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paisleyd

Study reveals how brain multitasks: Findings help explain how the brain pays attention to what;s important and how neural circuits may be 'broken' in attention-deficit disorders -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...151021135619.htm

science research brain

shared by paisleyd on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • a shell-shaped region in the center of the mammalian brain, known as the thalamic reticular nucleus or TRN, is likely responsible for the ability to routinely and seamlessly multitask
  • ndividual TRN neurons that act like a "switchboard," continuously filtering sensory information and shifting more or less attention onto one sense
  • blocking out distracting information from other senses
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • a newly emerging model of how the brain focuses attention on a particular task, using neurons in the thalamic reticular nucleus as a switchboard to control the amount of information the brain receives, limiting and filtering out sensory information that we don't want to pay attention to
  • People need to be able to focus on one thing and suppress other distractions to perform everyday functions such as driving, talking on the phone, and socializing
  • sets the stage for ever more detailed studies on the complex behavior involved in how the mammalian brain pays attention to what's important, and especially how those neural circuits are broken in cases of attention-deficit diseases, such as ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia
  • its individual neurons as possible regulators of the brain's ability to multitask
  • The test, they say, was designed to gauge how well the area of the brain known to control higher behavioral functions, the prefrontal cortex, could direct the focus on one sense over another
  • researchers distracted the mice with opposing stimuli: If the mouse was expecting a flash of light to guide it to the milk reward, the researchers distracted it with a sound, and vice versa. Distracting the mice decreased their ability to collect the food reward to 70 percent from nearly 90 percent, even if the distracting stimulus was removed later
  • found that inactivating the prefrontal cortex region of the brain, which is believed responsible for decision-making in complex behaviors, disrupted TRN neural signaling and reduced mice to only random success in obtaining a milk reward when presented with specifically cued light or sound signals
  • Inactivating the TRN, while leaving the cortical regions intact, also diminished success with obtaining the prompted food reward
  • prefrontal cortex is essential to performing such behavioral tasks
  • this part of the brain "stores the knowledge ultimately communicated to the TRN to control how much visual or auditory sensory information is suppressed or not, and how the brain ultimately multitasks
paisleyd

What's the Difference Between the Right Brain and Left Brain? - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ight-brain-and-left-brain.html

brain science knowledge

shared by paisleyd on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The two hemispheres communicate information, such as sensory observations, to each other through the thick corpus callosum that connects them.
  • left hemisphere
  • carrying out logic and exact mathematical computations.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • left brain pulls it from your memory.
  • face recognition and processing music.
  • right hemisphere
  • helps us to comprehend visual imagery and make sense of what we see.
  • increasing its processing capacity and avoiding situations of conflict where both sides of the brain try to take charge."
    • paisleyd
      paisleyd on 23 Oct 15
       
      The mind is strong but it has its flaws. Is that why the right side of our brain seems to take in most of the patterns we see. At the same time the right side of our brain seems to focus less on logic and more on emotion.
paisleyd

'The Dress': Explanation of optical illusion of colors of the striped dress -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...151014085416.htm

science research brain social media

shared by paisleyd on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • demonstrating that the optical illusion is linked to specific brain activation patterns
  • Many renowned research institutes have explored the phenomenon from various angles
  • differences in human brain activity caused by the contrasting perceptions
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • tested participants who perceived the dress as white-gold or black-blue
  • brain activation of all participants was measured while they looked at the photo of The Dress via a computer-based presentation system
  • participants looked at coloured squares with the same colour properties as the photo of The Dress
  • no differences between the groups were identified in correctly naming the colours of the squares
  • They demonstrated that in a direct comparison of groups the photo triggered differential brain activation, depending on their perception
  • participants who saw the dress as white-gold presented additional activation, mainly in frontal and parietal brain areas
  • Frontal regions are particularly involved in higher cognitive processes such as selective attention and decision making
  • Before, no optical illusion existed with exactly two competing perceptions which could not be deliberately manipulated
  • research group succeeded in identifying brain areas which cause optical illusions
  • thus we have laid a foundation for further research in the field of visual processing
Javier E

Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...11klass.html

bilingual language advantage

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different. In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.
  • Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function. These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said. Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.
  • Richard Monari on 25 Oct 11
     
    I had no idea that language could play such a huge role in the development of an infant! This makes me wonder as to what other external social factors can come into consequence, like music or visual perceptions.
Javier E

Your Brain on a Magic Trick - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...ur-brain-on-a-magic-trick.html

choice perception cognitive bias reality change blindness magic

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second.
  • Another dark psychological secret magicians routinely take advantage of is known as change blindness — the failure to detect changes in consecutive scenes.
  • we are often blind to the results of our own decisions. Once a choice is made, our minds tend to rewrite history in a way that flatters our volition, a fact magicians have exploited for centuries. “If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” said Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, to Smithsonian magazine. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them.
  • Scientists have found a way to induce change blindness, with a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which uses a magnetic field to disrupt localized brain regions
  • Such blind spots confirm what many philosophers have long suspected: reality and our perception of it are incommensurate to a far greater degree than is often believed. For all its apparent fidelity, the movie in our heads is a “Rashomon” narrative pieced together from inconsistent and unreliable bits of information. It is, to a certain extent, an illusion.
Javier E

Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...oldening-war-revisionists.html

Japan wwII war crime history revisionist politics

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Tabloids brand him a traitor for disseminating “Korean lies” that they say were part of a smear campaign aimed at settling old scores with Japan. Threats of violence, Mr. Uemura says, have cost him one university teaching job and could soon rob him of a second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide.
  • The threats are part of a broad, vitriolic assault by the right-wing news media and politicians here on The Asahi, which has long been the newspaper that Japanese conservatives love to hate. The battle is also the most recent salvo in a long-raging dispute over Japan’s culpability for its wartime behavior that has flared under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s right-leaning government.
  • “The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those articles cited a former soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old newspaper out of business.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • With elections this month, analysts say conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.Continue reading the main story
  • Among the women who have come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers are Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
  • The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.
  • Many on the right have argued that Japan’s behavior was no worse than that of other World War II combatants, including the United States’ bombing of Japanese civilians.
  • Since August, The Asahi’s daily circulation has dropped by 230,797 to about seven million
  • Mr. Uemura said The Asahi had been too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s top executives apologized on television and fired the chief editor.
  • Mr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now reluctant to appear in public. “This is the right’s way of threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t want to suffer the same fate that I have.”
carolinewren

Researchers at Brown University shattered an electron wave function | Motherboard - 1 views

motherboard.vice.com/...eirder-shattered-wavefunctions

knowledge electron researchers

shared by carolinewren on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • When we say some element of the quantum world occupies many states at once, what’s really being referred to is the element’s wave function. A wave function can be viewed as a space occupied simultaneously by many different possibilities or degrees of freedom.
  • Even what we’d normally (deterministically) consider empty space has a wave function and, as such, contains very real possibilities of not being empty.
  • Visually, we might imagine a particle in its undisturbed state looking more like a cloud than a point in space.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • a bunch of particles can share these states at the same time, effectively becoming instances of the same particle. And so: entanglement.
  • possible to strip away all of this indeterminateness
  • wave functions are very fragile, subject to a “collapse” in which all of those possibilities become just a single particle at a single point at a single time.
  • physicists have observed a very peculiar behavior of electrons in supercooled baths of helium. When an electron enters the bath, it acts to
  • two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes
  • it’s possible to take a wave function and isolate it into different parts. So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes
  • when a macroscopic human attempts to measure a quantum mechanical system: The wave drops away and all that’s left is a boring, well-defined thing.
  • trapping the chance of finding the electron, not pieces of the electron
  • using tiny bubbles of helium as physical “traps.
  • repel the surrounding helium atoms, forming its own little bubble or cavity in the process.
  • That an electron (or other particle) can be in many places at the same time is strange enough, but the notion that those possibilities can be captured and shuttled away adds a whole new twist.
  • wave function isn’t a physical thing. It’s mathematics that describe a phenomenon.
  • The electron, upon measurement, will be in precisely one bubble.
  • “No one is sure what actually constitutes a measurement,”
  • Is consciousness required? We don’t really know.”
Javier E

