dmunger | June 13, 2006A new study adds fuel to the notion that older people misremember how happy they were when they were young. What's more, young people mistakenly figure they won't be as happy when they're older.
"People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term misery," says lead author Peter Ubel. "But instead, people's happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources -- resources that appear to grow with age. People get better at managing…
dmunger | June 13, 2006I'm blatantly stealing this idea from several other web sites, but clearly this is a topic that's crying for a poll. As Retrospectacle and others have already reported, kids are downloading ringtones that are apparently inaudible to adults, just so they can IM each other in class without the teacher knowing. The New York Times has published the sound itself, and you can listen to it here.
The question: can you hear it? Let us know in the poll!
Update June 14 2:11 p.m.: As two of the commenters below note, this isn't actually a 17 kHz tone as the New York Times claims. To rectify this we've…
dmunger | June 12, 2006Experiments on change blindness have revealed striking limitations in visual memory. Take a look at the video below, for example (click to play -- and note that the video is contained in a java applet that may take a while to load -- but it's worth it!).
The woman is giving directions to one "construction worker," when two other "workers" carry a door in between them. A new worker (all of them are actually actors hired by the experimenters) is substituted during the hubbub, and the woman continues giving directions as if no change has occurred. This work has been duplicated in a variety of…
dmunger | June 12, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger inquires about our other research interests:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?...
We talked about this one over the weekend, considering all the important lines of research we could have gotten involved in: solving world poverty, curing cancer, stopping global warming. It's all quite overwhelming. Besides, we've just gotten comfortable with this gig, where Greta serves as the fountain of knowledge about things cognitive and I'm its editorial…
dmunger | June 10, 2006Science Magazine is reporting on a new sensor which should help robots achieve a humanlike sense of touch. It's a thin film that can be applied to nearly any surface. When the film touches something, it causes the material to light up. A camera can then record the lighting changes and use them to give highly accurate "touch" feedback.
The idea is to use such an interface for minimally invasive surgery: a small probe could feel inside the human body and determine, for example, whether a tumor is cancerous. But how do you get a camera in there to see what the sensor is feeling?
"There's…
dmunger | June 9, 2006If you haven't had a chance to visit the new ScienceBlogs home page, go now. It's got a slew of brand-new features, and we've more than doubled the number of bloggers. What's more, there are now several blogs that are in fields closely related to Cognitive Daily, which have conveniently been grouped together under the Brain and Behavior channel.
Actually, the channels are a bit more sophisticated than that. Every blogger can categorize every post into a channel. So if, for example, I write something about, say, academic publishing, I can specify that it's placed into the "academia" channel,…
dmunger | June 9, 2006Remember the movie Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman's character, stricken with autism, was amazingly talented with numbers, able to easily count cards and win a fortune at blackjack?
Researchers have found a way to temporarily duplicate that facility in ordinary individuals. By placing a strong magnet over a particular region of the brain, they in effect simulated one of the symptoms of autism: the ability to put objects into groups. This facilitated brute-force counting, temporarily allowing participants to display amazing counting ability:
The researchers think that by temporally inhibiting…
dmunger | June 8, 2006This one's been linked from all over the net: A Sixth Sense for a Wired World.
The idea is that by implanting a magnet in your fingertip, you're endowed with a "sixth sense," which enables you to detect magnetic fields. Useful for determining if a wire has electric current running through it, or if a hard drive is spinning.
The magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other…
dmunger | June 8, 2006The Wall Street Journal has an article -- unfortunately behind their subscription paywall -- about how scientific journals appear to be attempting to game the impact factor system which claims to offer an unbiased rating of a journal's influence. The article describes John B. West's experience in publishing a paper:
After he submitted a paper on the design of the human lung to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an editor emailed him that the paper was basically fine. There was just one thing: Dr. West should cite more studies that had appeared in the respiratory…
dmunger | June 8, 2006The always-excellent Chris Chatham has a thoughtful analysis of the computational model of critical periods of development. This is the idea that there are certain periods during which we are primed to learn particular things. It can explain how we learn language, or learn to walk, or why mathematicians nearly all seem to be child prodigies.
The next phase in the study of critical periods, Chatham argues, is uncovering the mechanism by which they operate. How, exactly, do children learn language at such an astonishing rate, while teaching them to hold a knife and fork properly seems an…
dmunger | June 7, 2006The BBC has a very simple test to determine how happy you are.
