mixingmemory | February 5, 2007There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that doesn't mean we haven't learned anything about theory of mind, it does mean we may have missed some…
mixingmemory | February 2, 2007If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my old posts on moral psychology (I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, right now, but if you really want to find them, I'll do it). Well, after I discussed that research with a couple other psychologists who, it turns out, are as dissatisfied with it as I am, we decided to throw our hats into the moral psychology ring. Now, as people who study representation for a living, we all agree that the important part of moral decision making is in how people represent moral situations, so that's how we're approaching it. We've got…
mixingmemory | February 2, 2007Sorry I haven't been posting much lately, but I'm in the process of rolling out a couple new experiments, and the resulting headaches have left me with little time or energy. However, next week, there will be 7 science posts in 7 days, because the Just Science challenge begins on the 5th! If you haven't heard about the challenge, be sure to visit the website, and if you're interested in signing up, go to the sign up page. So far, 60 blogs are participating. Sixty! We should get some great science bloggin' next week.
mixingmemory | January 22, 2007If you're a New Scientist reader, you may have come across this article titled "Beauty is in the eye of your friends." The brief article (which I found via 3 Quarks Daily) describes research purporting to show that whether (heterosexual) women find a man attractive depends, in part, on whether other women find him attractive, a phenomenon called mate choice copying.
In some animal species (guppies, quail, etc.), females sometimes pick mates based in part on the choices of other females, especially more experienced ones. If an experienced female guppy likes a male, then he's probably worth…
mixingmemory | January 20, 2007Last year, I wrote two really long, boring posts about V.S. Ramachandran's ten principles of art. Those principles, mostly drawn from research on vision, included things like peak shift, symmetry, and contrast. It turns out Ramachandran may have missed a much simpler principle: people dig curves. At least, they prefer them to sharp angles.
Why curves? Well, Moshe Bar and Maital Neta1 hypothesize that "sharp transitions in a contour might convey a sense of threat, on either a conscious or a nonconscious level, and thus trigger a negative bias" (p. 645). This preference, they argue, should show…
mixingmemory | January 17, 2007So RPM of Evolgen and I were sitting around, chattin' about science blogging, when we suddenly realized that more and more, what science bloggers blog about is dictated not by science, but by anti-science. Creationists, global warming skeptics, anti-vaccine nuts, people who think the moon landing took place in New Mexico, etc. are increasingly in the science blogging driver's seat. We recognized, of course, that the anti-science people are largely to blame science bloggers dealing with anti-science, because they're the ones who keep touting their anti-science agendas, often publicly. This…
mixingmemory | January 14, 2007Welcome, everyone, to the 14th installment of the brain blogging carnival Encephalon. If you're in the United States, I hope you've got today off, and that you've at least taken a moment to think about the contribution that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. made to our society. If you're not in the United States, you're going to have to take a break from whatever you're doing, because this installment's got a hell of a lot of posts for you to read. So wherever you are, grab a cup o' joe, make sure you're in a comfortable chair, and enjoy.
