Why is Tibet such a hot-button issue for China?
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TEDxKrungthep - Jennifer Hartley - "The Truth in the Lie" - 0 views
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I think it's good, although it slightly mixes up our nice distinction between sense perception and perception in general, and she actual says "we see things not as they are but as we are" at one point. The title "The Truth in the Lie" evokes one of the current essay titles, and it has a lot to say about ethics 'n stuff.
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Sound, the Way the Brain and the Ear Prefer to Hear It - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors. But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said. Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound relates to human perception." "
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Zakaria: China strategy is to wait out Dalai Lama - CNN.com - 0 views
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So who's right?
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And Tibetans see
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China sees the issue
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It's not so simple
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he Chinese have claimed
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The Tibetans, however, reject that claim
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Well, that depends on who you ask.
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However
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Why hasn't there been any resolution?
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Will it work?
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Do you think
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What's the stumbling block that keeps them from finding resolution?
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the difference in perception between the two sides
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The Infant Brain - BBC4 - In Our Time - 0 views
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"Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain. For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study. Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate. Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment. The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol. More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar. Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds."
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Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see | Video on TED.com - 1 views
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What Other People Say May Change What You See - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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"A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch. In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card. Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly. But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer. Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time. Dr. Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to group do so knowing that their answers was wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions? "
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shared by anonymous on 13 Apr 11
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'Molyneux's question' gets answered after 300 years | Space, Military and Medicine | Ne... - 1 views
www.news.com.au/...story-fn5fsgyc-1226037177460
human science psychology science sense perception Molyneux blind
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"RESEARCHERS say they have solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike for three centuries. Irish politician William Molyneux first posed the question in a letter to the great British thinker John Locke written 323 years ago. Imagine, Molyneux wrote, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects - a sphere and a cube, for example - only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see. The puzzle, he continued, is: "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?" For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question", as it became known, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind. Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch. If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued. More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience."
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shared by anonymous on 07 Sep 10
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Currents - Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...21iht-currents.html
metrics Human Science measurement Math quants Sense Perception
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Computers have become an extension of us: that is a commonplace now. But in an important way we may be becoming an extension of them, in turn. Computers are digital — that is, they turn everything into numbers; that is their way of seeing. And in the computer age we may be living through the digitization of our minds, even when they are offline: a slow-burning quantification of human affairs that promises or threatens, depending on your outlook, to crowd out other categories of the imagination, other ways of perceiving.
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Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try.
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The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.
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depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.
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We use gross domestic product to measure everything. It makes it easy to compare economies, but it makes us undervalue what cannot be measured, the report said. Trees are killed because the sales from paper are countable, while a forest’s worth is not. Unemployment grants are cut because their cost is plain, while the mental-health cost of idleness is vague.
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“In this world in which we are so centered on metrics, those things that are not measured get left off the agenda,” he said. “You need a metric to fight a metric.”
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Computers have become an extension of us: that is a commonplace now. But in an important way we may be becoming an extension of them, in turn. Computers are digital - that is, they turn everything into numbers; that is their way of seeing. And in the computer age we may be living through the digitization of our minds, even when they are offline: a slow-burning quantification of human affairs that promises or threatens, depending on your outlook, to crowd out other categories of the imagination, other ways of perceiving.
