Clipmarks | wildcat's mind collection

Great Minds Drink Alike

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:06:37 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Great Minds Drink Alike: Cafes Tapping Nation's Fascination with Science & Research

Major media from the Chicago Tribune to ABC News to Wired magazine and The New York Times have all reported on a new trend sweeping the U.S., Canada, and Europe: the rise of science cafes. Founded in London, the global network of Cafe Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology. Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants and even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.

"A lot of people come to see real live scientists — some of whom are extremely famous and prominent — and see how their brains work,"

The quarterly Cafes have tackled diverse issues such as biomechanics, the biology of gender, the big bang theory and global warming, but the basic formula stays the same

To find a Café Scientifique event near you visit their global cafe locations map.

Tags: mind, physics, education, life, science, cafe

11 Ways to Build an Extraordinary Life

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:16:30 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Have a vision for your future...

Clip Source: www.steve-olson.com

How can you build the life you want? The answer to that question is different for each of us. But it’s critical that you answer it, because in the answer you will find purpose and meaning. Many of us look for happiness in things, but happiness doesn’t come from things, it comes from how we relate to ourselves and our world.

Be True to Yourself

Have a Vision for Your Future

Avoid Debt

Save

Continue Your Education

Take Responsibility for Change

Learn from Mistakes -

Build Quality Relationships/Discard Destructive Ones

Love: Look for a partner who is on a similar journey as yours, who has similar goals and values, and build on your relationship by giving your love and encouragement

Friendship: Look for people with similar values, who give as much as they take, with which you can share interests and hobbies.

Do the Right Thing Even When it is Unpopular

Honor Your Commitments - Do not make commitments lightly

Be Charitable

Tags: life, extraordinary

The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:55:32 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.

What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

Tags: science, sarcasm

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:24:50 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.

These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.

By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.

Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?

Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian

Tags: storytelling, human universals

Mind Reading Is Now Possible

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:23:02 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

A computer can tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone is thinking about a hammer and not pliers.

Crime investigators always have their ears open for information only a perpetrator could know—where a gun used in a murder was stashed, perhaps, or what wounds a stabbing inflicted. So imagine a detective asking a suspect about a killing, describing the crime scene to get the suspect to visualize the attack. The detective is careful not to mention the murder weapon. Once the suspect has conjured up the scene, the detective asks him to envision the weapon. Pay dirt: his pattern of brain activity screams "hammer" as loud and clear as if he had blurted it out.

We'll get to the ethical implications of that, but first consider how quickly mind reading is advancing

Now research has broken the "content" barrier

If what your brain does when it thinks about an igloo is almost identical to what mine does, that suggests the possibility of a universal mind-reading dictionary,

Tags: mind, science, reading, ethics?

Comprehension Climbs When You Slooooow Doooown

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:54:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: clipversity, where art though?

Clip Source: www.wired.com

It should take you two and a half seconds to read this sentence. Any faster and you won't absorb its meaning. The motor response of the retina, and the time it takes the image of a word to travel from the macula to the thalamus to the visual cortex for processing, limits the eye to about 500 words a minute. (That's peak efficiency; the average college student can expect a rate about half that.) "There is no such thing as speed reading," says Keith Rayner a cognitive psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Not if your definition of reading is comprehending text." Studies show that fast readers fare worse than slower ones when questioned about the text. So, to get smarter, slow down. It's even OK to move your lips.

Tags: brain, reading, slowing down, comprehension

Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:02:44 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.psychologymatters.org

Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.

Tags: intelligence, smart

Thought control: it's the computer world's latest game plan

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:44:22 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: “This is the tip of the iceberg for what is possible,” said Tan Le, another of Emotiv's co-founders, during a recent press demonstration. “There will be a convergence of gesture-based technology and the brain as a new interface - the Holy Grail is the mind.”

Clip Source: technology.timesonline.co.uk

First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. Now get ready for another radical and rather unsettling leap in video games technology: thought control.

Satoru Iwata, the president and chief executive of Nintendo - which is expected to sell about 25million units of its successful Wii video games console this financial year - has no doubts about the next gaming boom. “As soon as we think something in our brain, it will appear within a video game,” he told The Times in an exclusive interview.

