mixingmemory
Posts by this author
February 5, 2007
There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins?…
February 2, 2007
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my old posts on moral psychology (I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, right now, but if you really want to find them, I'll do it). Well, after I discussed that research with a couple other psychologists who, it turns out, are…
February 2, 2007
Sorry I haven't been posting much lately, but I'm in the process of rolling out a couple new experiments, and the resulting headaches have left me with little time or energy. However, next week, there will be 7 science posts in 7 days, because the Just Science challenge begins on the 5th! If you…
January 22, 2007
If you're a New Scientist reader, you may have come across this article titled "Beauty is in the eye of your friends." The brief article (which I found via 3 Quarks Daily) describes research purporting to show that whether (heterosexual) women find a man attractive depends, in part, on whether…
January 20, 2007
Last year, I wrote two really long, boring posts about V.S. Ramachandran's ten principles of art. Those principles, mostly drawn from research on vision, included things like peak shift, symmetry, and contrast. It turns out Ramachandran may have missed a much simpler principle: people dig curves.…
January 17, 2007
So RPM of Evolgen and I were sitting around, chattin' about science blogging, when we suddenly realized that more and more, what science bloggers blog about is dictated not by science, but by anti-science. Creationists, global warming skeptics, anti-vaccine nuts, people who think the moon landing…
January 14, 2007
Welcome, everyone, to the 14th installment of the brain blogging carnival Encephalon. If you're in the United States, I hope you've got today off, and that you've at least taken a moment to think about the contribution that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. made to our society. If you're not in the…
January 13, 2007
Originally posted on the old blog on 3/12/2006
My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at least something other than Darwin Day (I thought about maybe suggesting "Variation…
January 11, 2007
I meant to post this a long time ago, but forgot about it. Here's the story of a cognitive neuroscientist who, using what he's learned about cognition in grad school, won $500,000 on the show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" From the article:
The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming…
January 8, 2007
Via Sandra over at OmniBrain, I learned about We Have Pie Charts, where just about everything you would never describe with a pie chart is described with a pie chart. Here are two of my favorites:
A Day In the Life of Goldfish:
God's Recipe:
January 5, 2007
Here's an article from Physics Web (via 3 Quarks Daily) that seems appropriate, in the context of the last two posts. Here's the conclusion of the article:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the existence of an ultimate coherent truth - a complete…
January 5, 2007
Comments on the last post make it clear that my use of the label "scientism" is far from clear. It does not mean a rejection of science, or its methods (though I do have to roll my eyes when someone talks of the scientific method), within their sphere. It's not, for example, a rejection of…
January 4, 2007
When science replaces religion, it becomes more and more like religion, and in the minds of its worshipers, can justify the same sorts of inhumanities. Witness Richard Dawkins, todays leading worshiper of science, calling for deposed dictators to be used as guinea pigs, rather than executed (via…
January 3, 2007
I just learned, via Brian Leiter's blog, that Robert Solomon has died. I have been a big fan since I was an undergrad, especially because his book In the Spirit of Hegel helped me to break the "Hegel code" that makes Hegel so unreadable to many. In fact, it wasn't very long ago that I had a short…
January 3, 2007
It's a new year, and that means it's time for Edge.org's annual silly question. This year, in addition to giving the question to scientists and philosophers, they also gave it to business people, and even Brian Eno. As in the past, there are a lot of people in cognitive science and related fields…
January 2, 2007
ScienceBlogs has added another brain sciences blog, Chris Chatham's Developing Intelligence. Welcome, Chris.
January 1, 2007
Regular cognitive science posting will resume in the very near future, but for the holiday, I thought I'd go with something a bit lighter. What's your favorite opening paragraph in a book? I've always liked the standards: Notes from the Underground and One Hundred Years of Solitude (and even Love…
December 31, 2006
In lieu of an effortful post on cognitive science while I'm relaxing for the holidays, I thought I'd say a few things about religion and Dawkins again. If you hang around ScienceBlogs, you've probably noticed the spat between the two biggest (traffic-wise) SBers, PZ Myers and Ed Brayton. Ed…
December 21, 2006
I'm traveling today, so I'm posting something I wrote along time ago instead of offering anything new. This one's from the blogs early days, so I really hadn't gotten used to this blogging thing when I wrote it. Also, in the time between its original posting and now, I've learned a bit more about…
December 20, 2006
More than a week ago, Razib wrote an unfortunate little post in which he displayed all sorts of poor judgment. Since it's short, I'm going to quote the entire post here, including his updates.
The virginity thread generated a lot of response. The virgin lot of the nerd, ah, so cliche. And yet now I…
December 20, 2006
I'm going to be traveling tomorrow, so I'm spending today getting ready. Instead of a long post about research, I thought I'd link you to a paper Stephen E. G. Lea by in press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For those of you who don't know, Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a target article (the…
December 19, 2006
One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory (which I've talked about before, here). Starting from the premise that cognition is for action, it argues that concepts are represented in the same brain systems that directly serve…
December 18, 2006
A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of the work in the poster (it's about negative numbers being represented on a mental number line).…
December 16, 2006
Congratulations to Pharyngula, winner of the 2006 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Congratulations to Bad Astronomy Blog for giving PZ a run for his money, too. I finished last, but given the fact that my traffic is much, much smaller than all of the other finalists, that's not so bad. Thanks to…
December 16, 2006
OK, the last two posts with quotes from philosophers were at least remotely relevant to recent discussions on this blog. These quotes will be completely irrelevant, but they've stuck with me since I first read them at least a decade ago, and have been on my mind recently, so I thought I'd post them…
December 16, 2006
Speaking of studies that make you go "wow," I recently read a very recent one that really surprised me, and thought I'd describe it here.
Memory researchers are famous for coming up with different types of memory, sparking years of research and debate just trying to determine whether two particular…
December 14, 2006
Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but the coolest ever just for the sheer implausibility of the…
December 13, 2006
Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're…
December 13, 2006
Humans are strange animals. We have such a deep need for social order that, when that order is threatened, we'll do irrelevant things in an effort to preserve it. For example, when people are told that the conviction rate for a particular crime is low, they'll assign harsher punishments to…