The good news: there has been an invention and it looks like it’s commercially valuable and is probably going to be patentable. The bad news: it’s your job to figure out who should be named as an inventor on the patent application. Test your knowledge or your instincts in what has been called “One of the muddiest concepts in the muddy metaphysics of the patent law.” Which of the following (if a...

Human sexual instincts can become fixated on a wide variety of targets, resulting in behaviours ranging from harmless fetishism to child abuse. The recent flood of investigations into historic cases in the UK has brought child protection issues to the top of the news agenda and shown that society is still far from addressing these problems in a rational, evidence-based way maximising harm reduc...

While Professor of Solfège...and Harmony at the Geneva Conservatory of Music, he was both interested and troubled by his students’ rhythmic problems. He noticed that one of his students, despite his musical problems, was capable of walking rhythmically. His observation caused him to conclude that people possessed musical rhythm instinctively, but did not transfer these instincts to fulfill thei...

In the " General Considerations " one finds a short exposition on the " Present Position of Psychotherapyoutlining the development of this new branch from Freud via Adler and Jung to Stekel. Here the author states that one of the most important results of analysis is the insight into the development of instincts, into the dynamics of the conscious mind, of repression, and of dreams. The conflic...

The author of "Mind in the Making" has scored another triumph and has given us in "Youth and the Race" a psychologically truthful picture of the real boy. "The role which racial instincts play in the emotions, intellect, and will of children," says Professor Swift in his preface, "has been the subject of many investigations in recent years by those interested in the psychology of childhood. The...

Most observers have agreed that the theory of human behavior derived from the assumption of selfish rationality is inadequate to describe human behavior and human organizations (Rousseau et al., 1998). The issue is what other approach to theory building will provide an adequate theoretical toolkit for human behavior. We argue in this essay that evolutionary theory is the proper foundation for t...

In the field of cognitive bioinspired robotics, we focus on autonomous development, and propose a possible model to explain how humans generate and pursue new goals that are not strictly dictated by survival. Autonomous lifelong learning is an important ability for robots to make them able to acquire new skills, and autonomous goal generation is a basic mechanism for that. The Intentional Distr...