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brains
Posts Tagged “
cognitive science
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brains
mad cognitive science
Study Shows Digg Freezes Innovation Among Its Users
Transparently-shared ideas, like those that circulate on popular social networks such as Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, may be destroying people's creativity. According to a new study published today by two cognitive scientists, people who share ideas in large groups tend to stagnate rather than innovate. They "glom onto" popular ideas and then don't pursue new discoveries or breakthroughs because they've already accepted the common wisdom of the crowd. Small groups, however, offer a different story. More »
futurism
You Have Severely Overestimated How Awful This Blog Post Will Be
I'm going to do a psychological experiment on you to prove how lousy humans are at predicting the future. First, I want you to imagine reading a post about how scientists are using nanobots to restore George Lucas' brain to the state it was in right after he made THX 1138, and he'll use that brain to reboot the Star Wars franchise with Joss Whedon as the lead writer. Then I want you to imagine reading below the fold on this blog post. How much do you think you are going to enjoy reading this post? More »
applied cognitive science
How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations
Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he's starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant. This morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston, Kosslyn spoke in a symposium devoted the visualization of data, explaining how breakthroughs in cognitive science have revealed the best way to present information in the PowerPoint format. It was one of the most interesting examples of applied science I've ever seen. More »
mad science
Neuroscience Explains Why You Get Pleasure From Hurting Yourself
It turns out there is a neurological explanation for why people scratch and cut themselves, and spank each other for pleasure. Inflicting small amounts of physical pain, whether from scratching your skin vigorously or doing something more extreme, deactivates the parts of your brain associated with unpleasant or painful emotions. Though scientists have long speculated that there was some kind of neurological payoff from self-inflicted pain, a study published yesterday demonstrated precisely why your brain gets a reward when you hurt your body. More »
x-phi
Give It Up X-Phi Bitches -- Science Cannot Measure Ethical Goodness
Neuroscience cultural critic Jonah Lehrer has just written about a strange new subculture: experimental philosophy, or x-phi. These ethical innovators want to combine the scientific method and its tools, like fMRI brain scans, with traditional philosophy. Many x-phi adherents are eager to do things like, say, map the neurology of altruistic behavior. Find out why x-phi is also the first school of philosophy to advocate burning furniture and vidcasting after the jump. More »
social control
People in Rome remember the 2004 anti-war protest as peaceful. But when university students in the United States looked at photographs of the protest later, they called it violent and disturbing. What happened? Was it a cultural gap? No — it was a doctored photograph, much like the ones the New York Times ran of an Israeli air raid on Beirut with a lot of extra smoke billowing over the city. The doctored Rome picture was used for a new study that asked whether small changes made in photographs could transfigure the way people interpret events depicted in them.
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Doctored Photographs Can Rewire How the Brain Remembers
People in Rome remember the 2004 anti-war protest as peaceful. But when university students in the United States looked at photographs of the protest later, they called it violent and disturbing. What happened? Was it a cultural gap? No — it was a doctored photograph, much like the ones the New York Times ran of an Israeli air raid on Beirut with a lot of extra smoke billowing over the city. The doctored Rome picture was used for a new study that asked whether small changes made in photographs could transfigure the way people interpret events depicted in them.
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