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Contents contributed and discussions participated by manhefnawi

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manhefnawi

Goldfish Can Get Depressed, Too | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...goldfish-can-get-depressed-too

Animal Cognition Behavior

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • fish not only suffer from depression, they can be easily diagnosed.
  • fish depression can be induced by getting them “drunk” on ethanol, then cutting off the supply, resulting in withdrawal. These fish mope around the tank floor until they’re given antidepressants, at which point they begin happily swimming near the surface again.
manhefnawi

Speaking in a Foreign Language Might Change Your Answer to a Major Philosophy Dilemma |... - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...nswer-major-philosophy-dilemma

Language Decisions Behavior

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • personal morality can be influenced by something as seemingly arbitrary as the language you're using.
  • They set out to see if the imagery our brains produce changes depending on whether we're communicating in our native language or a foreign one, and whether or not these changes influence the moral decisions we make.
  • But when they spoke in English, and therefore couldn't see the scene as clearly, they were more likely to go the utilitarian route.
manhefnawi

The Optical Illusion That Makes Static Lines Look Like They're Pulsing | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...atic-lines-look-theyre-pulsing

Perception

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The Müller-Lyer illusion shows that people perceive a line being longer if the arrow points away from its center, so when the arrows change direction on the animation, it looks like half of the line is getting longer, and half is getting shorter. In reality, though, only the direction the arrows are pointing changes.
manhefnawi

There's an Upside to Being Sad and Lonely: A Talent for Reading People | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...d-lonely-talent-reading-people

Psychology

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • introverted people prone to melancholy are better at inferring how others react in social situations than their more extroverted peers.
  • Respondents who made accurate judgments about social psychology were more likely to be intelligent and curious about complex problems. What was less expected was those same subjects also reported being more lonely and introverted, and having lower self-esteem.
manhefnawi

Blind People Envision the Future Differently Than Sighted People | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...ure-differently-sighted-people

Perception Memory Psychology

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Whether you believe that time marches forward, or that you can put the past behind you, is influenced by your visual development
  • the small study found that blind research participants did not conceive of the past as being behind them and the future in front, as most sighted participants did.
  • The study suggests that our concept of time as related to the body's movement in space depends on how our vision develops. It also shows the importance of using a diverse sample in psychology studies. Studies on the psychological links between time and space that don’t test any blind volunteers would suggest that everyone associates the future with forward movement, when, in fact, a significant portion of the world population may not.
manhefnawi

Want to Remember Your Vacation? Take Fewer Photos | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...our-vacation-take-fewer-photos

Memory

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Technology isn't always good for your memory. Overusing map apps can alter our navigational skills. Information overload can make us forgetful. Most of us treat Google like an external hard drive for information we might have once committed to memory. And all those selfies and picturesque vistas we photograph on vacation might be affecting how we remember the trip, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology spotted by Vox.
  • The researchers conclude that recording an experience "may prevent people from remembering the very events they are attempting to preserve." Their study ends on a dark note: "Ironically, our results suggest that using media to preserve these moments may prevent people from fully experiencing them in the first place.
manhefnawi

Having Trouble Dealing With Negative Feedback? Don't Be So Quick to React | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...to-deal-with-negative-feedback

Emotions Thinking

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • No one likes receiving negative feedback, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle it.
  • That’s because criticism, however constructive it may be, often challenges the image we have of ourselves.
  • Pay attention to the facts you’ve received rather than your emotional response to it, and compartmentalize the feedback by incorporating only what’s useful to you.
manhefnawi

How You Act at Starbucks Might Reflect Your Ancestors' Farming Style | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...t-your-ancestors-farming-style

Cultural Differences Behavior

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • To further study how regional differences affect behavior, the researchers decided to rearrange some chairs. They went to Starbucks and pushed chairs together in a way that would inconvenience people trying to walk through the cafe, then waited to see how many people would push the chairs out of their way.
manhefnawi

The Fascinating Way That Words Can Change How We Perceive Colors | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...-change-how-we-perceive-colors

Perception Language

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The language we speak can impact the colors we recognize
  • If a language only has two terms, they are almost always related to black and white (dark and light). If they have three, that third color is almost always red. And so on into green, yellow, and blue.
manhefnawi

The Fascinating Science Behind Why We See 'Faces' In Objects | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...science-behind-pareidolia

Perception Neurology Brain

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • People can discern faces in meaningless clouds
  • There's a name for this uncanny ability to see faces everywhere: pareidolia (roughly, from the Greek for "wrong shape").
  • Human brains are exquisitely attuned to perceiving faces—in fact, there's an entire region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is dedicated to it. Its functions are evident even from early childhood: Studies have shown that shortly after birth, babies display more interest in cartoon faces with properly placed features than in similar images where the features are scrambled.
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  • Others have found that paranormal and religious believers are more prone to pareidolia than skeptics and nonbelievers. Although believers and nonbelievers had equivalent sensitivity to faces, the paranormal and religious believers had lower thresholds for reporting that a face was present than nonbelievers did, possibly due to being more open to the suggestion that the images might contain faces.
  • Pareidolia can be exacerbated in cases of fatigue and in some neurological diseases, such as Lewy body dementia
  • It may not be a strictly human phenomenon either. Research has shown that rhesus monkeys see illusory facial features on inanimate objects such as toasters or sliced vegetables.
  • Pareidolia extends beyond human likenesses: In 2007, a "monkey tree" in Singapore attracted thousands of visitors, who swore that a bizarrely shaped callus growing on a tree was a manifestation of either the Chinese deity Sun Wukong (also known as the Monkey King) or the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.
  • the brain makes much ado about nothing.
manhefnawi

How 'Unconscious Bias' Can Trick Your Brain Into Trusting People (Even if You Shouldn't... - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...ng-people-even-if-you-shouldnt

Bias Brain Knowledge Trust Halo

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • oftentimes when we’re trying to decide whose judgment to trust, how people talk or present themselves has greater sway over our opinion than their actual knowledge or qualifications.
  • One such form, called the Halo Effect, is when we let someone’s positive attributes cloud our judgment to such a degree that we overlook their flaws
  • unconscious biases are difficult to overcome, being aware of them helps prevent them from having undue influence over your decision-making
manhefnawi

Why Our Brains Love Plot Twists | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...hy-our-brains-love-plot-twists

Knowledge Cognitive Science Plot Twist

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The curse of knowledge, Tobin explains, refers to a psychological effect in which knowledge affects our perception and "trips us up in a lot of ways." For instance, a puzzle always seems easier than it really is after we've learned how to solve it, and once we know which team won a baseball game, we tend to overestimate how likely that particular outcome was.
manhefnawi

Encouraging Findings from the 2018 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...2

Knowledge Awareness History

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • most Americans understand that The Holocaust must be taught so that the critical lessons from this atrocity are not lost with time. As such, 80 percent of U.S. adults think that it is important to keep teaching next generations about The Holocaust so that it does not happen again.
manhefnawi

MIT creates "Norman" - a "psychopathic AI" raised on Reddit | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-at-mit-create-psychopathic-ai

Psychology Teaching AI

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • They did it to prove that AI itself isn't inherently bad and evil, more-so that AI can be bad if fed bad and evil data.
manhefnawi

Opinion | Does Math Make You Smarter? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...math-logic-smarter.html

Mathematics Logic Reasoning Thinking

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Various studies point to the conclusion that subjecting the mind to formal discipline — as when studying geometry or Latin — does not, in general, engender a broad transfer of learning. There is no sweeping increase of a general capacity for tasks like writing a speech or balancing a checkbook.
  • Many reasons have been advanced for this poor showing, including the lack of relevance of such an abstract exercise to people’s daily lives.
  • Most people reflexively eliminate the cards not explicitly specified in the rule (the F and the 2) and then continue with slower, more analytic processing only for the E and the 5. In this, they rely on an initial snap judgment about superficial similarity, a tendency that some scholars speculate evolved in humans because in most real-world contexts, quickly detecting such similarities is a good strategy for survival.
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  • I propose we start to teach the Wason selection task in mathematics courses at the high-school level and higher. The puzzle captures so much that is essential to mathematics: the nuts and bolts of inference, the difficulty of absorbing abstract concepts when removed from the context of real-world experience, the importance of a slow, deliberative cogitative process and the pitfalls of instant intuitive judgments.
manhefnawi

