Psychology
omnibrain | June 19, 2007Ahh... some great research from Spain. You know when you get home from vacation you really need another vacation to get ready to go back to work. Well... it's called Post-Holiday Syndrome.
Here's the whole mess from Eurekalerts:
Millions of people will leave their working places and start their holidays in the next weeks. The daily routine will be part of the past and resting days, pictures at the seashore and summer memories will be back to stay - at least for some weeks.
Experts estimate that 35 per cent of Spanish workers between the ages of 25 and 40 will have to face the "post-holiday…
vhughes | June 19, 2007When does a large crowd become a dangerous mob? Where should architects put emergency exits to best anticipate how people will react under sudden fear? It's hard for scientists to answer these questions, mostly because the environmental situations that incite crowd behaviors can't be simulated in real life. As Arizona State University geographer Paul Torrens explains: "You couldn't stage a realistic rehearsal of an evacuation because people are not going to panic appropriately."
One way to get around this is to model the situations in virtual reality. Below are screenshots of scenes produced…
razib | June 15, 2007Tyler Cowen has a nice review in Slate (actually, a slice & summation) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's most recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb's discursive and meandering narrative delves mostly into the domains of economics, statistics and psychology, so Cowen is in a good place to tackle his argument. Myself, I was intrigued by the jeremiad against the Gaussian and Poisson distributions. Like Michael Stastny I think Taleb goes a bit too far. Nevertheless, I have to wonder about the fact that though we model characteristics like IQ as a bell curved…
sarahdasher | June 13, 2007Summer is nearly here, and beef is in the air: or at least in the mainstream media. A cursory search of Google news earlier this week turned up eighteen different stories about beef posted within a twenty-four hour period, among them: South Korea Opens to US Beef Imports, Pampered Beef Cattle Generate a Niche Profit, United Food Group Recalls More Beef, and my favorite, Roast Beef Helps Restore £9m Church.
Why is beef on everybody's brain?
Although beef production has levelled off in the U.S., global demand for beef continues to rise. According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture…
omnibrain | June 13, 2007"Pavlov's Cockroach: Classical Conditioning of Salivation in an Insect," sounds like a great paper and seriously...salivation in the cockroach! that's great stuff ;)
But this is certainly not the first time classical conditioning has been demonstrated in other animals. Heck, Eric Kandel (among others) won the Nobel prize for his work on classical conditioning and learning in Aplysia (sea slugs). If you're really excited about the salivation component of Classical Conditioning here's a little summary from Medical News Today :)
A new study, led by Makoto Mizunami and colleagues at Tohoku…
omnibrain | June 12, 2007Ever see a rat tickled? You can now - and evidently they laugh :)
[via scienceblog]
Here's another video of rats playing with their owner. I knew they could be friendly but this is something new to me. I didn't know that they could have so much personality - I was pretty sure they just crept around sewers or sat in a nest all day.
omnibrain | June 11, 2007We all know, thanks to Dan Simons and Chris Chabris (unless you've been living under a rock), that if we're really paying attention to something we can miss something else entirely... like a gorilla walking into the middle of a room and banging on its chest. Check out the video here. (Clearly this won't work for you now since you know what to look for, but there are some other examples on Dan Simons'' site that you can check out as well.)
In any case ... on to the main story here which is really the complete opposite of Inattentional Blindness. This time the gorilla suit was meant to bring…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007Simon Baron Cohen writes in entelechy on theories of imagination (scroll down):
In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination - a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory - be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artefacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture.
Let's start with a few definitional…
omnibrain | June 4, 2007Can dogs perform deduction? Evidently so...
The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place.
Original Story
clock | June 3, 2007Two ancient posts of mine, Why Creationists Need To Be Creationists and Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology are getting heavy traffic right now from Stumbleupon and Reddit. I posted a comment there trying to get people to come and see the much more recent update: More than just Resistance to Science, from which I'd like to promote a recent comment by Tree:
Thank you for drawing attention to the importance of understanding Phatic Language. While I was raised in a very formal family and as a youngster had an intuitive grasp that the purpose of protocol and etiquette is…
neurontic | June 2, 2007Charlie Rose recently ran a show billed as "A discussion about the legacy of Sigmund Freud." I'd urge anyone interested in the impact of neuroscience on psychotherapeutic practice to take the time to watch it.
The title is a bit misleading. It's less a discussion of Freud's contributions than it is a free wheeling conversation about how the fields of neuroscience and psychotherapy are beginning to overlap--and, perhaps more importantly, how understanding the biology of the brain promises to revolutionize the practice of psychotherapy.
The participants are seriously heavy hitters: There's…
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
omnibrain | May 29, 2007Growing up I used to read Omni magazine and would always see all sorts of devices that supposedly could induce lucid dreams or tapes that had subliminal messages recorded along with Bach to create special brain states where you'd be particularly receptive to messages like - "you will be psychic... you can lift objects with your mind...you will be rich and successful... you will quit smoking crack...etc etc etc" Let me tell you - I'm not psychic or rich! Although...I never did take up smoking crack so maybe the tapes did work! I eventually forgot about these tapes and devices for many years…
omnibrain | May 26, 2007Here's what PsyBlog has to say about Omni Brain:
Best humorous (but still scientific) psychology blog
The danger with mixing science and humour is slipping into the 'geek trap' where clever people try to be too clever. Omni Brain easily avoids this. Funky finger pictures on this post about sexual orientation and finger length.
Just to let you guys know... the only way we avoid being too clever is by not actually being very clever ;) haha...
Thanks for the props!
Check out the rest of their psychology blog reviews (which are great!) here.
Oh, and the beanie baby Freud doesn't have anything…
omnibrain | May 25, 2007Enjoy this great video where Dwight from The Office is trained with Pavlovian Classical Conditioning!
Wasn't that great?!
omnibrain | May 23, 2007
Sometimes headlines really rub me the wrong way. This happens to be a consistent topic that always bugs me - finger length. It's interesting in that finger length is correlated with testosterone levels and that affects all sorts of cognitive abilities - but come on! Really?! Shouldn't they be spending their time trying to figure out how to ungay these people? (That was sarcastic by the way!)
Here's the first story from EurekAlert:
Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that sexual orientation has a real effect on how we perform mental tasks such as navigating with a map in a…
omnibrain | May 23, 2007Ok... not really at home (Are they really suggesting in the picture that you can do it yourself?). There are now some relatively simple consumer devices on the market that will let your Psychiatrist wave his magic wand over your head, helping to alleviate your depressive symptoms in his office without checking you into a hospital and knocking you out. I'm curious whether they need an MRI before doing this procedure? It doesn't look like it's too precise. In any case... here's the device:
And a description from Engadget:
The devices employ a technique known as transcranial magnetic…
omnibrain | May 22, 2007Since the whole internet seems to be especially preoccupied with visual illusions in the last couple days, here's another one:
If you don't see it ... start moving back from your monitor.