mixingmemory | December 20, 2006More than a week ago, Razib wrote an unfortunate little post in which he displayed all sorts of poor judgment. Since it's short, I'm going to quote the entire post here, including his updates.
The virginity thread generated a lot of response. The virgin lot of the nerd, ah, so cliche. And yet now I'm having a really weird moment, I'm at the local wine bar and a very attractive hostess1 is recommending books in the science fiction genre to another (far less attractive) hostess. So far I've heard Ender's Game, Hyperion and Snow Crash tossed off as appropriate for a "newbie." Is this the Twlight…
mixingmemory | December 20, 2006I'm going to be traveling tomorrow, so I'm spending today getting ready. Instead of a long post about research, I thought I'd link you to a paper Stephen E. G. Lea by in press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For those of you who don't know, Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a target article (the linked paper is a target article), followed by peer commentaries on that article, and then the target article's author's response to those commentaries. The discussion of this paper should be pretty interesting. Here's the abstract:
Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong…
mixingmemory | December 19, 2006One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory (which I've talked about before, here). Starting from the premise that cognition is for action, it argues that concepts are represented in the same brain systems that directly serve perception and action. In the realm of memory, Arthur Glenberg put it this way1:
Suppose that memory and conceptualization work in the service of perception and action. In this case, conceptualization is the encoding of patterns of possible physical interaction with a three- dimensional world. These…
mixingmemory | December 18, 2006A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of the work in the poster (it's about negative numbers being represented on a mental number line). Apparently, nothing. But in the process of looking for more information, I came across another paper that might be even more interesting.
The poster was inspired by work showing that we may represent positive numbers on a "mental number line." In one experiment testing the mental number line hypothesis…
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006Congratulations to Pharyngula, winner of the 2006 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Congratulations to Bad Astronomy Blog for giving PZ a run for his money, too. I finished last, but given the fact that my traffic is much, much smaller than all of the other finalists, that's not so bad. Thanks to everyone who voted for me.
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006OK, the last two posts with quotes from philosophers were at least remotely relevant to recent discussions on this blog. These quotes will be completely irrelevant, but they've stuck with me since I first read them at least a decade ago, and have been on my mind recently, so I thought I'd post them. They're from letters by Nietzsche to friends Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner's widow, and Jacob Burckhardt, a historian, written in January, 1889, soon after his "psychotic break." The translations are from here (where you an read other January, 1889 letters).
Letter from January 3, 1889 to Cosima…
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006Speaking of studies that make you go "wow," I recently read a very recent one that really surprised me, and thought I'd describe it here.
Memory researchers are famous for coming up with different types of memory, sparking years of research and debate just trying to determine whether two particular types of memory are really different. One such debate has been over the implicit-explicit distinction. Implicit memory is, to quote the classic paper from which I stole the title of this post, "the nonconscious influence of previous experiences on the performance of tasks that do not require…
mixingmemory | December 14, 2006Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but the coolest ever just for the sheer implausibility of the results has to be Daniel Simons and Daniel Levins' "real-world interaction" change blindness experiment. It simply boggles the mind. First, a little bit about change blindness.
Check out this scene, and see how long it takes you to figure out what changes when the scene flashes. I'll give you a moment…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2006Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're relevant to the attitude towards science that some atheists take. The essays were written in the 1930s (most of them during the Spanish Civil War), but as is often the case with Ortega y Gasset, they're infused with a prescience that insures that they're still relevant today, and will continue to be…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2006Humans are strange animals. We have such a deep need for social order that, when that order is threatened, we'll do irrelevant things in an effort to preserve it. For example, when people are told that the conviction rate for a particular crime is low, they'll assign harsher punishments to individuals who commit that crime1. Because the low conviction rate is perceived as a threat to social order, they take it out on the next person associated with that threat, even though increasing one person's punishment does nothing to actually affect the perceived threat. Since terrorism is clearly one…
mixingmemory | December 12, 2006In the paper I discussed the other day, Atran and Norenzayan argue that one of the most important factors in determining whether a religious narrative is successful is how memorable it is. Easily remembered narratives get passed on, while difficult to remember narratives are forgotten. Thus, successful religious narratives will likely exhibit features that make them memorable. Norenzayan and Atran hypothesize that the feature shared by successful religious narratives (and cultural narratives in general) is that "they correspond to a minimally counterintuitive (MCI) cognitive template that…
mixingmemory | December 11, 2006
Over at A Brood Comb, Tanasije Gjorgoski posts a quote from Hegel's Philosophy of Logic that is one of my favorites. I used to use part of it all the time in discussions with people (mostly scientists) who thought that all metaphysics was nonsense to be avoided at all cost.
