Top-Down Engineering of AI

The philosophers’ fascination with propositions was mirrored in good old-fashioned AI, the AI of John McCarthy, early Marvin Minsky, and Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw. It was the idea that the way to make an intelligent agent was from the top down. You have a set of propositions in some proprietary formulation. It’s not going to be English—well, maybe LISP or something like that, where you define all the predicates and the operators. Then, you have this huge database that ...

 The Mind on Music

For some reason that no one really understands, there is a psychological effect upon human listeners in regards to the musical scale. The tonic pitch, or tonal center is not only the mathematical center of the scale, but is the psychological center as well. Human perception of the tonic pitch in relation to the other notes of the scale gives each note of the scale, including the tonic pitch, a distinct "personality" or identity. If we were to label each note of the major scale with a number, ...

 Being in a Car Affects Our Sense of Personal Space

Psychologists have noted that people driving a motor car react in a manner that is often completely unlike their normal social behaviour as regards their territories. It seems that a motor vehicle sometimes has a magnifying effect on the size of a person’s personal space. In some cases, their territory is magnified by up to ten times the normal size, so the driver feels that he has a claim to an area of 9 to 10 metres in front of and behind his motor car. When another driver cuts in front o...

 Survey of Studies on the Benefits of Meditation

...there has been a growing body of research over the last years examining various cognitive abilities related to mindfulness, most of which focusing on various measures of attention and memory... Although some studies did not find differences between meditators and non-meditators in rigidity related tasks (e.g [47], [48]), others have found that meditators exhibit decreased Stroop interference [49], [50](in a Zen meditation sample). The Stroop task requires participants to name the ink color...