Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:
Another week of top-notch psychology and neuroscience blogging!
- Should captive cephalopods be kept in "enriched" environments? Mike Lisieski of the Cephalove blog says yes: "Generally, providing enrichment for captive cephalopods seems worth it."
- " Psychologists are starting to look at how expert dancers learn and remember dance steps and what gives them the advantage of expertise in their style." How do ballerinas make it look so easy? An interesting offering from the students of the Cognition and the Arts class.
- "Either we have stumbled onto a rather amazing discovery in terms of post-mortem ichthyological cognition, or there is something a bit off with regard to our uncorrected statistical approach." The dead salmon returns! (at Byte Size Biology)
- Rift (of the Psycasm blog) laments: "It's sad legitimate scientists need to spend time and money disproving such hokum." Sad, indeed. Telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance; The Science of Mind-Reading.
Finally, a friendly reminder to submit your favorite posts for Open Lab - only one month left!
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On your link to Psycasm, you are aware that there is a large amount of evidence for these kinds of anomalous phenomena?
See my post on his blog for some of the links.
I personally think its sad that science bloggers have to waste word count on dissing science that offends their preconceptions. Reminds me of Galileo and the Inquisition, to be honest.
I'm with #1 on that item. It wasn't long ago that phenomena such as eidetic imagery and meditative states were also considered paranormal, woo, and unfit subject matter for science. Over time as mechanisms and neurophysiological correlates were found, they became part of mainstream science. The people who had huffed & puffed about them being nonsense never even had the good manners to say they were mistaken.
Frankly what's going on here with bashing of psi research is a form of *taboo.* Social sanctions based on superstitions held by high-status tribe members. That's an antiscientific attitude and it has no place in a rational worldview.
There is no contradiction between a materialist monist view of human consciousness, or an interactionist view of human consciousness (per Chalmers), and findings that there are small, persistent, statistical effects that appear to be anomalous. In due course those effects will be accounted for with physical mechanisms, as with eidetic imagery, meditation, and even religious experience itself (the latter appears to be correlated with activity in the contralateral temporal lobe, per Michael J. Persinger, numerous peer-reviewed findings in _Perception & Motor Skills_).
Dualism and spiritual monism have been deader than doornails since the invention of the EEG and the research on REM sleep. That would be more than a half century at this point. It's time for people to get over the fear that a few minor anomalies are going to send us backward into a demon-haunted world.