dmunger | September 20, 2006Encephalon, the biweekly neuroscience carnival, will be hosted at Omnibrain this week. Send in links to your favorite neuroscience posts, pronto! Don't wait, or you'll forget, like I usually do!
dmunger | September 20, 2006In 2001, Mark Orr and Stellan Ohlsson found that experts preferred more complex bluegrass music compared to non-experts, but there was no difference in preferences with jazz music. The model they were using to describe music preferences did not appear to describe all types of music. But what if the problem wasn't the model, but the "experts"?
All the participants in the 2001 study were college students. "Experts" had an average of 9.7 years of music training. This seems like a lot, but compared to professional musicians, it's still not much. In their new study, Orr and Ohlsson recruited 22…
dmunger | September 20, 2006Simon Owens has posted the results of his survey of diversity in the blogosphere at his site Bloggasm.
Here are the results for the blogosphere as a whole:
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%
This seems about right to me, based on anecdotal experience. Simon also broke down his results by niche. Here are the findings for science blogs (which presumably includes CogDaily's response):
Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Black/African: 6%
Asian: 6%
One thing I…
dmunger | September 19, 2006There are just over 24 hours remaining in the Blogger SAT Challenge.
The challenge has gained substantial notice in the blogosphere, with dozens of blogs linking to it, including at least one top-20 blog. I expect that when we publish the results, there will be even more interest in it. So....
If you've been putting off participating, now is your chance. Be warned, however, that it truly is a challenge. Though we've now had nearly 400 people start the challenge by entering a name and clicking through to the essay question, at last count (back when there were just 259 survey views), only 78…
dmunger | September 19, 2006A week ago Friday we conducted a little survey about musical preferences. Readers were asked to listen to three different clips, then say which music they preferred. We promised you we'd be back to let you know what the preferences were, and whether they said anything about how preferences are formed.
Our survey was inspired by much more exhaustive work conducted by Mark G. Orr and Sellan Ohlsson. They are interested in the question of how expertise informs preferences. Do experienced jazz musicians like the same music as untrained listeners? One dimension you might want to consider is…
dmunger | September 18, 2006Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles has begun a new blog on the origin of speech: Babel's Dawn. If it lives up to the promise of its first post, it may prove to be a valuable resource. The blog
aims to become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges.
I say speech rather than language because speech is a concrete behavior while language is an abstraction. In order to speak our ancestors had to evolve all the general elements of language (e.g., the ability to utter words in syntactical form) along with the specific…
dmunger | September 15, 2006The New York Times recently published sample top-scoring essays from the new written component of the SAT test in order to show the type of work that was likely to score highly. Several bloggers, as well as the Times itself, have noted that the writing isn't exactly compelling.
In fact, I've been carrying on a bit of a debate with Chad Orzel, of ScienceBlogs' Uncertain Principles on this very subject. Chad argues that it's unfair to put a microscope to the the highschoolers' prose, written in just 25 minutes based on a prompt they had never encountered before.
In the comments, I expressed…
dmunger | September 14, 2006Color categories, as we pointed out in this post, are remarkably consistent, even across different cultures and languages. "TLTB" pointed out in the comments that for people with color blindness, the color categories might not make much sense. He brought up an excellent point, one that becomes doubly perplexing when we realize that no two individual eyes are the same -- indeed, retinal scanning is considered more accurate than fingerprints in establishing someone's true identity.
The distribution of cones and rods across the retina varies substantially. What's more, the macula, a region in…
dmunger | September 13, 2006So, researchers have found a way to "edit" the memories of rats. Rats can easily be trained to avoid an electrically charged region of their cages. Then researchers injected a chemical into the rats' memory centers, and successfully "erased" the memory, so the rats no longer knew to avoid getting shocked.
This brings up the question: can we change our own memories in a similar manner? Could we conveniently be made to forget a traumatic event from childhood or war? Could we add new memories of events that never occurred, artificial memories as vivid as the real thing? The Ledger has exciting…
dmunger | September 12, 2006A fascinating press release is starting to gain attention.
Researcher Ian Walker equipped his bike with a precise sensor that measured exactly how much room British drivers gave him when they passed. After tracking thousands of motorists, he was able to make an astonishing claim: when he was wearing a helmet, drivers gave him significantly less room on the road -- over 8 centimeters less.
He suspects the reason is that drivers make judgements about the competence of a cyclist based on whether or not he is wearing a helmet. Indeed, Walker was struck by cars twice during the experiment -- both…
dmunger | September 12, 2006
The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of a new experiment purporting to show brain activity in a woman who was in a "persistent vegetative state." For a good summary of the experiment, visit Mind Hacks. Then take a look at Brain Ethics' analysis. I think the best analysis comes from ScienceBlogs' own Jake at Pure Pedantry. The upshot: The "persistent vegetative state" was probably misdiagnosed. FMRI imaging can help diagnose true cases of persistent vegetative state.
