Psychology
omnibrain | March 16, 2007It sounds good doesn't it?! Just read a bit further until you realize what they're actually saying...
The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has suggested that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.
The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and one of the country's evangelical leaders, posted the article on his personal Web site earlier this month.
Mr. Mohler said in the article that scientific research "points to…
omnibrain | March 15, 2007A company in Korea is applying for a patent of their new technique to help all those poor video game addicted kids in korea (think kids playing video games for 4 days straight and then dying). The only problem with the patent... the chances of it working in Korea are about the same as them working in the United States (with non-Korean speaking kids). Here's why:
Venture start-up Xtive proposes to subliminally convince these kids to kick the habit by exposing them to an inaudible repetitive message. "We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The…
omnibrain | March 14, 2007Note from Sandra: Steve posted this as a joke, for being so outrageous as to be self-parody. It's hard to convey irony in text, and Question Technology revealed that some people took it seriously. Omni Brain doesn't endorse the views of the revealed source, psychologist/racist Linda Gottfredson. It is indeed a "snippet of junk floating around the web" (76 Google search results); I'm not sure where Steve found it but he's not espousing racism, classism, sexism, or any other ism evident in this chart.
Or more appropriately... Why socio-economic status matters.
omnibrain | March 13, 2007There is an article by John Tierney in the NYT and a post on his blog about the science of humor. Here's a little sampler of the artcle:
So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, "Wow, it's hot in here!"
And the other muffin replies: "Holy cow! A talking muffin!"
Did that alleged joke make you laugh? I would guess (and hope) not. But under different circumstances, you would be chuckling softly, maybe giggling, possibly guffawing. I know that's hard to believe, but trust me. The results are just in on a laboratory test of the muffin joke.
Laughter, a topic that…
omnibrain | March 12, 2007Grunt pant exhale grunt uugh grunt exhale. Pump that iron!
That's all you really need to know.
So get with it! Get to the gym and start exercising!
Actually, it seems that aerobic exercise was the beneficial form of physical activity. The researchers next step is to determine what forms of activity are the best for avoiding memory loss.
Here's some details from the CNN article:
Exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss, U.S. researchers reported Monday.
Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called…
omnibrain | March 12, 2007
Chris of Mixing Memory fame has started a bit of a meme with this post and this post. The basic idea is that with just a few pieces of music you can tell what kind of personality (or lack thereof) a person has.
Here's my contribution of some things I listen to a good amount. Links go to examples of either the song or the band.
Enjoy!
What does this list say about my personality? What's on your list? Let us know in the comments.
Antonin Dvorak - American Quartet.
Bob Marley - Kinky Reggae.
Deltron 3030 - 3030
The Quintet of the Hot Club of France (aka Django Reinhardt & Stephane…
omnibrain | March 12, 2007It looks like under very controlled circumstances, with rats, you can pick and choose which memory stays and which memory goes with a new drug. Don't worry though - the CIA won't be implanting and removing memories of last Tuesday any time soon. I'm not saying they can't wipe out most of last January, but they've always been able to do that with a whole lot of electric shocks and crazy drugs ;) Now, aliens on the other hand, they have a decent success rate with people. At last it seems that way since some people don't recover the memories of their anal probes until years later.
In any case…
omnibrain | March 11, 2007This might just be the closest drug free way of experiencing a hallucination.
Check it out here
If you are epileptic you may not want to click the link.
So what causes this effect?
Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject.
Neurons coding a particular movement reduce their responses with time of exposure to a constantly moving stimulus; this is neural adaptation. Neural adaptation also reduces the responses of these same neurons when responding to a stationary stimulus (see, for example, Barlow & Hill, 1963; Srinivasan & Dvorak, 1979). One theory is that perception of stationary…
omnibrain | March 8, 2007If you remember from the Simpson's episode, Brother can you spare two dimes, Homer's brother Herb invents a device to translate baby language. Now it looks like some Australian mother is claiming to have figured out baby speech. Shouldn't the Simpson's get a patent or something? Perhaps get a cut of the profits here!?
A newly discovered baby language is helping infants sleep through the night and mothers bond with their babies. After eight years of research, Australian mother Priscilla Dunstan says she has discovered a universal baby language, comprised of five distinct sounds. Dunstan…
omnibrain | March 7, 2007This picture demonstrates how viewpoint matters in perceiving impossible 3d objects.
