And you didn’t think you could use neuroscience to improve your life. (From Koenigs & Grafman, 2009.)
Category Archives: science
neuroscience paintings by greg dunn
“Hippocampus II,” by Greg Dunn
These are amazingly beautiful. I have to post the hippocampus out of loyalty, but I think my favorite as a painting is the crab stomatogastric ganglion. (Dunn has a PhD in neuroscience from Penn!)
one wolf anticipates another
Each year he came to Beech Hill by bus, with an overnight stop. The stop had, itself, become a ritual. In fact, the entire trip from the moment he carried his bag out of the apartment was marked with golden milestones, events that were—so strong was the anticipation of pleasure—pleasures themselves.
“Beech Hill,” Gene Wolfe (1972)
“A neural substrate of prediction and reward,” Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, & P. Read Montague (1997)
new mantis shrimp paper in SCIENCE
on the ability of factor analysis to discover factors
I’m linking this post on g by Cosma Shalizi because I’ve only read it once, I haven’t understood it properly, and I don’t want to lose it.
(H/T Freddie DeBoer, via TNC.)
petardagnosia
From PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE: Facial Structure Is Indicative of Explicit Support for Prejudicial Beliefs
This is amazing. I’m praying for a commentary headlined “Psychologists unwittingly reveal information about own facial structure.”
bio-e
Some of those who read my short story “Tubby’s Letter” (currently, and likely for the foreseeable future, in the slush pile at tor.com) were skeptical about the use of what I called “Bio-E,” a not-very-well-specified method for harvesting electricity from the human body. To you I now say only PWNED.
As you were.
Oh, you wanted to read the story? In that case I would recommend rude emails to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky telling them to pay me for it already. (KIDDING. Don’t be rude. And, yes, I realize that, not having technically “bought” the story, they don’t technically “owe” me money, although really, aren’t such barristerly cavils beneath you? However, if the thought of bothering a couple of science fiction’s more high-profile editors fills you with a just and righteous fear, you could email me and I might send you the submitted draft.)
(But you should really email *somebody* and tell them to send me money. I’m not picky.)
links 2/20/13
Jane Friedman: How to get your book published
Business Insider: Privacy settings for Facebook Graph Search
The APS journal articles linked above are probably paywalled, sorry.
Between the special issue on how fMRI can inform cognitive theories, and the recent special issue on replication, CDIPS is killing it lately. I really want to read both from cover to cover, but I have to stick with the highlights for now. They also had a recent special issue on political bias in social psychology with a couple of good articles by Princeton’s Debbie Prentice and Penn’s Philip Tetlock; that’s not my field, so the priority is even lower, but on the strength of those article’s it’s probably worth reading through as well. Also to read, hopefully in the near future, my old officemate Martin Monti’s 2011 review of the GLM approach to fMRI…
why to have a smartphone
Nobody steal my experiment, now.
memrise
Every time I come back from Taipei, I resolve to study up on my Chinese. In an effort to actually roll that ball a little this time, I signed up for yet another account on my friend Greg’s startup, Memrise, a few days ago. I’m plugging it now because the service has improved to the point that I think I might use it enough to make some real progress. Practice sessions are low-stress and bite-sized enough to do as a break at work in lieu of, e.g., checking Facebook, and they’re online, which means I don’t have to drag my Rosetta Stone CD to work or buy a CD drive for my laptop. I think they’ve bought into the Farmville game just enough to keep users motivated—the governing metaphor for your knowledge is now a “greenhouse,” where you sprout seedlings (e.g. recently learned meanings of Chinese characters), and a “garden” where you maintain them after they’ve sprouted (i.e. you’ve practiced them enough to solidify them somewhat in your brain). You’re informed when a piece of knowledge is solid enough to be moved to the garden, and if the site’s practice schedule determines that you aren’t practicing an item in a way that best solidifies it, you’re warned that it’s “wilting.” There is a social aspect to the site, which I haven’t used yet.
I’m also appreciating some aspects of the Chinese relative to the year I took at Princeton. There was a lot that was good about the Princeton method, but the one thing it left me weak in despite copious practice was characters. Princeton’s approach, like most language courses, starts out training you in phrases you’d be likely to speak, e.g., “I am an American,” the first five characters I learned in Chinese 101 at Princeton. Memrise’s approach to Chinese seems a bit weird by contrast because you’re learning things like “fetus” and “ladle” and “field,” all of which seem entirely crackers unlikely to arise in casual conversation. But those characters form the roots of more complex characters that go into words like “dumpling” and “old” and “fish”—the sorts of things you might be likely to read on signs or menus. And it is a lot easier to remember “earth + ladle = old” than it is to remember the character holistically. Your eventual goal is holistic memory, of course, but in the near term what you want is just to be able to recognize the characters, and being able to combine them out of their elements this way is incredibly useful even when the combination doesn’t make sense (and it rarely does). In fact, it’s so useful that I understand why people who really get it can delude themselves into thinking it does make sense.
Anyway, I don’t know to what extent the cognitive science behind the mnemonics and practice schedule represents an advance on, say, Rosetta Stone, but Greg assures me it’s a lot, and I think the motivational aspect is likely to be even more powerful. When I’m goofing off, the effort of digging out my Rosetta Stone CD and special headset and getting everything spun up is a big obstacle. Keeping a Memrise tab open in my browser is easy enough that I’ll click over to water my cute little knowledge garden in lieu of a Facebook break.
I definitely would not counsel anyone to rely on Memrise alone for Chinese pedagogy, or probably any other language pedagogy; I think grammar requires a different approach. But I think the Memrise approach is going to be very useful and powerful for vocabulary, which is an immense hurdle especially in character-based languages. For the first time in a while, I’m a little bit optimistic that I might pay my next visit to Taiwan as a semi-literate. That’s a sufficiently amazing prospect that I’m prepared to be preemptively grateful for it.
the pulchrifex papers 