What Does Quantum Physics Actually Tell Us About the World? - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...adam-becker-what-is-real.html

quantum physics theory reality science ontological

shared by Javier E on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world has brought us modern marvels.
  • But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.
  • Indeed, Heisenberg said that quantum particles “are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Before he died, Richard Feynman, who understood quantum theory as well as anyone, said, “I still get nervous with it...I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.” The problem is not with using the theory — making calculations, applying it to engineering tasks — but in understanding what it means. What does it tell us about the world?
  • From one point of view, quantum physics is just a set of formalisms, a useful tool kit. Want to make better lasers or transistors or television sets? The Schrödinger equation is your friend. The trouble starts only when you step back and ask whether the entities implied by the equation can really exist. Then you encounter problems that can be described in several familiar ways:
  • Wave-particle duality. Everything there is — all matter and energy, all known forces — behaves sometimes like waves, smooth and continuous, and sometimes like particles, rat-a-tat-tat. Electricity flows through wires, like a fluid, or flies through a vacuum as a volley of individual electrons. Can it be both things at once?
  • The uncertainty principle. Werner Heisenberg famously discovered that when you measure the position (let’s say) of an electron as precisely as you can, you find yourself more and more in the dark about its momentum. And vice versa. You can pin down one or the other but not both.
  • The measurement problem. Most of quantum mechanics deals with probabilities rather than certainties. A particle has a probability of appearing in a certain place. An unstable atom has a probability of decaying at a certain instant. But when a physicist goes into the laboratory and performs an experiment, there is a definite outcome. The act of measurement — observation, by someone or something — becomes an inextricable part of the theory
  • The strange implication is that the reality of the quantum world remains amorphous or indefinite until scientists start measuring
  • Other interpretations rely on “hidden variables” to account for quantities presumed to exist behind the curtain.
  • This is disturbing to philosophers as well as physicists. It led Einstein to say in 1952, “The theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.”
  • “Figuring out what quantum physics is saying about the world has been hard,” Becker says, and this understatement motivates his book, a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science.
  • In a way, the Copenhagen is an anti-interpretation. “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” Bohr said. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
  • Nothing is definite in Bohr’s quantum world until someone observes it. Physics can help us order experience but should not be expected to provide a complete picture of reality. The popular four-word summary of the Copenhagen interpretation is: “Shut up and calculate!”
  • Becker sides with the worriers. He leads us through an impressive account of the rise of competing interpretations, grounding them in the human stories
  • He makes a convincing case that it’s wrong to imagine the Copenhagen interpretation as a single official or even coherent statement. It is, he suggests, a “strange assemblage of claims.
  • An American physicist, David Bohm, devised a radical alternative at midcentury, visualizing “pilot waves” that guide every particle, an attempt to eliminate the wave-particle duality.
  • Competing approaches to quantum foundations are called “interpretations,” and nowadays there are many. The first and still possibly foremost of these is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.
  • Perhaps the most popular lately — certainly the most talked about — is the “many-worlds interpretation”: Every quantum event is a fork in the road, and one way to escape the difficulties is to imagine, mathematically speaking, that each fork creates a new universe
  • if you think the many-worlds idea is easily dismissed, plenty of physicists will beg to differ. They will tell you that it could explain, for example, why quantum computers (which admittedly don’t yet quite exist) could be so powerful: They would delegate the work to their alter egos in other universes.
  • When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human.
  • If you were to watch me by day, you would see me sitting at my desk solving Schrödinger’s equation...exactly like my colleagues,” says Sir Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in superfluidity. “But occasionally at night, when the full moon is bright, I do what in the physics community is the intellectual equivalent of turning into a werewolf: I question whether quantum mechanics is the complete and ultimate truth about the physical universe.”
sissij

