dmunger | August 22, 2007This video (QuickTime required), captured last week by fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith, demonstrates a rarely seen visual and auditory effect:
When you watch this video of me singing the Men Without Hats one-hit-wonder "Safety Dance," it appears as though can I neither dance nor carry a tune.
I wonder if any of our commenters can offer an explanation.
Perhaps of more interest to the scientific community: a first -- Greta and I are finally photographed with Professor Steve Steve!
dmunger | August 21, 2007
When you look at a scene: a building, a park, a mountain, your visual system processes the information differently from when you look at a single object: a face, a pen, or a coffee mug. For example, this first image is from our trip to Prague this past summer:
When you look at this picture, your eye might move first to the bridge, then to the lampposts on the bridge, to the castle in the background, to the overhanging limbs. The next picture is much simpler:
It's a coffee mug, plain and simple. There's not much left to do with it. There are three regions of the brain that respond more…
dmunger | August 21, 2007One cool thing about running a lab is that there aren't really many restrictions about decor. As long as the immediate area around the equipment is clear of visual distractions, anything goes. That's why we're inviting readers to send us examples of crazy lab art. Here's a great example of what can happen working too many hours in a row in a cell biology lab, courtesy of "Winnie":
Here's what the main room of Greta's lab looks like. This is where her Perception and Attention students go to participate in demo experiments, plan experiments they'll be running more formally in subject-running…
dmunger | August 20, 2007I go for a run nearly every day. I wouldn't consider myself a fitness buff; mainly I run so that I don't gain weight. But according to an article in the New York Times, running might have another benefit -- improving my brain's health:
Scott Small at Columbia, for instance , likes nothing better than a strenuous game of tennis. "As a neurologist," he explains, "I constantly get asked at cocktail parties what someone can do to protect their mental functioning. I tell them, 'Put down that glass and go for a run.' "
The basis for this claim was first found in research on mice: mice with exercise…
dmunger | August 17, 2007Take a look at the following two circles. At the center, they're both the identical bright white. But which one seems brighter?
Let's make this a poll:
I'm not sure if this illusion will work when respondents know the objects are the same brightness, but naive viewers will reliably rate the circle on the left as brighter -- this is called the "glare effect," and it occurs whenever there's a gradual gradient around a circle or other shapes (the gradient must approach the color of the shape as it gets closer to the shape itself). I found the illusion so powerful that I had to close the…
dmunger | August 16, 2007Discover's got a very nice article about 10 unsolved mysteries of the brain. They're actually careful not to call these the "top 10" -- after all, who's to say that these are the 10 most important? Nonetheless, it's an impressive list:
1. How is information coded in neural activity?
2. How are memories stored and retrieved?
3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?
4. How do brains simulate the future?
5. What are emotions?
6. What is intelligence?
7. How is time represented in the brain?
8. Why do brains sleep and dream?
9. How do the specialized systems of the brain…
dmunger | August 15, 2007If you haven't checked out the BPR3 initative (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting), now's your chance to see everything that's going on with BPR3 in one place: The new web site has just gone live.
Set your bookmarks to researchblogging.org for the latest news on our efforts to identify promote blogging about peer-reviewed research. I'll probably still occasionally post here and link back to BPR3, but from here on out, that's the site to visit for the latest news on the project.
There's still a little dust in the corners as we build the site, and everything is pretty much plain-…
dmunger | August 15, 2007On our recent trip to Europe, we had a hard time getting the kids to smile for pictures. Most of our pictures of Nora ended up looking something like this (actually this one's a self portrait, but you get the idea):
Here her expression is basically neutral, and if it wasn't such a dramatic shot, it would be a bit boring.
When we could get her to smile, often the smile was inauthentic -- posed, or even sarcastic, like in this shot:
Here she's expressing mock excitement over her parents' excitement about the figure depicted in the statue: Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician (click…
dmunger | August 15, 2007When Jim was a baby (back when we called him "Jimmy"), he was clearly a bright child, but he didn't have a lot of words. This didn't stop him from getting his point across. After his doctor recommended that we cut back on the bottle to encourage him eating solid foods, he'd repeatedly say one of his two words: "bah-pull." When the desired result wasn't achieved, he pulled us by the hand into the kitchen and pointed to the item he craved (cf. Orangutans playing charades).
Within a few months, however, Jim knew dozens of words and was even assembling some primitive sentences. What accounted for…
dmunger | August 14, 2007There's a problem with most of the highway signs currently being used in the U.S.: Overglow. The signs are fairly legible in the daytime, but at night, when they're illuminated solely by the reflected light from car headlights, reading becomes trickier. A New York Times article and accompanying slideshow (via Mike the Mad Biologist) demonstrates the problem:
What was clear text during the daytime becomes an illegible blob at night. The problem, it seemed, was the tiny spaces inside of letters -- the loop of an "a" or an "e," for example. At long distances, at night, and particularly for…
dmunger | August 13, 2007Last week's post on a Peer-Reviewed Research icon has generated a tremendous amount of interest, including many very thoughtful comments and an incisive post over on Cabi Blogs. I'll get to Philip's comments in a moment, because they are at the core of what "peer reviewed" means, but first let me update you on the status of the project.
