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dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…
dmunger | August 28, 2007When I was in school, teachers often implored us to not put off studying to the last minute. Sometimes they even suggested that we spread out our studying over a period of weeks. But who has time for that? Most of us just studied the night before the test -- with varying results, of course.
But surely research has been done on the ideal way to study. Is it possible to over-study? How much studying is enough? Wray Herbert has uncovered some real data on the problem, from a study by Doug Rohrer and Harold Paschler:
They had two groups of students study new vocabulary in different ways. One…
dmunger | August 27, 2007The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a new initiative by commercial scholarly publishers to discredit the open access movement.
Prism describes itself as an organization to "protect the quality of scientific research", which it hopes to do by opposing policies "that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing." What policies are they opposed to? Why, this one, which recommends that NIH-funded research results be freely available to the public when they are published.
In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright.…
dmunger | August 23, 2007What motivates someone to deny that a disease -- one which kills millions of people -- exists? Why would someone claim that the scientifically-established cause of that disease is actually the product of a vast conspiracy? Why would anyone believe them? This is a question for psychologists, but also for epidemiologists and public health professionals who must deal with the implications of those beliefs.
Tara Smith and Steven Novella have written an excellent, exceptionally readable article in PLOS Medicine which describes the shape and scale of the problem of HIV denial. They point to a…
dmunger | August 20, 2007I go for a run nearly every day. I wouldn't consider myself a fitness buff; mainly I run so that I don't gain weight. But according to an article in the New York Times, running might have another benefit -- improving my brain's health:
Scott Small at Columbia, for instance , likes nothing better than a strenuous game of tennis. "As a neurologist," he explains, "I constantly get asked at cocktail parties what someone can do to protect their mental functioning. I tell them, 'Put down that glass and go for a run.' "
The basis for this claim was first found in research on mice: mice with exercise…
dmunger | August 16, 2007Discover's got a very nice article about 10 unsolved mysteries of the brain. They're actually careful not to call these the "top 10" -- after all, who's to say that these are the 10 most important? Nonetheless, it's an impressive list:
1. How is information coded in neural activity?
2. How are memories stored and retrieved?
3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?
4. How do brains simulate the future?
5. What are emotions?
6. What is intelligence?
7. How is time represented in the brain?
8. Why do brains sleep and dream?
9. How do the specialized systems of the brain…
dmunger | August 15, 2007When Jim was a baby (back when we called him "Jimmy"), he was clearly a bright child, but he didn't have a lot of words. This didn't stop him from getting his point across. After his doctor recommended that we cut back on the bottle to encourage him eating solid foods, he'd repeatedly say one of his two words: "bah-pull." When the desired result wasn't achieved, he pulled us by the hand into the kitchen and pointed to the item he craved (cf. Orangutans playing charades).
Within a few months, however, Jim knew dozens of words and was even assembling some primitive sentences. What accounted for…
dmunger | August 14, 2007There's a problem with most of the highway signs currently being used in the U.S.: Overglow. The signs are fairly legible in the daytime, but at night, when they're illuminated solely by the reflected light from car headlights, reading becomes trickier. A New York Times article and accompanying slideshow (via Mike the Mad Biologist) demonstrates the problem:
What was clear text during the daytime becomes an illegible blob at night. The problem, it seemed, was the tiny spaces inside of letters -- the loop of an "a" or an "e," for example. At long distances, at night, and particularly for…
dmunger | August 2, 2007A new study of brain responses to music has found a striking difference in brain activity when a symphonic movement ends and the next one begins, compared to other parts of the musical work. A team led by Vinod Menon (and including This Is Your Brain on Music author Daniel Levitin) played excerpts from the symphonic works of English composer William Boyce while while monitoring the brain activity of the listeners. Make sure you follow the link to the original press release for an amazing video showing brain activity as one movement ends and the next begins.
Boyce was chosen because his works…
dmunger | July 31, 2007Here's an interesting question:
If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands--assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive--would they produce language in any form when they grew up?
It comes from Christine Kenneally, who posed the question to a group of experts in the field. It's a fascinating dilemma--are we all born with language "inside" of us; will it emerge without the social guidance of parents and other language speakers, or does each successive generation have to learn language anew?
