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Author Archives: choldgraf
What can art tell us about the mind?
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Amy Cook, a professor at Indiana University, about some interesting new inroads that are being made between psychology and art. Professor Cook exists at the intersection of two fields that have historically been very far apart: theater and cognitive science.
She explained to me that both of these fields are ultimately touching on the same kinds of ideas, albeit from very different directions. While it is quite obvious that cognitive science is concerned with understanding the mind, theater is driven by our knowledge of the human psyche as well. Put the two together, and you have a very powerful combination. In a talk she gave at UC Berkeley, Professor Cook used a cognitive science perspective to look at Henry V, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. It turns out that The Bard was actually quite crafty about weaving a story that plays with your mind and deals with some pretty sophisticated mental concepts.
One of the fundamental themes that Dr. Cook sees embodied in Henry V is emergence.
The California Cognitive Science Conference: Metamorphoses of the Mind
What: Third Annual California Cognitive Science Conference
When: Saturday, April 30, 2011
Where: 416 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Have you ever wondered how the human brain is able to adapt itself so skillfully to the changing world around it? How nervous systems are able to repair themselves in the face of extensive damage? And what about the philosophical ramifications of all this: what does a changing brain say about what it means to be a human?
These questions are fascinating to me, so I was thrilled to discover that UC Berkeley’s upcoming California Cognitive Science conference focuses on these issues (and much more). Titled Metamorphoses of the Mind, the conference boasts an impressive list of speakers ranging from computer scientists to neurophilosophers, each with a unique approach to take on the human mind. Here is the scoop on the keynote speakers:
Nuclear power in a nutshell
With all of the media coverage going on right now about the disaster in Japan, perhaps a bit of explanation is in order. (Warning for those of you versed in the world of nuclear physics: this is going to be a relatively simple, watered-down, and incomplete idea of what goes on in a nuclear reactor…don’t get mad at me!) And let me get something out of the way right from the get-go: there’s not going to be a nuclear explosion in Fukushima, Japan. While atomic bombs and nuclear power plants both rely on nuclear reactions, they are extremely different when it comes to their potential to explode.
So here’s the short version. Essentially, nuclear reactors work in the exact same way as certain other engines we’ve been using for hundreds of years: by using steam. At the heart of a nuclear reactor lies a chamber that is submerged in large tank of water. Inside this chamber are a number of uranium “cores,” if you will. These are about the size of a Tootsie Roll, and they’re totally awesome.
Birds are quantum physicists!
A paper appeared last year in Current Biology describing the ability of birds to see magnetic fields. Many birds respond to changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and the theory is that they use this ability to navigate during migration. As I mentioned in my blog, scientists have been trying to figure out just how birds can accomplish this amazing feat. Several hypotheses involve the protein cryptochrome, a molecule that seems to be nearly one-of-a-kind as far as biological structures go. Now scientists have taken the awesome factor for this mechanism one step higher: a paper in PRL suggest that these birds may actually be using quantum entanglement in their navigational systems.
For those uninitiated into the world of really tiny physics, entanglement basically describes two electrons that are inextricably linked.
Blurring the line between man and machine
Human beings are a wonderful species, indeed. We’ve got the ability to think critically in difficult situations, to be flexible in the face of great adversity and challenge, and to create systems that were previously unthinkable. Our brains seem to be nature’s ultimate machine, a unique network of neurons in a storm of electrical activity. This fantastic assemblage of complex components has been the sole occupant of the throne of “consciousness” (whatever that is) for thousands of years now. However, our tenure as the known universe’s only sentient beings may be coming to an end.
This concept was recently discussed in an article in The Atlantic. Written by Brian Christian, a bona-fide flesh-and-blood human (honest), it covers one of the oldest questions facing humanity: what makes us special?
Why empiricism will always be imperfect
A new year is upon us, and that’s always a great time to clean out the skeletons in your closet. So without further ado, let’s take a look at Jonah Lehrer’s explanation of “the decline effect” (published in The New Yorker last month). Lehrer describes this odd phenomenon whereby statistical significance of previous scientific findings seems to decrease with age, as we get further and further away from the time that it was initially reported in literature.
As any scientist can tell you, the holy grail of an experiment is a low p-value, a statistical measure that tells whether your findings are indicative of an actual effect, not just randomness and chance. This sounds fairly straightforward – of course we want to find things of actual importance, rather than being lulled into a false discovery by arbitrary data – but it turns out to be much hazier than a simple “yes” or “no.”
Shedding light on the supposed link between MMR and autism
Editors note: With today’s post, we introduce a new category of “Opinion” posts on the BSR blog. We continue to welcome informative posts about scientific research, as well as posts that give an individual author’s point of view on controversial subjects. Please send any feedback or post contributions to sciencereviewblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
-Anna
As you may have noticed in the past few months (if not years), there is quite a bit of concern about the possible link between autism and vaccinations. If you were to look at almost any properly carried out independent study, you’d find that most of these allegations are completely ridiculous. Nevertheless, sensational claims seem to have a knack for outshining the factual evidence that contradicts them. The autism/vaccination “link” has caused a number of parents to intentionally avoid vaccinations for their children, resulting in a number of unnecessary deaths, including the recent outbreak in whooping cough in California.
It all started with a paper written by Andrew Wakefield in 1998. In the paper, he describes a number of children who had recently undergone vaccination for MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and supposedly began showing signs of autism shortly thereafter. The author suggested that the MMR vaccine was causing these children to develop their symptoms.
Twelve years and who knows how many un-vaccinated children later, we finally get…
Sunspots!
I just finished reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, and doing so made the astronomer in me appreciate the vast and unknown universe that makes up 99.99999% of existence. Luckily, there are plenty of amazing people who devote their entire lives to this cause, such as the folks at the Swedish Solar Telescope. In 2002, this telescope (located in La Palma, Spain) collected a remarkable high-res image of a sunspot the size of a planet.
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Taking AI to the next level
At the heart of artificial intelligence lies the question of whether we might be able to create artificial systems that behave and compute in the same manner than human beings do. This would obviously be a mind-blowing breakthrough were it ever accomplished – it would give us new applications for computers, change the nature of work in our society, and force us to redefine the very nature of being human. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that such a feat has proven to be incredibly difficult to achieve. While it has grown in complexity and scope, artificial intelligence is still quite far from any kind of accurate human resemblance. However, this may change very soon.
Back in 2008, the world of electronics was abuzz with excitement over a new invention – the memristor. This is an electrical component that behaves very similarly to a resistor, but with one key difference. Memristors impede the flow of electricity, but the amount that they do so is dependent on the current that has passed through the memristor in the past. Now, this might not seem like such a big deal, but think about the implications. Essentially, such a piece of hardware has the ability to store some information about its previous input. It has the electrical equivalent of memory. With that in mind, let’s venture into the realm of cognitive science.
Redefining the structure of life
Last Thursday, I was stuck at a conference, furiously refreshing my phone to try and get the latest scoop on the “big announcement” from NASA. Now that I’m back, I thought I’d look into exactly what has been found and what this implies for our understanding of life in the universe. First, we didn’t find extraterrestrial life. I emphasize this because people were speculating rampantly about this possibility. However, you could say that we’ve accomplished the next best thing.
On Thursday, a group of researchers from the US Geological Survey, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and a host of other groups published a paper detailing a strain of bacteria taken from Mono Lake, California that has the ability to live off of arsenic rather than phosphorous. They took samples of the bacteria and placed them into an environment that was devoid of phosphorous, but had plenty of arsenic. Such an environment should be fatal to life as we know it, but these bacteria were able to grow and proliferate, incorporating the arsenic into their biological makeup.
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