I took it and got the following assessment:
Satisfied
People who score in this range like their lives and feel that things are going well. Of course your life is not perfect, but you feel that things are mostly good. Furthermore, just because you are satisfied does not mean you are complacent. In fact, growth and challenge might be part of the reason you are satisfied. For most people in this high-scoring range, life is enjoyable, and the major domains of life are going well - work or school, family, friends, leisure, and personal…
dmunger | June 7, 2006Synesthesia -- the ability to experience a sensation like vision in another mode, like hearing -- is thought to be quite rare. Yet all of us have the ability to combine sensory modes, and we do it every day. The modes we combine just happen to be ones we don't think about as often: taste and smell.
While vision gets the lion's share of attention in perception research, research on olfaction and taste has begun to be more prominent. However, though we know that the senses of taste and smell interact, few studies have explored the interaction between the two sensory modes. The problem is that…
dmunger | June 7, 2006Here's a video of a brain-computer interface that's entering clinical trials. Unlike the MRI interface we reported on last week, this one requires an electrode to be embedded in the user's brain. Still, it offers impressive functionality:
One thing I've always wondered about these crude brain-control interfaces: Wouldn't it be simpler and easier to just use voice control?
(via World of Psychology)
dmunger | June 6, 2006CNN reports on a study which finds that a disproportionate number of first-graders are overweight when they have authoritarian parents -- the most strict form of parenting.
Strict mothers were nearly five times more likely to raise tubby first-graders than mothers who treated their children with flexibility and respect while also setting clear rules.
But while the children of flexible rule-setting moms avoided obesity, the children of neglectful mothers and permissive mothers were twice as likely to get fat.
The article, while somewhat carefully worded, does lapse into the correlation/…
dmunger | June 6, 2006A new longitudinal study suggests that playing online role playing games can help kids prepare for the world of adult responsibility:
Young players who become members of a clan, guild or faction (terminology depends on the game) find they have responsibilities to attend to if they wish to receive any kind of reward, rank advancement or recognition. There are also penalties if they disobey rules or fail to meet commitments. A faction may require the player to participate in missions/quests or other tasks such as mining materials or guarding a prison. Successful missions/quests result in the…
dmunger | June 6, 2006The Eide Neurolearning Blog reports on research suggesting that it's more difficult for highly anxious people to recognize happy facial expressions.
The original research article, by Leah Somerville and colleagues, can be found here.
dmunger | June 5, 2006A new study on mice offers some evidence of the mechanism that causes us to be sleepy after we eat. The research was conducted by a team led by Denis Burdakov:
In their experiments, the researchers engineered mice to produce a fluorescent protein only in orexin neurons. Thus, the researchers could isolate the neurons in brain slices from the mice and perform precise biochemical and electrophysiological studies to explore how glucose acted on those neurons. In particular, the researchers performed experiments in which they exposed the neurons to the subtle changes in glucose levels known to…
dmunger | June 5, 2006I've been an avid skier for over 25 years -- but I didn't start using goggles until very recently. Under the overcast Washington State skies, they didn't seem to be necessary. But now that I live in North Carolina, skiing is usually done under sunny skies on artificial snow; goggles are a must. As a person who also wears glasses, however, the experience can be frustrating -- any time I stop for more than a few seconds, my goggles, glasses, or both will usually fog up -- the goggles rely on airflow to keep from getting foggy. In this situation, I'm left with two choices: proceed with impaired…
dmunger | June 5, 2006I have a review of The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis up at The Quarterly Conversation. You might want to give it a look. Here's an excerpt:
At current count, several recent books, documentaries, and even an IMAX film have covered Ernest Shackleton's now legendary failed attempt to be the first explorer to cross Antarctica. His ship Endurance became trapped in the sea ice before he even spotted land in the Weddell Sea. The ship was eventually crushed, forcing Shackleton to sail a 20-foot dinghy 2,000 miles across some of the most tempestuous seas on the planet to find help for his party, who…
dmunger | June 2, 2006The Washington Post reports on the decline of school recess periods:
For many kids today, the recess bell comes too late, for too little time, or even not at all. Pressure to raise test scores and adhere to state-mandated academic requirements is squeezing recess out of the school day. In many schools, it's just 10 or 15 minutes, if at all. In some cases, recess has become structured with organized games -- yes, recess is being taught.
Parents are now fighting back -- armed with evidence from psychologists:
Academics and psychologists who study childhood development are growing concerned…