Minds and/or brains
jstemwedel | July 30, 2010Younger offspring: Mom? I have a question.
Dr. Free-Ride: OK.
Younger offspring: If I got up really early --
Dr. Free-Ride: I hope you won't.
Younger offspring: No, I won't, but if I got up really early, way before it's time to wake up, like, midnight, and I tried to open my eyes and wake up, would I not be able to because my nerves are tired?
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmmm.
Younger offspring: Because I think if I decided to wake up at midnight I wouldn't be able to. I won't be able to open my eyes or get out of bed.
Dr. Free-Ride: I think you might be right about that. If your body needs sleep, it…
jstemwedel | July 1, 2010I've just gotten back from a conference, and I was blaming the travel and time zones for the fact that I feel like this:
However, from the looks of things, it seems there is some kind of zombie epidemic on ScienceBlogs today. (I suppose this means I need to talk to the IT guys about internet security issues, if I got zombified through my browsing. Assuming they're still taking help tickets from zombies. I wonder if being a zombie with tenure makes a difference ...)
Anyway, in the meantime I thought it might be useful to break out the workplace safety talk for new students. While I can't…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2009In a recent column at Business Week, Bruce Weinstein (aka "The Ethics Guy") argues that multitasking is unethical. He writes of his own technologically assisted slide into doing too many tasks at once:
I noticed that the more things I could do with ease on my computer, the harder it was to focus on any one activity. My natural inclination to jump from one thing to another prematurely was now aided and abetted by technology--the very thing that was supposed to be helping me. Then, after the PDA and cell phone became a part of my daily life, I found myself, like millions of others, faced with…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2009Earlier this week, Ed Yong posted an interesting discussion about psychological research that suggests people have a moral thermostat, keeping them from behaving too badly -- or too well:
Through three psychological experiments, Sonya Sachdeva from Northwestern University found that people who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened. They donate less to charity and they become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment.
Sachdeva suggests that the choice to behave morally is a balancing act between the…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2007Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half's youth.
Well, kind of.
The grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment actually live a couple towns over from where they did when my better half still lived at home. In fact, they only moved from that house a few years ago, so I'm much more familiar with the immediate vicinity of the childhood home than I am with the environs of the current house.
But we do this thing that folks in this part of the country are…
jstemwedel | December 19, 2007In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007Another episode in the continuing saga, "Janet is a tremendous Luddite."
Back when I was "between Ph.D.s" one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn't do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on "house calls" to the students' homes for the tutoring. This meant I had clients in many different towns in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from San Carlos to Fremont to Los Gatos. And I had to figure out, from an address, how to get to each of them.
Of course, this was back in 1994, well before Google…
jstemwedel | May 30, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas.
Regular readers will guess that part of my interest in this research is connected to my habit of trying to engage my kids in conversations about science. Understanding what will make those conversations productive, in both the short-term and the long-term, would be really useful. Also, I should disclose that I'm pals with Deena (and with…