most pronounced in people who are naturally anxious.

It seems like it doesn’t take much to get us ‘glued to the spot’. The next time you notice a poor little animal trying to be invisible, remember that you are probably doing the same …

Conclusion In “The Grand Design”, Hawking and Mlodinow discuss the big questions of modern physics. The subject matter is engrossing, but the hurried presentation leaves the reader unsatisfied.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

There is a definite ring of truth to this famous statement, but because my chances of becoming a physicist are slim, the best I can do is occasionally pick up a popular science book. And, of course, no one has popularized physics like Stephen Hawking, the enigmatic disabled genius.

A great deal has been made of Hawking's newest book, “The Grand Design”, which he has written together with Leonard Mlodinow. Especially the superfluous statement that there is no God (or something to that effect) caused a small stir in the press, even in our not particularly pious country.

Unfortunately, “The Grand Design” does not live up to the hype. The book is entertaining, but there is little to set it apart from the competition. Hawking and Mlodinow start out with a very brief introduction to the philosophy of science. From there they fly by quantum mechanics, glance over string theory, and, a mere 150 pages later (large font, lots of pictures), they arrive at the grand conclusion. In this conclusion they appear to say something important, perhaps even brilliant, about how the total energy of the universe is zero, which would allow the universe to appear out of nothing (or something along those lines). But the problem with the conclusion, and the book in …

This month, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced Scientific Reports, a new online, open access journal. The new journal is reminiscent of PLoS One, which has the same liberal criteria for acceptance: All original and technically valid papers are accepted.

This move is a little surprising, because in the past Nature has accused PLoS One of relying on "bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals." Perhaps their change of mind has something to do with the recent uprise against NPG's increased subscription fees, in which the University of California threatened to boycott all Nature journals.

Nevertheless, I think it's a very good thing that one of the most distinguished publishers in the world has joined in the open access movement.

And now we can all have a Nature publication!

Pantheon Books, 2010

Conclusion In “Self Comes to Mind”, Damasio provides a neuroscientific account of consciousness. Despite being occasionally somewhat opaque, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in consciousness.

In his latest book, “Self Comes to Mind”, Antonio Damasio outlines his ideas about the neural basis of consciousness. This is not the first time (and probably not the last) that Damasio has dealt with this subject matter, but “Self Comes to Mind” is different from his previous books. First, the role of emotion is not quite as prominent. Second, “Self Comes to Mind” appears to be oriented towards people with some knowledge of neuroscience. The book is also perfectly suited for the interested layman, but those who are looking for light-weight popular science entertainment may be better off with, for example, recent books by Oliver Sacks or Victor Lamme.

According to Damasio, consciousness is all about neural maps. In order for an object to be consciously perceived, it needs to be represented in brain areas that are crucial for consciousness. This statement is a tad trivial when it comes to sensory perception (vision, hearing, etc.), but Damasio emphasizes that this principle extends to emotions as well, with one difference: Emotions are the result of maps of the body itself, rather than maps of the outside world.

Damasio already expressed these ideas about neural map-making before, but in “Self Comes to Mind” he goes a step further and provides a detailed account of how he thinks consciousness emerges …

This post has been moved to the OpenSesame documentation area: http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/getting-started/running-from-source