mixingmemory
Posts by this author
July 13, 2006
I'm going to have only sporadic computer access for the next several days, so I won't have time to do much new posting. So I'm going to just copy and paste some of the more popular posts from the old blog. They are four posts on neuroaesthetics, particularly Ramachandran's 10 principles of art.…
July 12, 2006
A couple weeks ago, a couple Science Bloggers, sparked by Jessica of Feministing, discussed the potential dangers of discovering the biological causes of homosexuality. Jessica expressed a common attitude in her post, writing:
And naturally the larger question with all these why-are-you-gay studies…
July 11, 2006
Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts by means of theory-like propositional knowledge, or through simulation…
July 10, 2006
It's been obvious to everyone who's written about politics since Aristotle that emotion plays an important role in political rhetoric and political judgment. With an increased focus on emotion in cognitive scientists, there has been a flourish of empirical work attempting to elucidate this role. I…
July 9, 2006
The second edition of The Synapse is up over at A Block Around the Clock. I especially liked "Are You Conscious of Your Precuneous" and Ethics at the Dawn of the Neurotechnological Age."
Elsewhere, John Hawks tackles Aymara, "the future is behind us" thing, with some links to some nice discussion…
July 9, 2006
Wow, what a really bad cup this year. I mean, I was rooting for Italy after the U.S. was eliminated, but ending on penalty kicks? That just sucks. Combine that with all the other games that either ended on penalty kicks after extra time, or in which the only goal scored was on a penalty kick, and…
July 8, 2006
This week's visual illusion is related to Mach bands, and similar in some ways to the watercolor effect. It's called the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet effect (or just the Cornsweet effect)1. This is the best example I've ever seen (from here):
What you should see is a dark square over a light square (…
July 7, 2006
The Westen et al. study on the motivated reasoning of political partisons has made its way back into the blogosphere, first with Will Wilkerson, and now fellow Science Blogger Ed Brayton. I posted on the study, and hot cognition/motivated reasoning in general back in March, when the study was first…
July 6, 2006
If you're looking for a good way to waste some time, try this (via Bitch Ph.D.). Here is a piece created by my 8-year old Pollock (aka Darth Vader):
July 5, 2006
If you found yesterday's post on perceptual symbol systems and related theories interesting, you might like this paper by Edouard Machery that is in press at Cognition. The paper is titled "Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique." The critique is aimed at "neo-empiricism" in concept…
July 5, 2006
Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was…
July 4, 2006
It's not uncommon these days to hear someone on the right side of the political spectrum refer to people on the left side as "America haters." It's a nice way to dismiss any criticism of the United States' policies or behaviors, and current administration in particular, because instead of…
July 3, 2006
The first edition of the new neuroscience carnival Encephalon is now up at The Neurophilosopher's Blog, here. There are several good posts, and I actually learned a bit from some of them.
I have to admit, though, that I'm particularly partial to this post from BrainTechSci. A sample:
It is hard…
July 3, 2006
Back in May, a study by Mitchell, Macrae, and Banaji (of Implicit Association Test fame) was published in Neuron that made the following claim (from the abstract):
We observed a double dissociation such that mentalizing about a similar other engaged a region of ventral mPFC linked to self-…
July 2, 2006
Over at Gene Expression, "Darth Quixote's" (George Menard's rewriting of Cervantes? That's a bad joke, isn't it?) 10-question interview with Steven Pinker was posted today. You can read it here. The questions are pretty good, for the most part, and Pinker's answers are interesting. I agree with…
July 2, 2006
It would be fair to say that I am obsessed with all things related to the first world war. I would be neglecting my own obsession, then, if I didn't mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme. For those of you who don't know, The Battle of the Somme began with a British…
July 1, 2006
OK, this is goofy, but I was tired and bored, so I started playing around with "The Advertising Slogan Generator" (via Pharyngula) You put a word or phrase in, and it sticks it in classic advertising slogans. I used "cognition," and this is what I got:
Try Cognition, You'll Like It.
The Cognition…
July 1, 2006
The literature on robot navigation is huge, and summarizing it would be difficult, if not impossible, but I thought I'd provide a few examples of papers you can read on robots that utilize ant-like navigational mechanisms.
Franz, M.O., Schölkof, B., Mallot, H.A., & Bülthoff, H.H. (1998).…
July 1, 2006
Discovered in the 1860s by Ernst Mach (hence the name), Mach Bands are actually a set of interrelated phenomena. Take a look at this image:
From here
The individual bands should appear as gradients, and they may even appear to be curved. In fact, they are all solid colors. Now look at this one:…
June 30, 2006
I'm going to play biologist for a moment, and talk about a species other than humans or nonhuman primates. First, imagine that you're about 10 mm long, a couple mm high, and you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Eventually you've got to find food, so you leave the comfort of your burrow…
June 28, 2006
Jonah, over at Frontal Cortex, has a post titled "Neglected Psychologists," in which he asks:
What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting?
The same could be asked of all cognitive scientists. Jonah gives two names: William James and John Dewey. If you've been reading…
June 27, 2006
In a response to my defense of Freud, Jonah Lehrer states that, with Harold Bloom (ewww!), he sees Freud as "one of the great artists of the 20th century." In my view, how we read Freud today -- as literature, philosophy, or science -- is largely a matter of choice, as is the case for most early…
June 27, 2006
Dave over at Cognitive Daily beat me to this (curse you, Dave!), but I wanted to point everyone to an article in Seed Magazine by Paul Bloom, titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain." If you can't tell from the title, the article is on the lure of imaging studies, and the sense that…
June 27, 2006
In the past, I've often wondered how journalists pick which studies to write about. The obvious answer is that they pick studies that will get readers or viewers, but given how little their stories correspond with the research they're writing about, it seems to me like they could pick any study and…
June 26, 2006
The first edition of The Synapse, one of two new neuroscience carnivals, is here. Especially interesting are the mating robots and the post on neurotheology.
June 25, 2006
Well, not on blogs exactly, but internet communication in general. What he says definitely applies to blogs, though. The quote is in a footnote in this speech that Habermas gave at the 2006 annual convention of the International Communication Association.
Allow me in passing a remark on the…
June 25, 2006
This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is, "What makes a good science teacher?" I don't know how to answer that. I've had many science teachers, some of whom were very good, some of whom were very bad, and most of whom fell somewhere in between. And they were all different. The only thing I…
June 24, 2006
Mark Liberman has two great posts over at Language Log debunking first a claim made by David Brooks in this article on the gender gap in education, and then Leonard Sax's poor use of science that inspired Brooks' claim. This is what Brooks wrote:
There are a couple of reasons why the two lists…
June 24, 2006
Here is an illusion that was discovered relatively recently. Take a look at this (from here):
You should see two figures with a purple outter border and an orange inner border. What color is the interior of the figure? It probably looks like it's orange, though a lighter shade of orange than the…
June 23, 2006
A couple Science Bloggers have been giving Freud a hard time lately. In a post on Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex wrote:
So why was Blink less than satisfying for me? Becase Gladwell ended up lumping together all sorts of research, from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task to…