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sissij

The Psychology of Scary Movies | FilmmakerIQ.com - 0 views

filmmakeriq.com/...the-psychology-of-scary-movies

psychology science research brain science

shared by sissij on 15 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • This may explain the shape of our movie monsters: creatures with sharp teeth or snake like appearance.
  • scary movies don’t actually activate fear responses in the amygdala at all. Instead, it was other parts of the brain that were firing – the visual cortex – the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, the insular cortex- self awareness, the thalamus -the relay switch between brain hemispheres, and the dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain associated with planning, attention, and problem solving.
  • Unfortunately for Aristotle, research has shown the opposite – watching violence actually makes people MORE aggressive.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Experiments with adolescent boys found that they enjoyed a horror film more when their female companion (who was a research plant) was visibly scared.
  • Where there is no imagination – there is no horror
  • sissij on 15 Nov 16
     
    I found this very interesting as it went deep into the psychology behind the horror movies. It's especially astonishing for me to see that horror movies don't actually activate fear responses, instead they stimulate the prefrontal cortex of our brain. Also, this article provides a lot of possibilities why we are so attracted to horror movies. I think this can be related to our perceptions and logic of survival since horror movie can help us return to the most primitive state(trembling in the woods) feel the impulse of wild. --Sissi (11/14/2016)
sissij

What is Russell's paradox? - Scientific American - 1 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...what-is-russells-paradox

paradox science language bias

shared by sissij on 13 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Russell's paradox is based on examples like this: Consider a group of barbers who shave only those men who do not shave themselves. Suppose there is a barber in this collection who does not shave himself; then by the definition of the collection, he must shave himself. But no barber in the collection can shave himself.
  • We write this description of the set formally as x = { n: n is an integer and 3 < n < 7} . The objects in the set don't have to be numbers. We might let y ={x: x is a male resident of the United States }.
  • What became of the effort to develop a logical foundation for all of mathematics? Mathematicians now recognize that the field can be formalized using so-called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The formal language contains symbols such as e to express "is a member of," = for equality and to denote the set with no elements.
  • sissij on 13 Nov 16
     
    I found this very interesting because it shows that even in math, there can be illogic paradox. There is no perfect logic. I think this paradox is a circular logic because the premise and assumption is used in the argument. Also, the definition and limitation of "those men" is too vague. I think to make this premise valid, we need to state that barbers are not in the reference of the term "those men" in the premise. --Sissi (11/12/2016)
sissij

Woman Drivers: Worse Than Men? Yes... and No | Reader's Digest - 0 views

www.rd.com/...-men-better-drivers-than-women

research knowledge language bias

shared by sissij on 10 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • In studies, men as a whole display less cautious behavior than women, such as driving at higher speeds and closer to other cars, not wearing seat belts, and driving while intoxicated more often.
  • However, this slight edge in ability doesn’t translate into better driving records.
  • According to one study, men are more than three times as likely to be ticketed for “aggressive driving” than women, and more than 25 percent as likely to be at fault in an accident.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Similarly, the stereotype that women are weaker drivers may negatively affect their performance behind the wheel.
  • sissij on 10 Nov 16
     
    I found it very interesting that although there is a stereotype that women drive poorly, men actually cause more accidents in researches. I very agree with the author because he make the term "better" clear in the passage, which most other claims mentioned vaguely. In his writing, "better" has two meanings: how safe one drives and how well one drives. I think looking at the problem through the two very different meaning of "better" can lead to very different conclusions. I think that's why different article held opposite views on this issue. They don't speak in the same language; they are speaking of different "better"s. --Sissi (11/10/2016)
Javier E

No matter who wins the presidential election, Nate Silver was right - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html

prediction election president trends forecasting psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • I don’t fault Silver for his caution. It’s honest. What it really says is he doesn’t know with much confidence what’s going to happen
  • That’s because there’s a lot of human caprice and whim in electoral behavior that can’t always be explained or predicted with scientific precision. Politics ain’t moneyball. Good-quality polls give an accurate sense of where a political race is at a point in time, but they don’t predict the future.
  • Predictive models, generally based on historical patterns, work until they don’t.
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  • In his hedged forecasts this time, Silver appears to be acknowledging that polling and historical patterns don’t always capture what John Maynard Keynes, in his classic 1936 economic General Theory, described as “animal spirits.”
  • There is, Keynes wrote, “the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”
sissij

