So I was listening to Fresh Air this evening. Terry Gross was interviewing science journalist Jonah Lehrer, author of a new book called How We Decide. It's about how decisions get processed in our brains. In the Fresh Air interview, Lehrer discussed the neurotransmitter dopamine, which appears to play an extremely important and complicated role in our brains. From my (extreme outsider) perspective, the topic in general sounded fascinating. But there was one moment in the interview that rubbed me the wrong way and made me (perhaps unfairly) wonder whether the book is worth picking up.

( details )

Tags: psychology
Current Mood: skeptical

• tablesaw on communicating, with a fascinating discussion of certain metaphors. The context is an evidently controversial discussion of writing and cultural appropriation, but it's interesting on its own in any case. Excerpt:
  
  The conduit metaphor has three components that work together (expressed here by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By):

  1. Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
     
  2. Linguistic expressions are containers.
     
  3. Communication is sending.
  tablesaw goes on to discuss flaws with this analogy and to suggest a different way of thinking about communication.


• markm notices an unintended optical illusion on the fivethirtyeight.com website.

Tags: language, psychology

This NY Times op-ed piece takes on some weighty topics in psychology. Too many to encapsulate in a single column, I think. But they posit an interesting chain of events in the brain that goes something like:

1. (Outside the brain) An assertion is made that may or may not be true, and repeated forcefully. People disagree and debate the topic sharply.
2. (Inside the brain) I hear the information. It goes into my memory but not all of its context gets stored along with it.
3. (Also inside the brain) I remember the assertion but not all of its context. In particular, I may forget that it's not true.

The article goes on to say that Barack Obama might be better served by introducing counter-memes than by restating the smears on his anti-smear Web page.

The article also says (without citation) that a poll showed that 18 percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. So, once again, maybe there are more geocentrists than I had at first imagined.

Tags: election 2008, geocentrism, psychology

After moving in March, I have a commute again, hence more audiobook listening in the car. ( Details about the title and about Behavioral Economics )

I like the title and the main idea of the book. I get annoyed when I see human nature characterized as either completely rational/predictable or completely irrational/unpredictable. Here is an author presenting us with some rhyme and reason behind human choices that are not rational in the classical economic sense. Topics include:

• Surprisingly-effective marketing gimmicks (e.g., setting Suggested Retail Prices or offering free stuff)
• Morality (an eyebrow-raising experiment involving sexual arousal and decisionmaking, which reminds the author of Jekyll and Hyde; an investigation into when and by how much people are willing to cheat for money)
• The placebo effect, presented in economic terms ("Why a 50-cent Aspirin Can Do What a Penny Aspirin Can't")
• The distinction between "market norms" and "social norms" (a rather blunt example: the contrast between prostitution and dating).

The author presents hypotheses and describes experiments (typically performed on undergrads) to back them up. The experiments were interesting and very clearly described. I expect that experts debate their significance more than the author lets on, but they are valuable for being quantifiable and concrete.

The author also brings up some interesting ideas for how people and society might take these human foibles into account (e.g., a credit card that has people declare their own limits before they go shopping). On the other hand, some of those ideas seemed a little glib. More generally, I got the sense in places that the author had only peeled away one layer of the onion, in terms of describing human behavior. That was perhaps as far as he could go without becoming controversial or too abstract.

The reader of the audiobook version is Simon Jones, of Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy fame.

Tags: audiobooks, economics, psychology

By way of yhlee: I'm probably way oversimplifying this but here goes: The linguist Noam Chomsky posited that young children are innate language geniuses with grammatical structures hard-wired into them. Others, however, strongly disagree. Interesting.

Tags: language, psychology

Slate.com has a piece by Jeff Greenfield about Obama's perceived elitism, referencing a book by George Orwell from 1937 called The Road To Wigan Pier. Apparently in that book, Orwell describes socialists as condescending snobs, using language similar to that often used to criticize liberals today. Greenfield concludes:

... if you want to court these voters in a way that will resonate with them, you could do a lot worse than heeding the cautionary words of George Orwell. And Barack? Ix-nay on the egg-white omelets.

Greenfield's piece reminded me of adamcadre's reviews of works by Orwell. These include a review of Wigan Pier that bashes Orwell's anti-intellectualism. Cadre's conclusion, rather different from Greenfield's, is that

ultimately The Road to Wigan Pier is less a political tract than a psychodrama. ... [Orwell comes across as being] terrified that he's too soft, insufficiently manly. So he overcompensates, like Chris Matthews going into raptures about Fred Thompson's musk. His intellect tells him to be a socialist, but inside him is a twelve-year-old who never grew up and is haunted by the question, "Is that normal?"

