Omni Brain

What I'm actually doing for the government

Category: Neuroart • Neuroscience

Posted by The Omnibrain at 8:30 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Watermelon Brains

Category: Neuroart • Neuroscience • Weird

It's time again for fruit and veggie carving season. And what could be better than a carved brain. This time it's out of a watermelon.

Enjoy!

-via Neatorama-

Posted by The Omnibrain at 3:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Psi. A debate.

Category: Academia • Parapsychology • Psychology

When everyone thought extrasensory perception had disappeared into the same embarrassing past as phrenology it came back with a vengeance. In a recent article by Daryl Bem titled Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect evidence was presented that some have found very hard to ignore. Others have completely trashed the experimental methods and statistics (obviously... it IS science after all). There are a number of available pdf's of both the article and the commentary floating around the internet if you do a google search.

There is also an interesting (if you have about 2 hours) debate on youtube with the author and a skeptic or two that was just posted online.

Posted by The Omnibrain at 9:34 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

So I walked into the women's locker room and no one saw me!

Category: Charity • Humor • Neuroscience • Psychology

And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla.

If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order the book and do the complete opposite - donate to charity. According to the authors:

If you pre-order or purchase the paperback edition of The Invisible Gorilla on or before June 11, 2011, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons will jointly donate $5 to the charity you choose. The charity selected most often at the end of the promotion will receive an additional $2000 donation! We will donate up to a total of $25,000.

Whether you want to be a skeevy (is that spelled right?) locker room peeping tom or a god like charity giving machine you should definitely pre-order the book. I really enjoyed it.

* For this to work the women must be wearing only black shirts or white shirts and be passing two basketballs. In addition, you should make sure the women are counting the passes and have very low working memory capacity.

Also, if you want an idea of what the book is about keep reading...

Read on »

Posted by The Omnibrain at 9:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Two cool optical illusions...

Category: Art • Vision

-via neatorama and boingboing-

Someone want to build me this table?

Posted by The Omnibrain at 7:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

A blast from the past and a personal update

Category: Academia • Blogging • Chatter • Human Factors • Neuroscience • Psychology

I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months.

I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise!

About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the applied psychology route. This decision deserves a blog post of its own and over the next couple days I hope to post something about the whole process and why I decided to leave academia.

Read on »

Posted by The Omnibrain at 8:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Disney's purposeful accidental view

Category: Art • Psychology • Vision

Or forced perspective.

I suspect this is more sensitive to viewpoint than the previous post.

-via BoingBoing-

Posted by The Omnibrain at 9:11 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Walking on water

Category: Art • Vision

These installations (or more precisely drawings on the floor and ceiling) take advantage of our use of textures to perceive a third dimension/depth out of monocular cues. I'm curious how effective they are from different viewpoints. Perhaps there are some accidental views that make the texture completely boring instead of completely cool.

Here's some great examples:

Check out bookofjoe for some more examples.

-Via Neatorama-

Posted by The Omnibrain at 8:54 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

ionpsych... get it! hahaha.

Category: Academia • Blogging • Neuroscience • Psychology

There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not aware of any other class out there dedicated to teaching psychology and neuroscience students how to best communicate their ideas to the world.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig:

How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria, saying things like "I know it when I see it." This kind of response implies that good design can't be analyzed objectively. In a recent interview, Project Runway's Tim Gunn even claims that people should avoid consciously analyzing fashion:

Read the rest here and check out all the other great writing.

Posted by The Omnibrain at 9:10 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks