Human nature

Watch this video. It is 15 minutes long and presents some really interesting ideas about ideas, culture, and conflict.

TED | Talks | Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes (video)

Here’s one of those talks that can change your view of the world forever. Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of “memes” — a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain. On the way, look out for:
+ a powerful one-sentence secret of happiness
+ a compelling insight into terrorists’ motivation
+ a chilling view of Islam
And just when you think you know where the talk’s heading, it dramatically shifts direction and questions some of western culture’s fundamental assumptions. This. Is. Unmissable.

Technorati Tags: ideas, memes, evolution, culture, conflict, terrorism, TED conference

Here is an interesting article on the shortcomings of online communication and the reasons why it can lead to social problems such as “flame wars.”

The central idea is that online communications, such as e-mail and discussion groups, are so impoverished that much of the subtle, non-verbal messages that we normally rely on to govern our social responses are missing. The result has been labeled “the online disinhibition effect”, and it is the reason behind cyber rudeness.

The solution is to make sure that people who work together do meet face-to-face as much as possible, and to be aware of, and develop strategies against, the impoverished nature of online communications.

Web Rage: Why It Happens, What It Costs You, How to Stop

Although claims that telecommunications will replace travel have persisted ever since AT&T proposed the videophone in 1964, technology is a complement, rather than a substitute, to meeting face-to-face. People communicate better when they are together, and they also communicate better online after they’ve spent some time one-on-one. The memory of what a person is like in the real world mitigates the mind blindness created by our online tools.

Technorati Tags: flame wars, rudeness, online communication

This is an interesting article on things that people can do better than computers, like judge beauty, and how that can be exploited to build better computer services.

For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU

This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.

Technorati Tags: computers, people, beatury, human computation

Here is an interesting article on how child rearing has changed. We are severely limiting the freedom of our children because of perceptions, but not realities, of risks. There are serious concerns about the psychological effects. Are we raising children to be risk-averse, crippled by fears, and phobic?

The article also makes reference to a wonderful movie called Swallows and Amazons. See it if you can.

Rearing children in captivity

The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922 – despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.

In 1970, 80% of primary school-age children made the journey from home to school on their own. It was what you did. Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm.

We are rearing our children in captivity – their habitat shrinking almost daily.

Technorati Tags: risk, fear, children, parents, Swallows and Amazons

Here is a posting for the hockey-crazy Ottawa readers. This is an interesting field of research on determining how perception and anticipation contributes to remarkable athletic skills.

Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable

In the otherwise unremarkable 1984 National Hockey League game between the Edmonton Oilers and the Minnesota North Stars, there are five seconds that Peter Vint will watch over and over. The star of this sequence is Wayne Gretzky, widely considered the greatest hockey player of all time. In the footage, Gretzky, barreling down the ice at full speed, draws the attention of two defenders. As they converge on what everyone assumes will be a shot on goal, Gretzky abruptly fires the puck backward, without looking, to a teammate racing up the opposite wing. The pass is timed so perfectly that the receiver doesn’t even break stride.
…
Such talent has long been assumed to be innate. “Coaches tend to think you either have it or you don’t,” Vint says. Unlike a jump shot or a penalty kick, field sense — which mixes anticipation, timing, and an acute sense of spatial relations — is considered essentially untrainable, a gift. Gretzky himself once fuzzily described it as having “a feeling about where a teammate is going to be. A lot of times, I can just turn and pass without looking.”

Technorati Tags: athletes, skill, hockey, perception, expertise, training

Here is an article on the validity of Internet polling. Many researchers do surveys on the Internet because it is cheap and convenient. This article points out the problems in making sure the research sample is representative of the population being studies.

About Online Surveys, Traditional Pollsters Are: (C) Somewhat Disappointed

To be sure, traditional pollsters and political consultants do not view online surveys as scientifically acceptable. The sampling of consumer opinion tapped through an online questionnaire cannot be as random as traditional measures, they argue, and it is easier for people to misrepresent themselves and their opinions online. Another critical difference is that in traditional polls, participation is voluntary, not paid.

“Voter polling by the Internet is not yet viable,” said Joel Benenson, a Democratic pollster working for the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. “There are some uses for online polling, but it still misses out on too much of the population for us.”

Despite the strong skepticism, Internet-based survey results are likely to get some publicity during the 2008 elections, and executives from companies that conduct these surveys hope that they can use the attention to gain credibility for their methods.

Technorati Tags: Internet, research, polls, surveys

Here is another article on the biological basis of moral behavior. Once again, new brain imaging techniques are allowing us to study these higher cognitive processes, and raising interesting philosophical questions.

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

…when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable. Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Technorati Tags: morals, altruism, selfish, neuroscience, psychology, morality

If you are not familiar with the now-classic Stanford Prison Experiment done by Philip Zimbardo, there is a new short video at The New York Times that is well worth watching.

In this interview, Zimbardo summarizes the shocking findings of the original experiment, which showed that “normal” students easily adopted roles of sadistic guards or broken prisoners. Zimbardo discusses the parallels with recent events in the US prisons in Iraq, and introduces his new book titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d3cee846a166e3b7bad1e51843da3375feecde91

Thanks to Cognitive Daily for the pointer.

We have known for a while that memories are strengthened as we sleep. But why, and what can we do about it? This study looked at giving people cues during their sleep that repeated cues given during learning. The cues were puffs of a rose smell, and they worked!

Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says

Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. A rose bouquet — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by almost 15 percent.

Technorati Tags: memory, sleep, learning, research