I wonder whether Obama will try to build issues of class and elitism into another [scarequote]landmark speech[/scarequote], what he'll say, how he'll do.

On a related topic, slate.com also has a piece on possible reasons why many Catholics are choosing Clinton over Obama. 

Tags: politics, psychology

... may be good for assessment but not so good for teaching.

Tags: math, psychology

For what it's worth, this blogger (who seems to be perceptive about this sort of thing) thinks that Hillary was being "absolutely genuine" in the now-famous scene where she got teary-eyed at a press conference the night before the New Hampshire primary. To her credit, the blogger also stresses that she is not endorsing anyone. 

That one scene has gotten far more attention than it ought to, of course, but it is nonetheless interesting.

Tags: politics, psychology

... is about analyzing people's facial expressions and body language for cues as to whether they are telling the truth. The blogger assesses Larry Craig (one of the easiest of her targets) but refuses to assess Roger Clemens (apart from making some noncommittal observations).

Tags: psychology

By way of meep, a great article about ... well, if you haven't read the article yet, you may first want to watch a certain video and follow the instructions. The instructions are this:

1. There are two teams of three people each, tossing around two basketballs. One team wears all black, the other all white. Choose a team, either black or white.
2. As the video runs, count how many times members of your chosen team successfully complete a pass, keeping the ball away from the opposition.

That's it! The video (in Java applet form only) is posted at the University of Illinois website.

The article, Sleights of Mind (NY Times -- registration required), talks about that exercise. It also talks about the annual meeting, held this year in Las Vegas, of a group called the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. It also talks about magicians and magic tricks.

I'm not sure how much I actually learned from the article -- I'm not sure what to make of the thought experiments it poses, for one thing -- but it sure is entertaining. For those familiar with Irene Pepperberg, she's quoted (if perhaps shoehorned into the story). Zombies are also made reference to. And, that U of Illinois video has its own aesthetic value, as performance art.

Tags: philosophy, psychology
Current Mood: hmmm

Cleaning out the bookmarks file ... an assortment of piled-up links, taken from various sources.

• How to Lucid Dream. I bet it's still hard to do.
  
• A crack team of scientists is developing a surgically implantable bra of sorts. The surgery involved is far less invasive than current breast implant methods.
• Have I raved about the idea of smart glass before? I like smart glass. I just like saying "smart glass."
• A Yahoo sports columnist considers a kind of slippery-slope argument around the dogfighting case of Michael Vick, not entirely unlike the one I was thinking of a while back. Doesn't change matters all that much, but it is thought-provoking.
  
• For that matter, I've seen a couple of thought-provoking columns in defense of Barry Bonds, or at least putting criticism of him on a slippery slope too. Think of the other juiced batters of his era, or about the possibility that Bonds was facing up to equally juiced pitchers. An espn.com piece about painkilling injections focuses on the NFL, but it too makes one look at the Bonds situation at least slightly differently. Likewise when one thinks about the history of amphetamines in baseball. Whose old records are tainted? Who decides what is laudable healthy medicine and what's cheating unhealthy drugs? Again -- these thoughts may not change matters much; there are answers to these arguments; but they are thought-provoking all the same. 
• Initial reactions to the first announcement of the iPod in 2001. Many folks were unenthused. It's hard to predict history ...

Tags: psychology, science, sports, the future

By way of jrw, an interesting test for visual recognition memory -- see how well you recall a set of faces, a set of eyeglasses, and a set of names.

I got Corporal Agarn ... no wait, that was the "Which F Troop character are you?" quiz. Sorry about that.

( my actual results )

Tags: memes, psychology

• By way of ctate, an interesting piece on why some people reject scientific ideas such as evolution. This article claims (without attribution): "1 in 5 American adults believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, which is somewhat shocking—but the same proportion holds for Germany and Great Britain." Thus, there are more geocentrists than I would have guessed.
• A related item, by way of several others: Blogger claims that "Heliocentrism is an atheist doctrine."
  
  (Actually I'm kind of reluctant to laugh at this person. Give them credit for consistency. Laughing at them can be something like taking a step on a slippery slope toward laughing at anyone who believes in any supernatural aspect of their religion, no? Or no?)

Tags: geocentrism, psychology, science

a recent new yorker article on the science of facial expressions is fascinating. i stole the link from an LJ friend-of-a-friend.

Tags: psychology, science