Group items tagged

Evidence from a new study shows that memory circuits assist the mind in recalling thoughts by associating them with sensations. The mind can use the brain’s storage mechanisms to sort more important or urgent memories for faster recall. 

In particular, it remains unknown whether factors that structure the retrieval of external stimuli also apply to thought recall, and whether some thought features affect their accessibility in memory.

These observations appear to support the view that the conscious self uses memory as a tool. The mind uses the brain; it is not a passive illusion conjured up by the brain. The brain is active and ready, storing each sensation as we walk through daily life, but thoughts that involve planning are more readily recalled. It’s as if the self tells the brain, “Remember this,” and the brain obliges like a computer operator or librarian, pigeonholing the data where it can be recalled more easily later.

A marine laboratory 85 miles southwest of New Orleans was designed to be a fortress against extreme weather. But it might be defeated by climate change.

It stands 18 feet above the ground on pillars with pilings that extend more than 100 feet underground. Its walls can withstand winds of up to 250 miles per hour.But the water is coming.

The assault from climate change is slower but more relentless than any storm, and will ultimately do more damage. It threatens researchers’ ability to study marine environments up close at a time when it’s more vital than ever to understand them.

individuals are indeed variably persuasible and that, at times, factors of personality are related to this quality.

The dissonant or inconsistent elements include the bowler’s knowledge of his skill and the fact of his poor score. This produces tension.

Because the agreement or disagreement of a communication with an individual’s cognitive structure affects not only behaviour but perception as well, the major criterion for the psychological analysis of communication is neither the message nor the medium but the expectation of the person receiving the message.

They need to recognise the role of communication in our society and from birth they need many and varied opportunities for positive interaction, and responses to their attempts to express themselves.

Communication, Language and Literacy helps a child to understand relationships, to hear words and sentences.

Through their growing knowledge and understanding, children can learn to appreciate the contribution made by many cultures to the development and application of communication, language and literacy.

In the evolutionary history of humans, reading and writing are relatively new functions. As a result, in order to read written language, human brains have had to recruit and adapt parts of the visual system to interface with language centers. This is a process researchers have long believed occurred primarily in the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain. But in a new study where illiterate people in their thirties were trained to read over six months, researchers have discovered that reading actually activates much deeper brain structures as well, opening doors to a better understanding of how we learn, and possible new interventions for dyslexia. Their results were recently published in the journal Science Advances.

Homo sapiens became sapiens largely because of language.

We can call this problem the radically uneven distribution of language.

If one conceives of consciousness as access to our thoughts for action and report—the so-called ‘access consciousness’ (Block, 1995

Sociology looks beyond individuals and examines societies through the specific lenses or associations.

People with a background in sociology can work in these specific positions and more:

While it is interesting to note all the places that they overlap – eventual deductions about the behaviors of people, humanity, societal structures – they are also very different and attract different kinds of people to each of their disciplines.

In Sociology, you will be introduced to core elements of the subject, including sociological methodology and key concepts.

These will help you to develop the knowledge, understanding, and skills that you'll use in more specialised investigations in your third year.

Course structure may vary in future years.

oe Biden said Wednesday that Democrats have "had enough" debates, suggesting he is unwilling to have another one-on-one showdown with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders communications director Mike Casca said Tuesday.

"I think we need a good debate as to where we go, not only just now but in the future," Sanders told Cooper. "And to my mind, if there's anything that this unexpected moment in American history should teach us, we've got to rethink the basic structures of American society, and that is guaranteed health care to all as a human right, creating an economy that provides for all people not just the wealthy."

Machines can write compelling ad copy and solve complex “real life” problems. Should the creative class be worried?

Rich breaks down some “abstract” problems into their fundamental parts and shows how, with comprehensive enough data and well-structured enough logical programming, AI could be suited to tackle creative problems. In one case, she offers a “real world” example about a manufacturing company’s new line of products and their plans, goals, and expectations for marketing the new line to a specific city. Weekly Newsletter Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

almost all problems rely (or ought to rely) on an understanding of the nature of both knowledge and reasoning. Humanists are trying to solve many of these same problems. Thus there is room for a good deal of interaction between artificial intelligence and many disciplines within the humanities.