'I Saw My Father Dying': A View From Aleppo's Government-Held Side - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...aleppo-syria.html

social media bias new york times

shared by sissij on 07 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • President Bashar al-Assad’s main pitch to his people is that they are safer in the territory he controls, a far cry from the bombs and hunger on the rebels’ half of the storied and strategic city.This is what the government wanted international journalists to see when it invited a group into the country this week after years of keeping most out. But when I stepped off the bus, I found a war zone.
  • Dr. Mazen Rahmoun, a city health official in a neat brown suit, moved gingerly through the chaos with the preternaturally calm stare of a man long ago traumatized into numbness.
  • Instead, they are trying to break the siege, with Qaeda-linked groups and those backed by the United States working together — the opposite of what Russia has demanded.
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  • “Moderate rebels” was a sarcastic refrain we heard often, making fun of the Obama administration’s description of groups it backs; the Syrian government calls them terrorists.
  • “Don’t tell me he died! Don’t!” she shrieked. “I only have this one son.”“He will survive,”
  • Soldiers there said they did not expect the evacuation deal to work.
  • A senior military official said simply, “It’s over.”
  • sissij on 07 Nov 16
     
    I found this news very interesting because it shows flawed the media can be. It also reveals that countries sometimes invite journalists to write some news in their favor. All the deceptions seem normal because their standard for abnormal is way higher than us. They are so numb to war and death that they can accept the worst situation with out being surprised. --Sissi (11/7/2016)
kortanekev

'Less Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eir-victims-as-less-than-human

psychology labeling language prejudice

shared by kortanekev on 06 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.
  • it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings "to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators."
  • Mostly, they were seen as "soulless animals." And that dramatic dehumanization made it possible for great atrocities to take place.
  • kortanekev on 06 Nov 16
     
    The use of dehumanizing labels has allowed for the mind to perceive the world in vast oversimplifications -- in recognizing every member of a group as exhibiting certain socially manufactured characteristics  -- and to use this to rationalize one's treatment towards a certain group. Language in this way (through mental short cuts and deep rooted prejudice) has posed the greatest threat to human rights, abuse of power, and their lasting effects on our culture today. 
oliviaodon

Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...genetics-of-iq

brain research science

shared by oliviaodon on 05 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world.
  • fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.
  • studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns. The frightening upshot is that IQ remains by far the most powerful predictor of the life outcomes that people care most about in the modern world. Tell me your IQ and I can make a decently accurate prediction of your occupational attainment, how many kids you’ll have, your chances of being arrested for a crime, even how long you’ll live.
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  • Dozens of popular books by nonexperts have filled the void, many claiming that IQ—which after more than a century remains the dominant metric for intelligence—predicts nothing important or that intelligence is simply too complex and subtle to be measured.
  • evidence points toward a strong genetic component in IQ. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent
  • intelligence has a genetic recipe
  • “Do you know any Perl?” Li asked him. Perl is a programming language often used to analyze genomic data. Zhao admitted he did not; in fact, he had no programming skills at all. Li handed him a massive textbook, Programming Perl. There were only two weeks left in the camp, so this would get rid of the kid for good. A few days later, Zhao returned. “I finished it,” he said. “The problems are kind of boring. Do you have anything harder?” Perl is a famously complicated language that takes university students a full year to learn.
  • So Li gave him a large DNA data set and a complicated statistical problem. That should do it. But Zhao returned later that day. “Finished.” Not only was it finished—and correct—but Zhao had even built a slick interface on top of the data.
  • driven by a fascination with kids who are born smart; he wants to know what makes them—and by extension, himself—the way they are.
  • oliviaodon on 05 Nov 16
     
    This is a really interesting article about using science to improve intelligence.
oliviaodon

