Charles Burchfield | Lull in Summer Rain (1916) | Art.sy. Quote Investigator | Dedicated to the Exploring and Tracing of Quotations. Studying the Brain Can Help Us Understand Our Unscientific Beliefs. Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in a December, 2009, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine. We regret the duplication of material. Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution.
The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power. What’s most remarkable about these numbers is their stability: these percentages have remained virtually unchanged since Gallup began asking the question, thirty years ago. Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. Shtulman and colleagues summarize their findings: Ray Bradbury on Space, Education, and Our Obligation to Future Generations: A Rare 2003 Interview. By Maria Popova “Anything that puts a sense of the miraculous in you… Anything that makes you feel alive is good.”
After this morning’s remembrance of Ray Bradbury through 11 of his most memorable quotes, here comes a rare archival gem: On August 22, 2003, SCVTV news man Leon Worden conducted a short but wide-ranging interview with the beloved author, in which he discusses such timely subjects as future of space exploration, what’s wrong with the education system, and where technology is taking us, exploring ideas as broad and abstract as the possibility of alien life and as specific and concrete as tackling the 40,000 highway deaths that take place every year. The interview is now available online, mashed up with images from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — highlights below. In commenting on the cultural impact of mainstream media, Bradbury echoes David Foster Wallace’s lament: Maybe we can get rid of a lot of lousy TV, I hope.
Anything except what’s on there! Donating = Loving. The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood | Wired Science. Muerte de Ray Bradbury: los consejos del escritor a los jóvenes. Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.: Why Weird Experiences Boost Creativity. Creative people think differently. But why? There is no magic bullet or single pill. We all have the potential for creativity, but there are so many different triggers that can broaden our minds, inspire, and motivate. Of course, there are just as many triggers that can shut down our minds. A crucial trigger is the experience of unusual and unexpected events. To test their idea, the researchers put people in a virtual reality world where participants took a virtual three-minute stroll through the university cafeteria, and during the course of their walk experienced weird events that violated the laws of physics. They also had people take a test of cognitive flexibility where they were required to come up with as many ideas as possible to the question "What makes sound?
" In a second experiment they asked participants to prepare a sandwich with butter and chocolate chips (apparently, this is a breakfast delicacy in the Netherlands, where the study was conducted). The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction. C. S. Lewis on "School Stories" and Media Distortion as a Greater Fiction Than Fiction. How To Stay Cool Under Pressure. Tuesday, May 29, 2012 Cognitive scientist Sian Beilock writes: “Our performance is often linked to financial incentives. But not everyone responds to financial incentives in the same way. While some thrive when the proverbial carrot is dangling out in front of them, others choke.
Why? New research published last week in the journal Neuron provides some answers to this question. A group of researchers at Cal Tech invited people to their lab to have their brains scanned while they performed a tricky exercise in exchange for a monetary reward. To figure out what was going on, the researchers next peered inside people’s heads. Why? Interestingly, those people who tend to be most loss-adverse (those people who really hate losing something they have) were the ones who showed the least activity in the ventral striatum when the stakes were high and the ones who choked the most.
I like that last bit of advice: focus on the reasons you are likely to succeed. Weighing the words of our different inner voices. Excuse me while I try to get a word in edgewise. I have someone in my head at the moment, and she’s talking very loudly. It’s Wobbly Wendy doing her thing in my left lobe. She natters away, worrying about Mayan prophecies and the cancer that’s surely the reason for the pain in my right knee. I imagine she wears a track suit and slippers and obsessively twiddles with a strand of her hair.
Oh phew, she is wearing herself out now, as she always does, which is a relief. I much prefer to listen to Cheerleading Cindy, who tells me things I like to hear – that everything is possible, the credit card will be paid off, a holiday is deserved, and, sure, go ahead and book yourself a massage because you’ve worked hard. And then there’s my mother, of course. Listen for a moment, and you’ll hear your own voices. Some experts argue that unhappiness is caused when we passively listen to those voices rather than pro-actively talk to ourselves. Researchers suggest a far more nuanced approach to self-talk. Molecular Gastronomy in Aisle 6: Kits for the Modern Cook | Wired Design.
