These mental states are typically named in commonsense terms, such as emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, love), cognitions (e.g., retrieving a memory, planning the future, concentrating on a task), perceptions (e.g., face perception, color perception, sound perception), and so on. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.ĭuring every waking moment of life, a human mind consists of a variety of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks.

We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI.

Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. Instead, they find themselves right at the center of it.Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain. When he wakes up in hospital after an explosion and finds that his wife and son have mysteriously vanished, Richard realizes: he and his family have become more than just bystanders in a storm of rivaling ideas pertaining humankind’s salvation between dystopian reality and digital utopia. Richard Nolan is one of the few journalists openly criticizing this development. Drones and humanoid robots replace humans in the public sector, everything is interconnected, surveillance has become omnipresent. Governments and companies promise remedies through technological progress. Lack of resources, illnesses caused by polluted air and water, crime on the rise, war. About This Game When mind and machine become one – what will remain of humanity?īerlin, 2048 – The world is on the brink.

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