Let's start, randomly, with some cognitive neuroscience.…
mixingmemory | January 13, 2007Originally posted on the old blog on 3/12/2006
My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at least something other than Darwin Day (I thought about maybe suggesting "Variation Appreciation Day," or "Hug a Mutation Day"). But objections to the name aside, I felt kind of guilty about making such a substanceless contribution to a day with what I believe are noble purposes, especially after reading (via Clark) that 53% of Americans reject evolution entirely. So I'm going to try…
mixingmemory | January 11, 2007I meant to post this a long time ago, but forgot about it. Here's the story of a cognitive neuroscientist who, using what he's learned about cognition in grad school, won $500,000 on the show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" From the article:
The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar "connectionist" neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may…
mixingmemory | January 8, 2007Via Sandra over at OmniBrain, I learned about We Have Pie Charts, where just about everything you would never describe with a pie chart is described with a pie chart. Here are two of my favorites:
A Day In the Life of Goldfish:
God's Recipe:
mixingmemory | January 5, 2007Here's an article from Physics Web (via 3 Quarks Daily) that seems appropriate, in the context of the last two posts. Here's the conclusion of the article:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the existence of an ultimate coherent truth - a complete text or "final theory". While many scientists may believe this, it is ultimately only a belief, and it is far likelier that we will endlessly find more in nature as our concepts and technology continue to evolve. Furthermore, the image suggests that the "text" of the book of nature has a divine…
mixingmemory | January 5, 2007Comments on the last post make it clear that my use of the label "scientism" is far from clear. It does not mean a rejection of science, or its methods (though I do have to roll my eyes when someone talks of the scientific method), within their sphere. It's not, for example, a rejection of methodological naturalism, which has been the topic of much discussion in the debate between ID creationists and scientists with which I'm sure many of you are intimately familiar. Instead, it is a rejection of an idea that is both old and new (by new, I mean about a century old), which states, in essence,…
mixingmemory | January 4, 2007When science replaces religion, it becomes more and more like religion, and in the minds of its worshipers, can justify the same sorts of inhumanities. Witness Richard Dawkins, todays leading worshiper of science, calling for deposed dictators to be used as guinea pigs, rather than executed (via John Hawks). He writes:
But perhaps the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient…
mixingmemory | January 3, 2007I just learned, via Brian Leiter's blog, that Robert Solomon has died. I have been a big fan since I was an undergrad, especially because his book In the Spirit of Hegel helped me to break the "Hegel code" that makes Hegel so unreadable to many. In fact, it wasn't very long ago that I had a short email conversation with Dr. Solomon about that book. I also enjoyed From Rationalism to Existentialism, What Nietzsche Really Said (which he wrote with Kathleen Higgins), and Living With Nietzsche, all three of which are good introductions to their subjects, especially for those who aren't all that…
mixingmemory | January 3, 2007It's a new year, and that means it's time for Edge.org's annual silly question. This year, in addition to giving the question to scientists and philosophers, they also gave it to business people, and even Brian Eno. As in the past, there are a lot of people in cognitive science and related fields on the list this year, so I thought I'd give you a brief look at how they answered the question, "What are you optimistic about?" Since this has to be the worst Edge.org question ever, and that's saying a lot, most of the answers are thoroughly uninteresting and unoriginal. You can almost feel the…
mixingmemory | January 2, 2007ScienceBlogs has added another brain sciences blog, Chris Chatham's Developing Intelligence. Welcome, Chris.
mixingmemory | January 1, 2007Regular cognitive science posting will resume in the very near future, but for the holiday, I thought I'd go with something a bit lighter. What's your favorite opening paragraph in a book? I've always liked the standards: Notes from the Underground and One Hundred Years of Solitude (and even Love in the Time of Cholera), for example. I'd include the opening of Growth of Soil on that list, too. But I think I've found one to add to that list. It's the opening of Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov's Oblamov, and in David Magarshak's translation, it goes like this:
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov was lying in bed…
mixingmemory | December 31, 2006In lieu of an effortful post on cognitive science while I'm relaxing for the holidays, I thought I'd say a few things about religion and Dawkins again. If you hang around ScienceBlogs, you've probably noticed the spat between the two biggest (traffic-wise) SBers, PZ Myers and Ed Brayton. Ed criticized Dawkins for signing a petition that read:
In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with…
mixingmemory | December 21, 2006I'm traveling today, so I'm posting something I wrote along time ago instead of offering anything new. This one's from the blogs early days, so I really hadn't gotten used to this blogging thing when I wrote it. Also, in the time between its original posting and now, I've learned a bit more about the study of humor in cognitive science. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll write a new post on the topic. For now, though, here's the post, originally from 11/27/04.
Cognitive Science of Humor
Much like creativity in general, the cognitive aspects of humor haven't been widely studied. While…