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markfrankel18

Why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - Jeff Zacks - Aeon - 1 views

aeon.co/...r-brains-explode-at-movie-cuts

perception psychology film

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Throughout evolutionary history, we never saw anything like a montage. So why do we hardly notice the cuts in movies?
  • Simply put, visual perception is much jerkier than we realise. First, we blink. Blinks happen every couple of seconds, and when they do we are blind for a couple of tenths of a second. Second, we move our eyes. Want to have a little fun? Take a close-up selfie video of your eyeball while you watch a minute’s worth of a movie on your computer or TV.
  • Between blinks and saccades, we are functionally blind about a third of our waking life.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Worse yet, even when your eyes are open, they are recording a lot less of the world than you realise.
  • Our brains do a lot of work to fill in the gaps, which can produce some pretty striking – and entertaining – errors of perception and memory.
  • That makes good evolutionary sense, doesn’t it? If your memory conflicts with what is in front of your eyeballs, the chances are it is your memory that is at fault. So, most of the time your brain is stitching together a succession of views into a coherent event model, and it can handle cuts the same way it handles disruptions such as blinks and saccades in the real world.
  • There is, however, one situation in which stitching a new view in with the previous one is a bad idea: when the new view represents a transition from one event to another.
  • So now I think we have a story about why our heads don’t explode when we watch movies. It’s not that we have learned how to deal with cuts. It’s certainly not that our brains have evolved biologically to deal with film – the timescale is way too short. Instead, film cuts work because they exploit the ways in which our visual systems evolved to work in the real world.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Search for Silence - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ff-the-search-for-silence.html

TOK sensory perception sound design senses

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • We hear the thrum of urban life, overhear the neighbors arguing next door; we eavesdrop, whether we want to or not, on the conversations of co-workers. In medical waiting rooms or hospitals, we’re often privy to nurses and doctors discussing a patient (or, worse, as I experienced recently, to the decidedly un-relaxing sounds of Southern country rock blaring in a mammography clinic). These are things we often don’t want to hear, and with smarter design we shouldn’t have to.Continue reading the main story All of ARUP’s offices have a resource — the Sound Lab — that allows clients to listen to the soundscape of an environment or the acoustics of a space at the early design stages, before that environment or space even exists.
Lawrence Hrubes

Want to Ace That Test? Get the Right Kind of Sleep - NYTimes.com - 1 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...st-get-the-right-kind-of-sleep

education health science sleep learning

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Sleep. Parents crave it, but children and especially teenagers, need it. When educators and policymakers debate the relationship between sleep schedules and school performance and — given the constraints of buses, sports and everything else that seem so much more important — what they should do about it, they miss an intimate biological fact: Sleep is learning, of a very specific kind. Scientists now argue that a primary purpose of sleep is learning consolidation, separating the signal from the noise and flagging what is most valuable. School schedules change slowly, if at all, and the burden of helping teenagers get the sleep they need is squarely on parents. Can we help our children learn to exploit sleep as a learning tool (while getting enough of it)? Absolutely. There is research suggesting that different kinds of sleep can aid different kinds of learning, and by teaching “sleep study skills,” we can let our teenagers enjoy the sense that they’re gaming the system.
markfrankel18

There is no language instinct - Vyvyan Evans - Aeon - 0 views

aeon.co/...there-is-no-language-instinct

TOK language chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.
  • How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.
  • If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world’s 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals’ common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered.
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  • In a 2002 version, Chomsky and colleagues at Harvard proposed that perhaps all that is unique to the human language capability is a general-purpose computational capacity known as ‘recursion’.
  • While the human brain does exhibit specialisation for processing different genres of information, such as vision, there appears not to be a dedicated spot specialised just for language.
  • And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect.
  • we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech.
markfrankel18

Climate buffoons' real motives: 5 reasons they still spout debunked garbage - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...hey_still_refuse_to_see_reason