Edmond Blair Bolles has provided a nice summary of…
dmunger | July 30, 2007You might think the best way to make a robot seem more "human" is to reproduce human features as precisely as possible, like in this YouTube video:
But most people are creeped out by robots this "real." We're actually more comfortable interacting with less realistic robots that exhibit some human traits, like this adorable robot named Leo:
So why is this less realistic robot so much more endearing? A fascinating article in this week's New York Times Magazine may offer some answers:
If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine ... we would be willing…
dmunger | July 27, 2007CBS News has a pretty good video describing the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in the workplace. Perhaps most shocking is the statistic depicted in this info-graphic:
Our friend Suzanne Greenlee is the benefits director for the food service company Sodhexo USA, and CBS interviewed her for the story. Her company offers free anonymous substance abuse counseling for all its employees, but I suspect that's quite rare in the industry. In a longer version of the interview not available online, Suzanne says that her company believes it saves more money by addressing the problem than the costs…
dmunger | July 27, 2007When I was in college, Ronald Reagan was president, and his wife Nancy Reagan gained a lot of media attention with her project to end drug abuse. Here campaign followed the mantra "just say no," suggesting that kids should be able to resist pressure to use drugs simply by refusing to give in to peer pressure.
Most people my age thought the campaign was ridiculous. On college campuses across the nation there was a "Nancy Reagan Day" where students got together and smoked marijuana in public (no, I didn't participate!).
Psychologists have been exploring the powerful influence of peer pressure…
dmunger | July 26, 2007Fox News has a very detailed review of the so-called $100 laptop, officially called the XO. The technology sounds quite impressive:
Even though bright sunshine is beating down upon the laptop screen, you're having no trouble reading the display.
But the sunlight is OK, since it's powering your system through a small, low-cost solar cell. And the XO doesn't need much power since it runs at a fraction of what laptops that are considered "green" run at.
The review only gets more glowing from there:
I expected to be impressed simply by the economic, low-power capabilities and wireless mesh…
dmunger | July 24, 2007Greta and I have been back from Europe for about 36 hours now, and we're slowly adapting to life back in the US. Sure, the olive oil's not as good, and wine costs a fortune, but amazingly we're finding that we're able to accommodate to these problems, as well as the 7-hour time shift from Athens to Charlotte.
I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise to us -- after all, the human brain is a remarkably adaptable organ. As many, many blogs have observed, a 44-year-old man, married with kids and holding a steady job, was found to have practically no brain matter in his skull:
Corpus…
cogdaily | June 14, 2007"What was your 6th birthday party like?
"If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval."
A fascinating article was posted over at the Developing Intelligence ScienceBlog discussing how retrieving an old memory can compete with the ability to later recall similar memories. This competition is said to assist in selective memory retrieval, and reduce metabolically…
dmunger | May 30, 2007There's been lots of commentary online about Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg's article about why children (and adults) often resist learning scientific information. Deric Bownds gives the money quote from the article:
Resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as…
dmunger | May 29, 2007With the preparations for Europe going on at full steam, I find myself drawn toward psychology articles about traveling. Take, for example, this article in Scientific American. Kaushik Basu explains the "traveler's dilemma," a scenario in which identical items purchased by two travelers are both damaged in transit. The airline agent is worried that they'll claim the price of the item is higher than what they actually paid, so he devises the following scheme:
He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both…
dmunger | May 24, 2007I don't know what I expected to see when I posted yesterday's poll about people's work schedules, but I didn't expect to find this. With over 250 responses, fewer than half of our respondents said they work a standard 8-5 Monday-Friday schedule.
It's possible that Cognitive Daily's readership isn't representative of the population at large (we've got a disproportionate number of students), but based on our sample, 52 percent of people don't work 8-5 every day. Using the poll results, it's easy to calculate how many people we expect to see out and about during the workweek. At any given time…
dmunger | May 23, 2007Jason Kottke points to an interesting article about why so many people seem to be hanging out in cafes, coffee shops, and parks in the middle of the day while "normal" people are working. Everyone seems to have a different reason:
"Jeffrey" (some names changed at owner's request), writing a poem in a notebook on Church Street, had quit his California Pizza Kitchen job that morning; he was down to a barista gig now. The poem was about knots. With extreme reluctance he conceded to hailing from Fresno. There was "no love" at his pizza job.
"I get Wednesdays off," said Kim Anderson, 29, an…