Maturation of the adolescent brain - 1 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC3621648

brain research science

shared by oliviaodon on 04 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The adolescent population is highly vulnerable to driving under the influence of alcohol and social maladjustments due to an immature limbic system and prefrontal cortex.
  • Synaptic plasticity and the release of neurotransmitters may also be influenced by environmental neurotoxins and drugs of abuse including cigarettes, caffeine, and alcohol during adolescence.
  • Brain maturation during adolescence (ages 10–24 years) could be governed by several factors, as illustrated in Figure 1. It may be influenced by heredity and environment, prenatal and postnatal insult, nutritional status, sleep patterns, pharmacotherapy, and surgical interventions during early childhood.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • During adolescence, the neurocircuitry strengthens and allows for multitasking, enhanced ability to solve problems, and the capability to process complex information. Furthermore, adolescent brain plasticity provides an opportunity to develop talents and lifelong interests; however, neurotoxic insult, trauma, chronic stress, drug abuse, and sedentary lifestyles may have a negative impact during this sensitive period of brain maturation
  • oliviaodon on 04 Nov 16
     
    This is a very interesting, but technical, article on the maturation of the adolescent brain and external and internal factors affecting it. 
oliviaodon

How to Rebuild the Republican Party - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503282

politics republican

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Unburdened by illusion that Donald Trump can or will “turn this thing around,” they have proceeded straightaway to the next important conversation: What comes next for America’s battered Republican Party? Noah Rothman writes: “Reunification and a recapitulation of something resembling a national governing coalition must be the foremost priority.”
  • reconstitute conservatism as it used to be, refined by the famous “autopsy” of 2013.
  • for all Trump's many faults and flaws, he saw things that were true and important—and that few other leaders in his party have acknowledged in the past two decades.
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  • The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.
  • The democratic world today is roiled by a tide of nationalist populism.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    As the title says, this article discusses how to rebuild the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump's campaign. 
oliviaodon

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118

politics republican

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    This article definitely serves as an interesting read. 
oliviaodon

What Will Fix the Republican Party? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501137

republican party

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • “It’s like that scene in Titanic,” he remarked to me, “where they know the ship is going down, and the conductor decides there’s nothing to do but keep the orchestra playing.”
  • Roy, a health-care expert who has advised Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney, once looked forward to 2016 as a year of Republican opportunity, when the party would choose a leader capable of reorienting it toward the future.
  • Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion.
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  • But in the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future.
  • Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.
  • Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters.
  • Trump is the “logical end point” of the GOP’s long history of racialized politics.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    After talking in class about the imploding Republican party, I found this article that discusses disaffected Republicans. 
oliviaodon

Why Republican Women Are Calling on Men to Follow Suit in Denouncing Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503771

republican

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism. When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in.
  • Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.
  • I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This election, many Republicans won’t withhold their support from an openly cruel, sexist bigot. And there is a lesson in their failure. It suggests the best way forward. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.
  • Those are the stakes in November, the rare election where the larger the margin of the GOP loss, the better the chance it will have to be reborn into something viable and constructive. It certainly cannot succeed with conservative women in swing states calling its delegation scum and even a faction of elected Republicans cheering her on.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    This article hinted at people slowly leaving the Republican party. 
oliviaodon

Why Silence Is So Good For Your Brain | Huffington Post - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ts_us_56d83967e4b0000de4037004

Silence Brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • We live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by — and that may be negatively affecting our health.
  • World Health Organization report called noise pollution a “modern plague,”
  • overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • How many moments each day do you spend in total silence?
  • In our everyday lives, sensory input is being thrown at us from every angle. When we can finally get away from these sonic disruptions, our brains’ attention centers have the opportunity to restore themselves.
  • noise pollution has been found to lead to high blood pressure and heart attacks, as well as impairing hearing and overall health. Loud noises raise stress levels by activating the brain’s amygdala and causing the release of the stress hormone cortisol
  • Silence relieves stress and tension.
  • The ceaseless attentional demands of modern life put a significant burden on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in high-order thinking, decision-making and problem-solving.
  • Silence can quite literally grow the brain.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    This article serves as a reminder to keep some silence in our lives! 
oliviaodon

One In Seven Children Breathes Air So Filthy It Can Damage Their Brain | Huffington Post - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ns_us_58176467e4b0990edc324275

damage brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Almost one in seven children worldwide live in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage
  • air pollution was a “major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year”, causing illnesses such as pneumonia.
  • “Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    I found this article interesting as it just goes to show you how complex our brain really is. 
oliviaodon