Check out this site for an explanation on how it is done, the history of and the psychological mechanisms responsible.
And here are some more 3-d impossible structures and animated java demonstrations on how the illusions are possible.
Go here for the demos
There is a demo of the original impossible 3D object from the post a couple days ago at this site as well.
omnibrain | March 7, 2007
This guys brain is sorta having an out of body experience...
In any case, The March 6 issue of the journal Neurology has an article in it entitled, Out-of-body experience and arousal. where they found
that some people's brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep…
omnibrain | March 7, 2007Since yesterday I talked about blinking I figured that today I would re-post something from the old blog about another important eye movement that impacts our day to day life as much or more than blinking - The Saccade. Without further ado, here's the old post (with some edits including a definition of a saccade):
So as per my usual laziness I'm not even going to read the source article and make wide sweeping generalization about the conclusions presented in this news article (which may very well ignore whats in the actual journal article).
I think this stuff is actually pretty cool - there…
omnibrain | March 6, 2007According to Thomas and Irwin in Perception & Psychophysics 2006, 68 (3), 475-488:
Blinks occur on average once every 4 sec, or 900 times per hour, and the average blink duration is approximately 250 msec; thus, a total of 1 h out of every 16âh waking day is spent blinking.
During this time we see absolutely nothing that's going on around us - but what's even more crazy is that many cognitive functions (iconic memory for example) are suppressed shortly before, during and after the blink.
Someone decided to see what he was missing during a blink and created a crazy device that takes…
omnibrain | March 5, 2007The Visual Cognition laboratory at Harvard is looking for your help!
These aren't the usual ho-hum surveys - these are some pretty cool visual cognition experiments (I'm biased of course since that's what I study).
Head on over and participate in a short study!
From Josh:
Web-based experiments are becoming very common. Putting surveys online
is not that new and is already reasonably common, but it was generally
thought that you couldn't put cognitive psychology and perception
experiments online because they require careful controls in timing,
display, etc. Well, increased bandwidth has helped…
ksharpe | February 26, 2007Have you ever blown it on a standardized test? Had your mind go blank during a job interview? Faced a situation of enormous urgency and...totally underwhelmed yourself?
If you've ever been puzzled by your inability to do under pressure tasks that you usually find a snap, you can now soothe yourself with the thought that your breakdown may be due to your big brain.
At the AAAS meeting earlier this month, University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock presented her finding that talented people fail under pressure more than less-talented people do. This is because talented folks (the…
omnibrain | February 25, 2007I've pretty much ignored all the academic fraud cases lately since I don't know what good can come from getting upset/annoyed/whatever about asshole scientists who screw it up for the rest of us. But lately I haven't been able to ignore them anymore - they are really starting to affect both my day to day life as well as how I read actual science.
Day to Day:
At Illinois we had a married couple who while perhaps not committing academic fraud (although that has been questioned) were committing actual monetary fraud by essentially double charging their respective grants for things like travel…
omnibrain | February 25, 2007Ok just kidding but you should really read this funny post from the Language Log mocking a Washington Post article about spear use in chimps.
The Original:
Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.
The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of…
omnibrain | February 23, 2007Do you have a great memory? Go compete at the The 10th Annual Memory Championship! It will be held on Saturday, March 10, 2007 in New York City at the Con Edison Building. You can also watch it live on HDNet If you have HD ;) Hey all you guys can come over to my place! Actually I don't think I could watch it... sounds more boring than a spelling bee.
In anycase... how does this contest work?
There is a pre-qualifying round of four events in which the top seven scoring "Mental Athletes (MAs)" advance to the Championship Round. The memorization categories are: Names and Faces, Speed…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2007Swedish researchers claim that it may be possible to read a person's personality by analyzing their irises. They studied 428 people and correlated iris patterns with warm-heartedness and trust or neuroticism and impulsiveness. The researchers looked at crypts (pits) and contraction furrows (lines curving around the outer edge of the iris), which are formed when pupils dilate.
It was found that those with more crypts were likely to be tender, warm and trusting, while those with more furrows were more likely to be neurotic, impulsive and give in to cravings.
The researchers suggest that a…