Group items tagged

Part 1 of a 4-part series examining what happens when science is used for marketing (using brain-training software as the central example). Almost all of the programs that tout their ability to train your brain are limited in scope. Most train your ability to perform simple cognitive tasks by having you perform them repeatedly, often adapting the difficulty of the task over time to keep it challenging. Some determine which tasks you perform well and which need improvement and adjust the tasks based on your ongoing performance. The simplest ones, though, simply track how much you improve and inform you that such improvements have made increased the fitness of your brain. Such task-specific training effects can be really useful-if you want to enhance your ability to do Sudoku, by all means practice doing Sudoku. But what pitches for those programs regularly imply is that playing their videogame or using their training will enhance your ability to do other tasks that weren't specifically trained. For example, this advertisement for Nintendo's Brain Age implies that by using their game, you will be better able to remember your friend's name when you meet him on the street. The idea that playing games can improve your brain is pervasive, and it taps what Chris Chabris and I have called the "illusion of potential." A common myth of the mind is that we have vast pools of untapped mental resources that can be released with relatively minimal effort. This common intuitive belief underlies the pervasive myth that we only use 10% of our brains, that listening to Mozart can increase our IQ [pdf], and even the belief that some people have "discovered" psychic abilities. We devote the last main chapter of The Invisible Gorilla to this belief and its ramifications, and we recently wrote a column for the NY Times discussing how popular self-help books like The Secret and The Power capitalize on this mistaken belief. The marketing for some brain training programs

"It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. "This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a "tribal-moral community" united by "sacred values" that hinder research and damage their credibility - and blind them to the hostile climate they've created for non-liberals. "Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation," said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. "But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations." "

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded

In this edition I would like to explain why hot water freezes faster than cold water, when put into the freezer. It is a very counter-intuitive observation, it's a paradox. This is called the Mpemba Effect. The effect is named according to Tanzanian high-school student Erasto B. Mpemba who re-discovered the effect while making ice cream back in 1963. The Mpemba Effect is a nice example of how the change of one variable, the temperature, can have unexpected side effects. Most people assume that the difference between a hot glass of water and a cold glass of water is only the temperature. But this is not the case. Just by heating the water we are introducing a range of other variables that have an unexpected effect on the outcome.

"Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much information--words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth--and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all happening so quickly that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-- people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and again-- roughly one time in a thousand--someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists, an arbitrator, a vice cop-- and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook