Video of the Royal Society event on 16th-17th of October – ‘Mental processes in the human brain’, is now available online. I strongly recommend the first talk, by Dan Schacter, which is about the active, constructive, nature of human episodic memory and why it might be built like that (answer: because it is designed to subserve the flexible recombination of past experiences to predict the future)
Author: tomstafford
Hey baby, show me your stats
The Statz Rappers “What would you say if I told you my Cohen d was .30?”:
These guys are so sig…
joke
What’s the difference between a psychologist and a magician?
A psychologist pulls habits out of rats
Student Blogging Scholarship
Scholarships-ar-us.org are offering $5000 in fee-money as part of their ‘Student Blogging Scholarship’. You can vote for your favourite student blogger from among the top ten finalists here.
There is only one neuroscientist in the final 10: Shelley Batts, a 3rd-year Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, who blogs at Retrospectacle. Shelley would love to have your vote, and the money would help put her through school, promote blogging and promote neuroscience – all good things in my book!
Vote for Shelley here. Voting ends midnight Nov 5th.
Hello Canada!
CBC listeners – you can find my article about why email is addictive here
Mind Hacks readers, you can hear me talking, briefly, on CBC Radio 1 about this topic. You need to click here and then click on a city in a timezone where it is currently 2pm (i’m on at about ten passed two). At 19:10 UK time you want to be listening to Halifax
not your average PSY101 slide
I’m putting together my lectures for the visual perception part of PSY101 (which I’m teaching in a few weeks). I was so proud of this particular slide that I had to share it:
Long-time readers of Mindhacks.com will know what I’m on about. Original paper available from the Homepage of Rodrigo Quian Quiroga
Why email is addictive (and what to do about it)
Email is addictive
Like lots of people who sit in front of a computer all day, I am addicted to email. This worries me for two reasons. The first is the sheer strength of my compulsion. I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am suppossed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.
This is all rather sad, but the second reason I am worried by my email addiction is that I work in a psychology department and we’re supposed to understand how these things work. Now email isn’t a drug – it doesn’t deliver a chemical into your bloodstream. Yet it is clearly addictive. I’m a normal rational person (which is to say I’m just normally maladjusted) and I know that I don’t need to check my email as often as it do – certainly not immediately after checking it the first time for Goodness’ sake! – but still I am compelled. What’s going on, and can psychological science help me out?
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Berkeley’s Cherry
I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted: it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry, since it is not a being distinct from sensations. A cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind, because they are observed to attend each other. Thus, when the palate is affected with such a particular taste, the sight is affected with a red colour, the touch with roundness, softness, &c. Hence, when I see, and feel, and taste, in such sundry certain manners, I am sure the cherry exists, or is real; its reality being in my opinion nothing abstracted from those sensations. But if by the word cherry you mean an unknown nature, distinct from all those sensible qualities, and by its existence something distinct from its being perceived; then, indeed, I own, neither you nor I, nor any one else, can be sure it exists.
George Berkeley Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous
defining the field of psychology
Several decades ago, an eminent psychologist defined the field of psychology as ‘a bunch of men standing on piles of their own crap, waving their hands and yelling “Look at me, look at me!”’ Fortunately, things have changed quite a bit over the years, and the field is no longer composed entirely of men.
Daniel Gilbert, Are psychology’s tribes ready to form a nation?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol.6 No.1 January 2002.
the forbidden experiment
Rebecca Saxe, a psychologist from MIT, reviews Encounters with Wild Children by Adriana S. Benzaqu√©n, a history of the fascination that scientists have had with children who grow-up isolated from human contact. To raise a child without the influence of culture is the ‘forbidden experiment’, the test theorised by philosophers of human nature to reveal our ‘true selves’ (is man a beast or an angel underneath?). Some have thought that wild-children offer a natural occurance of this forbidden experiment, but at route, Benzaqu√©n argues, this idea doesn’t even make sense (quoting Saxe):
But here’s the catch: the forbidden experiment may belong to a smaller group of experimental problems that persistently seem meaningful but are not. Intuitively, we expect that while human nature interacts with human society in a typical child’s development, the natural and the social are in principle independent and distinguishable. If this intuition is wrong, the forbidden experiment is incoherent.