Equal parts periodic table and Gourmet Magazine, Molecule-R has an Apple-like flair for design. Photo: Molecule-R “Where can I find the maltodextrin?” It’s a question that’s likely to result in a blank stare from your local grocer’s stock boy. But the scarcity of such ingredients is a real problem for molecular gastronomy enthusiasts. This avant-garde cooking style combines traditional foods with obscure, technical ingredients and processes, with outlandish results. Peanut butter powder with jelly noodles, anyone? The technique was popularized by chefs like Wylie Dufresne of WD-50, Ferran Adria of elBulli, and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, who wrote the magnum opus in the field, Modernist Cooking.
Until now. Molecule-R was founded by college friends Jonathan Coutu and Jerome De Champlain after Jean bought a couple of disappointing molecular gastronomy kits. The components of a Molecule-R kit. Molecular Gastronomy Crib Sheet: Co-Nectar. Hoy en día contamos con una gran cantidad de softwares para crear mapas mentales, probablemente más de 100. Sin embargo, vale la pena destacar el lanzamiento de MindMaple, que tuvo lugar en diciembre pasado. Estoy probando este programa desde unos días y me gusta mucho por su simplicidad de uso, la calidad gráfica de los mapas, la posibilidad de crear, como en XMind, un multimap: cada archivo es un clasificador de varios mapas. También me ha parecido muy útil poder crear tu propia biblioteca de símbolos dentro del programa, creando carpetas y clasificando las imágenes por etiquetas.
Por el momento solo está disponible para Windows a une precio de 99$ (es un oferta de lanzamiento porque el precio normal es de 199$). Me gustaría que el programa tenga más opciones a la hora de importar y exportar con otros programas de mind mapping, sin embargo hay que destacar que exporta fácilmente a Word, Powerpoint y Excel. Social-Cognitive Deficits in Normal Aging. Joseph M. Moran, Eshin Jolly, and Jason P.
Mitchell +Show Affiliations Author contributions: J.M.M. and J.P.M. designed research; J.M.M. and E.J. performed research; J.M.M. and E.J. analyzed data; J.M.M. and J.P.M. wrote the paper. The Journal of Neuroscience, 18 April 2012, 32(16): 5553-5561; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5511-11.2012 A sizeable number of studies have implicated the default network (e.g., medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) in tasks that require participants to infer the mental states of others (i.e., to mentalize). Received November 1, 2011. Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own. Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor.
Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists. Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd "lay psychologists" and took situational factors into account. It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating.
Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own altruism (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's altruism more reliably. Social ecology of similarity. Big schools, small schools and social relationships Abstract Social ecologies shape the way people initiate and maintain social relationships. Settings with much opportunity will lead to more fine-grained similarity among friends; less opportunity leads to less similarity. We compare two ecological contexts—a large, relatively diverse state university versus smaller colleges in the same state—to test the hypothesis that a larger pool of available friendship choices will lead to greater similarity within dyads. Participants in the large campus sample reported substantially more perceived ability to move in and out of relationships compared to participants in the small colleges sample.
Dyads were significantly more similar on attitudes, beliefs, and health behaviors in the large campus than in the small colleges sample. To 'think outside the box,' think outside the box. Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.
The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body. Angela Leung of Singapore Management University and her coauthors from the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and others wondered if the same was true of metaphors about creativity. "Creativity is a highly sought-after skill," they write. People talk about thinking "outside the box" or consider problems "on the one hand, then on the other hand. " 5 things you didn't know about the beginning of a relationship. Why Love Matters More (And Less) Than You Think - Umair Haque. By Umair Haque | 6:14 PM February 14, 2012 So, how was your Valentine’s Day?
