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An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.
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.
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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
The Mixing Memory Reading Group is a place for experts and non-experts alike to discuss books and papers in cognitive science.
June 30, 2008
Category: Frame Analysis
Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense,...
Posted by Chris at 1:07 PM • 3 Comments •
June 28, 2008
Category: Cognitive Psychology
There's an interesting short paper by Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science with that title. Unfortunately, it's not yet available without a subscription (though Bloom tends to put his papers on his...
Posted by Chris at 6:02 PM • 13 Comments •
June 24, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
Here's a little tidbit from my personal life that I thought I'd share, because I find it pretty amusing. I've always ridden the bus to work, because as anyone who's spent time on a college campus knows, it's impossible to...
Posted by Chris at 4:30 PM • 15 Comments •
June 23, 2008
Category: Visual Illusions
UPDATE: I've messed with some of the images below the fold, which will hopefully make it easier for people to see the illusion without having to move all round the room. Last year, Rob Jenkins published a seriously spooky-looking illusion...
Posted by Chris at 6:35 PM • 15 Comments •
June 22, 2008
Category: Frame Analysis
There's a review of George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, in today's New York Times. You can read the review here. Some key excerpts: Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea....
Posted by Chris at 6:41 PM • 11 Comments •
June 19, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
Hahahahaha!!! From the comment section to this post: HULK SEE MOVIE, HULK LIKE SMASH THINGS, HULK F5 NEURONS EXHIBIT ABOVE-BASELINE BOLD ACTIVITY....
Posted by Chris at 5:52 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're...
Posted by Chris at 2:47 PM • 6 Comments •
June 18, 2008
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Blogs and the mainstream media have been filled with neuroscience news lately. First we learned that sarcasm happens in the brain, and then that sexual orientation is in the brain too. There was even an attempt (sarcastic, I hope) to...
Posted by Chris at 5:32 PM • 1 Comments •
June 16, 2008
Category: Visual Illusions
One of my favorite optical illusions is the rotating face, an instance of depth inversion. I like it so much that I sometimes use the above image as my avatar around the web. If you're not familiar with the...
Posted by Chris at 10:50 AM • 2 Comments •
June 11, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
If you're a depressed liberal and need to read something uplifting and inspiring, check out this profile of Adam Bender (pictured below), a great little league catcher who happens to have only one leg. Be sure to watch the video!...
Posted by Chris at 8:07 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Social Cognition
"They only care about themselves," "They're out of touch with reality," "They don't become academics." These are just some of the answers people yelled at me yesterday when I read out loud the title of a paper in the...
Posted by Chris at 4:05 PM • 8 Comments •
June 9, 2008
Category: Visual Illusions
I love afterimages and aftereffects, so I was excited to see that the 2008 winner for Best Illusion of the Year is a new afterimage illusion. To see the illusion for your self, watch this sequence of images for about...
Posted by Chris at 4:13 PM • 3 Comments •
June 5, 2008
Category: Research & Theory
This morning, while I was riding the bus to campus, I checked my email on my phone (man, I love that thing), and had a cognitive psychology topic alert from ScienceDirect. There were only three papers in the alert, but...
Posted by Chris at 11:20 AM • 6 Comments •
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