mixingmemory | August 25, 2008Back 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:
mixingmemory | July 26, 2008Way, 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 the world, including pretty extensive coverage in the American media. This coverage resulted in several important and, it seems to me, pretty productive discussions on a wide variety of relevant issues, including self-censorship among journalists, the double standard that exists when criticizing…
mixingmemory | July 9, 2008I'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 judgment, and Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model in particular. Under Haidt's view, moral judgments are largely intuitive (that is, unconscious, automatic, and non-deliberative), and instead of being based on ethical principles, which we use mostly for post-hoc rationalization, they're…
mixingmemory | July 8, 2008I 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 to someone back home, she slips into her old Jamaica Queens accent, and when she does, I spend the first thirty seconds or so just trying to figure out whether she's speaking English, and I don't even bother trying to understand the meaning of those strangely accented words she's uttering. After…
mixingmemory | July 7, 2008In 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 evidence for. But no, he clings to them even more desperately in this book, writing (I wish I could parody him this well, but he really wrote this):
It should be noted that these models [the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" models] are descriptive not prescriptive. They do occur in people's…
mixingmemory | July 2, 2008Chapter 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.
First, let's look at what will inevitably piss conservatives off. Lakoff writes that there are "thoroughgoing progressives" who "hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues," and that these progressives "are the bedrock of our democracy" (p. 46). Progressives, then, need to "reclaim"…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2008The 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 of scripts, schemas, frames, and the like, and how important they are in our thinking. The discussion is dotted with what I've taken to calling "gratuitous neuroscience" (I even mark "g.n." in the margins any time he uses it, and he uses it a lot throughout the book), but overall it's pretty good. If…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2008Well, 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 hard to really say anything general about the book. Really, the sections within the chapters are really disjointed as well, so even chapter-by-chapter reviewing is a little tenuous, but I imagine reviewing each little section would be tedious in the extreme. I guess after a couple posts, we'll see…
mixingmemory | June 28, 2008There'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 the near future), but if you have a subscription or access to a university library, you can read it here.
If you're not familiar with the idea, "psychological essentialism" is the belief that entities have an internal set of necessary properties, or an essence, that make them what they are. For…
mixingmemory | June 24, 2008Here'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 while waiting for the bus, I read. I don't read work-related stuff, because I like to underline and take notes, and with the bus bouncing me around, my underlines become strike-outs (when I go back to the paper, I wonder, "Why did I dislike this passage so much that I struck it out?"), and my…
mixingmemory | June 23, 2008UPDATE: 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 look at this face (from Jenkins' paper, Figure 1, p. 1266):
Spooky, right? Hopefully you all see a spooky looking woman (it's actually a combination of two female faces, which is why it looks so creepy) who is looking to your left (her right). Now take a look at the face again, only this time,…
mixingmemory | June 22, 2008There'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 discoveries. They'll present frames instead of raw facts. They'll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It's not the platform that needs to be changed. It's the voters.
I have to say, I've always thought there was a not-so-vague Orwellian quality to Lakoff's…
mixingmemory | June 19, 2008Hahahahaha!!! From the comment section to this post:
HULK SEE MOVIE, HULK LIKE SMASH THINGS, HULK F5 NEURONS EXHIBIT ABOVE-BASELINE BOLD ACTIVITY.
mixingmemory | June 19, 2008We 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 responsible for sex as well. Oh, I know, I know, we'd already learned that mirror neurons were responsible for sexual orientation, as I mentioned like two years ago, but we're just now learning that they're responsible for all sex. But we should have known already, right?
Let's start with the sexual…
mixingmemory | June 18, 2008Blogs 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 the actual reason we like watching sports is because we have retinas(1)). Neuroscience is all the rage, man.
I haven't, however, seen much coverage of what I think is the coolest recent neuroscience finding. That finding was reported in a paper in the May 30 issue of Science, titled "Predicting Human…
mixingmemory | 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 concave. When viewing the convex side, you see what looks like a normal face. As the mask slowly rotates, however, you begin to see the "inside" of the mask, on the concave side. Suddenly, however, the mask switches back to looking convex, like a normal face. This is likely the result of a…
mixingmemory | June 11, 2008If 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 concussion on one collision and missed a practice or two. But he recovered and was ready for action in the next game. At one point this season he led the rookie league in put-outs at home.
Man, the kid knows how to block the plate. I hope he got the out on that play.
mixingmemory | 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, by Napier and Jost(1), is titled "Why are conservatives happier than liberals?" (duh!), and was inspired by the Pew Research Center study from a couple years ago, which naturally got a bunch of media and blog attention, in which 47% of conservative Republicans said they were "very happy," as…
mixingmemory | June 9, 2008I 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 illusion isn't really strong, so you may need to know what you're looking for in order to see it. What you should see is, after 20 or 30 seconds, the blank shapes start to be filled with a "ghostly" color. That's the afterimage, and though the actual colors only fill part of the the shapes, the…
mixingmemory | June 5, 2008This 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-old woman." I don't know whether it was the fact that she was really, really old, that they expected to find disease in her brain, or what, but the title drew me in. I need to start coming up with better titles myself.
Anyway, the paper's in press in the journal Neurobiology of Aging (you can read…