What animals have a severed limb trying to feed a former owner? Detailed answer

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What animals have a severed limb trying to feed a former owner? Detailed answer

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What animals have a severed limb trying to feed a former owner?

The nervous system of the octopus is arranged in such a way that only a third of the total number of neurons is in the brain, and the rest are concentrated in the tentacles, which have some autonomy in reactions to environmental changes. Even after separation from the body, the tentacles reflexively shrink for a long time and dodge the unpleasant impact. In one experiment, a severed tentacle, when it collides with a piece of food, grabs it and tries to move it towards the phantom mouth.

Authors: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What is a wandering light?

If man did not possess the marvelous gift of imagination, we might not have superstitions at all. Even if a person did not study the phenomena of nature, it seems that individual superstitions will never die. The will-o'-the-wisp has been the subject of many amazing stories for centuries.

Many legends were told by travelers who lost their way in the swamps and got out of them only thanks to a blue light that seemed to dance in front of them, showing the way. It was something elusive. People thought that the will-o'-the-wisp was also an evil spirit dragging them to their death. The will-o'-the-wisp has another name - "dead man's candle".

In England, in different parts of it, this phenomenon was called differently. Pale bluish flames in swamps and swamps were seen by people in Germany, and in Scotland, Ireland, and even in Venezuela. Sometimes the blue light glows in one place, but more often it wanders. From time to time he appears and disappears. Its Latin name is gnis fatus, which means stupid fire.

The blue light appears as a result of the glow of swamp gases, which are released from rotten plants and animals that have fallen into the bog. One of these gases is a mixture of hydrogen and phosphorus. In dry air, this mixture bursts into flame - that's the will-o'-the-wisp.

But why is this fact the cause of so many superstitions? Perhaps the fact is that the will-o'-the-wisp was often observed near churches, where the soil and climate are favorable for such phenomena. And when people tried to follow the spark, they eventually lost it, since these are just luminous gases.

In Wales today, peasants believe in the following explanation for the will-o'-the-wisp. Years ago, Saint David promised the people of Wales that not one of them would die without seeing the light it would bring forth in the churchyard. Since then, the people of Wales believe that the will-o'-the-wisp is a ghost that came from the church fence to take away the soul of the deceased.

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Brain of a criminal as evidence 16.03.2017

Sometimes people do illegal things simply because they didn’t think about the consequences, or because they obeyed some impulse, or just for fun. And it is quite difficult to distinguish someone who "just didn't think" from someone who really wanted to do exactly what he did, for the sake of some kind of benefit - you need to look for motives, delve into psychology, etc. But the task can be to simplify if you include neuroscience in the case.

Reed Montague (Read Montague) and his colleagues from the Virginia Polytechnic University and other US research centers compared the brain activity of people who were asked to do an illegal thing: according to the scenario, the participants in the experiment, several dozen men and women, had to carry some " contraband" in the suitcase. In some cases, it was known that the suitcase contained “contraband”, while in others it was required to choose from two or five suitcases, one of which contained something that was not allowed, and then you could only guess what you were carrying with you. The probability that you would be caught also depended on whether there was a guard at the checkpoint - there were ten such checkpoints, and at some there were no guards.

An article in PNAS says that the scans showed a clear difference in brain function between those who took the suitcase, being sure that it contained "contraband", and those who were not sure and took the suitcase "just like that." However, these differences were clearly manifested only when the participants in the experiment saw in advance which checkpoints had guards and which did not, and only then chose a suitcase for themselves.

In this case, we are not talking about behavior - everyone had to carry the suitcase one way or another - but about the state of the brain. For some reason, the difference between intentional misconduct and unintentional arose only when a person could assess the degree of risk, that is, the number of guards and the likelihood of choosing the "wrong" suitcase. By and large, we see here that at the level of the brain, confidence in the incompetence of one's actions is clearly different from the situation when a person simply does something for the sake of the process itself, hoping that everything will work out.

True, although we have said that something like this neurobiological test could help forensic scientists distinguish between reputable criminals and unintentional ones, it is not clear how exactly this should work in practice. It is necessary to clarify that in this case, it was not the background activity of the brain that was determined, which could be the “calling card” of the criminal (in general, the question is whether there is such a “background activity” in nature, unless in mentally ill people), but about situational changes in work of nerve centers. That is, if we have a criminal situation, the brain can work this way or that, and depending on the result, we can judge the intentions of a person.

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