dmunger | April 20, 2007Update: New version of the study is up here!
#@*& it if I couldn't come up with a shorter Casual Friday study this week. When we started doing Casual Fridays a year and a half ago, the goal was to keep them short -- less than five questions, if possible. They've gradually expanded from week to week, but we've typically been able to keep to around ten questions.
But this week I came up with a *@&&ing good idea for a study that just wouldn't cooperate with the length limits. Fortunately, the subject matter tends to be quite arousing: offensive language. What words really get you *…
dmunger | April 19, 2007While the debate over guns and gun control has taken center stage on ScienceBlogs, ultimately there's a human pulling the trigger. The New York Times has an interesting article about the problems getting troubled students to seek help before they harm themselves or others. The facts about college suicide are startlingly grim:
While shootings like the one at Virginia Tech are extremely rare, suicides, threats and serious mental-health problems are not. Last year, the American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment, covering nearly 95,000 students at 117 campuses, found…
dmunger | April 18, 2007One "trick" dieters often use is to put their food on a smaller plate. The idea is to fool yourself into thinking you're eating more food than you really are. But doesn't our stomach tell us how full we are?
Actually, it doesn't. Brian Wansink has devoted his career to studying how perception of food intake relates to actual eating behavior. Together with James Painter and Jill North, he's come up with a dramatic demonstration of how wrong our stomachs can be.
Volunteers were recruited to participate in a soup-only lunch in a room adjoining the school cafeteria. They filled out a form asking…
dmunger | April 18, 2007Madam Fathom has an excellent discussion of nicotine's effect on the brain and cognitive function. First off, I've rarely seen a clearer explanation of how neurons actually work:
Neurons are functionally integrated in expansive neural networks, with each neuron receiving up to thousands of inputs from other neurons. However, the neurons are not actually physically connected to one another; there is a tiny gap that separates neurons, called a synapse.
When a neuron is activated, an electrical pulse (an action potential) travels down its membrane; the neuron is said to "fire" an action…
dmunger | April 17, 2007Earlier today I wrote a post about optical illusions. I was hoping it would distract me from thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings. It didn't. I began to see connections between the illusions and the tragedy: That sinking feeling that somebody was being shot, that spiral like a gun sight.
The problem is that human brains are connecting machines: we can connect anything to anything else. Trying not to think about the shootings was the worst thing I could do. How should I be handling it? I should be talking about it directly -- preferably face-to-face or over the phone. I did spend some…
dmunger | April 17, 2007Tired of depressing news? Take a break and look at some optical illusions!
For more, visit SandLot Science.
Haven't seen enough illusions? There are more below!
Q: How many spirals are in this picture?
A: None
For more, visit Michael Bach's illusion page.
Akiyoshi's got a new one:
For more, visit Akiyoshi's illusion pages.
Do you have a favorite illusion? Share a link in the comments section!
dmunger | April 16, 2007Today at least 31 people were killed by gunfire at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in senseless violence. Early reports suggest that the perpetrator was a boyfriend of a Virginia Tech student who was "looking for his girlfriend."
But whatever the proximal cause of this tragedy, the larger question is how we can prevent such incidents in the future. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, one report (PDF) from the National Institute of Justice suggests that as many as two-thirds of these seemingly random occurrences are preventable. Large attacks are planned, and attackers reveal their plans…
dmunger | April 16, 2007How many hours did you spend watching TV news coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks on that day?* Now, did you have dreams about it in the following days and weeks?
According to a newly published study, the more hours you spent watching news coverage, the more likely you were to have dreams with specific references to the attacks. Ruth Propper had been asking her psychology students at Merrimack College to keep dream journals for several weeks before September 11, and they continued to maintain them afterwards. In class on September 12, the students filled out questionnaires about…
dmunger | April 13, 2007There was a lot of talk on the ScienceBlogs back channel last week about Mike Dunford's post on President Bush's wrangling with Congress over funding the Iraq war. The post attracted a lot of attention, including many comments from readers who claimed Dunford didn't "support the troops." If they had actually read the post they would have realized that the "troops" include Mike's wife and two brothers.
Bora Zivcovic remembered a post by Chris Clarke, which argued that very few readers were willing to read very long blog posts. In the past, he had written several three-part articles, requiring…
dmunger | April 13, 2007A good friend of mine was a bank manager for many years. He told me that robberies are much more common than you might think: bank employees are trained to comply with robbers' demands, minimizing losses by keeping relatively small amounts of cash in their drawers. Typical training also suggests that employees don't confront or establish eye contact with robbers, activating hidden alarms if possible but not causing a stir.
