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BBC - Future - Why you think your phone is vibrating when it is not - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...y-you-feel-phantom-phone-calls TOK phone perception psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Sensing phantom phone vibrations is a strangely common experience. Around 80% of us have imagined a phone vibrating in our pockets when it’s actually completely still. Almost 30% of us have also heard non-existent ringing. Are these hallucinations ominous signs of impending madness caused by digital culture?Not at all. In fact, phantom vibrations and ringing illustrate a fundamental principle in psychology.
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Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...he_real_reason_for_brains.html TOK science brain neurology
shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion.
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BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...w-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ TOK memory learning education technology brain
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
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Theory of mind and the belief in God. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...e_god_its_me_brain.single.html TOK mind god belief science
shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Sep 13 - Cached
  • As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
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On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html ToK psychology human sciences voting
shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
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Why we can 'see' the house that looks like Hitler | Science | The Observer - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...why-we-see-hitler-house ToK psychology perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • had inadvertently rediscovered the remarkable human talent for perceiving meaning where there is none. Known as apophenia or pareidolia, it is something we all experience to some degree. We see faces in the clouds and animals in rock formations. We mishear our name being called in crowds and think our mobile phones are vibrating when it turns out to be nothing but the normal sensations of our own movement.
  • In many ways, this tendency is the basic ingredient of hallucination and it is present to a much stronger degree in people who have frank and striking hallucinations, most notably as part of the range of experiences that can accompany a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
  • Less clinically, the Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger has discovered that this tendency is raised in people who have greater numbers of supernatural beliefs and experiences but aren't unwell in any sense of the word. With increased apophenia, perhaps, the world just seems more imbued with meaning.
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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.
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BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Why science needs imagination and beauty - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...cret-to-thinking-like-a-genius TOK science physics imagination beauty
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13
     
    "Albert Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." They're both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature's mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful."
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No, dogs aren't people! - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...no_dogs_arent_people TOK dogs psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Rather than selectively allowing certain critters into the club of species that are like us, we should probably simply remember that humans aren’t as special as we think we are. Instead of advocating for the protection of animals by leaning on their apparent similarity to our own species, perhaps we can just work to avoid needless suffering in all animals — human-like or not.
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Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

www.anxiousmachine.com/...placibo-philes TOK placebo perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • 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.
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What 'The Simpsons' Says About Ukraine's Language Divide : Parallels : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...about-ukraines-language-divide TOK language ukraine history simpsons
shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • And though Kostin and most of the people in eastern Ukraine are native Russian speakers, he prefers to download episodes dubbed not in Russian but in his second language, Ukrainian. All his friends in the city of Donetsk prefer the version dubbed in Ukrainian. "They talk in Russian, they think in Russian," and even their parents speak only Russian, he says of his friends. "But Simpsons? They like in Ukrainian."
  • But Lykov says language in Ukraine has always been more a political tool of division than an actual divide. People in eastern Ukraine — especially those under 35, who came of age after the Soviet Union collapsed — like being bilingual, he says. "Unfortunately," he says, "the media likes to show that only Russians live here and only Ukrainians live in western Ukraine. Actually people here have no trouble understanding both languages. And Ukrainian is even funnier for Russian-speakers [because] it's got cleverer slang."
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Airbrushed Sexting: What We Can Learn From Snapchat | WikiMind | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...hat-we-can-learn-from-snapchat TOK technology communication
shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Human history, up until about 5000 BC, was an invisible thread. People lived their lives, told stories to their tribes, and passed on. The important information stuck in memory and persisted in the group for weeks, years, or generations
  • All of this is to say that with the advent of instant, ephemeral visual communication, we have moved away from the relatively recent construction of permanence in our communication, and have created a close approximation to face-to-face interaction. We’ve moved closer to our natural communication preferences; what our perceptual and cognitive apparatus evolved to do.
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BBC News - Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29476893 TOK science time relativity
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever. What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.
  • As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you've hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It's because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate. The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.
  • Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are. And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo - he's in charge of time "dissemination" at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee. NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond - a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common - they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.
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  • Mr Lobo's biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light. In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.
  • The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.
  • Due to the earth's elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time. The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a "daylight saving" measure exaggerates the issue yet further.
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BBC News - The difficult task of reading the brain - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-27221632 science technology brain neuroscience psychology tests TOK
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, but despite advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Many of us have seen the pictures and read the stories. A beautiful picture of the brain where an area is highlighted and found to be fundamental for processes like fear, disgust or impaired social ability. There are so many stories it can be easy to be swayed into thinking that much more of the brain's mystery has been solved than is the case.
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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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Why Smart People Are Stupid - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-smart-people-are-stupid TOK bias reason Kahneman
shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.
  • Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.
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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.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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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How Societies Should Organize: Balancing Freedom and Community | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ancing-freedom-and-community-2 TOK ethics community
shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Now most people would probably agree that whatever is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is the right action. But what if you came in for a routine medical operation and they carved you up and gave your organs to those in need?! It's a problem called the Transplant Surgeon Objection and it demonstrates how tricky our beliefs can be when we're pressed to defend them.
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