How Do We Learn Languages? | Brain Blogger - 0 views

brainblogger.com/...how-do-we-learn-languages

knowledge languages brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.
  • human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.
  • Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The effectiveness of this process is so great that human brain is able to accurately identify words and whole phrases from a noisy background. This power of analysis brings to minds the great similarity between the brain and powerful supercomputers.
  • Until the last decade few studies compared the language acquisition in adults and children. Thanks to modern imaging and electroencephalography we are now able to address this question.
  • infants begin their lives with a very flexible brain that allows them to acquire virtually any language they are exposed to. Moreover, they can learn a language words almost equally by listening or by visual coding. This brain plasticity is the motor drive of the children capability of “cracking the speech code” of a language. With time, this ability is dramatically decreased and adults find it harder to acquire a new language.
  • clearly demonstrated that there are anatomical brain differences between fast and slow learners of foreign languages. By analyzing a group of people having a homogenous language background, scientists found that differences in specific brain regions can predict the capacity of a person to learn a second language.
  • Functional imaging of the brain revealed that activated brain parts are different between native and non-native speakers. The superior temporal gyrus is an important brain region involved in language learning. For a native speaker this part is responsible for automated processing of lexical retrieval and the build of phrase structure. In native speakers this zone is much more activated than in non-native ones.
  • Language acquisition is a long-term process by which information are stored in the brain unconsciously making them appropriate to oral and written usage. In contrast, language learning is a conscious process of knowledge acquisition that needs supervision and control by the person.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    Another cool article about how the brain works and language (inductive reasoning). 
Javier E

Meeting 'the Other' Face to Face - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-through-virtual-reality.html

virtual reality journalism understanding dialogue psychology conflict war empathy

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Sitting in a conference room at a hotel near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here, I slip on large headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and wriggle into the straps of a backpack, weighed down with a computer and a battery.
  • when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.
  • Then the portraits disappear, replaced by doors, which open. In walk the two combatants — Abu Khaled, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Gilad Peled, an Israeli soldier — seeming, except for a little pixelation and rigid body movement, like flesh-and-blood people who are actually in the room with me.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • What he saw there was a culture of warfare that often perpetuated itself through misunderstanding and misinformation, with no mechanism for those of opposing sects or political forces to gain a sense of the enemy as a fellow human being.
  • “I began to think, ‘I’m meeting the same people over and over again,’” he said. “I’m seeing people I knew as kids, and now they’re grown-up fighters, in power, fighting the same fight. And you start to think about your work in terms of: ‘Am I helping to change anything? Am I having any impact?’ ”
  • “I thought of myself as a war illustrator. I started calling myself that.”
  • as a visiting artist at the university’s Center for Art, Science and Technology, he transformed what he initially conceived of as an unconventional photo and testimonial project involving fighters into a far more unconventional way of hearing and seeing his subjects, hoping to be able to engender a form of empathy beyond the reach of traditional documentary film
  • He interviewed Mr. Khaled in Gaza and Mr. Peled in Tel Aviv, asking them the same six questions — basic ones like “Who’s your enemy and why?”; “What is peace for you?”; “Have you ever killed one of your enemies?”; “Where do you see yourself in 20 years?”
  • Then he and a small crew captured three-dimensional scans of the men and photographed them from multiple angles
  • he began to build avatars of his interviewees and ways for them to move and respond inside a virtual world so realistic it makes even a 3-D movie seem like an artifact from the distant past. Mr. Harrell describes it as “long-form journalism in a totally new form.”
  • “You have something here you don’t have in any other form of journalism: body language.”
  • indeed, inside the world they have made, the power comes from the feeling of listening to the interviewees speak (you hear Mr. Ben Khelifa’s disembodied voice asking the questions, and the men’s voices answer, overlaid by the voice of an interpreter) as your body viscerally senses a person standing a few feet away from you, his eyes following yours as he talks, his chest rising and falling as he breathes.
  • Sofia Ayala, an M.I.T. sophomore, tested the project after I did and emerged — as I did — with a mesmerized flush on her face, a feeling of meeting someone not really there. “It makes it feel so much more personal than just reading about these things online,” she said. “When someone’s right there talking to you, you want to listen.”
  • “In many places I’ve been, you’re given your enemy when you’re born,” he said. “You grow up with this ‘other’ always out there. The best we can hope is that the ‘other’ will now be able to come into the same room with you for a while, where you can listen to him, and see him face to face.”
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