This is a very interesting piece on the philosophy of science and popular understandings of science: How our botched understanding of ‘science’ ruins everything http://theweek.com/article/index/268360/how-our-botched-understanding-of-science-ruins-everything   As an exercise to the reader, explain what is wrong with his complaint that what most people think of science is actually the opposite of science. Some helpful ideas […]

For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately to explain why we are bad at remembering people’s names lately.  An email exchange on this with an Atlantic reporter got summarized online here: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/why-do-we-forget-names-as-soon-as-we-meet-people/375815/ Curiously, it then also got picked up on another site, Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/why-its-so-hard-to-remember-peoples-names-1620881563 And then I was contacted earlier this […]

I’m a big fan of Jerry, who posts to YouTube as ChessNetwork his videos of playing chess online.  One of the things he does regularly is playing online speed chess — ultra-rapid, “bullet” chess where each player has ~1m for the whole game. Chess is a different game when you have 60 seconds to make […]

Good article on Cognitive Science versus Artificial Intelligence in the Atlantic from a few weeks ago. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we’ve lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind. This is the key point, in my opinion: “I don’t […]

I wrote a short piece for a gaming-oriented online magazine, GLHF (Good Luck, Have Fun!) talking about the neuroscience of skill learning and how it applies to getting better at even things like video games.  The magazine is generally focused on Starcraft2 and the professional e-sports scene around Starcraft (although I think they want to […]

Can’t believe I didn’t Randomness this one already… Real-Time Strategy Game Training: Emergence of a Cognitive Flexibility Trait Brian D. Glass, W. Todd Maddox, & Bradley C. Love http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070350 The main finding: increased cognitive flexibility after 40 hours of playing Starcraft.  Of note, the assessment of cognitive flexibility was done by meta-analytic Bayes factor across […]

Brain Training in PLoS One: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055518 Brain Training Game Boosts Executive Functions, Working Memory and Processing Speed in the Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial Rui Nouchi, Yasuyuki Taki, Hikaru Takeuchi, Hiroshi Hashizume,Takayuki Nozawa, Toshimune Kambara, Atsushi Sekiguchi, Carlos Makoto Miyauchi, Yuka Kotozaki, Haruka Nouchi, Ryuta Kawashima The title seems to accurately tell the results […]

I stumbled across the “cup song” by Anna Kendrick (from the movie Pitch Perfect, also performed by her on Letterman and originally learned from a “viral video” which sources to a homemade youtube video by Lulu and the Lampshades).  The trick is singing a short song while tapping out a short percussion sequence using a […]

I did a short interview with an Australian radio show called Ghosts of Oz, hosted by Danni Remali, on Saturday night.  The show focuses on paranormal topics and they wanted to talk about deja vu — they found me by the Scientific American AskTheBrains column.  They assured me that they wanted a real scientific perspective […]

So apparently a new hastag, #overlyhonestmethods, is burning up the twitterverse.  It appears to be driven by students, technicians, post-docs in science labs blowing off steam about the challenges of doing research.  It’s funny and probably a good thing in the overall sociology of science — I think.  It is a good thing if it […]