The reason you don't hear about them is banks don't like to publicize robberies -- they're bad for business.
But a new program in Seattle turns all this on its head.…
dmunger | April 12, 2007Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has…
dmunger | April 12, 2007Yesterday, we conducted a poll asking how often our readers would give money to truly talented street performers. The poll was in response to a Washington Post experiment where world-famous violinist Joshua Bell performed in a subway station for 45 minutes and only earned $32, an amount that would pay for less than a third of a seat at one of his concerts.
One objection to the Post experiment is that Bell wasn't in a very good location: he was at the entrance to the station, during morning rush hour, when people have the least time to stop and listen. Our poll tried to determine what might…
dmunger | April 11, 2007This story in the Washington Post has been getting a lot of attention. The reporter convinced world-famous violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to play for 45 minutes in a busy Washington subway station, as an experiment to see if passersby would recognize his amazing talents and reward him appropriately. His take was a lowly $32, not counting $20 from a disgusted fan who recognized Bell and couldn't believe others weren't being more generous.
But there are questions as to whether the experiment was a good one. Why play in a subway entrance, where people are rushing to catch trains or off to their…
dmunger | April 10, 2007Jim just started playing this year for his school's junior varsity lacrosse team. As a beginner, he doesn't see a lot of action, but it's nonetheless exciting to watch the games -- they are fast-paced, with plenty of scoring and a few hard hits. Most junior varsity teams don't have the equipment budget of a varsity team, so they don't have separate home and away uniforms like varsity teams do. This means game officials have a hard time remembering which team is which, so instead of referring to players as "home" or "away," they use the color of the uniforms to distinguish between teams.…
dmunger | April 10, 2007These days, it seems like everyone's got a science book. Not a small number of them end up on my desk -- apparently Cognitive Daily is "important" enough that publicists feel a review from us is worth the cost of printing and mailing me a book. But just because they send me the book doesn't mean I have to review it. Often I simply ignore these books, putting them on my shelf or throwing them away. The most recent book I've received, however, is so bad that I couldn't just ignore it: this book is actually instructive -- of how NOT to write a science book. Reading just a few chapters of this…
dmunger | April 9, 2007The debate about Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet's recent Science article has gotten quite contentious. Nisbet and Mooney contend that if scientists hope to persuade the public to value science, they must take heed of recent research on "framing." In other words, they claim, scientists are failing at presenting their message effectively.
So what exactly is this "framing" stuff anyway? Matthew Nisbet might not agree that this is all there is to it, but I thought this article in the APS observer offered a nice summary of what we're talking about:
People are more likely to take risks when they…
dmunger | April 6, 2007This week's Casual Fridays study plays off a post written by Mike Dunford. The question is, how are political attitudes affected by legal knowledge? Do you let the law get in the way of a political position, or do political goals trump legal ones? In fact, you might what to read Mike's post before you participate. It's an excellent post, and it really highlights the kind of issues I'm talking about.
Mike Dunford's Post
The link brings up the article in a new tab or window (because we want you to come back and take the survey!).
Click here to participate.
The study is brief, with just 10 quick…
dmunger | April 5, 2007Even though most of us aren't concerned with physical survival on a day-to-day basis, the concept of "survival" remains a potent one -- just think of the persistent success of TV shows like Survivor and Lost. Perhaps this popularity has to do with more than just good advertising and an interesting plot twist. Perhaps it also has to do with the fundamental nature of survival itself.
Darwin's mechanism for evolution -- natural selection -- has often been reduced to the catch-phrase "survival of the fittest." There's more to it than that, of course, but if survival is such an important aspect of…
dmunger | April 5, 2007In a recent opinion piece appearing in the Washington Post, Jason Johnson argues that in today's cut-and-paste world, the term paper is becoming irrelevant:
Today I plagiarized multiple documents at work. I took the writing of others and presented it to my supervisor as if it were my own. It was an open secret that my entire report, written "by Jason Johnson," had been composed by others and that I had been merely an editor. Instead of a reprimand, I was rewarded with a post-briefing latte.
In the fast-paced world of today, Johnson claims, no one has time to worry about who the real "author"…
dmunger | April 4, 2007Cognitive Daily has been chosen to respond to the first question in a newly revised feature on ScienceBlogs: Ask a ScienceBlogger. Readers can submit questions, and they'll be answered by an expert in the field of inquiry (even though it's posted under Dave's name, Dave and Greta worked together on this one). Then, hopefully, discussion among the various ScienceBlogs will ensue. This week's question:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
The main difference between psychology and neuroscience…