Cognitive Science:
Most people are not stupid (?) permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
More Singularity stuff. I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid, says Eliezer Yudkowsky in response to my summary of his talk. The last line of his post says: "I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid." So...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:07 PM • 9 Comments •
Going for the pain of paying permlink
Category: Culture
For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 6:59 PM • 1 Comments •
Addiction is not a "disease" (?) permlink
Category: Culture
Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 7:07 PM • 20 Comments •
Babies can understand meaning behind dog barks? permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
We know that dogs can read human faces, it turns out that babies can infer the meaning of different dog barks: New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks - despite little or no...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:01 PM • 2 Comments •
Good to the bone; adducing honesty via imaging permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
Update: See Ed Yong. Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert: The research was designed...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:14 AM • 2 Comments •
Neurotypicals are irrational beasts permlink
Category: Culture
Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts: But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain,...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:33 AM • 3 Comments •
Empathy & neurobiology permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
Related to yesterday's post,The neural bases of empathic accuracy: Theories of empathy suggest that an accurate understanding of another's emotions should depend on affective, motor, and/or higher cognitive brain regions, but until recently no experimental method has been available to...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:13 AM • 0 Comments •
Staring at "freaks" permlink
Category: Genetics
Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To: "When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that," Rosenberg said. "All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:38 PM • 4 Comments •
Your neuro-personality in graphics permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
The Neurocritic points me to a paper, The brain structural disposition to social interaction: Social reward dependence (RD) in humans is a stable pattern of attitudes and behaviour hypothesized to represent a favourable disposition towards social relationships and attachment as...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:16 AM • 0 Comments •
Categorizing ideas & humans permlink
Category: Culture
Andrew Gelman has a post up titled Difficulties in trying to understand the views of others, responding to a Robin Hanson taxonomy outline the motivations of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Gelman is skeptical of Hanson's glosses of each group. The...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:04 AM • 13 Comments •