dmunger | August 10, 2006Scientific American has an article covering recent research about neighborly relations. The conclusion: people living in desert climates get along better with neighbors when they have nice, shady green lawns, as opposed to natural desert landscaping.
From the SciAm article:
The 60 or so individual subjects have been living within the various landscapes since 2005 and already have shown a strong preference for lush conditions. In surveys done before the landscaping took place, the residents, particularly those with children, rated mesic and oasis conditions more highly than their desert…
dmunger | August 9, 2006
Greta really wants some of these neurotransmitter earrings. But which ones should she get? Let's make this one a poll -- that way you can help her decide! When she gets the earrings, we'll post a picture of her wearing them.
dmunger | August 9, 2006Seed has asked all the sciencebloggers to respond to the following question:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
I talked with Greta about this last night, and we each used similar logic for our choices. Greta's pick was Jurassic Park, which of course generally has appalling science, but in one scene demonstrates an incredibly important scientific lesson. The scientists at the Jurassic Park Institute "knew" it was impossible for their dinosaurs to…
dmunger | August 8, 2006Take a look at this short video clip. Can you tell which dot is blue and which is yellow?
Click here to play
Unless you have a rare vision impairment, this task should be easy for you. But read on, and we'll show you how you can become blind to this difference in as little as 40 minutes.
The human visual system is amazingly adaptive to eye movements. Consider this: if you film a video from a moving car, the resulting image is so jiggly that it's unwatchable. But if you're riding in the car, even on a bumpy road, the outside world appears stable and smooth.
Or take a camcorder and move it…
dmunger | August 7, 2006An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page:
The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of content.
Here's their summary of the site's mission:
The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource placing the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or users of psychology services.
In doing so we are looking to address three…
dmunger | August 3, 2006[originally published March 2, 2005]
Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to the end; just stop.
Did you notice any changes? Most people won't spot any changes at all when they watch this movie the first time. But watch the image as you press play again, and you'll see that the desk has changed significantly from the beginning to the end of the movie. I actually rotated…
dmunger | August 1, 2006One of the summer jobs I had during college was working for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle. My job was to do data entry for a breast cancer study; it was simultaneously one of the most boring and depressing jobs I ever had. I sorted through the medical records of hundreds of women, found their chemotherapy dosage regimens, then entered their dosages for weeks and weeks of therapy. For accuracy, I had to enter all the data twice. Even as I was entering the data, I could notice a pattern: the women who completed their entire chemotherapy regimens lived, and those who did…
dmunger | July 31, 2006[originally posted on March 16, 2005]
I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image in the world. Here's the one I took last summer:
I hadn't noticed it until now, but the motion of the painting in the background seems to mirror the chaotic struggle of the tourists with their cameras. I wonder if the Louvre's curators placed it there as a sort of an inside joke.
But this post isn't about museum curators, it's about one feature of the Mona Lisa…
dmunger | July 27, 2006[originally posted December 9, 2005]
A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came through completely uncensored. Stewart himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention,…
dmunger | July 26, 2006I'm still on vacation, but I've got just enough time to pop in with a quick link to a nice discussion about the link between heredity and IQ. While some have argued that as much of 75 percent of the variability in IQ is hereditary, more recent research suggests a more complex interaction. The key, as always, are studies on adoption of identical twins:
Regardless of whether the adopting families were rich or poor... children whose biological parents were well-off had I.Q. scores averaging 16 points higher than those from working-class parents. Yet what is really remarkable is how big a…
dmunger | July 25, 2006We've written a lot on Cognitive Daily about the relationship between violent video game play and real-world aggressive behavior. While we feel the evidence showing that playing violent games does cause real aggression is compelling, a frequent critique of our analysis is that other activities, such as competitive sports, may also lead to violence. "Should we ban football?" the commenters opine. We've replied that football is a separate issue which doesn't negate the video game evidence. (For the record, we don't think we should ban violent video games, and the incidence of head injuries and…
dmunger | July 24, 2006[originally posted April 6, 2005]
Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern:
Ave Maria, version 1
Ave Maria, version 2
(Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko)
If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two excerpts. Maybe one seems to be played at a different tempo, or with different instrumentation, or is a bit longer or shorter. You probably won't think either clip sounds unpleasant, and you might not notice any differences at all.
If you are a professional musician, on the other hand, you may find…
dmunger | July 21, 2006How is a mother "connected" to her infant? According to a recent report in Stem Cells, quite literally. The research, conducted on mice, found the stem cells of fetal mice were present in their mothers' brains. These cells persist long after birth, and even seem to assist in the process of repair when the mother's brain is damaged.
So how did the researchers identify the fetal cells? They inseminated the mothers with "green mice" who had been genetically altered using jellyfish genes to glow a phosphorescent green. Some of the babies, therefore, were also green mice, and any of their cells…
dmunger | July 20, 2006[article originally posted September 27, 2005]
All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "…
dmunger | July 18, 2006Is beauty a universal standard? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? Some research on attractiveness, including some we've discussed on CogDaily, suggests that "average" faces are the most attractive, and that most people agree on what makes a pretty face.
But Johannes Hönekopp has recently questioned the statistics behind these studies. Consider a hypothetical study that asks participants to rate the attractiveness of Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney on a scale of 1 to 10. From one perspective, nearly all judges might give both faces extremely high marks. Taken from this point of view, a…
dmunger | July 17, 2006[article originally posted July 6, 2005]
Today's article is one of my all-time favorites. It was originally written by Katherine Kiechel, an undergraduate at Williams College as part of her honors thesis, and could serve as a model for others in its simplicity and ingenuity (the report I'm discussing here was revised and coauthored by her professor, Saul Kassin: "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science, 1996). Some empirical work has been done on false confessions, and at least one example of a genuine false confession…
dmunger | July 14, 2006The whole Munger family will be heading out of town for the next three weeks. Fortunately, there should be plenty to keep you occupied here while we're gone. We've written up a few posts in anticipation of the trip, and they've been scheduled to appear intermittently while we're gone.
In addition, we've gone to the archives and found some of our all-time greatest hits, which are scheduled to pop up a couple times a week. If you started reading Cognitive Daily later than, say, May of 2005, there'll certainly be something here that's new to you. Finally, I'm going to try to post a few smaller…
dmunger | July 13, 2006The New York Times infographic on Lasik got me thinking: How many of our readers would consider getting Lasik surgery? Let's make this one a poll:
dmunger | July 13, 2006The NY Times has an excellent infographic showing exactly how the newest Lasik eye surgery process works:
The key modification to this technique is that the flap is now cut with a laser instead of a metal blade, reducing the chance of complications. I still think I'm going to stick with good old fashioned eyeglasses for now.