How Does Expectation Affect Perception - 3 views

jonlieffmd.com/...-expectation-affect-perception

perception expectation brain science language

shared by sissij on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • One important fact is that the brain works in some ways like television transmission, in that it processes stable backgrounds without much attention and moving parts more intensely and differently.
  • Recent research in babies shows that they respond most to unexpected events and use these to evaluate the environment and learn.
  • But, the over arching analysis of visual signals depends on what is expected.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Picture of bright light causes eye pupils to react, as if a real light.
  • Good hitters in baseball view the ball as larger.
  • Large people judge the absolute measurement of a doorway as more narrow than others will.
  • Words and thoughts alter sensory information:
  • She kicked the ball” or “grasped the subject” stimulates the leg or arm brain regions related to kicking or grasping.
  • Experienced observers of ballet or classical Indian dance who have never danced, when watching a dance stimulate specific muscles of the dance.
  • The brain has many interacting pathways and loops that create expectations with different probabilities from our previous experiences.
  • sissij on 17 Nov 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it explains some aspects of how our expectation can influence our perception. In this article, language is also mentioned that different vocabulary can alter our perception. I think this can be related to the definition of words we talked about recently. I think this article suggests that the definition of a word is the result of our expectation as we often define things differently in our favor if no clear definition is stated. This relationship can also be reversed as we use definitions to describe and organize our expectation. --Sissi (11/16/2016)
Javier E

What all the critics of "Unorthodox" are forgetting - The Forward - 0 views

forward.com/...s-of-unorthodox-are-forgetting

art reality truth beauty

shared by Javier E on 08 May 20 - No Cached
  • The series has garnered glowing reviews
  • It also has its critical critics
  • both those who have celebrated the series and those who lambasted it are missing something. Something important.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • intelligent assessors of artistic offerings never forget that truth and beauty are not necessarily one and the same. At times they can even diverge profoundly. There is a reason, after all, why the words “artifice” and “artificial” are based on the word “art.”
  • something obvious but all the same easily overlooked. Namely, that art and fact are entirely unrelated
  • Not only is outright fiction not fact, neither are depictions of actual lives and artistic documentaries, whether forged in words, celluloid or electrons
  • A brilliant artistic endeavor that has been a mainstay of college film studies courses is a good example. The 1935 film has been described as powerful, even overwhelming, and is cited as a pioneering archetype of the use of striking visuals and compelling narrative. It won a gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. The New York Times’ J. Hoberman not long ago called it “supremely artful.”
  • And it was. As well as supremely evil, as Mr. Hoberman also explains. The film was Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”
dicindioha

When Mismatched Voices and Lips Make Your Brain Play Tricks - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...lip-reading-mcgurk-effect.html

shared by dicindioha on 05 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The good news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This helps us make sense of the world. But the bad news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This means the brain can sometimes make mistakes.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      This is a great way to say what we talked about with human perception and survival reflexes!
  • You can watch this tension play out when the brain tries to connect auditory and visual speech.
  • By comparing mathematical models for how the brain integrates senses important in detecting speech, they found that the brain uses vision, hearing and experience when making sense of speech.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      mathematical modeling involved too
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “But it turns out that what their face is doing is actually profoundly influencing what you are perceiving.”
  • The brain asks itself: “Is it likely that these two things go together or not?”
  • “In science we’ve assumed that people do that, always put together everything,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “It turns out that might not be right.”
  • brain most likely processes information about lip movements and sound in a part of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus.
  • clinicians understand and improve your hearing as you age, Dr. Magnotti said.
  • dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
     