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shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 11
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The Young And the Perceptive - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...06hallinan.html
experts music paradigms economics inference human science sense perception
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"IT has been more than three years since the beginning of the Wall Street financial crisis, yet we continue to hear about new evidence of glaring errors and widespread misdoings. Even the smartest minds in finance are left scratching their heads: how did we not catch any of this sooner? When I hear this refrain, I am reminded of Boris Goldovsky. Goldovsky, who died in 2001, was a legend in opera circles, best remembered for his commentary during the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he was also a piano teacher. And it is as a teacher that he made a lasting - albeit unintentional - contribution to our understanding of why seemingly obvious errors go undetected for so long. One day, a student of his was practicing a piece by Brahms when Goldovsky heard something wrong. He stopped her and told her to fix her mistake. The student looked confused; she said she had played the notes as they were written. Goldovsky looked at the music and, to his surprise, the girl had indeed played the printed notes correctly - but there was an apparent misprint in the music. At first, the student and the teacher thought this misprint was confined to their edition of the sheet music alone. But further checking revealed that all other editions contained the same incorrect note. Why, wondered Goldovsky, had no one - the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, scores of accomplished pianists - noticed the error? How could so many experts have missed something that was so obvious to a novice? This paradox intrigued Goldovsky. So over the years he gave the piece to a number of musicians who were skilled sight readers of music - which is to say they had the ability to play from a printed score for the first time without practicing. He told them there was a misprint somewhere in the score, and asked them to find it. He allowed them to play the piece as many times as they liked and in any way that they liked. But not one musician ever found the err
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shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 11
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Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...11klass.html
human science psychology science bilingual babies language language acquisition
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Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their
Miss Representation Trailer on Vimeo - 0 views
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shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 11
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The Certainty of Memory Has Its Day in Court - NYTimes.com - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...mory-has-its-day-in-court.html
certainty memory court Psychology CLOA cognitive sense perception eyewitness
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"Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night. And in August the New Jersey Supreme Court set new rules to cope with failings in witness accounts, during an appeal by a man picked from a photo lineup, and convicted of manslaughter and weapons possession in a 2003 fatal shooting. Rather than the centerpiece of prosecution, witness testimony should be viewed more like trace evidence, scientists say, with the same fragility and vulnerability to contamination. Why is a witness's account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. "Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it's overloaded," said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. "An event happens so fast, and when the police question you, you probably weren't concentrating on the details they're asking about." "
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shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 11
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Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ally-photos-are-retouched.html
software photos sense perception ethics truth advertising
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"The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic - shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe's Photoshop software, the photo retoucher's magic wand. "Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie," said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth. And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to "discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image." Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said. Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "
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What Is Taste? | Special Series | Big Think - 1 views
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Basics - Primal, Acute and Easily Duped - Our Sense of Touch - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The signals from the various touch receptors converge on the brain and sketch out a so-called somatosensory homunculus, a highly plastic internal representation of the body. Like any map, the homunculus exaggerates some features and downplays others.
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But on some tactile tasks, touch is all thumbs. When people are given a raised line drawing of a common object, a bas-relief outline of, say, a screwdriver, they’re stumped. “If all we’ve got is contour information,” Dr. Lederman said, “no weight, no texture, no thermal information, well, we’re very, very bad with that.”
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Touch also turns out to be easy to fool. Among the sensory tricks now being investigated is something called the Pinocchio illusion. Researchers have found that if they vibrate the tendon of the biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand drifting ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch the forefinger of the vibrated arm to the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose was lengthening, too.
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People who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view quickly come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it.
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Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.
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“Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it,” said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.”
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For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan J. Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin. And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle looms large. “Contact is a two-way street, and that’s not true for vision or audition,” Dr. Lederman said. “If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back.”
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Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Wow!!!! If true, this is fascinating!!! Your brain is linking the Marshall Plan or Endocrine Systems to the shades of light in your bedroom or the smell of your couch.
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It is interesting how you came across this article and liked it. My orchestra teacher Ms. Pipkin also showed the orchestra about this article and I liked it a lot and decided to do it for my blogging assignment. Ivan coincidentally also has the same article. I believe that this article is very TOK in form because it discusses the flaws of study habits, something we perceive as always right. Many believe that studying in a quiet place for a long time and focusing on subject by subject are the keys to success and getting the most out of each study period. However, through cognitive science studies, it is interesting how many scientists argue that a person should be in a room where the outside world can be sen (to have some distraction but not too much) and that a person should expose him or herself with many areas during one study sitting. So the whole argument boils down to "what is the right way to study?" and whether or not studying really helps. -max
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“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.
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Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.
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they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.
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“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
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“We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,”
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psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
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The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
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To Slow Speeders, Philadelphia Tries Make-Believe - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Fake speed humps, as flat as the street, but designed to appear three-dimensional, fool drivers into slowing down.
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Are these Philly speed bump illusions better than Vancouver's? Does this suggest that Canadians are just plain demented? For more on Canadians: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pILPiB-07uI
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Speed Bumps of the Future: Creepy Optical Illusion Children | Discoblog | Discover Maga... - 3 views
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Today, West Vancouver officials will roll out a new way to keep drivers alert and slow them down: a little girl speed bump. A trompe-l'œil, the apparently 3D girl located near the École Pauline Johnson Elementary School is actually a 2D pavement painting, similar to the one shown here.
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All you Psych folks out there. What type of behavioral conditioning is this likely to create?!?!?