mixingmemory
Posts by this author
August 25, 2008
Back to real blogging soon, but before then, I wanted to post this. You probably saw a bit of this during NBC's Olympics coverage, but the whole thing has to be seen. It's one of the coolest things ever, though me being a huge Marvin Gaye fan might have something to do with me thinking that:
July 26, 2008
Way, way back in September of 2005, a Danish newspaper published some cartoons depicting Muslims and their prophet, and in response, thousands of Muslim extremists responded with varying degrees of threatened and actual violence. As you all know, this resulted in a storm of media coverage around…
July 9, 2008
I've been meaning to post about this set of studies for a while, but because it's relevant to Chapter 4 of Lakoff's The Political Mind, I figured I'd better get around to it before I write the review of that chapter.
It's been a while, but in the past, I've talked a lot about new theories of moral…
July 8, 2008
I have this friend from New York who, most of the time, speaks in a normal (that is to say, southern) accent that she's acquired as a result of being surrounded for so long by people who speak the King's English ('cause Elvis was a southerner). Occasionally, though, usually after she's been talking…
July 7, 2008
In Chapter 3, we finally get to read all about the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent. I knew this was coming, of course, but for some reason, when I finally got to this chapter, I still felt surprised. I mean, at some point, you'd think he'd give up metaphors that even his own epigones can't find…
July 2, 2008
Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty of gratuitous neuroscience to top it all off.…
July 1, 2008
The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the best chapter in the book. That's because it contains a pretty good discussion…
June 30, 2008
Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense, because the chapters are pretty disjointed and, at least after the first few, it's…
June 28, 2008
There's an interesting short paper by Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science with that title. Unfortunately, it's not yet available without a subscription (though Bloom tends to put his papers on his website once published, so it might show up there sometime in…
June 24, 2008
Here's a little tidbit from my personal life that I thought I'd share, because I find it pretty amusing. I've always ridden the bus to work, because as anyone who's spent time on a college campus knows, it's impossible to get good parking spots unless you show up at about 4 am. On the bus, and…
June 23, 2008
UPDATE: I've messed with some of the images below the fold, which will hopefully make it easier for people to see the illusion without having to move all round the room.
Last year, Rob Jenkins published a seriously spooky-looking illusion (it freaks my son out) in the journal Perception (1). Take a…
June 22, 2008
There's a review of George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, in today's New York Times. You can read the review here. Some key excerpts:
Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a "New Enlightenment," progressives will exploit these…
June 19, 2008
Hahahahaha!!! From the comment section to this post:
HULK SEE MOVIE, HULK LIKE SMASH THINGS, HULK F5 NEURONS EXHIBIT ABOVE-BASELINE BOLD ACTIVITY.
June 19, 2008
We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're now learning that they're…
June 18, 2008
Blogs and the mainstream media have been filled with neuroscience news lately. First we learned that sarcasm happens in the brain, and then that sexual orientation is in the brain too. There was even an attempt (sarcastic, I hope) to account for sports fandom with mirror neurons (I've heard that…
June 16, 2008
One of my favorite optical illusions is the rotating face, an instance of depth inversion. I like it so much that I sometimes use the above image as my avatar around the web.
If you're not familiar with the illusion, what you're seeing is a 3D mask, one side of which is convex, while the other is…
June 11, 2008
If you're a depressed liberal and need to read something uplifting and inspiring, check out this profile of Adam Bender (pictured below), a great little league catcher who happens to have only one leg.
Be sure to watch the video! It's really impressive. And then there's this:
He suffered a mild…
June 11, 2008
"They only care about themselves," "They're out of touch with reality," "They don't become academics." These are just some of the answers people yelled at me yesterday when I read out loud the title of a paper in the June issue of Psychological Science. My answer was "some of each."
Oh, the paper…
June 9, 2008
I love afterimages and aftereffects, so I was excited to see that the 2008 winner for Best Illusion of the Year is a new afterimage illusion. To see the illusion for your self, watch this sequence of images for about 30 seconds (it takes at least 30 seconds for it to really work for me):
The…
June 5, 2008
This morning, while I was riding the bus to campus, I checked my email on my phone (man, I love that thing), and had a cognitive psychology topic alert from ScienceDirect. There were only three papers in the alert, but the title of the first one caught my eye: "No disease in the brain of a 115-year…
May 28, 2008
After my call for puns, I got some really bad ones, but I think I may have found the worst pun ever, and its a science pun too (via toothpastefordinner.com
Ouch!
May 19, 2008
Got your attention, right? That's the title of a paper by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli in April's Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Well, the full title is "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds." Here's the abstract:
Over the last quarter century, the…
May 16, 2008
Interesting (and short) video of a talk by Joshua Klein (via HENRY) on how smart crows are, and how we might use their intelligence:
May 13, 2008
I was asked to post this. Judging by the list of presenters and the topics, it sounds like an interesting conference.
Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Registration is now open; deadline Thursday…
May 13, 2008
There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The…
May 9, 2008
Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage…
May 7, 2008
More fluff while I grade papers...
While you're giving me your puns (see below), you should also give me your best (slightly) pejorative and (hopefully) funny descriptions of cognitive psychology/science. The two best I've heard, both from the same attention researcher, are:
"Cognitive psychology…
May 7, 2008
I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit, but as the semester wraps up, I wanted to ask for your help. Over the years, punning has become a more and more integral part of our lab meetings. It's reached the point, in fact, that our P.I. can barely utter a single non-pun sentence, even outside…
May 6, 2008
Like 99.8% of the people in psychology departments, I hate teaching statistics, in large part because it's boring as hell, for both the instructors and the students, but also because students have a hell of a time grasping it, and that makes for some really painful interactions. Part of the…