Dancing Makes You Smarter For centuries, dance manuals and other writings have lauded the health benefits of dancing, usually as physical exercise. More recently we've seen research on further health benefits of dancing, such as stress reduction and increased serotonin level, with its sense of well-being. Most recently we've heard of another benefit: Frequent dancing apparently makes us smarter. A major study added to the growing evidence that stimulating one's mind by dancing can ward off Alzheimer's disease and other dementia, much as physical exercise can keep the body fit. You may have heard about the New England Journal of Medicine report on the effects of recreational activities on mental acuity in aging. The 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, was led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, funded by the National Institute on Aging, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Neuroplasticity What could cause these significant cognitive benefits? Aging and memory
Top 10 Common Medical Myths Health At the List Universe we love to dispel myths – so here we are, yet again, presenting another list of common myths that need to be debunked and forgotten once and for all. This time we look at medical myths – of which there are thousands. The Myth: Sugar makes kids hyperactive Dr. The Myth: You lose most of your body heat through your head A military study many years ago tested the loss of temperature in soldiers when exposed to very cold temperatures. The Myth: You should drink at least eight glasses of water a day The origins of this myth is most likely the fact that a 1945 government agency said that the human body needed around 8 glasses of fluid a day. The Myth: Chewing gum takes seven years to pass through your system I am sure we have all been told at least once in our life by a concerned adult, not to swallow gum as it will take seven years to leave our bodies. The Myth: Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis in later life The Myth: Teething causes a fever
Observation Active acquisition of information from a primary source Science[edit] The scientific method requires observations of natural phenomena to formulate and test hypotheses.[3] It consists of the following steps:[4][5] Human senses are limited and subject to errors in perception, such as optical illusions. Scientific instruments were developed to aid human abilities of observation, such as weighing scales, clocks, telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, cameras, and tape recorders, and also translate into perceptible form events that are unobservable by the senses, such as indicator dyes, voltmeters, spectrometers, infrared cameras, oscilloscopes, interferometers, Geiger counters, and radio receivers. Considered as a physical process itself, all forms of observation (human or instrumental) involve amplification and are thus thermodynamically irreversible processes, increasing entropy. Paradoxes[edit] Biases[edit] Confirmation bias[edit] Processing bias[edit] Philosophy[edit] See also[edit]
List of paradoxes This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. Because of varying definitions of the term paradox, some of the following are not considered to be paradoxes by everyone. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are based on fallacious reasoning, or incomplete/faulty analysis. Logic[edit] Self-reference[edit] These paradoxes have in common a contradiction arising from self-reference. Barber paradox: A barber (who is a man) shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Vagueness[edit] Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. Mathematics[edit] Statistics[edit] Probability[edit] Infinity and infinitesimals[edit] Geometry and topology[edit] The Banach–Tarski paradox: A ball can be decomposed and reassembled into two balls the same size as the original.
The Dr. Oz Show Mental representation Hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.[1][2] Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually present to the senses.[3] In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts. Mental representations (or mental imagery) enable representing things that have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist.[4] Our brains and mental imageries allow us to imagine things have either never happened or are impossible and do not exist. Representational theories of mind[edit] Canadian philosopher P. Responses[edit] Philosophers[edit]
Science Wars What Scientists Know and How They Know It the status of scientific knowledge that began in ancient Greece, raged furiously among scientists, social scientists, and humanists during the 1990s, and has re-emerged in today's conflict between science and religion over issues such as evolution. Professor Steven L. Goldman, whose Teaching Company course on Science in the 20th Century was praised by customers as "a scholarly achievement of the highest order" and "excellent in every way," leads you on a quest for the nature of scientific reasoning in this intellectually pathbreaking lecture series, Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It. Those who have taken Professor Goldman's previous course, which is an intensive survey of the revolution in scientific knowledge from 1900 to 2000, may have wondered: if what counts as scientific knowledge can transform so dramatically within only 100 years, what exactly is scientific knowledge? Science Wars addresses this surprisingly difficult question. What Is Reality?
Empirical evidence Knowledge acquired by means of the senses Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. Scientific evidence is closely related to empirical evidence but not all forms of empirical evidence meet the standards dictated by scientific methods. Some philosophers restrict evidence even further, for example, to only conscious, propositional or factive mental states.[2] Restricting evidence to conscious mental states has the implausible consequence that many simple everyday beliefs would be unjustified. A thing is evidence for a proposition if it epistemically supports this proposition or indicates that the supported proposition is true. Knowledge a posteriori and a priori [edit] Empiricism and rationalism Scientific evidence
FUTURE PREDICTIONS CONTRIBUTE YOUR PREDICTION Belief Mental state of holding a proposition or premise to be true Beliefs are the subject of various important philosophical debates. Notable examples include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented with various sorts of evidence?", "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs (e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water is H2O part of the content of that belief)?", "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?" Various conceptions of the essential features of beliefs have been proposed, but there is no consensus as to which is the right one. Representationalism [edit] Representationalism characterizes beliefs in terms of mental representations. There are different ways of conceiving how mental representations are realized in the mind. Interpretationism can be combined with eliminativism and instrumentalism about beliefs. Rules.
Cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes.[1] It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animal) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.[2] It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. Principles[edit] Levels of analysis[edit] Interdisciplinary nature[edit] Cognitive science: the term[edit] Scope[edit] Cognitive science is a large field, and covers a wide array of topics on cognition. "... Attention[edit]
Truth-bearer Entities that are said to be either true or false Some distinctions and terminology as used in this article, based on Wolfram 1989[3] (Chapter 2 Section1) follow. It should be understood that the terminology described is not always used in the ways set out, and it is introduced solely for the purposes of discussion in this article. Use is made of the type–token and use–mention distinctions. A character[nb 1] is a typographic character (printed or written) etc. A word-token[nb 2] is a pattern of characters. A sentence-token[nb 6] is a pattern of word-tokens. A referring-expression[nb 14] is expression that can be used to pick out or refer to particular entity. Sentences in natural languages [edit] As Aristotle pointed out, since some sentences are questions, commands, or meaningless, not all can be truth-bearers. Theory 1a: All and only meaningful-declarative-sentence-types[nb 18] are truth-bearers Criticisms of theory 1a Revision to Theory 1a, by making a distinction between type and token.
Proposition Bearer of truth or falsity if given the actual world as input, but would return if given some alternate world where the sky is green. However, a number of alternative formalizations have been proposed, notably the structured propositions view. Relation to the mind [edit] In relation to the mind, propositions are discussed primarily as they fit into propositional attitudes. Explaining the relation of propositions to the mind is especially difficult for non-mentalist views of propositions, such as those of the logical positivists and Russell described above, and Gottlob Frege's view that propositions are Platonist entities, that is, existing in an abstract, non-physical realm.[1] So some recent views of propositions have taken them to be mental. Philosophical debates surrounding propositions as they relate to propositional attitudes have also recently centered on whether they are internal or external to the agent, or whether they are mind-dependent or mind-independent entities. such that and