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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing - 0 views

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    "Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions."
markfrankel18

Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

  • It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
  • n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
sleggettisp

Donut Holes in Law of the Sea-who controls what? - 0 views

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    Any littoral state claims the area stretching 200 nautical miles from its coast. This area becomes an Exclusive Economic zone (EEZ). Complex bathymetry of the ocean marries the Law of the Sea to shape quite convoluted maritime borders. You can view an accurate representation of seabed or and hover over the disputed sectors.
Lawrence Hrubes

Cap'n Crunch Is Looking at You - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But intentional or not, he said, the psychological results were the same. In a second experiment, the researchers recruited 63 university students and showed them one of two Trix cereal boxes. One featured a rabbit gazing straight ahead at the viewer, while the other showed the same rabbit looking down. Afterward, the participants were asked to answer questions about the brand. Those who had gazed into the rabbit’s eyes reported higher feelings of trust and connection with Trix, and they were also more likely to choose that cereal over Fruity Pebbles.
markfrankel18

3quarksdaily: Is Wine Tasting Nonsense? - 1 views

  • If there is such a thing as real expertise in identifying the properties of a wine, then it must be possible to get it wrong.  If tastes, in general, were entirely subjective there would be no right answer to the question of whether, for instance, chocolate ice cream tastes of chocolate.  No one really thinks that. The fact that expert wine tasters get it wrong so often is evidence that wine tasting is harder than identifying the presence of chocolate in ice cream—not that it is utterly capricious. So tastes are not so entirely subjective that our experiences of them have no relationship to an object.
  • Furthermore, tasters can strive to eliminate environmental factors that have been shown to influence judgments about wine such as conversations, the style of music being played, and changes in the weather, etc. These are all factors that wine tasters can control by adjusting the environment in which they taste. Wine tasters, if they are to maintain credibility, must taste under the appropriate conditions. But that is no different from any other normative judgment we make. Our ability to make ethical judgments, for instance, is similarly influenced by environmental factors. We know (or should know) better than to make ethical judgments when we are excessively angry, fearful, under the influence of powerful desires, etc. Yet, it does not follow from the fact that ethical judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors that all ethical judgments are subjective.
  • So the taste of wine (or anything else) is partly dependent on objective features of the world and partly dependent on how our view of those features has been shaped by past experience. The crucial question then is how much of a distorting lens is that past experience.
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  • What is puzzling about this whole debate about the objectivity of wine critics, however, is why people want objective descriptions of wine. We don't expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren't we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different? The judgment of any critic is simply a snapshot at a particular time and place of an object whose meaning can vary with context. Wine criticism cannot escape this limitation.
  • What we want from critics whether of music, art, or wine is a judgment made in light of their vast experience that can show us something about the object that we might have missed without their commentary. That can be accomplished independently of whether the critic is perfectly consistent or objective. We want the critic to have a certain kind of bias, born of her unique experience, because it is that bias that enables her to taste, see, or hear what she does.
Cisco Walker

VSauce-Spooky Coincidences - 2 views

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    Mathematical and psychological explanations for the once in a million and pareidolia.
markfrankel18

What's Up With That: Why It's So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos | WIRED - 1 views

  • The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “
  • As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”
  • Unfortunately, that kind of instinctual feedback doesn’t exist in the editing process. When you’re proof reading, you are trying to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time. Stafford suggests that if you want to catch your own errors, you should try to make your work as unfamiliar as possible. Change the font or background color, or print it out and edit by hand. “Once you’ve learned something in a particular way, it’s hard to see the details without changing the visual form,” he said.
markfrankel18

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

  • 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.
artuscaer

What are Ethical Dilemmas? | TOKTalk.net - 2 views

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    This is also related to psychology through an idea of cognitive dissonance.
markfrankel18

Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies? : The New Yorker - 2 views

  • From the self-absorbed faux seriousness of some (meditating on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau!) to the jarring jokiness of others (hitching a ride by the train tracks!), the pictures have fed a perception of today’s youth as a bunch of technology-obsessed, self-indulgent narcissists. They also bring to mind the photos compiled in the popular Selfies at Funerals Tumblr blog. But if the “funeral selfie” kids were somehow hilarious in their inappropriateness, there’s nothing quite like seeing Israeli teens blowing kisses from the death camps of Poland to send you into a confusing and curious rage.
Andrea Barlien

Art as Therapy - 0 views

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    Functions of Art by Alain be Botton
Lawrence Hrubes

The true size of ... - 0 views

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