dmunger | October 9, 2006
Greetings, prospective students and parents!
I'll be your tour guide today as we explore the mind-opening campus of Encephalon U, one of the most esteemed liberal arts colleges in the nation. As you know, Encephalon U's admission requirements are extremely strict, so I certainly hope you've already taken the SAT Test. Did you realize that some of the world's foremost research on the SAT has been conducted here on our own campus, by Professors Munger and Orzel. Of course, Munger and Orzel have differing opinions on the results. While Orzel believes they demonstrate that high school students…
dmunger | October 6, 2006I'm headed to the Smoky Mountains tomorrow at noon, so if you'd like to see your blog post included in Monday's Encephalon neuroscience carnival, you'll need to submit it by tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. EDT!
So, send me your astounding, astonishing, or astute neuroscience posts and I'll collect them into one convenient post for your perusal. You can send your submissions here or directly to me (remove dashes). Just be sure to include "Encephalon Submission" in the subject line.
dmunger | October 6, 2006Today's analysis of the Blogger SAT Challenge results is the one I've been looking forward to the most. After subjecting 109 people to a sample question from the SAT writing test, we've learned that bloggers are dumber than high school kids (though there's some reason to question that analysis). Our participants, most of them bloggers, didn't fare nearly as well as high schoolers.
But bloggers have all sorts of excuses to explain their poor results: They were multitasking at the time; they hadn't spent 18 months in an SAT prep course like the high schoolers; the judges don't "get" sarcasm.…
dmunger | October 6, 2006So psychologists got shut out of the Nobels this year ... so what! This year the peace prize at the Ig-Nobels went to a discovery of a psychological phenomenon: how to get rid of teenagers. That's right, the "teen repellent" is this year's winner of the Ig-Nobels' biggest prize.
As we have reported on CogDaily, already this useful technology has proven to have other important applications, such as alerting teens to important IMs without getting caught by geriatric teachers.
Seriously, though -- the last psychological Nobel was split among three researchers in 2000: Arvid Carlsson, for work on…
dmunger | October 5, 2006As of yesterday, readers had made an astonishing 3,878 individual ratings of the essays in the Blogger SAT Challenge. The average rating was 2.76, compared to 2.9 from the expert judges. Averaging the most popular rating for each essay comes up with an even lower number, 2.51. Anyone who thought that blog readers would judge bloggers more favorably than the experts was sorely mistaken.
Of the 109 entries, just 11 received a score of 5 or higher. Casual readers of the challenge were even stingier with their marks: Only 8 essays were ranked 5 or higher by a plurality of readers. Interestingly…
dmunger | October 5, 2006From CNN: Apparently scientists have actually teleported a relatively large object.
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.
"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer…
dmunger | October 5, 2006
Chris Chatham on the relationship between psychology and neuroscience
Why healthy people call in sick for work
Excellent long analysis of Isabel Peretz's "The Nature of Music from a biological perspective"
For the attention-impaired: Excellent, shorter analysis of the above analysis
Hey, we've got something to say about Peretz, too!
More discussion on the nature of music
Related but different: Figure out how to quantify people's tastes and win a million bucks
Update: A bonus link, which offers some support for something my 14-year-old son has been saying for a long time:
The Daily Show just…
dmunger | October 4, 2006The Encephalon, a collection of the week's best neuroscience and psychology posts, will be arriving at CogDaily on Monday, October 9. Since I'll be hiking in the Smoky Mountains on that day, I'd like to request that you send in your posts a day early. I'll try to include everything I receive by 8:00 a.m. EDT on Saturday, October 7. I'm headed for the mountains by noon on the 7th, so that deadline is quite firm.
So, send me your brilliant, insightful, or at least entertaining neuroscience posts and I'll collect them into one handy post for your week's fix. You can send your submissions here…
dmunger | October 3, 2006Tired of all the hoopla about the Blogger SAT Challenge? Do you not want to hear another word about Booker T. Washington and why he is or is not like George W. Bush? Then have I got a study for you: Yolanda Martins and Patricia Pliner have conducted a fascinating experiment about food preferences -- or, rather, what precise attributes make food disgusting.
