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Are We Really Conscious? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...are-we-really-conscious.html TOK consciousness perception brain science
shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.
  • How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
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How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition | Brain Pickings - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...daniel-kahneman-intuition TOK intuition perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.
  • Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.
  • There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.
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  • The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence [but] of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
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Stephen Fry Explains Humanism in 4 Animated Videos: Happiness, Truth and the Meaning of... - 0 views

www.openculture.com/...nism-in-4-animated-videos.html
shared by Petr Dimitrov on 12 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Petr Dimitrov on 12 Oct 14
     
    Answers to life's big questions don't come cheap, but they very often come free, or at least we feel they should. Which answers you find compelling among your available options is up to you.
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Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 1 views

nautil.us/...hy-we-keep-playing-the-lottery ToK Lottery math psychology emotion
shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
  • “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.
  • It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.
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  • Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, the probabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didn’t evolve to calculate complex odds. In our evolutionary past, the ability to distinguish between a region with a 1 percent or 10 percent chance of being attacked by a predator wouldn’t have offered much of an advantage. An intuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as “doesn’t happen,” “happen sometimes,” “happens most of time,” “always happens,” would have sufficed, explains Jane L. Risen, an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, who studies decision-making. Despite our advances in reason and mathematics, she says, we still often rely on crude calculations to make decisions, especially quick decisions like buying a lottery ticket.
  • In the conceptual vacuum created by incomprehensible odds, people are likely to experience magical thinking or superstition, play a hunch, or simply throw reason out the window all together, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. “Most of the weird stuff that you see with decision-making and risk happens with small probabilities,” he says.
  • But even fantasy will drop its hold on us if we always lose—a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge’s Williams. Lotteries that allow players to choose combinations of four or five numbers from a total of 60 numbers are popular, he says, because many players experience “the near miss,” which creates the illusion that they came close to winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. Most players don’t realize, however, that “near-miss” is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match.
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Episode 189: Why A Dead Shark Costs $12 Million : Planet Money : NPR - 4 views

www.npr.org/...-a-dead-shark-costs-12-million TOK arts economics
shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • On today's Planet Money: Why a dead shark costs $12 million, and a photo of steel wool that looks like a tornado costs $1,265. In other words, we wade into the economics of the art world.
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The Berlin Wall's great human experiment - Ideas - The Boston Globe - 5 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html TOK history psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • But before it fell, the wall did something that most people never think of: It created a massive laboratory for studying human society.Imagine this: If you were a researcher trying to determine how a political system affects people’s values, beliefs, and behavior, you would ideally want to take two identical populations, separate them for a generation or two, and subject them each to two totally different kinds of government. Then you’d want to measure the results, the same way a medical researcher might give two sets of patients two different pills and then track their progress.Ethically, such a study would be unthinkable even to propose. But when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a “perfect experiment.”
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The Psychology of Cheating : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-makes-people-cheat.html psychology cheating TOK
shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13
     
    "When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he'll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?"
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The Two Faces of Science - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-two-faces-of-science science
shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    "Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as it may seem, both these contradictory statements have held true throughout the 450-year history of "modern" science. In fact, they are what have given science the stability and creativity that root its cultural power."
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The Psychology of Fear - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...280938 psychology emotion
shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    If fear is a natural survival response to a threat, or danger, why would we seek out that feeling?
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Art as Therapy - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...alain-de-botton-john-armstrong arts perception emotion
shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    Functions of Art by Alain be Botton
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Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...print TOK science research
shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
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The Psychology of Cheating : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-makes-people-cheat.html TOK ethics cheating
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 13
     
    "When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he'll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?"
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Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...for-depression-overstated.html TOK psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15
     
    "Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday."
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Strong placebo response thwarts painkiller trials : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...arts-painkiller-trials-1.18511 TOK psychology placebo
shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Drug companies have a problem: they are finding it ever harder to get painkillers through clinical trials. But this isn't necessarily because the drugs are getting worse. An extensive analysis of trial data1 has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger over time, making it harder to prove a drug’s advantage over placebo. The change in reponse to placebo treatments for pain, discovered by researchers in Canada, holds true only for US clinical trials. "We were absolutely floored when we found out," says Jeffrey Mogil, who directs the pain-genetics lab at McGill University in Montreal and led the analysis. Simply being in a US trial and receiving sham treatment now seems to relieve pain almost as effectively as many promising new drugs. Mogil thinks that as US trials get longer, larger and more expensive, they may be enhancing participants’ expectations of their effectiveness.
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