Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
September 29, 2006
Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously modify their victims' participants' behavior.
In some ways, this…
September 27, 2006
Thousands of police departments use face composite software to help create a picture of crime suspects. You've probably seen one of the systems in use on TV: witnesses build a picture of the suspect by choosing each individual facial feature -- hair, eyes, nose, and so on. But what happens when…
September 26, 2006
I've just learned about what so far look to be two great new blogs. In the order I heard about them:
Sound and Mind
Written by two cognitive musicologists, "Sound and Mind will primarily provide links to articles in journals and blogs on music and cognitive science, commentary on those articles,…
September 26, 2006
My aunt Jeannie died of brain cancer when she was just in her 30s. Though her death was tragic, her illness did allow me to witness firsthand a most curious vision impairment. A few months after her cancer was diagnosed, she suffered a stroke in her right visual cortex. Since the visual cortex in…
September 22, 2006
Musical complexity is bafflingly difficult to define. Is it just a lot of notes? Would a 100-note trill (the same two notes alternating over and over again) be more complex than 50 completely random notes? Most people would probably say "no." But what about the same trill versus just 3 random notes…
September 21, 2006
The data-collection phase of the SAT Challenge is complete. By any measure, this was the most successful Casual Friday ever. We maxed out the generous 500 responses I allotted for the challenge, the most ever responses to a Casual Friday study -- despite the fact that participants were warned the…
September 20, 2006
Encephalon, the biweekly neuroscience carnival, will be hosted at Omnibrain this week. Send in links to your favorite neuroscience posts, pronto! Don't wait, or you'll forget, like I usually do!
September 20, 2006
In 2001, Mark Orr and Stellan Ohlsson found that experts preferred more complex bluegrass music compared to non-experts, but there was no difference in preferences with jazz music. The model they were using to describe music preferences did not appear to describe all types of music. But what if the…
September 20, 2006
Simon Owens has posted the results of his survey of diversity in the blogosphere at his site Bloggasm.
Here are the results for the blogosphere as a whole:
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native…
September 19, 2006
There are just over 24 hours remaining in the Blogger SAT Challenge.
The challenge has gained substantial notice in the blogosphere, with dozens of blogs linking to it, including at least one top-20 blog. I expect that when we publish the results, there will be even more interest in it. So....
If…
September 19, 2006
A week ago Friday we conducted a little survey about musical preferences. Readers were asked to listen to three different clips, then say which music they preferred. We promised you we'd be back to let you know what the preferences were, and whether they said anything about how preferences are…
September 18, 2006
Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles has begun a new blog on the origin of speech: Babel's Dawn. If it lives up to the promise of its first post, it may prove to be a valuable resource. The blog
aims to become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate…
September 15, 2006
The New York Times recently published sample top-scoring essays from the new written component of the SAT test in order to show the type of work that was likely to score highly. Several bloggers, as well as the Times itself, have noted that the writing isn't exactly compelling.
In fact, I've been…
September 14, 2006
Color categories, as we pointed out in this post, are remarkably consistent, even across different cultures and languages. "TLTB" pointed out in the comments that for people with color blindness, the color categories might not make much sense. He brought up an excellent point, one that becomes…
September 13, 2006
So, researchers have found a way to "edit" the memories of rats. Rats can easily be trained to avoid an electrically charged region of their cages. Then researchers injected a chemical into the rats' memory centers, and successfully "erased" the memory, so the rats no longer knew to avoid getting…
September 12, 2006
A fascinating press release is starting to gain attention.
Researcher Ian Walker equipped his bike with a precise sensor that measured exactly how much room British drivers gave him when they passed. After tracking thousands of motorists, he was able to make an astonishing claim: when he was…
September 12, 2006
The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of a new experiment purporting to show brain activity in a woman who was in a "persistent vegetative state." For a good summary of the experiment, visit Mind Hacks. Then take a look at Brain Ethics' analysis. I think the best analysis comes from…
September 11, 2006
The World Color Survey is a massive project which attempts to understand how colors are categorized in different languages. The researchers studied 110 different languages, none of which had a written component, which ensured that only spoken word categories would be used to describe the colors.
Do…
September 11, 2006
It's no surprise that on the fifth anniversary of the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, most newspapers and many blogs are offering reflections and analysis of what happened. This morning I asked my kids, who were in the third and fourth grade on the day of the attacks, if they remembered what…
September 8, 2006
We've recently seen a fascinating study on music preference: What causes people to prefer certain songs to others? Why do some of us love Jewel but others think she's a bad poet and a worse singer?
We're planning on writing up the results of that study for Cognitive Daily next week, but in the…
September 8, 2006
Take a look at this little video of a baby monkey. It's just three days old. Isn't it just adorable?
Oh, there's also this little bit about how the monkeys imitating humans is similar to earlier research on human babies, suggesting that it's a social adaptation that is common not to just humans,…
September 7, 2006
The Wall Street Journal has an article discussing the accuracy of patient survey results in determining the effectiveness of HMOs. I'm not sure if it's behind a paywall, so I'm going to quote liberally from the article:
Researchers from the Rand Corp. think tank, the University of California at Los…
September 6, 2006
Sometimes we think of emotions as completely separate from the more "objective" parts of the mind. You might believe that emotion can sometimes cloud your judgment, but it certainly can't affect your vision system. Or can it?
Take a look at the following image. It's my attempt to use Photoshop to…
September 5, 2006
An excellent article in American Scientist compares "animal math" with math ability in infants. Some similarities and limitations emerge. While rhesus monkeys appear to successfully understand concepts such as 1+1=2 or 1+2=3, 2+2=4 appears beyond their ken. Five-month-old babies show about the…
September 4, 2006
It's Labor Day, the kids are home from school, and Greta has to work (why is it that only professors and manual laborers work on Labor Day?), so I hope you're not expecting to see much serious thinking on CogDaily today.
However, I did promise that I'd share some of the more interesting responses…
September 1, 2006
The results are in for last week's Casual Fridays study, and the findings are ... uncertain. The task was to try to parse out the lyrics of two songs. The first came from the American TV show "So You Think You Can Dance." If you didn't get a chance to participate in the study, you can listen to it…
September 1, 2006
This week's Synapse will be at The Mouse Trap.
To submit your entry, email your post to the.synapse.carnival {AT} gmail.com
September 1, 2006
This past Wednesday, Alvaro Castillo drove a 1997 Dodge Caravan into the parking lot of Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Today's Charlotte Observer has the rest of the story:
He threw a smoke bomb onto a vehicle in the parking lot, then got two guns and ammunition out of the van…
August 31, 2006
Just by listening to music, we can learn a lot about its structures and conventions. For example, even you have no musical training, you can tell that something is wrong with this scale (it's followed by a proper C-major scale):
But we learn a lot more than just standard scales when we listen to…
August 31, 2006
I try to stay away from answering "Ask a Scienceblogger" when it strays too far from my areas of expertise. This week, the question is the following:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that […