There's a nice article at New Scientist discussing decision-making in adolescents. Again fMRI was used to record brain…
dmunger | September 11, 2006The World Color Survey is a massive project which attempts to understand how colors are categorized in different languages. The researchers studied 110 different languages, none of which had a written component, which ensured that only spoken word categories would be used to describe the colors.
Do the speakers all understand colors the same way? Is "red" red whether you're speaking Chumburu or Saramaccan? Rolf Kuehni undertook an analysis of the data to try to find out.
To discuss colors and language, it's important to differentiate between the word we're using to describe a color, and the…
dmunger | September 11, 2006It's no surprise that on the fifth anniversary of the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, most newspapers and many blogs are offering reflections and analysis of what happened. This morning I asked my kids, who were in the third and fourth grade on the day of the attacks, if they remembered what happened that day. Of course they did -- the bigger question is what of the world before September 11 they remembered. Nearly everyone has a story to tell about September 11, 2001.
It seems almost human nature to reflect on our memories of shocking events such as September 11. In fact many…
dmunger | September 8, 2006We've recently seen a fascinating study on music preference: What causes people to prefer certain songs to others? Why do some of us love Jewel but others think she's a bad poet and a worse singer?
We're planning on writing up the results of that study for Cognitive Daily next week, but in the meantime, we thought we'd see if we could find rhyme or reason to the musical preferences of our own readers. In that spirit, this week's study will ask you to rate three different, short musical clips.
This week's study is a bit of a risk -- we may not be able to duplicate the controlled environment or…
dmunger | September 8, 2006Take a look at this little video of a baby monkey. It's just three days old. Isn't it just adorable?
Oh, there's also this little bit about how the monkeys imitating humans is similar to earlier research on human babies, suggesting that it's a social adaptation that is common not to just humans, but also other primates. You can read all about it here, or in summaries on BrainEthics or John Hawkes.
But aren't the little monkeys cute?
dmunger | September 7, 2006The Wall Street Journal has an article discussing the accuracy of patient survey results in determining the effectiveness of HMOs. I'm not sure if it's behind a paywall, so I'm going to quote liberally from the article:
Researchers from the Rand Corp. think tank, the University of California at Los Angeles and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs asked 236 elderly patients at two big managed-care plans, one in the Southwest and the other in the Northeast, to rate the medical care they were getting. The average score was high -- about 8.9 on a scale from zero to 10.
Asked questions such…
dmunger | September 6, 2006Sometimes we think of emotions as completely separate from the more "objective" parts of the mind. You might believe that emotion can sometimes cloud your judgment, but it certainly can't affect your vision system. Or can it?
Take a look at the following image. It's my attempt to use Photoshop to make a Gabor patch -- a means of testing vision.
Gabor patches are useful because researchers can systematically vary their contrast and determine the limits of the visual system. For example, try this quick movie. The screen will remain blank for a second, then quickly flash four Gabor patches.…
dmunger | September 5, 2006
An excellent article in American Scientist compares "animal math" with math ability in infants. Some similarities and limitations emerge. While rhesus monkeys appear to successfully understand concepts such as 1+1=2 or 1+2=3, 2+2=4 appears beyond their ken. Five-month-old babies show about the same level of expertise.
The always-excellent BPS Research Digest has an article on the differences between people who think about suicide and those who attempt suicide. While suicidal thoughts are common, a much smaller group actually attempts suicide. There are gender differences -- men who feel…
dmunger | September 4, 2006It's Labor Day, the kids are home from school, and Greta has to work (why is it that only professors and manual laborers work on Labor Day?), so I hope you're not expecting to see much serious thinking on CogDaily today.
However, I did promise that I'd share some of the more interesting responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, so here goes. Participants were asked to listen to snippets from two hard-to-understand songs, then indicate what they thought the words were.
Respondents were most successful with the snippet from the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." The actual lyric was…
dmunger | September 1, 2006The results are in for last week's Casual Fridays study, and the findings are ... uncertain. The task was to try to parse out the lyrics of two songs. The first came from the American TV show "So You Think You Can Dance." If you didn't get a chance to participate in the study, you can listen to it now:
This show is one of our family's guilty pleasures, but even though we watched the show every week, we still can't agree on the lyrics. Jim, Nora, and I think it's repeating the name of the show: "So you think you can dance." Greta insists that the male voice is singing "Shoo bee doo bee doo…