TOK science bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The most simplistic of climate deniers are those who looked out their windows this winter, saw that it was snowing, and reasoned that global warming therefore can’t be real. This speaks to a basic confusion of the difference between weather and climate. (If you’d like a much more thorough debunking of weather-based climate change denial, read this.)It’s also a classic example of confirmation bias: Deniers get giddy when it snows because it appears to confirm their belief that Earth isn’t really getting warmer. To understand why that doesn’t make sense, one need only look at the average global temperatures. Yes, it was very cold in parts of the U.S., but zoom out and it becomes clear that last month, overall, was the fourth-warmest January in recorded history.In some cases, it could be a fear of science that is driving this type of thinking.
  • A misunderstanding of what scientists take as “proof” may also be responsible for this confusion.
markfrankel18

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ember-life-before-the-internet

TOK technology internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.
  • It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was.
  • That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “I think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean I am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +
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  • Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss.
markfrankel18

Colonoscopies Clarify Inner Workings of Minds | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...larify-inner-workings-of-minds

TOK memory

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Memories, and understandings, are story shaped. To remember or make sense of a thing is to have a story about it. Tales of colonoscopies and cathartic errors can probe the inner workings of our minds.
  • . We must reconcile: Steven Pinker’s “to a very great extent our memories are ourselves,” with Kahneman’s “I am my remembering self and the experiencing self who does my living is like a stranger to me,” and Oliver Sacks’ observation that there is “no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth” of memories. Our minds are story processors (not logic processors, or movie cameras). By all means get better stories. But don’t tell yourself the tall tale that you can do without them.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...power-touch

touch sensory perception perception science psychology health brain emotion experiment neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
  • Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
  • And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.
Diana Shafran

Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...gative-emotions-key-well-being

TOK emotion psychology sadness happiness

shared by Diana Shafran on 28 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Diana Shafran on 28 Feb 15
     
    Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being," says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Eleven untranslatable words - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...03-eleven-untranslatable-words

language culture linguistic determinism translation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.
  • Iyer’s Found in Translation project will be published as a book later in 2014. She has been a polyglot since childhood. “My parents come from different parts of India, so I grew up learning five languages,” she says. “I’d always loved the word Fernweh, which is German for ‘longing for a place you’ve never been to’, and then one day I started collecting more.”Some are humorous, while others have definitions that read like poetry. “I love the German word Waldeinsamkeit, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’. “It captures a sense of solitude and at the same time that feeling of oneness with nature.” Her favourite is the Inuit word Iktsuarpok, which means ‘the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up’, because “it holds so much meaning. It’s waiting, whether you are waiting for the bus to show up or for the love of your life. It perfectly describes that inner anguish associated with waiting.”
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pi-prime-numbers-cybersecurity

math mathematics beauty technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
Lawrence Hrubes

Debate Persists Over Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders, Long After 'Sybil' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isorders-long-after-sybil.html

TOK psychology human sciences SocialScience memory psychiatry science false memories

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound. Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating personas. But few instances of the phenomenon captured Americans’ collective imagination quite like “Sybil,” the study of a woman said to have had not two, not three (like the troubled figure in the 1950s’ “Three Faces of Eve”), but 16 different personalities. Alters, psychiatrists call them, short for alternates. As a mass-market book published in 1973, “Sybil” sold in the millions. Tens of millions watched a 1976 television movie version. The story had enough juice left in it for still another television film in 2007.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Do We Eat, and Why Do We Gain Weight? - www.newyorker.com - 2 views

www.readability.com/...doxpy7i3

science biology obesity food hunger psychology TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Here are a few of the things that can make you hungry: seeing, smelling, reading, or even thinking about food. Hearing music that reminds you of a good meal. Walking by a place where you once ate something good. Even after you’ve just had a hearty lunch, imagining something delicious can make you salivate. Being genuinely hungry, on the other hand—in the sense of physiologically needing food—matters little. It’s enough to walk by a doughnut shop to start wanting a doughnut. Studies show that rats that have eaten a lot are just as eager to eat chocolate cereal as hungry rats are to eat laboratory chow. Humans don’t seem all that different. More often than not, we eat because we want to eat—not because we need to. Recent studies show that our physical level of hunger, in fact, does not correlate strongly with how much hunger we say that we feel or how much food we go on to consume. That’s something of a departure from commonly held views of what it means to be hungry.
markfrankel18

Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams | Brain Pickings - 2 views

www.brainpickings.org/...schematics-julian-hibbard

TOK math emotion love arts diagrams schematics

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Schematics: A Love Story — a truly unique, in the most uncontrived sense of the word, project exploring love, memory, and time through 43 schematic diagrams drawn from old books and paired with poetic text that gleans new meaning from the geometric forms. From them emerges a layered and paradoxical narrative that is at once very personal and very universal, a kind of forlorn optimism about what it means to be human and to follow the heart’s sometimes purposeful, sometimes erratic, usually unpredictable will in pursuing the deepest of human connections.
Lawrence Hrubes

My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rancium-and-it-killed-her.html

TOK science chemistry physics ethics health

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.
  • How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.
  • Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. In the years that followed, the women began to suffer ghoulish physical deterioration. Their jaws melted and ballooned into masses of tumors larger than fists, and cancers riddled their bodies. They developed anemia and necrosis. The sensational court case started — and won — by the dying Radium Girls, as they were called, is a landmark in the history of occupational health. It was settled in June 1928, four months before Marguerite Perey arrived at the Radium Institute to begin a 30-year career of heavy exposure to radiation.
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  • We know now that alpha and beta particles emitted in radiation attack DNA and that the mutations they cause can lead to cancer. Ingested radioactive elements can concentrate in the bones, where they continue their decay, in effect poisoning someone for as long as that person lives. By the time Perey made her discovery, she was already heavily contaminated. She spent the last 15 years of her life in treatment for a gruesome bone cancer that spread throughout her body, claiming her eyesight, pieces of her hand and most of the years in which she had planned to study francium. As the disease progressed, she warned her students of the horrible consequences of radiation exposure. Francis, my grandfather, says he recalls hearing that when she walked into labs with radiation counters in her later years, they would go off.
  • Over the years, historians have pondered what drove the Curies to throw caution so thoroughly to the wind. Perhaps it was inconceivable to them that the benefits of their research would not outweigh the risks to themselves and their employees. In a field in which groundbreaking discoveries were being made and the competition might arrive there first, speed was put above other concerns, Rona noted. But you almost get the impression that in the Curie lab, dedication to science was demonstrated by a willingness to poison yourself — as if what made a person’s research meaningful were the sacrifices made in the effort to learn something new.
Lawrence Hrubes

Margaret Atwood on Our Robotic Future - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ood-on-our-robotic-future.html

TOK technology robots future

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many of our proposed futures contain robots. The present also contains robots, but The Future is said to contain a lot more of them. Is that good or bad? We haven’t made up our minds. And while we’re at it, how about a robotic mind that can be made up more easily than a human one?Sci-fi writers have been exploring robots for decades, but they were far from the first to do so. Humankind has been imagining nonbiological but sentient entities that do our bidding ever since we first set stylus to papyrus.
  • To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate weapons, delicious banquets minus the cooking and washing up — and artificial creatures at our beck and call.
  • Every technology we develop is an extension of one of our own senses or capabilities. It has always been that way. The spear and the arrow extended the arm, the telescope extended the eye, and now the Kissinger kissing device extends the mouth. Every technology we’ve ever made has also altered the way we live. So how different will our lives be if the future we choose is the one with all these robots in it?
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dividualistic-than-others.html

TOK SocialScience human sciences culture indigenous knowledge systems anthropology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
  • These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about the seaweed and other objects in the scene.Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus, asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the others.
  • In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways. Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”
markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

m.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

TOK bias reason emotion science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - 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."
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers
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  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information.
  • Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."
Lawrence Hrubes

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ater-problems-disgusting-solve

science psychology emotion human sciences perception reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
  • In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
  • eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
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  • Disgust has deep psychological roots, emerging early in a child’s development. Infants and young toddlers don’t feel grossed out by anything—diapers, Rozin observes, are there in part to stop a baby “from eating her shit.” In the young mind, curiosity and exploration often overpower any competing instincts. But, at around four years old, there seems to be a profound shift. Suddenly, children won’t touch things that they find appalling. Some substances, especially human excretions of any sort, are seen as gross and untouchable all over the world; others are culturally determined. But, whether universal or culturally-specific, the disgust reactions that we acquire as children stay with us throughout our lives. If anything, they grow stronger—and more consequential—with age.
markfrankel18

What Are You So Afraid Of? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-are-you-so-afraid-of.html

TOK fear emotion evolution psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own absurd hierarchy, in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for the wrong things.
  • Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles
  • The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.
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