Sian Beilock |
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Anti anxiety
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Reception
In 1998, psychologist Arthur Graesser examined the real-time components of speech and reading comprehension. See [Einstein’s Dreams]. Components of comprehension include things like ‘syntax parsing’, ‘semantic processing’, ‘unexpected event-handling’ and ‘resolution’. They can be measured in milliseconds. Using an interactive computer-presentation, he recorded the time students spent at each component-step. Sort of like a reaction-time study. What he found was counterintuitive. Comprehension scores were actually higher for students who took longer to process the semantic and unexpected components of a narrative. Students who spent less time performing these tasks scored lower. On closer examination, he found that they were interpreting events way too fast to derive the most likely meaning. Neglecting these early steps also put them at greater risk of misunderstanding whatever happened next. What this tells me is that receptivity and a sense of wonder are far more important than coming to the most expedient conclusion when following what another person is saying.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Academic freedom
The other day students asked me why we waste money on research that doesn’t have immediate medical or commercial value. It was a fair question. I told them I thought it was because progress often depends on research that was originally done for non-commercial purposes ..like scientific advancement. The Internet came to mind. The Internet and all the social networking and businesses it hosts ..did not start out as a texting or commercial enterprise. It was an experiment that relied on research coming out of fields such as cybernetics and neuropsychology. The head of the project was a psychologist from MIT named Joseph Licklider [link]. He was a leading expert on the nature of the auditory system. His research involved understanding the way signals travel across the nervous system and get converted to sound by the auditory centers in the brain. His findings became the basis for ‘packet switching’ in computer networks, without which the Internet would have never progressed much farther than the telephone [link]. These studies were not originally intended for use by the computer industry ..nor were they funded by drug companies. The Internet would have never come about through corporate sponsorship alone. That’s the reason why scientific inquiry needs to be conducted in a neutral setting.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Conspiracy theory
Friday, December 17, 2010
Social perception
I have a theory. An awful lot of what we find ‘attractive’ is determined by what we see our peers paying attention to while we’re growing up. I mean during the formative years of 13 to 29. Experts in human development call this a ‘cohort group’. So, to express my theory another way: Our social perception is determined by the cohort group we belong to. For example, the cohort group that came of age after World War II (during the fifties) had greater respect for people in authority and admired commanding-looking leaders. They elected a war hero for president. Larger-than-life actors like Sophia Loren and John Wayne captured their imagination. They also valued conformity. That’s why affluent-looking crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin sold millions of records. However, the cohort group that came of age during the Vietnam War (the sixties and seventies) had lost respect for heroes and people in authority. Their attention turned more toward realistic-looking actors like Mia Farrow and Jack Nicholson ..as well as less affluent-looking musicians like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones (although they’re certainly affluent now). I hear evidence of this almost everyday. People of my father’s generation tell me they don’t find present-day actresses as appealing as the bombshells of the fifties. They say things like: “Hollywood just doesn’t make ‘em the way they used to” and point to reasons like “Today actresses suffer from mediocrity and over-exposure.” However, from the perspective of someone in my cohort ..that’s exactly what makes them appealing. What they call over-exposure ..I call peer-attention. And what they interpret as mediocre ..I see as realistic. That’s why I find actresses today equally, if not more attractive than actresses of the past. But hey, don’t take my word for it ..the film industry banks on it. The target group for moviemakers used to be people between the ages of 13 and 25. Not anymore. It is now people in their forties. They are less likely to stay at home playing X-box ..and they prefer watching movies with actors from their own generation. That’s why now, more than ever .. the screen-life of an actress lasts well into their forties and fifties. Look at the successful careers of Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Which brings me back to my theory ..greater realism equals greater appeal to moviegoers of my generation. Either that or I could say: “Hey, Hollywood must not have built ‘em to last in the fifties.” Or some such bull shyte.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The advantages of ADD
The kind of focused attention ordinarily required in a classroom is not all that helpful overcoming obstacles outside the classroom. A wider focus of attention, which is usually associated with ADD, is actually more adaptive according to neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman [link]. And from what I’ve seen, I believe it ..! They found that when students are more receptive and open to distraction, they do better navigating a computer-simulated labyrinth than when they are focused and blocking out distractions (as seen on an fMRI). Students actually see and hear more .. finding their way faster by heuristic than by analytic reasoning. In other words, discovering relationships between vague and loosely connected information was more advantageous than step-by-step analysis.
I found the same thing to be true once while I was applying for a home loan. After obtaining the 1st mortgage ..I was looking for a bank to help me with the down-payment. After three banks turned me down because they considered this ‘risky’ and ‘somewhat irresponsible’ ..I sat on the beach, got over the feeling that I was ‘risky’ (and somewhat irresponsible) ..and pulled together the real reasons why. They had nothing to do with my ability to meet my obligations. It was not a personal failing on my part but a circumstance of the recession (i.e. time required to find a buyer for my prior home). When I put this and other reasons down in a letter-of-explanation ..the next bank understood intuitively and, with just a couple of questions ..they approved my application.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Biomimicry
Notes from Bioengineering Conference, Nov 25, Long Beach, CA
Monday, November 15, 2010
Sirens of Titan
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Quality of understanding
“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence that is perceived is rapidly forgotten and memory is for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” [Link]
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Narrative space
Proceedings from the Symposium on Extraterrestrial Psychology
Dr. Latimer: Language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that signify nothing until we recognize something we might have either seen or heard before, and look up it's meaning in our mental dictionary. In a plurality of worlds, without a common store of experience that comes from shared culture, efforts at communication may be an exercise in incomprehensible gestures. Verbal communication is the manipulation of symbols to which meaning is assigned by culture. An important point to keep in mind my friends is that the events experienced by members of a culture over time are what make up the narrative thread of that culture.
Dr. Zhavern: When we look into space, we don’t see things as they are. What we see is a single narrative thread winding it’s way through the cosmos ..a cosmos that may be shared by narratives other than our own. However, to it’s participants ..each narrative looks like the only cosmic game in town. Like language, we skew space to resemble something we’ve either seen, or heard before. It’s the only way we can come to grips with it.
Dr. Orloff: I think human consciousness is a fragmented and unstable process. It creates rapid models of counterfactual worlds inside the brain for things it cannot observe ..but only infer. The brain keeps track of these different versions until only those that contribute to narrative coherence receive sufficient signal strength to survive while those leading nowhere dissolve into noise ..and disappear into non-narrative space .. in an instant.
Dr. Pangloss: I think consciousness is made up of searchlights, projected from different mental versions of the world we create. They eventually converge to form concentric circles in the brain that illuminate the focal points that contribute most to narrative events, and fade rapidly at the periphery with fewer contributing points until things go black somewhere around the edges of non-narrative space.
My feeble brain ( hasn’t got a clue ): Are you saying that the narrative threads of extraterrestrials aren’t likely to uncoil very closely to ours ..(?)
Saturday, October 16, 2010
PTSD
Monday, October 11, 2010
Extraterrestrial psychology
“We could try and introduce ourselves to them ..but all they might see is a sparse dusting of energy waves occurring in a vacuum ..with some probability of identity based on their backgrounds ..not ours.”
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Age of Inception
Kerry: this is what I meant by a cohort effect when trying to understand differences of opinion. I'll post Dr Henry Jenkins reply next. It’s way brilliant..!
Friday, September 3, 2010
Working memory
Friday, August 27, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Altered state of California
Socialist Republic of California
“So Bill, what are you doing for your thesis ..?”
“Studying how people can be easily misinformed ..like deceptive advertising, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, so you can devise better methods of propaganda ..”
“No, so we can teach better methods of detecting it ..”