    This is really interesting because it relates to sense perception, and how we connect our eyes and ears. Our brains try to make sense of things and put things together that might not always go together. It's always funny when you watch a video that you saw before with a new voice over, and it really looks like it's happening. I did not think of this as being connected to TOK, but it is. I also found it really interesting that learning more about the McGurk effect could help clinicians improve hearing as we get older.
clairemann

Robinhood app makes Wall Street feel like a game to win - instead of a place where you can lose your life savings in a New York minute - 0 views

theconversation.com/gs-in-a-new-york-minute-156013

education bias research knowledge technology brain science psychology

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Wall Street has long been likened to a casino. Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering, makes the comparison more apt than ever.
  • Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool
  • Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost US$750,000.
  • The psychological impact of game play can also be harnessed for profit.
  • Games also mimic rites of passage similar to religious rituals and draw players into highly focused “flow states” that dramatically alter self-awareness. This sensory blend of flow and mastery are what make games fun and sometimes addicting: “Just one more turn” thinking can last for hours, and players forget to eat and sleep. Players who barely remember yesterday’s breakfast recall visceral details from games played decades ago.
  • The reason games are so captivating is that they challenge the mind to learn new things and are generally safe spaces to face and overcome failure.
  • For example, many free-to-play video games such as Angry Birds 2 and Fortnite give players the option to spend real money on in-game items such as new and even angrier birds or character skins.
  • This “free-to-play” model is so profitable that it’s grown increasingly popular with video game designers and publishers.
  • Gamification, however, goes one step further and uses gaming elements to influence real-world behavior.
  • . Common elements include badges, points, rankings and progress bars that visually encourage players to achieve goals.
  • Many readers likely have experienced this type of gamification to improve personal fitness, get better grades, build savings accounts and even solve major scientific problems. Some initiatives also include offering rewards that can be cashed in for participating in actual civic projects, such as volunteering in a park, commenting on a piece of legislation or visiting a government website.
clairemann

Flights to Nowhere and Travel After the Pandemic | Time - 0 views

time.com/...why-we-are-desperate-to-travel

world technology pandemic knowledge brain science

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I’ve taken to staying in bed and flying to Morocco. It’s the place I’ve been that’s the least like Brooklyn, where I have spent most of this pandemic. Trying to remember the way the air feels on your skin in an unfamiliar climate is the smallest of escapes. Maybe it’s a necessary one, now that everything within reach feels so unrelentingly familiar.
  • In our travel-starved, pandemic-addled state, people will actually pay to go to the airport, get on a plane wearing their face masks, and fly over their own country or a neighboring one and come right back. A seven-hour Qantas sightseeing flight over Australian landmarks sold out in 10 minutes.
  • I don’t think we’ll need to book a SpaceX flight to feel like we’re somewhere startling and new. For many of us, seeing a new movie in a real theater will feel like a trip. Or better yet, dancing in the sticky aisles of a dark music venue humming with people and anticipation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “The metaphor of the parental scaffold is visual, intuitive, and simple: Your child is the ‘building.’ You, the parent, are the scaffold that surrounds the building. The framework of all your decisions and efforts as parents is the three pillars of your scaffold: structure, support, and encouragement. Eventually, when the building is finished and ready to stand completely on its own, the parental scaffold can come down.”
Javier E

