Word: mentalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...burrows into wood shavings on the floor, eats, eliminates, sleeps. But put the animal through its paces in a testing lab, and it quickly becomes evident that this mouse is anything but ordinary. One after another, it knocks off a variety of tasks designed to test a rodent's mental capacities--and almost invariably learns more quickly, remembers what it learns for a longer time and adapts to changes in its environment more flexibly than a normal mouse...
...mouse (which they nicknamed "Doogie," after the precocious lead character of the old TV show Doogie Howser, M.D.) that is smarter than his dim-witted cousins. Not only that, the scientists wrote in last week's issue of the journal Nature, "our results suggest that the genetic enhancement of mental and cognitive attributes such as intelligence and memory in mammals is feasible...
...even as psychologists and brain researchers have learned to appreciate memory's central role in our mental lives, they have come to realize that memory is not a single phenomenon. "We do not have a memory system in the brain," says James McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. "We have memory systems, each playing a different role...
...comes from one set of neurons; the memory of how to get from here to the other side of town comes from another; the nervous feeling you have left over from taking a bad spill last time out comes from still another. Yet you are never aware that your mental experience has been assembled, bit by bit, like some invisible edifice inside your brain...
...neurobiologist Alcino Silva. "Very often when there's a genetic change where we improve something, something else gets hit by it, so it's never a clean thing." The alarmists, like longtime biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, go further. "How do you know you're not going to create a mental monster?" he asks. "We may be on the road to programming our own extinction...