Comment

Comment by doone on April 25, 2012 at 9:51am

Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

• By Brandon Keim 
• Email Author 
• April 24, 2012 |  
• 4:41 pm |  
• Categories: Brains and Behavior

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study

Comment by doone on April 24, 2012 at 10:49am

Not naked but still cool

Source: bodyandsoul.com.au  /  via: roflzoo.com

Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 9:48pm

Amazing Nervous System

Apr. 22, 2012

The more I look at this the more I see a map for a transit system.
-JH

Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 10:45am

BFF?: CELL PHONE STUDY SHOWS EVOLVING LIFETIME RELATIONSHIPS IN MEN AND WOMEN

Daisy Yuhas in Scientific American:

An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes. The researchers argue that women's friendships in particular drive the process of finding a mate and supporting the next generation.

The data could also undermine traditional notions about how humans like to organize themselves. "There has been a view in anthropology that the ancestral state for humans is a form of patriarchy, and I'm not sure that that's true," says University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, an author of the study published April 19 by Nature Scientific Reports. (Scientific American is a part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Dunbar and an interdisciplinary team examined cell phone data from a single provider in an undisclosed European country. (Specific locations were kept anonymous to protect cell phone users' identities.) The researchers worked with data gathered over a seven-month timeframe and restricted themselves to studying communications between cell phone users of a known age and sex, making a data set of about 3.2 million subscribers, or about 20 percent of the nation's cell phone users. Working on the assumption that close friends communicate most frequently, the team analyzed the top three friendships of each cell phone user based on the frequency of communication to spot patterns in the average male or female user at various ages.

The researchers expected to find "homophily," or the tendency for an individual to pick a friend like him or herself. Instead, it seems that romance trumps other forms of friendship: The data revealed that an individual's best friend, particularly in one's 20s and 30s, happens to be someone of the opposite sex and a similar age. In addition, striking differences exist in how men and women communicate with their presumed romantic partner. For one, the man in a woman's life was her very best friend for roughly 15 years, compared with seven years in the case for men. The peak age for partner parlance also differed: 27 years old for women and 32 for men.

After age 50, however, things change. The preference for a romantic partner peters out in both men and women, and toward the oldest age range in the data set, both sexes seek companionship first and foremost.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:46 PM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on April 21, 2012 at 8:54am

EVOLUTION HAS GIVEN HUMANS A HUGE ADVANTAGE OVER MOST OTHER ANIMALS: MIDDLE AGE

From The Washington Post:

As a 42-year-old man born in England, I can expect to live for about another 38 years. In other words, I can no longer claim to be young. I am, without doubt, middle-aged. To some people that is a depressing realization. We are used to dismissing our fifth and sixth decades as a negative chapter in our lives, perhaps even a cause for crisis. But recent scientific findings have shown just how important middle age is for every one of us, and how crucial it has been to the success of our species. Middle age is not just about wrinkles and worry. It is not about getting old. It is an ancient, pivotal episode in the human life span, preprogrammed into us by natural selection, an exceptional characteristic of an exceptional species.

Compared with other animals, humans have a very unusual pattern to our lives. We take a very long time to grow up, we are long-lived, and most of us stop reproducing halfway through our life span. A few other species have some elements of this pattern, but only humans have distorted the course of their lives in such a dramatic way. Most of that distortion is caused by the evolution of middle age, which adds two decades that most other animals simply do not get. An important clue that middle age isn’t just the start of a downward spiral is that it does not bear the hallmarks of general, passive decline. Most body systems deteriorate very little during this stage of life. Those that do, deteriorate in ways that are very distinctive, are rarely seen in other species and are often abrupt. Each of these changes can be explained in evolutionary terms. In general, it makes sense to invest in the repair and maintenance only of body systems that deliver an immediate fitness benefit — that is, those that help to propagate your genes. As people get older, they no longer need spectacular visual acuity or mate-attracting, unblemished skin. Yet they do need their brains, and that is why we still invest heavily in them during middle age.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:50 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on April 19, 2012 at 10:01pm

TWO SCIENTISTS DEBATE WHETHER MUSIC COMES FROM BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OR FROM THE ADVENT OF CIVILIZATION

Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller in The Atlantic:

Music is everywhere, but it remains an evolutionary enigma. In recent years, archaeologists have dug up prehistoric instruments, neuroscientists haveuncovered brain areas that are involved in improvisation, and geneticists haveidentified genes that might help in the learning of music. Yet basic questions persist: Is music a deep biological adaptation in its own right, or is it a cultural invention based mostly on our other capacities for language, learning, and emotion? And if music is an adaptation, did it really evolve to promote mating success as Darwin thought, or other for benefits such as group cooperation or mother-infant bonding?

Here, scientists Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller debate these issues. Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and The Science of Learning and Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of The Human Mind, argues that music is best seen as a cultural invention. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Na... and Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, makes the case that music is the product of sexual selection and an adaptation that's been with humans for millennia.

Gary Marcus: We both love music and think it's important in modern human life, but we have different views about how music came to be. In Guitar Zero, I argued that music is a cultural technology, something that human beings have crafted over the millennia, rather than something directly wired into our genomes. Why do you think music is a biological adaptation?