The Atomic philosophy forms a vital stage in the historical evolution of the Idea. The principle of that system may be described as Being-for-itself in the shape of the Many. At present, students of nature who are anxious to avoid metaphysics turn a favourable ear to Atomism. But it is not possible to escape metaphysics…
mixingmemory | December 10, 2006So far, Mixing Memory is not in last place in the voting for "best science blog"! That's saying something, given that this blog is probably the lowest traffic blog on the list by a rather large margin. If you want to vote to insure that Mixing Memory finishes second to last, instead of last, you can go here (if you've already voted once, that's OK; you can vote once every 24 hours).
mixingmemory | December 10, 2006Apparently, there's another new brain blog on ScienceBlogs, though I only learned about it because Bora linked to it. So, a warm welcome to Neurontic.
While I'm linking to other SBers, Shelley of Retrospectacle has a nice interview with Irene Pepperberg, the parrot lady. It looks like Dr. Pepperberg could use some help, funding-wise, so if you're still not sure what to get people for Christmas, you might think about buying them an Alex t-shirt.
Finally, in comments to yesterday's post on cussing and memory, Michael of Peripersonal Space mentioned this paper in which memory for the location…
mixingmemory | December 9, 2006A few days ago, there was an interesting discussion of swear words in the blogosphere (my contribution was a map of Louisiana... don't ask). Like any good cognitive psychologist with obsessive compulsive disorder, upon reading the swear words posts, I thought to myself, "What have I read in the literature about swear words?"
The answer is, not much. In fact, the only studies that I can recall well enough to write about without having to do any actual work other than pressing keys on a keyboard weren't actually about swear words, but about words with a negative emotional valence. Kensinger…
mixingmemory | December 8, 2006This was originally posted on the old blog on 1/5/05. I'm reposting it here, with a few editorial ommissions (contextual; references to things from back then that won't make sense here), because of our recent discussion of religion. Hopefully I'll be able to post about some of the empirical work over the next few days, including a study on memory and religion published by the authors of the theory described in this post and their colleagues.
A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition
The cognitive science and neuroscience of religion have become hot areas of research over the last several…
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006You can go here to get the links for all the categories, or here to vote for the best science blog. You can vote once a day, apparently. Voting ends December 15.
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006Since it's come up a lot, here's a recent discussion of Anselm's Ontological Argument in the philosophical literature (via OPP).
Millican, P. (2004). The one fatal flaw in Anselm's Aagument. Mind, 113, 437-476.
Anselm's Ontological Argument fails, but not for any of the various reasons commonly adduced. In particular, its failure has nothing to do with violating deep Kantian principles by treating 'exists' as a predicate or making reference to 'Meinongian' entities. Its one fatal flaw, so far from being metaphysically deep, is in fact logically shallow, deriving from a subtle scope ambiguity…
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006Is it wrong that I find this absolutely hilarious? It may be my son's new favorite song, too.
Someone should pass this on to David Chalmers. That zombie clearly exhibits all the signs of consciousness.
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006I should have posted about this yesterday, but, well, I'm a slacker. One of my favorite blogs, OmniBrain, has moved to ScienceBlogs. Both Stephen and Sandra are great bloggers, and they always manage to have fun with cognitive and brain sciences.
Stephen is a perception researcher, but I try not to hold that against him. He's done some cool work, though. Some of you might find this paper interesting, for example.
Sandra, in addition to her lighthearted blogging, also posts on important mental health issues, which has been something generally lacking on ScienceBlogs. She also makes really…