Throughout our lives, our brains undergo a process of gradual, ongoing, and highly variable modifications. It is perfectly normal for people to notice slight cognitive changes by their 50s. This chapter explains how our brain changes throughout our life span. New research on dementia has good news. Just like incidence of heart disease is going down, the incidence of dementia going down! Prevalence, however, or total number of cases, is going up, because there are more older adults in the population than ever before. Research shows life-long healthy habits may cut dementia risk by at least 1/3. Employing healthy habits at age 50 reduces our risk for dementia for at least 24 years. People in Blue Zones develop dementia at a 75% lower rate. Chapter explains the top ten practices to keep brain healthy and high functioning throughout life. Pushing yourself to learn something new helps you develop new neurons and new neural connections. Actions to take explained: Exercise, Mediterranean Diet, participate in Cognitive Training/Stimulation. Engage in creative pursuits. Sleep. Be mindful of medications. Higher education. Wear hearing aids. Watch heath. Avoid social isolation. Celebrate a healthy aging brain.

‘Cannabis-associated psychosis’ (CAP) refers to a chronic psychotic illness that arises in the context of significant current or past cannabis use. This chapter is an interrogation of the large-scale, multi-centre cross-sectional study of individuals with an established psychotic illness, the bipolar–schizophrenia network on intermediate phenotypes (B-SNIP). B-SNIP used biological characteristics to sub-divide individuals with psychotic illnesses into distinct sub-group,s known as ‘Biotypes’. A subtype associated with adolescent cannabis exposure, Biotype-3, was characterized to have the distinct profile of a significant excess of adolescent cannabis use histories preceding the onset of psychosis, histories of childhood abuse, distinctly preserved cognition, hippocampal morphological and neurochemical abnormalities, normal evoked and resting electrophysiology, more normal MRI grey matter patterns, near-normal saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements, and the lowest schizophrenia polygenic risk scores. Further work is necessary to study CAP in order to find treatments specific for CAP.

Adolescence is a critical window of brain development. The adolescent brain is highly plastic and undergoes developmental and biological changes that are required for proper behavioural and cognitive maturation. However, this dynamic nature of the adolescent brain places it in a state of higher vulnerability to harmful environmental manipulations, such as exposure to drugs such as cannabis. Adolescents may be at a higher risk of suffering from adverse consequences of cannabinoid exposure than the adult population. Animal research supports the hypothesis of the existence of long-term behavioural deficits in adulthood following adolescent cannabinoid exposure depending on the dose of exposure, the age of first exposure and possibly the ratio of THC:CBD.

Human studies have expanded insight about the lasting effects of adolescent cannabis use documenting structural and functional alterations in frontal and limbic regions of the brain, potentially relevant to behavioural vulnerability. Functional neuroimaging indicates that cannabis experience during adolescence is associated with perturbations in regions relevant to cognitive function such as working memory, attention, inhibitory control, and decision-making. Inconsistencies evident in the literature likely relate to variability in amount and frequency of cannabis use, potency, psychiatric comorbidity, and polysubstance use. Translational pre-clinical models help to elucidate how these factors contribute to protracted behavioural vulnerability of adolescent cannabis exposure.

With increasing legalization and medicalization of cannabis use, there is need for greater public awareness of the short- and long-term effects of cannabis use on cognition. Recent research has comprised a renewed focus on increasing the safety profile of cannabis to reduce potential harms. In this chapter, we summarize recent evidence to support that acute exposure to cannabis impairs cognitive function in humans, particularly in the domains of learning, episodic memory, attention, and processing speed. The evidence for non-intoxicating residual effects of chronic cannabis use is less consistent and there is a need for further research to investigate risk factors that may slow or prevent recovery of cognitive impairment in some regular users. We then discuss factors that confer greater risk and resilience to cognitive impairment following cannabis use and field-wide methodological challenges that need to be tackled to delineate the cognitive domains that are most vulnerable to cannabis exposure. These future directions are necessary to inform targets for preventative interventions and public health policies to mitigate the harms that people can experience when using cannabis.

This chapter examines the contributions that research in zoos has made to zoology. Much of the research conducted in zoos is concerned with the biology of captive animals. However, zoos can also be used to study the basic biology of little-known species and those that are difficult to study in the wild because they are very rare, difficult to find or for some other reason. Many of the early anatomical studies were performed on animals that died in zoos. In addition, zoo studies have included work on animal physiology, genetics, ecology, evolution, behaviour, animal personality and cognition. Some zoos have built specialist research facilities that allow carefully designed experiments to be conducted in controlled conditions in facilities integrated into exhibit designs.