Geoffrey Miller: Music's got some key features of an evolved adaptation: It's universal across cultures, it's ancient in prehistory, and kids learn it early and spontaneously.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 01:44 PM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on April 19, 2012 at 9:57pm

Practice And The Self

New research measures how practice physically manifests itself in the brain: 

Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill. In a recent study, scientists peeked into the brains of living mice as the rodents learned some new tricks. Mice who repeated the same task day after day grew more clusters of mushroomlike appendages on their neurons than mice who divided their attention among different tasks. ... “I think it is a very active process,” [Yi] Zuo says. “The neurons work very hard to form clusters, to place spines close to one another. Even after a short training period on the first day, a mouse makes of a lot of new spines—they might make double what they make in an ordinary day, but these spines are not clustered. Only after repeated training are they clustered.” 

I find this fascinating because it reflects what one might call a conservative truth: we become what we do. We are not Etch-A-Sketches, blank slates on whom a new abstract idea can simply and easily be applied to turn our lives around. We are constantly evolving organisms, each choice leading to another fate and another choice and all of these creating us, slowly, by will and habit. One is reminded of Orwell's assertion that "at age 50, every man has the face he deserves" (something he conveniently avoided by dying in his forties). I'm also reminded of Pascal's rather controversial dictum that merely practicing faith will instill it. Acts become thoughts which become acts, and habits become personality which becomes character. There can be no total rupture - which is why I am not a fan of "born-again" Christianity. It only takes if it reorients practice.

We like to think of the brain as some kind of separate part of the body. It isn't. And what exercize and diet and sleep do for the body, thought and practice and sleep do for the brain. And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does. Julia Childs' cook-book can never replicate an actual Julia Childs meal. It can merely abstract from it, copy it. But the itness is hers and hers alone. At that point, where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral.

The neurons merely prove what every truly wise man has long known.

(Painting: The Music Lesson, Jan Vermeer.)

Comment by doone on April 18, 2012 at 11:12am

MEMORY FORAGING: WHEN THE BRAIN BEHAVES LIKE A BEE

From Scientific American:

In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. "Memory foraging" is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering.

Hills and his colleagues asked 141 Indiana University Bloomington students to type the names of as many animals as they could think of in three minutes. For decades, psychologists have used such "verbal fluency tasks" to study memory and diseases in which memory breaks down, such asAlzheimer's and dementia. Again and again, researchers have found that people name animals—or vegetables or movies—in clusters of related items. They might start out saying "cat, dog, goldfish, hamster"—animals kept as pets—and then, having exhausted that subcategory, move onto ocean animals: "dolphin, whale, shark, octopus." On average, the students in Hills's experiment named 37 animals in three minutes and, like so many of their predecessors, the lists they typed were organized into groups of animals unified by a single theme—pets, the savanna, etcetera. What Hills and his colleagues really wanted to know was whether the students shifted from one themed cluster to another the same way some animals hop from patch to patch of food. To make the most of its time and get the most food possible, a bird feeding on berries, for example, should only stay on any one particular bush if the plant will yield more berries than nearby bushes. At some point, the bird has eaten so many berries on the first bush that it makes more sense to switch to one with more to offer.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:58 AM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on April 14, 2012 at 7:33pm

Hot Or Not?

by Zoë Pollock

It takes only 13 milliseconds to decide:

[Neuroscientists Ingrid Olson and Christy Marshuetz] exposed men and women to a series of pre-rated faces, some gorgeous and other homely, and asked them to rate their appearance. The twist was that the faces flickered on the screen for only thirteen milliseconds -- a flash so fast that the exasperated viewers swore they didn't see anything. Yet when forced to rate the faces they thought they didn't see, the judges were uncannily accurate. Without knowing why, they gave good-looking faces significantly higher scores than unattractive ones. 

The takeaway:

To a great extent, first impressions of people's looks are less about choice and culture and cultivated tastes, and more about something deeper and universal. Judging attractiveness seems to happen just as automatically and matter-of-factly as judgng identity, gender, age, and expression.

Comment by doone on April 14, 2012 at 1:58pm

Why Is Men's Fashion So Straight?

by Zoë Pollock

Blame the French:

The reign in France of Louis XIV, with his gloriously powdered face and wig, silk stockings of cardinal red, heels, and fine plumage of velvet, ribbons, and lace, would mark the zenith of aristocratic fashion. By the time the republicans executed Louis XVI, the flush of colors, fabrics, and accoutrements had already begun giving way to a darker, more muted palette. The Industrial Revolution changed the way people dressed, as mass-produced three-piece suits became more accessible. The bourgeois class ushered in a new paradigm where men were to be defined by their commitment to industry and work, not the elaborateness of their dress. Their sobriety was a direct rebuke of the excesses of the French aristocracy.

Prominent British psychologist J.C. Flugel, in his book, The Psychology of Clothes, called this moment the “Great Masculine Renunciation,” when men “abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful” and “henceforth aimed at being only useful.” 

How little has changed:

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• …
• 78
• Next ›
• Page