In a waking day of 16 hours, you are conscious for 960 minutes. If a “memory event” is something in the neighborhood of 10s, that’s something like 5000 opportunities for a memory per day. How many memories do you have from yesterday? If It’s in the neighborhood of...
Implicit bias in education
In an article titled "Georgetown Law professor terminated after ‘reprehensible’ comments about Black students," we hear about a professor who is being fired from Georgetown Law after some inappropriate remarks made on a recorded classroom after class. Predictably,...
Gender gaps and statistical myths
Chess's recent surge in popularity, plus the Netflix show "Queens Gambit" featuring a female chess prodigy have unsurprisingly inspired a flurry of new conversations into the old question of differences in chess ability for men versus women. Prof Wei Ji Ma (NYU,...
Early in-person voting in Illinois starts Oct 6
I'm planning to vote in person, with a mask on, during a time that I hope it won't be too crowded. If you aren't planning a mail in ballot, early voting in Evanston is at the Civic Center, starting now. Just FYI.
Replicability advocate John Ioannidis might be a bad actor
[Note: this was published originally in May 2020, but didn't get migrated to the new site right away] When you publish a finding titled “Why most published research findings are false,” the impact of your report is likely to have two major effects. The first is to...
Illinois Primary Day March 17
Pushing the upper bound on cognitive performance
Over the holidays, I discovered a new chess competition variant being played and streamed by Chess.com: Puzzle Battle. Chess puzzles are a well-known training device that also have something of a micro sub-community within the chess world for artistry in creating positions with a difficult to spot but winning move. They are highly recommended to […]
Answers to some semi-frequently asked questions about memory
Hello, We are working on a group speech for a school project and need to reach out to an expert in the field of psychology. We have a few questions about the topic of brain capacity and we would greatly appreciate it if you would take a look at them and get back to us. […]
Recreational lockpicking
On the theme of demonstrations of exceptional skills via youtube, I recently ran across the channel of the LockPickingLawyer (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ/about). He posts videos of picking various kinds of locks together with evaluations on how effective the locks are as security devices. I found this to be highly interesting for a variety of reasons. First, this […]
Implicit Comics
Many people have emailed me the following comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/conscious Yes, I appreciate it. No, I didn’t have anything to do with the author/artist. Happy New Year! P.S. I wish I could embed it more directly here, but I don’t want to deprive the author of links/traffic. It’s about implicit memory.