This chapter focuses on questions related to human cooperation, focussing in particular on punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation. We take child development processes as a means to investigate this, drawing on fieldwork material from China and Taiwan. As anthropologists would expect, we find that: (a) cooperation is not only a cultural phenomenon but also a historical and political one; (b) reciprocity is a key feature of human cooperation, but the manifestations of this in particular fieldsites are highly variable and sometimes surprising; and (c) cooperation in one domain of life tends to spill over into other domains of life. As noted, however, we go beyond standard anthropological accounts of cooperation by adding a set of questions regarding punishment and child development – questions that, in turn, may help bring the anthropological study of cooperation into closer dialogue with work being done by scholars in other disciplines on this important topic. The goal is to develop comparative questions about ethical life: ones anchored in species-level understandings of what it is to be human and to engage in human cooperation.

Anthropologists and cognitive scientists interested in ethics and morality have much to gain from a two-way dialogue that does not shy away from constructive criticism. This chapter seeks to initiate such a conversation through an overview of three lines of recent research in cognitive science: the evolution of human morality from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology; theories that look to social institutions rather than only evolved psychological dispositions for insight into the variability of human moral dispositions; and studies of how responsibility and intentionality are ascribed in cases of wrongdoing. The final section offers some personal reflections on the methodological challenges of inter-disciplinary engagement, drawing on some of the authors’ recent research on morality and change in western Amazonia. It concludes that anthropologists can use experimental methods creatively, as a way of generating new ethnographic insights; although if genuine conversation on an equal footing is to take place, then ethnography must not only inform experimental design but also be employed to redefine concepts and generate theory.

Famously, in the Canon of Pure Reason, Kant present a practical argument to the effect that our beliefs in God and immortality are justified. I argue that reading the Critique of Pure Reason as the doctrine of method of metaphysics provides a straightforward explanation of the systematic place of Kant’s practical argument in the Canon. Customarily, the relevance of the Critique for the practical part of metaphysics is restricted to proving the theoretical undecidability of God and immortality, but the Canon clearly goes beyond establishing that. According to its positive task as the doctrine of method of metaphysics, the Critique must establish that metaphysics can achieve ‘architectonic unity’. I argue that showing that this unity is possible for metaphysics requires showing that there is conceptual space for coherently accommodating our commitment towards the existence of God and immortality within it.

This chapter provides an introduction and an overview of computational cognitive sciences. Computational cognitive sciences explore the essence of cognition and various cognitive functionalities through developing mechanistic, process-based understanding by specifying corresponding computational models. These models impute computational processes onto cognitive functions and thereby produce runnable programs. Detailed simulations and other operations can then be conducted. Understanding the human mind strictly from observations of, and experiments with, human behavior is ultimately untenable. Computational modeling is therefore both useful and necessary. Computational cognitive models are theoretically important because they represent detailed cognitive theories in a unique, indispensable way. Computational cognitive modeling has thus far deepened the understanding of the processes and the mechanisms of the mind in a variety of ways.

What counts as a philosophical issue in computational cognitive science? This chapter briefly reviews possible answers before focusing on a specific subset of philosophical issues. These surround challenges that have been raised by philosophers regarding the scope of computational models of cognition. The arguments suggest that there are aspects of human cognition that may, for various reasons, resist explanation or description in terms of computation. The primary targets of these “no go” arguments have been semantic content, phenomenal consciousness, and central reasoning. This chapter reviews the arguments and considers possible replies. It concludes by highlighting the differences between the arguments, their limitations, and how they might contribute to the wider project of estimating the value of ongoing research programs in computational cognitive science.

Many of the problems that human minds need to solve – including learning concepts, causal relationships, and languages – require making informed inferences from limited data. Bayesian models of cognition consider how an ideal agent should solve these problems, drawing on ideas from probability theory, statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.  The resulting models can then be used to understand human behavior, identifying in formal terms the knowledge that human minds draw on when solving these problems and identifying potential mechanisms by which their solutions might be implemented. This chapter provides an introduction to Bayesian models of cognition, starting with the basic principles of probability theory and then considering more advanced topics such as graphical models, causal learning, hierarchical Bayesian models, and Markov chain Monte Carlo. The chapter ends with a brief review of recent theoretical developments.

This chapter shows that Hegel’s discussion of cognition in his Logic fits his previous conclusions on teleology. I argue first that both cognising and acting are analysed by Hegel as processes that have an inner purpose. I, then, explain what Hegel calls being alive ‘for itself’. For being alive for itself, Hegel requires that a concept be realised in a medium that is itself of an ideal, inner purposive character. The objectification of teleology in a purposive element, one that sustains its own existence, is the source of an ‘imperishable life’, as Hegel puts it –the life of a concept qua concept. The upshot of my entire discussion is that Hegel’s Science of Logic succeeds in making sense of the idea that an objective activity can be the accomplished realisation of a purpose and, indeed, of a purpose for itself.