Seed Media Group

Mixing Memory

An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.

Search this blog

Profile

No3.jpg Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.

The lovely banners were created by Anton Oetll and Todd Hartman.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

iloveyoupzmyers.jpg

.

Reading Group

The Mixing Memory Reading Group is a place for experts and non-experts alike to discuss books and papers in cognitive science.

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Blogs For All and For None

Cognitive Science and the Like

The Lesser Sciences

Philosophy

Feminists

Politics Or Close to It

Seriously Good But I Don't Know What to Call It

Other Links

Journals

June 30, 2007

The Cognitive Psychology of Baseball!

Category: Cognitive Psychology

Ah, yes, a real game (kidding, Scrabble people). If you've watched many baseball games or baseball movies, you know that one of the things that makes for a successful hitter is the ability to predict what the next pitch will...

Read on »

June 29, 2007

Dupes, All

Category: Politics

I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Anyone who reads the fundamentalist atheist blogs (you know, like the biggest blog on ScienceBlogs) knows that these people have a lot of passion and energy. They...

Read on »

The Basics of Statistics I: The Normal Distribution

Category: Statistics

So here's the first post on statistics. If you know the basics, and I suspect most of you do, then you can just ignore these posts (unless you want to check to make sure I'm getting it right). If you...

Read on »

June 28, 2007

The Cognitive Psychology of Scrabble?

Category:

I kid you not: Halpern, D.F., & Wai, J. (2007). The world of competitive Scrabble: Novice and expert differences in visuospatial and verbal vbilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(2), 79-94. Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr...

Read on »

The Basics of Statistics

Category: Blogs and Blogging

So the other day, I was talking to someone about one of the studies I was planning on posting about. I mentioned one of the results, and he said he'd really like to see the means and standard deviations. I...

Read on »

June 26, 2007

When Do Children Think Wishes Can Come True?

Category: Cognitive Development

It's now clear that by age 3, children have a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, which includes an understanding of the limits of the causal powers of thought. They know that thoughts cause behaviors and other thoughts, but they're also...

Read on »

June 25, 2007

Language, Writing, and the Spatial Representation of Events

Category: Cognitive Psychology

Picture in your head one person throwing a ball to another. How were the two people oriented spatially? Was one on the left, and the other on the right? If so, which one was on the left, and which on...

Read on »

June 24, 2007

Turn it Up (O, Child)

Category: Miscellaneous

Jonathan Rowe, over at Positive Liberty, posted a link to Ophelia from The Last Waltz. Because I've been a fan of The Band since I was a little kid, I'm upping the ante, with "Carivan" with Van, the Man, who...

Read on »

June 22, 2007

Color Opponency in Synaesthesia

Category: Cognitive Neuroscience

All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was...

Read on »

June 18, 2007

Explaining the War of the Metaphors1

Category: Cognitive Linguistics

In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes: The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in...

Read on »

Conceptual Metaphor Comment by Dr. Gibbs

Category: Cognitive Linguistics

In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously...

Read on »

June 17, 2007

What's the Conceptual Metaphor for Disingenuous?

Category: Cognitive Linguistics

In case you haven't heard about it, there's a relatively new blog in the cognitive science section of the blog world called Cognitive Approaches to Literature. They don't post very often over there, but if they ever start doing so,...

Read on »

June 16, 2007

More on Richard Rorty's Death

Category: Philosophy

First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him: After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have...

Read on »

June 12, 2007

Tomasello on Infant Pointing

Category:

Those of you who are interested in Michael Tomasello's work as a follow up to his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition may be interested in his new paper with Malinda Carpenter and Ulf Liszkowski, "A New Look at...

Read on »

June 9, 2007

R.I.P. Richard Rorty

Category: Philosophy

I just learned that Richard Rorty died Friday. I was a big fan of his work as an undergrad, and at that time both Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had a big influence on my thinking....

Read on »

June 8, 2007

The Brain Makes It Better

Category: Cognitive Psychology

About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science,...

Read on »

June 6, 2007

Motivated Cognition in Relationships, or How Motivated Cognition Can Save Your Marriage

Category: Social Cognition

Originally posted on the old blog on 4/5/06, and reposted here and now out of laziness. It's easy to see why research on motivated political reasoning/cognition has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosophere lately. It fits nicely with...

Read on »

June 5, 2007

Rhesus Monkeys Know When You Can Hear No Evil

Category: Comparative Psychology

Over the last couple decades there's been a pretty heated debate about which, if any, nonhuman animals possess a "theory of mind," that is, the ability to think about what others are thinking. Much of the research bearing on...

Read on »

June 4, 2007

Make Me Fries...

Category: Miscellaneous

I've always really liked this song, but I've never understood a single word of it. Fortunately, some guy figured them all out for me: These are apparently the actual lyrics, but how would you know?...

Read on »

Search All Blogs

Blogs in the Network

Top Five: Most Active

Top Science Stories

powered by SEED - seedmagazine.com