Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
May 9, 2006
All the ScienceBloggers have been asked to write about the recent invention they could wipe off the face of the earth. Their answers have been the usual suspects: nuclear bombs, land mines -- truly awful stuff -- and they might be right.
However, I'm not enough of a historian to know what the full…
May 5, 2006
Every year it seems there are more and more graduation ceremonies to attend. Not just high school and college, but middle school, and even elementary and pre-school ceremonies.
All this has made us wonder. Which of these ceremonies is really worth attending? Now we all have a chance to find out,…
May 5, 2006
Last week, we asked Cognitive Daily readers to tell us what they believed was an acceptable excuse for two very different social gaffes. Here's the first scenario:
Suppose a co-worker insulted you during a meeting which involved your boss and several colleagues. The insult was audible to all, and…
May 4, 2006
Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel's hosting a discussion on who should be on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of science. There's a fairly broad consensus that Darwin, Einstein, and Newton make the cut, but rather heated debate on who should be the fourth member.
Many of Chad's readers suggest…
May 3, 2006
Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?…
May 1, 2006
Family lore has it that my uncle was influential in instituting what is now a fixture in college education: student evaluation of college instructors. He was class president at the University of Washington in the 1960s, when tensions between students and the school administrators were high, and he…
April 28, 2006
When we are wronged, we expect the wrongdoer to apologize. But some apologies just don't seem to cut the muster. As a teacher, my least favorite excuse was always this one: "Can I have an extension on the assignment? I've got a really important assignment due in _______ class." If the other class…
April 28, 2006
Last week's study generated plenty of interest: it was the fastest we've ever gotten 400 responses. The study was based on a claim by this web site that they could influence your thoughts with 98 percent accuracy using a simple math quiz. If you haven't tried it yet, unfortunately I'm going to…
April 28, 2006
The transfer of archives from the old Cognitive Daily site is now complete; all of our archives are now available here at ScienceBlogs! There really are some amazing articles back there. Here are some of my favorites from CogDaily's adolescent months:
Can our understanding of "Normal" and "…
April 27, 2006
I've now finished posting archives up through June of 2005. There's some great stuff in there -- here are some highlights:
Drumbeats alone can convey emotion
Is memory better for shocking events?
Why we can't all be divas
What makes a wine expert?
Kids' unreliability as witnesses: Hard wired into…
April 26, 2006
When two athletes are the same size and strength, what makes one better than the other? In many sports, the best athletes are the ones who can react more quickly to game situations than others. Are they just generally better at focusing their attention where it needs to be? Or have they learned…
April 26, 2006
Over the next few days I'll be dusting off the old Cognitive Daily posts and moving them over to this site. If you'll scroll down a bit to the archives section on the sidebar to the left, you'll notice that they now extend all the way back to our first post back in January of 2005. I've even…
April 25, 2006
A number of studies have found cultural differences in visual cognition. For example, Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett found that when Americans watch a short video clip of an underwater scene, they tend to recall the items in the foreground: the fish. Japanese people watching the same clip…
April 21, 2006
Cognitive Daily reader "Jokermage" pointed us to a web site which claimed that it could predict with 98 percent accuracy what site visitors would be thinking after a short quiz.
I tried the quiz, and indeed, the site appeared to "predict" my thoughts. But could it really do this with 98 percent…
April 21, 2006
Last week, we asked our readers a few questions about procrastination: how long it takes them to wake up on a typical morning, how close to the deadline they finish computing their taxes, and so on.
The basic question was, are there different types of procrastinators, or if you put off one type of…
April 20, 2006
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a…
April 19, 2006
The average 3- to 10-year-old girl in the U.S. owns eight Barbies. Only one percent of this group owns no Barbies. And every girl seems to go through similar stages with her Barbies -- first, adoration, next, ambivalence, and finally, rejection. By the time they're in middle school, most girls have…
April 18, 2006
Take a look at these two faces.
One of these women can't recognize that the other is afraid, but when asked to express fear, is still able to produce a fearful expression. Can you tell which is which?
We know the amygdala is associated with identifying scary music; we know the amygdala helps us…
April 14, 2006
When I was in college, I put off everything until the last possible instant: I got out of bed just moments before class started; I finished papers minutes before they were due. But I rarely actually missed a deadline for a paper. Now most of my deadlines aren't nearly as firm as they were in…
April 14, 2006
Last week's Casual Friday study seemed like a great idea. Playing off the study we recently analyzed which revealed that the orientation of shapes could convey emotion, we thought we might be able to demonstrate a similar phenomenon with scenes.
Respondents were divided into three groups. Everyone…
April 13, 2006
If you have normal hearing and an amygdala, you can probably tell which of these two songs is "happy," and which is "scary."
Song 1
Song 2
However, for extreme cases of epilepsy, one treatment is to surgically remove the amygdala, the area of the brain which processes, among other things, the…
April 11, 2006
Yesterday's post brings up an interesting question: How can you be unaware of having even seen an image, and yet be able to make reliable judgments about that image? That article is just one example of a variety of situations in which people can be unaware of seeing something, even immediately…
April 10, 2006
How long does it take to decide if someone's attractive? It might be before you even know you looked.
Researchers can use a masking technique to show an image of a human face subliminally -- without the observer being aware of seeing it. To do it, they first show a scrambled face (39 milliseconds…
April 7, 2006
Do pictures evoke similar emotions for you as they do for others? Now's your chance to find out. This week's Casual Fridays study is designed to determine whether the same pictures evoke the same emotions in different people. You'll first be asked your birth month, which is just a way to divide…
April 7, 2006
This week's Casual Friday study was about the hearing loss problem associated with headphone use, and whether readers would adopt a technological solution to the problem. Eighty-one percent of our 133 respondents said that they own a portable music device (though the relatively low response rate…
April 6, 2006
Standup comics have long made vice president Dick Cheney the butt of their jokes, suggesting that he's never seen in public with the President because he inhabits some fortified underground bunker so as to avoid terrorists or some other unidentified threat, or that he's actually a cyborg, secretly…
April 3, 2006
Babies as young as three months old will follow the eyes of an adult to look at the same thing the adult is looking at. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a predator or other danger looms, we can learn from the actions of others (though it's unclear exactly what a three…
March 31, 2006
With legendary guitarist Pete Townshend's recent public statement that studio headphones have caused deafness, there's growing concern that iPods and other portable music devices might be destroying the ears of the children of the digital era.
We thought this might be a good time to find out how…
March 31, 2006
Last week we asked readers to answer some questions about how they managed their email. The results are in, and boy are they ... confusing. We're having trouble identifying any clear patterns at all in email management. First of all, let's get a sense of the scale of the problem. Here's how…
March 30, 2006
The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a bit of a guilty pleasure for our family. I've never been quite sure why we like it: the plot of the show is always the same. We're introduced to a family which has undergone some terrible tragedy through no fault of their own: the father has been…