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Lawrence Hrubes

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-try-reading-literary-fiction

TOK arts literature fiction EQ emotions thoughts social intelligence SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13
     
    "Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read. That's the conclusion of a study in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
markfrankel18

Paul Bloom: The Case Against Empathy : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130520crat_atlarge_bloom

ToK Ethics psychology empathy

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 May 13 - Cached
  • Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.
  • Rifkin calls for us to make the leap to “global empathic consciousness.” He sees this as the last best hope for saving the world from environmental destruction, and concludes with the plaintive question “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid planetary collapse?”
  • This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.
  • This interest isn’t just theoretical. If we can figure out how empathy works, we might be able to produce more of it.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 14
     
    "Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an "affective revolution." There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We've learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others."
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ilingual-advantage-aging-brain

TOK language human sciences social studies bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
  • For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language.
  • Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published. That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. “Our overview,” de Bruin concluded, “shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged.”
markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science - 2 views

www.motherjones.com/106166

TOK science pseudoscience psychology bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [1] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [2] in psychology. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.
  • In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [5]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [6] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-new-science-of-mind.html

TOK mind brain psychotherapy science psychiatry behaviour neurology biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
markfrankel18

The Brain on Trial - Issue 5: Fame - Nautilus - 0 views

nautil.us/...the-brain-on-trial

ToK human sciences psychology brain consciousness bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Now we are regularly bombarded with new insights into how the unconscious guides our behavior. At the same time, neuroscience has largely debunked the idea of an autonomous self that has the final say in decisions; few science-savvy folks still believe there is a “ghost in the machine,” a little homunculus in the brain who is watching our perceptions or thinking our thoughts. Some philosophers even question whether the conscious mind plays any role in our thoughts. In short, present-day neuroscience has pulled the rug out from under the concept of “the rational man.”
  • If you are asked why you chose the violin, your answer is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the unconscious competition that led to your choice. In effect, the decision happened to you. Your brain developed a “violin neural circuit” in the same way that fame makes some actors, musicians, and novelists superstars while others, for reasons that are never entirely clear, are relegated to obscurity.
  • Imagine that you are a juror assigned to the sentencing phase of a person convicted of first-degree murder. The defendant is a 33-year-old woman who has confessed to shooting her boyfriend in the head, then stabbing him nearly 30 times before unsuccessfully trying to decapitate him with a butcher knife. Initially she tells police she hadn’t been present, that her boyfriend had been killed by “unknown intruders.” When she can offer no evidence to substantiate her alibi, she then confesses, arguing self-defense and that her boyfriend had submitted her to prior physical and mental abuse. On a national TV news show, she predicts that no jury will find her guilty, yet after a several-month trial, you find her guilty of first-degree murder. It is now sentencing time. Your assignment is to determine whether the crime warrants the death penalty or a life sentence without parole, or a lesser sentence with the possibility of parole.
markfrankel18

Thinking about the mind: an anti-linguistic turn | OUPblog - 2 views

blog.oup.com/...philosophy-language-mind

TOK language mind philosophy

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • It would be extremely surprising if the way the mind is shaped had anything to do with language as language is such a late addition to our mental life. A much more natural suggestion is that it has a lot to do with the actions the organism performs. We are evolved creatures and what matters in evolution is really whether one performs actions successfully (and not what one thinks). The mind is shaped in a way that would help us to perform actions. What we should expect then is that the structure of the mind is geared towards facilitating actions and not towards representing propositions. Of course, some select minds can also do that – and, may even use propositional thoughts to perfect one’s performance of actions. But it would be a methodological mistake to start with propositions. We should start with actions.
  • This doesn’t mean that we should no longer talk about beliefs and thoughts — these are clearly important constituents of the human mind. So the anti-linguistic turn I am proposing is more like an anti-linguistic half-turn. But linguistically structured representations are late, last minute additions to our mental life — in the same way as humans are last minute additions to our planet. And while humans radically transformed the way the Earth looks, it would be a mistake to try to understand the planet merely focusing on human-made features.
Lawrence Hrubes

Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...121224fa_fact_foer

TOK language linguistic determinism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Feb 14
     
    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal," John Quijada told me. Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be. In his preface, Quijada wrote that his "greater goal" was "to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language." Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. "
Lawrence Hrubes

