10 Ways Our Minds Warp Time How time perception is warped by life-threatening situations, eye movements, tiredness, hypnosis, age, the emotions and more… The mind does funny things to our experience of time. Just ask French cave expert Michel Siffre. In 1962 Siffre went to live in a cave that was completely isolated from mechanical clocks and natural light. He soon began to experience a huge change in his perception of time. When he tried to measure out two minutes by counting up to 120 at one-second intervals, it took him 5 minutes. But you don’t have to hide out in a cave for a couple of months to warp time, it happens to us all the time. 1. People often report that time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations, like skydiving. But are we really processing more information in these seconds when time seems to stretch? To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Time is relative “Time is an illusion.
Ads Implant False Memories | Wired Science My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust. And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from? A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were introduced to a new popcorn product called “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their memory of the product. The scientists refer to this as the “false experience effect,” since the ads are slyly weaving fictional experiences into our very real lives.
The Reinvention of the Self Just as Duman was beginning to see the biochemical connections between trophins, stress, and depression, Gould was starting to document neurogenesis in the hippocampus of the primate brain. Reading Altman’s and Kaplan’s papers, Gould had realized that her neuron-counting wasn’t erroneous: She was just witnessing an ignored fact. The anomaly had been suppressed. But the final piece of the puzzle came when Gould heard about the work of Fernando Nottebohm, who was, coincidentally, also at Rockefeller. Despite the elegance of Nottebohm’s data, his science was marginalized. But Gould, motivated by the strangeness of her own observations, connected the dots. She would spend the next eight years quantifying endless numbers of radioactive rat hippocampi. After her wearisome post-doc, during which her data was continually criticized, Gould was offered a job at Princeton. Gould’s finding has led, via work Duman has done that builds on it, to a rash of R&D to stimulate neurogenesis in the brain.
The Cognitive Science of Rationality (The post is written for beginners. Send the link to your friends! Regular Less Wrong readers may want to jump to the Stanovich material .) The last 40 years of cognitive science have taught us a great deal about how our brains produce errors in thinking and decision making, and about how we can overcome those errors. These methods can help us form more accurate beliefs and make better decisions. Long before the first Concorde supersonic jet was completed, the British and French governments developing it realized it would lose money. John tested positive for an extremely rare but fatal disease, using a test that is accurate 80% of the time. Mary gave money to a charity to save lives in the developing world. During the last four decades, cognitive scientists have discovered a long list of common thinking errors like these. How are these errors produced, and how can we overcome them? Rationality First, what is rationality ? Cognitive scientists recognize two kinds of rationality: Notes
Less Empathy Toward Outsiders: Brain Differences Reinforce Preferences For Those In Same Social Group An observer feels more empathy for someone in pain when that person is in the same social group, according to new research in the July 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The study shows that perceiving others in pain activates a part of the brain associated with empathy and emotion more if the observer and the observed are the same race. The findings may show that unconscious prejudices against outside groups exist at a basic level. The study confirms an in-group bias in empathic feelings, something that has long been known but never before confirmed by neuroimaging technology. Researchers have explored group bias since the 1950s. "Our findings have significant implications for understanding real-life social behaviors and social interactions," said Shihui Han, PhD, at Peking University in China, one of the study authors. Other recent brain imaging studies show that feeling empathy for others in pain stimulates a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex.
Teenage Brains Although you know your teenager takes some chances, it can be a shock to hear about them. One fine May morning not long ago my oldest son, 17 at the time, phoned to tell me that he had just spent a couple hours at the state police barracks. Apparently he had been driving "a little fast." What, I asked, was "a little fast"? "That's more than a little fast," I said. He agreed. He did, however, object to one thing. "Well," I huffed, sensing an opportunity to finally yell at him, "what would you call it?" "It's just not accurate," he said calmly. " 'Reckless' sounds like you're not paying attention. "I guess that's what I want you to know. Actually, it did make me feel better. My son's high-speed adventure raised the question long asked by people who have pondered the class of humans we call teenagers: What on Earth was he doing? Through the ages, most answers have cited dark forces that uniquely affect the teen. Ten-year-olds stink at it, failing about 45 percent of the time.
Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. Neuroscientist Kathleen McDermott of Washington University began by quoting famous memory researcher Endel Tulving, who called our ability to remember the past and to anticipate the future “mental time travel.” Tellingly, not only can he not recall the past, he can’t envision the future. Alas, they couldn’t.
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
News Desk: Steve Jobs: “Technology Alone Is Not Enough” Editors’ Note: Details from this post appeared in similar form in a July, 2011, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine, U.K. We regret the duplication of material. On January 30, 1986, shortly after he was forced out of Apple Computer (and years before his return), Steve Jobs bought a small computer manufacturer named Pixar from George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. While the Pixar team had produced a few impressive animated shorts for marketing purposes—“The Adventures of Andre and Wally B” is widely credited with spurring Hollywood’s interest in digital animation—Jobs was most interested in the Pixar Image Computer, a $125,000 machine capable of generating complex graphic visualizations. Unfortunately, the expensive computers were a commercial flop. The survival of Pixar, and its subsequent rise, is a revealing case study in Jobs’s approach to innovation. This faith in the liberal arts is rooted in Job’s own biography.