Though disgust has long been considered to be a "basic emotion," there has been surprisingly little research on what foods evoke disgust (hopefully by now you've figured out that you probably don't want to read this post too close to a meal…
dmunger | October 3, 2006Remember yesterday when I said that only one essay scored a six on the Blogger SAT Challenge? I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I wrote it.
I think it's a pretty good essay, but it is a bit suspicious that the person who designed the study just happened to get the highest score (by the way, it wasn't a perfect score: the first grader gave me a 6 but the second grader gave me a 5). I can honestly say, however, that I didn't cheat. My plan was to write my essay as soon as I picked the question, so that I didn't have an advantage over people who saw it for the first time when they…
dmunger | October 2, 2006BPS Research Digest is running an interesting series this week: they've enlisted an impressive list of psychology bloggers to write about their favorite psychology journal article from the past three years. First up is our entry. Here's an excerpt:
Helene Intraub's 2004 Cognition paper "Anticipatory spacial representation of 3D regions explored by sighted observers and a deaf-and-blind observer" is the one we'd like to nominate as our favorite of the past three years. In a remarkable set of experiments, Intraub extends the phenomenon of boundary extension to a new modality: touch.
. . .
The…
dmunger | October 2, 2006Two weeks ago, after reading the New York Times Article which judged the best high school writers harshly, Chad Orzel came up with an idea that was so good it just had to be tried:
Somebody ought to get a bunch of bloggers together, and give them the writing SAT under timed conditions, and see what they come up with.
I took Chad up on the challenge, and together we created the Blogger SAT Challenge, giving writers from across the blogosphere the chance to show that they can do better than high school students. How did they do?
Well, 500 people looked at the essay question, but just 109 were…
dmunger | October 2, 2006Today's Zeitgeist points to a cute editorial cartoon.
The cartoon's joke is that all the studies that have been done connecting violent media to real youth violence, or soda consumption to childhood obesity, are just a big waste of money because it's obvious these things are connected. Now I have to agree that these things all seem quite obvious to me, but given the huge number of comments our posts on the impact of violent media always seem to generate, clearly this isn't a cut and dried topic.
We've also discussed some violent games which don't appear to lead to violent behavior. If all…
dmunger | September 29, 2006We are nearly finished grading the 109 entries for the Blogger SAT Challenge. Chad Orzel has designed a way for our readers to view and rate the essays themselves, but it's not quite ready yet. We're going to take the weekend to make everything perfect (well, nearly perfect), and then we'll unveil the rating system and the official, professionally graded results.
I think it will be worth the wait. Suffice it to say, this has been a larger undertaking than Chad and I could have imagined at the outset. We've had some amazing volunteer graders who went beyond the call of duty to make sure…
dmunger | September 29, 2006Occasionally 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 research is nothing new. As the researchers point out, if we smell chocolate chip cookies, we may decide to eat; if we smell a garbage truck, we may walk faster down the street. We might associate pine scent with Christmas, or pheromones with sex. But most of these associations involve people being…
dmunger | 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 the suspect is captured and the witness is asked to identify the real perpetrator in a lineup? Does the witness remember the actual face they saw at the crime scene, or the composite face created at the police station? A recent study has found that the process of creating a face composite can have a…
dmunger | September 26, 2006I'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, and a forum for discussion of these articles and other topics of interest amongst cognitive musicologists. Sound and Mind also features a podcast, in conjuncture with the Am Steg podcast, which will review books and articles and discuss issues of relevance to cognitive musicologists, as well as other…
dmunger | September 26, 2006My 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 some ways serves as a mirror image of the area we're looking at, this meant that she had a very large blind spot covering most of the left side of her field of vision.
This cortical blindness is different from other sorts of blindness, because the viewer doesn't perceive that something is "missing"…
dmunger | September 22, 2006Musical 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? Now maybe the trill gets the nod. A scale with a trill at the end is probably more complex than just the scale by itself. But what about "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with trills versus "Ode to Joy" without?
Researchers usually just take the easy way out and ask their listeners to rate each piece on a…
dmunger | September 21, 2006The 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 task would take up to 21 minutes.
The survey required participants to enter at least their name before moving on to answer the essay question. The most popular name was "asdf," but no one claiming the name asdf actually wrote an essay. Clearly plenty of participants only "participated" in order to…