Me? I had an anti-Valentine’s day at my local bar with the ghost of Albert Camus, an existential crisis, and a decent bottle of wine. Here’s what occurred to the four of us while we were angsting out. I’ve made the point before that our economy seems especially good at mass-producing toxic junk. Throw The Art of War at me if you must, waterboard me, glue my eyes wide open and dress me in one of Rick Santorum’s sweater vests if you have to, but I’d suggest, when it comes to real human prosperity: the truest denominator of a life searingly well lived is love. Hence, here are a few things I’ve learned along the way — thanks to a long string of catastrophically failed relationships, imploding corner offices, living in between multiple cities, a couple of fistfights, and long evenings of solitude at the bar. Experience. Act. Suffer. Mean it. But it can, if you’re very lucky, be earned. None of us belong here.
Taming the Wandering Mind | The Moral Sciences Club. This lovely Hanif Kureishi piece on the often misguided drive to tame the wandering mind struck a chord with me. This is familiar: My son, who can skip and sing, found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished, for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labeled dyslexic and dyspraxic.There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis.
I've been diagnosed with a fairly serious case of "adult ADHD," but I am convinced that this is mostly a hand-waving, pseudo-scientific way of saying that my constitution leaves me ill-suited to perform certain tasks under certain conditions. In America, however, it's tough to feel at ease with this thought. As Kureishi says: For me, now, things do get done; books are finished, and other projects are started that are also finished. Also, this: Not to say that one can drift one's way to success. Friedman_foerster2001. Less thinking biases in a foreign tongue. Creativity Happens When You Least Expect It. It's well known that there are circadian or daily rhythms in basic physiological functions like body temperature or digestion. Interestingly, these circadian rhythms extend to our psychological abilities too. Simply put, we tend to have more brainpower at our peak circadian arousal time, which leads to success on activities that require us to concentrate and mentally 'buckle down.' Morning types (i.e., people who are most alert in the morning) excel on a whole host of cognitive tasks when they complete these tasks early in the day.
This is especially true for tasks that require working memory , like systematically reasoning through a problem or juggling numbers in your head. As I have blogged about before , working memory is our flexible mental scratch pad. It's the brainpower that helps us keep what we want in mind and what we don't want out. But not all tasks require working memory for success. Recent research confirms this idea. Take the following problem: What Dr. Both Convergent and Divergent Thinking are Necessary for Creativity. 0Share Synopsis What happens when the IQ test taker is suddenly asked to be the IQ test constructor? The relationship between intelligence and creativity has long been debated and studied. One of the hallmark tests of "general intelligence" is the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test.
This test gives you a matrix of figures and you have to figure out the missing piece that completes the pattern. Here's an example: There are typically 8 answer options and you choose the one correct answer. Performance on this test is strongly related to the common factor derived from performance across a wide range of IQ test items.
Whatever this test is really measuring, one thing is for sure: this is a test of convergent thinking. Researchers have attempted to get at the answer to that question-- reporting on average a small correlation between convergent thinking tests and divergent thinking tests. First they gave the children the standard pattern completion test to take. Their result? Study of literature under attack? A Stanford scholar to the rescue. The Fatal Flaw of the Storyteller. Camille Seaman Photography - Earth Series: Part I, Ger , The Last Iceberg, The Last Iceberg Series II , Dark Ice, A Penguin's Life, This Other World, The Big Cloud. Sharmistha Ray | Official Website.
Prismatic blog - Prismatic Blog - Clustering Related Stories. Under the Namibian Sky - The Movie. The 'If' Moment: A Brief History of Alternate Histories | Underwire. Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data. How Titanoboa, the 40-Foot-Long Snake, Was Found. Geneticist Runs Personalized Medicine Superstudy On Himself | Wired Science. Time-Lapse Starscape Videos Show Heavens in Motion | Wired Science. America, the Beautiful (And Nutty): A Skeptic's Lament | Wired Science. Luc Sante, Author of Low Life, on the Benefits of Self-Editing | Word Craft.
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