FaceApp helped a middle-aged man become a popular younger woman. His fan base has never been bigger - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ker-faceapp-soya-azusagakuyuki

identity authenticity social media fake avatar Japan psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.
  • It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.
  • As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • She took pride in the basic things, like cleaning engine parts. And she only hinted at the truth: When one fan told her in October, “It’s great to be young,” Soya replied, “Youth does not mean a certain period of life, but how to hold your heart.”
  • She seemed, well, happy, and FaceApp had made her that way. Creating the lifelike impostor had taken only a few taps: He changed the “Gender” setting to “Female,” the “Age” setting to “Teen,” and the “Impression” setting — a mix of makeup filters — to a glamorous look the app calls “Hollywood.”
  • Soya pouted and scowled on rare occasions when Nakajima himself felt frustrated. But her baseline expression was an extra-wide smile, activated with a single tap.
  • Nakajima grew his shimmering hair below his shoulders and raided his local convenience store for beauty supplies he thought would make the FaceApp images more convincing: blushes, eyeliners, concealers, shampoos.
  • “When I compare how I feel when I started to tweet as a woman and now, I do feel that I’m gradually gravitating toward this persona … this fantasy world that I created,” Nakajima said. “When I see photos of what I tweeted, I feel like, ‘Oh. That’s me.’ ”
  • The sensation Nakajima was feeling is so common that there’s a term for it: the Proteus effect, named for the shape-shifting Greek god. Stanford University researchers first coined it in 2007 to describe how people inhabiting the body of a digital avatar began to act the part
  • People made to appear taller in virtual-reality simulations acted more assertively, even after the experience ended. Prettier characters began to flirt.
  • What is it about online disguises? Why are they so good at bending people’s sense of self-perception?
  • they tap into this “very human impulse to play with identity and pretend to be someone you’re not.”
  • Users in the Internet’s early days rarely had any presumptions of authenticity, said Melanie C. Green, a University of Buffalo professor who studies technology and social trust. Most people assumed everyone else was playing a character clearly distinguished from their real life.
  • “This identity play was considered one of the huge advantages of being online,” Green said. “You could switch your gender and try on all of these different personas. It was a playground for people to explore.”
  • It wasn’t until the rise of giant social networks like Facebook — which used real identities to, among other things, supercharge targeted advertising — that this big game of pretend gained an air of duplicity. Spaces for playful performance shrank, and the biggest Internet watering holes began demanding proof of authenticity as a way to block out malicious intent.
  • The Web’s big shift from text to visuals — the rise of photo-sharing apps, live streams and video calls — seemed at first to make that unspoken rule of real identities concrete. It seemed too difficult to fake one’s appearance when everyone’s face was on constant display.
  • Now, researchers argue, advances in image-editing artificial intelligence have done for the modern Internet what online pseudonyms did for the world’s first chat rooms. Facial filters have allowed anyone to mold themselves into the character they want to play.
  • researchers fear these augmented reality tools could end up distorting the beauty standards and expectations of actual reality.
  • Some political and tech theorists worry this new world of synthetic media threatens to detonate our concept of truth, eroding our shared experiences and infusing every online relationship with suspicion and self-doubt.
  • Deceptive political memes, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine hoaxes and other scams have torn the fabric of our democracy, culture and public health.
  • But she also thinks about her kids, who assume “that everything online is fabricated,” and wonders whether the rules of online identity require a bit more nuance — and whether that generational shift is already underway.
  • “Bots pretending to be people, automated representations of humanity — that, they perceive as exploitative,” she said. “But if it’s just someone engaging in identity experimentation, they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re all doing.'
  • To their generation, “authenticity is not about: ‘Does your profile picture match your real face?’ Authenticity is: ‘Is your voice your voice?’
  • “Their feeling is: ‘The ideas are mine. The voice is mine. The content is mine. I’m just looking for you to receive it without all the assumptions and baggage that comes with it.’ That’s the essence of a person’s identity. That’s who they really are.”
  • But wasn’t this all just a big con? Nakajima had tricked people with a “cool girl” stereotype to boost his Twitter numbers. He hadn’t elevated the role of women in motorcycling; if anything, he’d supplanted them. And the character he’d created was paper thin: Soya had no internal complexity outside of what Nakajima had projected, just that eternally superimposed smile.
  • Perhaps he should have accepted his irrelevance and faded into the digital sunset, sharing his life for few to see. But some of Soya’s followers have said they never felt deceived: It was Nakajima — his enthusiasm, his attitude about life — they’d been charmed by all along. “His personality,” as one Twitter follower said, “shined through.”
  • In Nakajima’s mind, he’d used the tools of a superficial medium to craft genuine connections. He had not felt real until he had become noticed for being fake.
  • Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.
caelengrubb

Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...748703467304575383131592767868

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion.
  • The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.
  • Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
  • In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.
  • About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.
  • As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.
  • People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions.
  • And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
  • Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
  • Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.
  • Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs
  • Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.
ilanaprincilus06

Argentina Legalizes Abortion In Historic Senate Vote : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ortion-in-historic-senate-vote

abortion women's rights Argentina

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Argentina's Senate voted early Wednesday to legalize elective abortion, marking a historic shift in the heavily Catholic country that is the homeland of Pope Francis
  • the Senate passed the bill 38-29 with one abstention just over two weeks after the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Argentina's Congress, narrowly approved the measure.
  • "Today we took a huge step and we are getting closer to the Argentina we dream of. We are writing our destiny, we are making history."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Argentina joins a small group of Latin American and Caribbean countries that have legalized elective abortion, including Uruguay, Cuba and Guyana.
  • "Today we are a better society that expands rights to women and guarantees public health," Fernández wrote after the legislation passed.
  • in mid-November. Fernández, who was elected in late 2019, has been vocal about legalizing abortion during his presidency and says he will sign the measure.
  • In 2018 and 2020, people backing the legalization have sported green clothing and often held or worn green bandannas — a visual that has become linked with the movement.
  • Despite being largely illegal throughout the region, about 5.4 million abortions occurred annually in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2015 and 2019, the Guttmacher Institute reported.
caelengrubb

Our Language Affects What We See - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...r-language-affects-what-we-see

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Does the language you speak influence how you think? This is the question behind the famous linguistic relativity hypothesis, that the grammar or vocabulary of a language imposes on its speakers a particular way of thinking about the world. 
  • The strongest form of the hypothesis is that language determines thought
  • A weak form is now thought to be obviously true, which is that if one language has a specific vocabulary item for a concept but another language does not, then speaking about the concept may happen more frequently or more easily.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Scholars are now interested in whether having a vocabulary item for a concept influences thought in domains far from language, such as visual perception.
  • In the journal Psychological Science,  Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman investigated whether the color distinction in the Russian blues would help the brain become consciously aware of a stimulus which might otherwise go unnoticed.
  • The task selected to investigate this is the "attentional blink." This is an experimental paradigm frequently used to test whether a stimuli is consciously noticed.
  • The current study is an important advance in documenting how linguistic categories influence perception. Consider how this updates the original Russian blues study, in which observers pressed a button to indicate whether two shades of blue were the same or different
  • In that study, it seems likely that observers silently labeled colors in order to make fast decisions. It is less likely that labeling was used during the attentional blink task, because paying attention to color is not required and indeed was irrelevant to the task.
  •  The current finding indicates that linguistic knowledge can influence perception, contradicting the traditional view that perception is processed independently from other aspects of cognition, including language.
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views

brownpoliticalreview.org/...linguistic-colonialism-english

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
  • As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
  • The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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  • Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West
  • Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.
  • Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations.
  • This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life.
  • People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.
  • The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs
  • English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation.
  • Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage.
  • These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence
  • Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality.
  • If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.
katedriscoll

Linking Arts, Math, Perception and Emotions | TOKTalk.net - 0 views

www.toktalk.net/...s-math-perception-and-emotions

shared by katedriscoll on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It is a powerful illustration on how a visual representation (sense perception!) of numbers in the form of colorful dots greatly helps in understanding statistics. Tables with numbers alone are too difficult to perceive. Rosling’s computer program makes these numbers accessible.
  • It links the areas of knowledge arts, statistics (math), with the ways of knowing sense perception and emotions
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