They performed several studies that had a similar structure. In these studies, strangers had a brief conversation (ranging in length from five minutes to 45 minutes). Afterward, the participants rated how much they liked their conversation partner as well as how much they thought their conversation partner would like them.

On the one hand, people’s predictions of how much people would like them were pretty good. In general, if you thought that the other person would like you (or would not), you were just about right. On the other hand, people also systematically underestimated how much other people would like them. That is their ratings of how much their conversation partner liked them were pessimistic. The researchers called this the liking gap.

Independent raters were able to predict how much a person liked their conversation partner by the way that person acted during the conversation. So, people could potentially get accurate information from their conversation partner about how much they are liked. They are just not using that information.

We can’t see it, but brains hum with electrical activity. Brain waves created by the coordinated firing of huge collections of nerve cells pinball around the brain. The waves can ricochet from the front of the brain to the back, or from deep structures all the way to the scalp and then back again.

A recent approach, “behavioral economics,” seeks to use psychology to inform economics, while maintaining the emphases on mathematical structure and explanation of field data that distinguish economics from other social sciences (1–3).

fine line between procrastination and being “pressure prompted.” If you’re like me and pressure prompted, you are someone who often does your best work when faced with a looming deadline. While being pressure prompted may entail a bit of procrastination, it is procrastination within acceptable limits. In other words, it is a set of conditions that offers just enough pressure to ensure you’re at the top of your game without divulging into chaos or most importantly, impacting other members of your team by preventing them from delivering their best work in a timely manner.

Procrastination is a condition that has consequences on one’s mental and physical health and performance at school and in the workplace.

Piers Steel defines procrastination as “a self-regulatory failure leading to poor performance and reduced well-being.” Notably, Steel further emphasizes that procrastination is both common (80% to 90% of college-age students suffer from it at least some of the time) and something most people (95%) wish to overcome.

The challenges for alternative gravity theories—collectively known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND—were spelled out in a separate preprint coincidentally published the day after the new model appeared. Chief among them is recasting the leading role dark matter plays in drawing the universe together, as described by a well-established cosmological model known as LCDM, or Lambda cold dark matter.

Simply put, LCDM says that we wouldn’t be here without dark matter. The infant universe was so smooth that the gravitational attraction of ordinary matter alone wouldn’t have been enough to gather particles into galaxies, stars, and planets. Enter dark-matter particles. Under the LCDM model, their collective bulk sculpts normal matter into the modern cosmic structures studied by astronomers.

LCDM became the standard model of cosmology in part because it so precisely agrees with the CMB. This map of the early universe shows almost imperceptibly thick and thin spots rippling through the cosmos. More recently, researchers have been able to measure the orientation or polarization of the CMB’s light more precisely. Any successful cosmology will need to establish a comprehensive history of the cosmos by reproducing these three observations: the CMB’s temperature, the CMB’s polarization, and the current distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Our approach, which borrows from physics and in particular the work of Richard Feynman, goes under the bonnet. It attempts to capture the mathematical structure of the phenomenon – in this case, the pandemic – and to understand the causes of what is observed. Since we don’t know all the causes, we have to infer them. But that inference, and implicit uncertainty, is built into the models

That’s why we call them generative models, because they contain everything you need to know to generate the data. As more data comes in, you adjust your beliefs about the causes, until your model simulates the data as accurately and as simply as possible.

A common type of epidemiological model used today is the SEIR model, which considers that people must be in one of four states – susceptible (S), exposed (E), infected (I) or recovered (R). Unfortunately, reality doesn’t break them down so neatly. For example, what does it mean to be recovered?

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

Personality traits that are shaped by genetics and early life experiences strongly influence our Covid-19-related decisions, studies from the U.S. and Japan have found.

In a study of more than 400 U.S. adults, Dr. Byrne and her colleagues found that how people perceive risks, whether they make risky decisions, and their preference for immediate or delayed rewards were the largest predictors of whether they followed public-health guidelines when it came to wearing masks and social distancing.

These factors accounted for 55% of the difference in people’s behaviors—more than people’s political affiliation, level of education or age.