13 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Thinking Means Understanding in More Than One Way
Thus, your knowledge is represented in various forms that are stored in different regions of the brain, to be used by different processes. What are those representations like? In the brain, we do not yet know. However, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, researchers have found several useful ways to represent knowledge, each better suited to some purposes than to others. The most popular ones use collections of "If-Then" rules. Other systems use structures called 'frames'--which resemble...Folksonomies: cognition understanding
Folksonomies: cognition understanding
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notes19 FEB 2015 by ideonexus
'Yo' as a Gender-Neutral Pronoun
Margaret Troyer, a former Baltimore-area teacher, published the first paper showing that "yo" is being used to replace "he" and "she." Troyer first noticed it while she was teaching middle-school kids in the area.
"Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example."
So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them ... 1 notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Neccessity of Selective Attention
Three decades ago, cognitive scientist Colin Martindale advanced the idea that each of us has several subselves, and he connected his idea to emerging ideas in cognitive science. Central to Martindale’s thesis were a few fairly simple ideas, such as selective attention, lateral inhibition, state-dependent memory, and cognitive dissociation. Although there are billions of neurons in our brains firing all the time, we’d never be able to put one foot in front of the other if we were unable t...Folksonomies: attention perception
Folksonomies: attention perception
1 Douglas T. Kenrick explains how our senses are bombarded, so we filter. If we could not filter, we would become incapacitated.
11 DEC 2013 by TGAW
Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma) on Compassion
Not long ago, a young boy handed me an envelope containing 300 euros. He said he wanted it to be used to help the orphans at our ashram. I asked him to keep the money, which he had won in a music competition, but he refused.
Two weeks later, his little sister came to me with an envelope containing her ice-cream pocket money. She told her parents: “I eat ice cream all the time. This time I want to give to the orphans, like my brother.” The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother...I really responded to this excerpt of Amma's response to the New York Times on who our moral leaders are.
Two sentences in particular stuck out: “The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother’s moral integrity” (on the girl who donated her ice cream money after seeing her brother donate his music competition winnings) and “The universe is like a vast net; if one corner is shaken, the vibration pervades the whole.” (on the man who mowed the Lincoln Memorial).
She really illustrated how generosity and compassion can spread.
26 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
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...Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
Decreased Stroop interference, superior visual perspective switching, superior verbal fluency, improved category production tasking, and reduced rumination.
18 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Universe as a Library with Atoms as Words
The words are strung together, with their own special grammar—the laws of quantum theory—to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular “sentences.” The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules—but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeabl...And look what has been written with just a hundred words.
15 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Washoe the Chimpanzee Demonstrates Sympathy
People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a...Story of Washoe the Chimpanzee when one of her caretakers missed work for awhile after having a miscarriage.
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Talk to Your Babies
The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback. You can reinforce language skills through interaction: l...2,100 words per hour in a variety of words. Babies are listening.
19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
DNA is not a Blueprint
Textbooks of biology repeat time and again that DNA is a
'blueprint' for building a body. It isn't. A true blueprint of, say, a car or a house embodies a one-toone
mapping from paper to finished product. It follows from this that a blueprint is reversible. It is
as easy to go from house to blueprint as the other way around, precisely because it is a one-to-one
mapping. Actually, it's easier, because you have to build the house, but you only have to take some
measurements and then draw the blu... 1 notes
notesYou cannot reverse engineer DNA from the animal it appears within.
15 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Consumption of Media Has Moved to Bits and Pieces
The problem is: We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one.
We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.
And the result: What we gain is ...Folksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
We don't consume whole books and albums anymore, but bits and pieces.