“You'll probably need to wear some kind of hat or helmet or something.”

As far-fetched as it sounds, Mr Iwata's claim - which brings to mind the plot of Craig Thomas's bestselling 1977 novel Firefox, about a mind-reading Soviet fighter aircraft - is already coming true: the world's first thought-controlled game is expected to be launched by the Sydney company Emotiv by the end of this year.

Tags: gaming, neuroscience, mind, emotiv

Culture influences brain function

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:49:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training,”

Clip Source: physorg.com

People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns"

“We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone,” says Hedden.

Tags: culture, brain functions

Einstein, Newton displayed autistic traits

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:10:01 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Psychiatry tends to focus almost exclusively on the negative side of different forms of mental illness," Fitzgerald said in statement. "I want to show that psychiatric disorders can also have positive dimensions."

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton displayed symptoms of psychiatric disorders that may have been a key to their genius, a Dublin psychiatrist said.

Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, said characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger's syndrome are the same as those associated with creative genius, The Daily Telegraph said.

Fitzgerald, author of the book, "Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Changed the World," said Enoch Powell and Charles de Gaulle both appear to have had Asperger's syndrome.

Speaking at a meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Academic Psychiatry, Fitzgerald said De Gaulle's Asperger's syndrome was critical to his success. He was aloof, had a massive memory, lacked empathy with other people, and was extremely controlling and dominating.

Isaac Newton was known to work non-stop for days and Einstein worked in a patent office because he was too disruptive to get a university job, the newspaper said.

Tags: einstein, newton, genius, creativity

Bored?

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:35:13 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Don't blame your job, the traffic or your mindless chores. Battling boredom, researchers say, means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for

Dissecting Dullness

Most people blame boredom on the circumstances, but psychologists say this emotion is highly subjective and rooted in aspects of consciousness—and that levels of boredom vary among people. Some individuals are less—and others considerably more—likely to be bored than others.

Boredom is not a unified concept but may comprise several varieties, including the transient type that occurs while waiting in line and so-called existential boredom that accompanies a profound dissatisfaction with life.

Boredom is linked to both emotional factors and personality traits. Problems with attention also play a role, and thus techniques that improve a person’s ability to focus may diminish boredom.

Virtually everyone gets bored once in a while

Tags: boredom, emotion, subjective?

Your brain lies to you

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:28:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

Clip Source: www.iht.com

False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories - and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned

Tags: brain, misleading, false beliefs

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:14:59 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: and your answer?

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

A star-studded panel of scientists gathered to discuss those heady themes last night at the World Science Festival in New York City. Here are their answers in convenient nutshell form:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can't: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. "The planet has grown a nervous system," he said.

Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist: The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We're probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds

Tags: question, deep question, human, meaning

Expansion of Consciousness

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:33:57 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: brainmeta.com

We are the Universe conscious of Itself

Introduction

The evolution and expansion of consciousness is inevitable. With the expansion of consciousness comes new ways of seeing reality. Everything changes. You see things that you never could of conceived of before. Old philosophies and religions suddenly appear naive and give way to a far more profound understanding. Most religions and philosophies will not last long, simply because it is inevitable that a profound transformation in our consciousness, in our way of understanding and interacting with reality, is going to soon take place. It is inevitable because that is the direction that consciousness is headed.

A few of us have chosen to make consciousness our 'game', in all of its forms and degrees of intensity, as well as its neural basis, modification, manipulation, and expansion

Tags: consciousness

Is Conscious Choice an Illusion?

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:08:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

How much of the decision making process do we actually have a say in? That’s the question being raised thanks to new research coming out of the Max Planck Institute. Using brain scanners, researchers were able to predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision is not necessarily one that involves a lot of mental preparation – whether to hit a button with your left or right hand – so whether this study is representative of our own self-direction is up for debate. Nevertheless, questions are naturally going to be raised over whether we have free will at all, or whether conscious choice is just an illusion.

"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.

Tags: consciousness?, choice, free will?, illusion