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Interesting psychological experiment

Another Star Trek technology :) Might have an positive psychological effect if astronauts on long term missions could virtually escape their confinement - walking through a labyrinth with the blue sky above them. Ok, ISS does not provide enough space, but on Moon or Mars...

Is there not a risk that while walking in circles this way the cable I keep dragging behind will eventually strangle me?

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Apparently, between 33 to 50%. But I'm not convinced the results are reproducible...

maybe of interest to Nikolaos? have to admit that I did not read it entirely ....

interesting stuff ... I like this quote "When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars-sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific-you need to find another diagnosis. That's the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There's a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they're embarking on isn't really that risky. They're wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong-to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary-no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new."

So... who is in?

nice comment Johannes ... if you add a bit of Kleopatre, e.g. why bathing in milk helped her fool Marcus Antonius, your comment would be fully interdisciplinary :-)

you mean it would include History or Psychology? I would understand why Marcus Antonius might get fooled by a bathing beauty - but milk? DONKEY MILK?!? That's just wrong... :-[

What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars-our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes-execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate.

or "your phone vs. your wife"...

Did you know that papers in space science are among the most quoted? Check how your country is doing .... you will be surprised :)

this might also be an indication / point to an issue with their data concerning space science publications ... quite surprising indeed that all Europeans are doing so well in this field

Something should be wrong, for Spain I can read: Economics & Business 4.54 -28 Only minus 28!

Great introduction to the Bayesian view on the workings of the brain, which has been a successful view in explaining many psychological phenomena, visual illusions, etc. One of the possible criticisms on this view is that it neatly separates perception and action.

man infected with brewer's yeast brews beer and gets drunk whenever he injests carbohydrates. This surely presents an excellent opportunity to address long term manned space exploration psychological issues by infecting astronauts with yeast rather than investing in costly and bulky space-brewing equipment.

I doubt that Shnoll is really the first one making such experiments, but perhaps they are more complete than any others done before. Similar things are very popular in the context of Psychology and more exotic fields. If I remember correctly someone ran long experiments with random number generators... Mostly the stories died after a short time, since the experiments are not reproducable. Anyway, why do these guys always have to claim that their work is somehow fundamentally changing our view of physics, notoriously referring to Einstein-Bohr debates and this stuff. That's nonsense! If these effects exist the first explanation is always much simpler. There is somewhere something that influences physics on Earth in a defined way. But this influence depends on the relative position or whatever of the Earth to that whatever-it-is. No problem with absolute time and all that sh...

Two years ago, nearly unnoticed in the West, the Russian biophysicist S.E. Shnoll published a paper in the prominent Russian physics journal Uspekhi Fisicheskikh Nauk ..... ah then ...

You are right, Leo, they are mostly Russians that publish in some unspellable Journals nobody knows.... or then they are supported by Templeton Foundation.

one more try to get you interested in this ... seems that it is slowly but surely moving into the domain of serious science ...

Why don't you try this out? 10 minutes group meditation before every ACT meeting... Should be fun!

Great, just great!! The conclusion seems to be "Thus IBMT could provide a means for improving self-regulation and perhaps reducing or preventing various mental disorders." Why all this neuro-bio-nonsense?? Wasn't this conclusion known before just using good old classic psychology and similar? Again one of these studies that thinks to provide new evidence just because they made a boring brain scan...

his day to day research experience must be relatively unusual highlights include: - Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18380130 'The effect of a joke on tipping when it is delivered at the same time as the bill' http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/Articles/JASP2002.pdf "Love is in the air": Effects of Songs With Romantic Lyrics on Compliance to a Courtship Request. http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/Articles/PsyMusic2010.PDF and the mostly confusing 'Presence of Various Figurines on a Restaurant Table and Consumer Choice: Evidence for an Associative Link.'

Now that's what I call applied science... will consider applying to his lab for a post-doc!

"After decades spent thinking, arguing, hoping, and in the words of Turyshev, "making a career off of it," these scientists' interest in the Pioneer anomaly has, understandably, accumulated psychological baggage; in the case of many of them, a cloud of emotional investment has formed around the core of objective scientific inquiry. And clouds obscure things."

165 pages about it!! http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3686

good old Turyshev ...

nice podcast ... ESTEC YGT community might be an interesting study pool ....

haha ;) I dunno what the general idea of the YGTs here at ESTEC is ;)

Personally, I have the habit of switching off keypad sounds in any device I use (mobile, camera, etc.). Now I have scientific results to back this philosophy up :) P.S. Mass-media version is here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20139-predictive-texting-alters-our-perception-of-numbers.html

seems that we behave like fish ... :-)

a study from a dutch university

I knew it --- we have to fire Fairouz, Nina and Friederike!!! your sheer presence is impacting the performance of the male researchers in the team!!!