More at the Boston Review: The Forbidden Experiment: What can we learn from the wild child? Rebecca Saxe reviews ‘Encounters with Wild Children’ by Adriana S. Benzaqu√©n
interested in words
A classic quote from R.D. Laing of anti-psychiatry fame:
I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven’t got words for. For instance, the word “paranoia.” It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don’t think that he is. But we haven’t got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.
What a wiki is good for
Matt and I researched and co-wrote Mind Hacks using a wiki (MoinMoin). The wiki was just right for what we were doing – a brief, intense project with lots of information which needed efficient sharing and storing. Our use of the wiki was as part of the process, rather than aiming to produce a public, finished project (like say Wikipedia). We loved using the wiki as a provisional, shared, short-term memory – an ideal note taking device which allowed us to explore the ideas and information in Mind Hacks without getting bogged down by it all. We loved it so much that we’ve written an article about what wikis are and our view of how they are best used for the O’Reilly Network, What Is a Wiki (and How to Use One for Your Projects) – let us know what you think!
after-effect illusions
There’s an illusion popular on youtube.com right now here. Have a look – it’s a motion after-effect illusion. These are discussed in the book (Hack #25). The basic story is the same for all after-effects – continuous exposure to something causes a shift in sensitivity. For continuous motion this means that the visual system shifts its baseline so that, subsequently, stillness looks like movement in the opposite direction to the adapted-to direction. The nice thing about this demo is that is shows that you can have separate motion after-effects in different parts of your visual field. My top tip is to look at your hand at the end of the video for an extra-weirdness effect.
Also today someone asked me how the moving green dot illusion works. Answer: again, i think, it is an after-effect. The purple dots create a colour after-effect, a green dot. All the separate after-effects are joined together by the phi-phenomenon (Hack #27) to give an illusion of one single, moving, green dot.
To understand why we get after-effects, check out Hack #26 (‘Get Adjusted’). Which makes this post the biggest plug for the book I’ve done in a long while!
it’s your brain, stupid
Language Log presents a post that acts as a case study of the danger of taking neuroscientific evidence, essentialising it and extrapolatating to policy. On this occasion, policy relating to how you teach reading in schools to the two sexes.
Link: Language Log on David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist
Japanese War Tuba Hack
Via badscience.net, the Japanese War Tuba Hack! (Or maybe we’ll call it “improve sound localisation by increasing interaural distance” or something).
Similarly the way your visual system calculates depth from the different images that your two eyes get, you use the difference in when sounds arrive at your ears to calculate their location. Bigger distance between the ears means bigger differences in arrival times, means more sensitivity in detecting sound location. How do you increase the distance between the ears? Ear horns! Don’t they look great?
Are you comfortably numb?
This friday the Royal Insitution is asking Are you comfortably numb?, with an event about what we can learn about consciousness from unconsciousness:
Until very recently it was thought that consciousness couldn’t be studied scientifically, but now the drive to find out how your brain can make you self-aware is one of the most significant areas of new research. What’s more, scientists are now making headway with some of the big questions. What is consciousness? How can we hope to study it empirically when it’s all about each person’s subjective experience?
Some clues to these answers may come from studying anaesthesia. When you go under anaesthesia you’re in a strange position with regard to consciousness. It’s a much deeper oblivion than sleep, but we all know stories of people becoming aware during surgery. It even appears that patients under perfectly adequate anaesthesia can still hear, and in one experiment, patients were able to learn while under!
The event features Prof Mike Alkire & Prof Peter Sebel and is Chaired by Baroness Susan Greenfield. Date & Time: Friday 12 May 2006, 7.00pm–8.30pm, and tickets are £8/£5 for members and concessions.
If you’d like an even more in-depth look at the topic, you can join the preceding day-long Consciousness and Anaesthesia meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine.
Mind Hacks 