First off, Kevin Z of the fabulous The Other 95% blog offered the best suggestion for a name for this initiative: PR^3 (Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting). Unfortunately, PR3.org was taken, but fortunately, BPR3.org was not. I decided to risk $9 and registered…
dmunger | August 9, 2007When you have a conversation with someone, you're doing a lot more than just interpreting the meaning of the words they say. You're also trying to figure out what they intend to say and integrating that in to your understanding. You're working together with them to decide whose turn it is to speak. Your accents become similar. Your body movements become synchronized. You even scratch your nose at the same time as your conversational partner.
It makes sense, then, if you're both looking looking at the same picture while you talk, that you'll look at the same parts of the picture at the same…
dmunger | August 8, 2007Most CogDaily readers are familiar with the little icon we developed to indicate when we were reporting on peer reviewed research. We created it when we began to offer links to news and blog posts, as a way of distinguishing those less "serious" posts from when we were talking about peer-reviewed journal articles.
But Sister Edith Bogue of Monastic Musings recently pointed out that other academic bloggers could also make use of the icon, to distinguish when they're blogging about news, family, books, etc., from serious scholarship. But our icon isn't ideal for this purpose since its design is…
dmunger | August 7, 2007One of the amazing things the visual system does is to compensate for the motion of our bodies. Consider, for example, the difference between the apparently smooth view of the world you get when you're talking a walk, and the shaky image you see if you record the same walk while holding a camcorder. Compensating for the motion of your body is a complex process, but it seems to occur almost automatically.
Similarly, if you quickly dart your eyes from one object to another, or even several objects in succession, the motion is seamless, while a videocamera recording the same motion would be…
dmunger | August 6, 2007It would be difficult to come up with a more frequently confused concept in psychology than reinforcement and punishment. In fact, "reinforcement" and "punishment" aren't difficult to understand on their own: Reinforcement simply means any means of increasing or encouraging the designated behavior; punishment is any means of inhibiting or decreasing the designated behavior.
It was only when B.F. Skinner devised the "positive" and "negative" descriptors that he became the bane of college students for generations to come. Rather than "positive" and "negative," things would have been much…
dmunger | August 3, 2007Like most parents, Greta and I were very excited about having our first baby (Greta, I imagine, might be somewhat less enthusiastic about me putting this vintage photo of her online...). We weren't naive, though -- we had heard from friends and family about the sleepless nights, the juggling of jobs and child care, the constant requirements for feeding, and the endless stacks of diapers. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, but we felt we were up to it, and we were overjoyed to be having a child.
But at what point does this optimism become a burden? If you're unrealistically hopeful about the…
dmunger | August 2, 2007A new study of brain responses to music has found a striking difference in brain activity when a symphonic movement ends and the next one begins, compared to other parts of the musical work. A team led by Vinod Menon (and including This Is Your Brain on Music author Daniel Levitin) played excerpts from the symphonic works of English composer William Boyce while while monitoring the brain activity of the listeners. Make sure you follow the link to the original press release for an amazing video showing brain activity as one movement ends and the next begins.
Boyce was chosen because his works…
dmunger | August 1, 2007Eric Schwitzgebel has been doing a lot of thinking about the relationship between thinking about ethical behavior and actually behaving ethically. In his most recent post, he takes on a meta-analysis claiming that religious belief correlates negatively with criminal activity:
I found a 2001 "meta-analysis" (Baier & Wright) of the literature that shows all the usual blindnesses of meta-analyses. Oh, you don't know what a meta-analysis is? As usually practiced, it's a way of doing math instead of thinking. First, you find all the published experiments pertinent to Hypothesis X (e.g., "…
dmunger | July 31, 2007Take a look at this movie (QuickTime Required):
The moving object is exactly the same in each picture, but the background is different. If you're like most people, you'll see one object as an ice skater, and the other as a spinning top.
This puts the objects in two different classes -- animate (something that can move by itself: a human, animal, robot, and so on) and inanimate (something that requires an external force to move). Do we perceive the two objects differently?
Arguably, it's important that we do: if an object can move by itself, it's much more likely to be a threat to us than…
dmunger | July 31, 2007Here's an interesting question:
If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands--assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive--would they produce language in any form when they grew up?
It comes from Christine Kenneally, who posed the question to a group of experts in the field. It's a fascinating dilemma--are we all born with language "inside" of us; will it emerge without the social guidance of parents and other language speakers, or does each successive generation have to learn language anew?
Edmond Blair Bolles has provided a nice summary of…