6 Scientific Reasons You Should Be Reading More | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...c-reasons-you-should-read-more

Cognitive Skills Emotion Language Theory of Mind

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • to assess the relationship between cognitive skills, vocabulary, factual knowledge, and exposure to certain fiction and nonfiction authors
  • those who read literary fiction performed better on tasks like predicting how characters would act and identifying the emotion encoded in facial expressions. These speak to the ability to understand others' mental states, which scientists call Theory of Mind.
  • If we engage with characters who are nuanced, unpredictable, and difficult to understand, then I think we're more likely to approach people in the real world with an interest and humility necessary for dealing with complex individuals
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  • When we read fiction, we practice keeping our minds open because we can afford uncertainty
  • 100 people were assigned to read a fictional story or a nonfiction essay. The participants then completed questionnaires intended to assess their level of cognitive closure, which is the need to reach a conclusion quickly and avoid ambiguity in the decision-making process. The fiction readers emerged as more flexible and creative than the essay readers—and the effect was strongest for people who read on a regular basis.
  • They saw themselves differently after reading about others' fictional experience.
  • As you identify with another person, a protagonist in the story, you enter into a piece of life that you wouldn't otherwise have known. You have emotions or circumstances that you wouldn't have otherwise understood
manhefnawi

Study Finds Experts Overestimate Their Knowledge | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...s-overestimate-their-knowledge

Knowledge Claims

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • You’re in the middle of a conversation about politics or music or art, and someone asks, “Have you heard of…?” And despite your complete lack of knowledge of that band or law or artist, you say, “Sure!”
  • As it turns out, the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to fib when your knowledge falls short, claiming that some factoid rings a bell when, in fact, there are no bells to be rung
  • Self-professed experts were more likely to claim they were very knowledgeable about concepts and places that didn’t exist
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  • “Our results suggest that people do not simply consult a ‘mental index’ that catalogues their knowledge but instead draw on preexisting self-perceptions of knowledge to make inferences about what they should or probably do know
manhefnawi

Bees understand the concept of zero | Science | AAAS - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...bees-understand-concept-zero

Training Bees Thinking Mind

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • we’re not the only species to consider “nothing” a number. Parrots and monkeys understand the concept of zero, and now bees have joined the club, too.
  • researchers trained 10 bees to identify the smaller of two numbers. Across a series of trials, they showed the insects two different pictures displaying a few black shapes on a white background. If the bees flew to the picture with the smaller number of shapes, they were given delicious sugar water, but if they flew toward the larger number, they were punished with bitter-tasting quinine.
  • a white background containing no shapes at all. Even though the bees had never seen an empty picture before, 64% of the time they chose this option rather than a picture containing two or three shapes,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This suggests that the insects understood that “zero” is less than two or three. And they weren’t just going for the empty picture because it was new and interesting
  • Advanced numerical abilities like this could give animals an evolutionary advantage, helping them keep track of predators and food sources. And if an insect can display such as thorough grasp of the number zero, write the researchers, then this ability may be more common in the animal kingdom than we think.
manhefnawi

How the Father of Computer Science Decoded Nature's Mysterious Patterns - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alan-turing-desalination.html

Mathematics Modeling Nature

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • few have heard of Turing, the naturalist who explained patterns in nature with math
  • And even now, scientists are finding new insights from Turing’s legacy.
  • A keen natural observer since childhood, Turing noticed that many plants contained clues that math might be involved.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It’s unclear why this interested the early computer scientist, but Turing had told a friend that he wanted to defeat Argument From Design, the idea that for complex patterns to exist in nature, something supernatural, like God, had to create them.
  • He just thought mathematics was very powerful, and you could use it to explain lots and lots of things — and you should try
  • By creating three-dimensional Turing patterns like bubbles and tubes in membranes, the researchers increased their permeability, creating filters that could better separate salt from water than traditional ones.
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