The Rise of Hate Search - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-rise-of-hate-search.html

language religious knowledge systems prediction prejudice

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.
Cisco Walker

What if the Universe is a Computer Simulation? - Computerphile - YouTube - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

science math technology perception

shared by Cisco Walker on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Cisco Walker on 20 Mar 14
     
    Thoughts and reflections on possible realities like The Matrix (among others) using the model of Conway's Game of Life... simple rules breeding complex outcomes.
markfrankel18

BBC News - Why modern maps put everyone at the centre of the world - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-19908848

science maps bbc

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • As a curious race we have always liked to know where we are, but it is now almost impossible not to know - our phones, computers and sat navs keep us continually co-ordinated, and through them we are involuntarily tracked ourselves. Once the preserve and privilege of the rich and influential, maps and accurate wayfinding have suddenly come to feel like a birthright
  • But these days we are all really at the centre of our maps, which is both a useful and egocentric thing. A thousand years ago Jerusalem stood at the centre of the Christian world view, or if you lived in China it was Youzhou. But now it is us, a throbbing green dot on our handhelds. We no longer travel from A to B but from Me to B, and we spread out maps on the floor or on our laps in a car only with wistful nostalgia.
  • It is still too early to say whether a lessening in our spatial ability and perspective, and our ability to remember landmarks, will decrease that area in our hippocampus that serves as the engine room for such skills, but it is highly likely. An examination of the brains of cab drivers has shown a great expansion in that area due, it is thought, to the retention of many miles of street plans.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Did You Think of 'What's Going On in This Picture'? - The New York Times - 1 views

learning.blogs.nytimes.com/...whats-going-on-in-this-picture

photography news interpretation arts perception analysis

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Last October we introduced a new feature in which, each Monday morning this school year, we posted a New York Times photograph without a caption, then invited students to answer three deceptively simple questions about it: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? As student answers poured in to the blog each week — this shows someone learning a back-flip; I think he’s in the military because of his camouflage shirt; The background makes it look like a movie set — our collaborators for the feature, Visual Thinking Strategies, acted as live moderators, linking thoughts and posting further questions intended to help them go deeper and see more. Most weeks that created a lively debate in our comments section, as students of all ages, backgrounds and places pushed each other to find detail and defend interpretations.
markfrankel18

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
  • Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

rationalism reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
  • If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...mals-have-rights-should-robots

ethics animals robots technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • People projected thoughts into Harambe’s mind. “Our tendency is to see our actions through human lenses,” a neuroscientist named Kurt Gray told the network as the frenzy peaked. “We can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be a gorilla. We can only imagine what it’s like to be us being a gorilla.” This simple fact is responsible for centuries of ethical dispute. One Harambe activist might believe that killing a gorilla as a safeguard against losing human life is unjust due to our cognitive similarity: the way gorillas think is a lot like the way we think, so they merit a similar moral standing. Another might believe that gorillas get their standing from a cognitive dissimilarity: because of our advanced powers of reason, we are called to rise above the cat-eat-mouse game, to be special protectors of animals, from chickens to chimpanzees. (Both views also support untroubled omnivorism: we kill animals because we are but animals, or because our exceptionalism means that human interests win.) These beliefs, obviously opposed, mark our uncertainty about whether we’re rightful peers or masters among other entities with brains.
  • The big difference, they argue, is “sentience.” Many animals have it; zygotes and embryos don’t. Colb and Dorf define sentience as “the ability to have subjective experiences,” which is a little tricky, because animal subjectivity is what’s hard for us to pin down. A famous paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, points out that even if humans were to start flying, eating bugs, and getting around by sonar they would not have a bat’s full experience, or the batty subjectivity that the creature had developed from birth.
  • If animals suffer, the philosopher Peter Singer noted in “Animal Liberation” (1975), shouldn’t we include them in the calculus of minimizing pain? Such an approach to peership has advantages: it establishes the moral claims of animals without projecting human motivations onto them. But it introduces other problems. Bludgeoning your neighbor is clearly worse than poisoning a rat.
Lawrence Hrubes

Stalin, Russia's New Hero - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-vladimir-putins-russia.html

history memory politics nationalism bias ethics propaganda

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
  • School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader.
  • Why is Stalin now gaining popularity? For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”
markfrankel18

How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rnet-could-change-history.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly.
  • But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events.
  • Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history.
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