• Admissions Requirements for Psychology Schools

    Updated: 2023-07-31 22:06:50
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  • The visible gorilla.

    Updated: 2023-07-31 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 31, 2023 The visible gorilla . A staple of my lectures in the 1990s was showing the invisible gorilla’ video , in which viewers were asked to count the number of times that students with white shirts passed a basket ball . After the start of the game a student in a gorilla costume walks slowly through the group , pauses in the middle to wave and moves off screen to the left . Most viewers who are busy counting the ball passes don’t report seeing the gorilla . Here's the video : Wallish et al . now update this experiment on inattentional blindness in an article titled The visible gorilla : Unexpected fast—not physically

  • Unnarratability -The Tower of Babel redux - where have all the common narratives gone?

    Updated: 2023-07-28 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 28, 2023 Unnarratability The Tower of Babel redux where have all the common narratives gone I pass on some clips from Venkatesh Rao's recent Ribbonfarm Studio . posting Perspectives like his make me feel that one's most effective self preservation stance might be to assume that we are on the dawn of a new dark age , a period during which only power matters , and community , cooperation , and kindness are diminished a period like the early middle ages in Europe which did permit under the sheltered circumstances of the church a privileged few to a life of contemplation . Strongly Narratable Conditions The 1985-2015 period , arguably ,

  • A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4

    Updated: 2023-07-26 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 26, 2023 A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4 This popst is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post of GPT bots editing a paragraph I wrote , this one being on non-dual awareness . nbsp The paragraph : The fact that there is no there there means it . Empty is empty . The ground state is just the mute body doing its thing . From its depths storylines rise and fall , bonbons to savor or ignore . The body can know that it has found a new ground state , and can be no longer willing to just play nice if the upstairs word salad is dinking around with or

  • The evolution of transhuman forms - a MindBlog paragraph edited by GPT implementations

    Updated: 2023-07-24 18:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 24, 2023 The evolution of transhuman forms a MindBlog paragraph edited by GPT implementations In this post I am documenting the final result of passing a paragraph I wrote on future human evolution through a number of different GPT generative pre-trained transformers This is to archive the results of this exercise for myself , and in case it might be of interest to a few MindBlog readers . The bots were prompted by a request to re-write or edit the paragraph to make it more accessible to a reader with a college education . The bottom line is that the edited versions with the most depth and coherence were obtained using Open AI’s

  • Proxy Failure is an Inherent Risk in Goal-Oriented Systems

    Updated: 2023-07-20 00:10:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 19, 2023 Proxy Failure is an Inherent Risk in Goal-Oriented Systems I will pass on the title and abstract of another article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Science for which reviewers comments are being solicited . MindBlog readers can email me to request a PDF of the target article . nbsp Dead rats , dopamine , performance metrics , and peacock tails : proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal- oriented systems Authors : Yohan J . John , Leigh Caldwell , Dakota E . McCoy , and Oliver Braganza Abstract : When a measure becomes a target , it ceases to be a good measure . For example , when standardized test scores in education

  • MindBlog's reading list.

    Updated: 2023-07-17 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 17, 2023 MindBlog's reading list . I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts because I'm speading more time now at my Steinway B's keyboard than at my computer's keyboard . If you encounter a paywall with any of the links , you might try entering the URL at https : archive.is An installment of Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter : The permaweird narrative Jaron Lanier There is no . A.I in The New Yorker Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed David Brooks in The New York Times commenting on Douglas Hofstadter's recent ideas .

  • ‘Adversarial’ search for neural basis of consciousness yields first results

    Updated: 2023-07-14 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 14, 2023 Adversarial’ search for neural basis of consciousness yields first results Finkel does a summary of the first round of results of an adversarial colloboration' funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation in which both sides of the consciousness debate agreed on experiments to be conducted by theory-neutral” labs with no stake in the outcome . It pits integrated information theory IIT the sensory network hypothesis that proposes a posterior hot zone” as the site of consciousness , against the global neuronal workspace theory GNWT which likens networks of neurons in the front of the brain to a clipboard where sensory

  • The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence

    Updated: 2023-07-12 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 12, 2023 The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence I would recommend having a read through Evgeny Morozov's piece in the NYTimes as an antidote to Marc Adreessen's optimistic vision of AI that was the subject of MindBlog's June 23 post Here is a small clip from the article , followed by the titles describing different problem areas he sees : Discussions of A.G.I . are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios . Yet a nascent A.G.I . lobby of academics , investors and entrepreneurs counter that , once made safe , A.G.I . would be a boon to civilization . This is why , for all the hand-wringing , so many smart people in the tech industry

  • Inheritance of social status - stability in England from 1600 to 2022.

    Updated: 2023-07-10 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 10, 2023 Inheritance of social status stability in England from 1600 to 2022. From historical records Clarks demonstrates open source strong persistence of social status across family trees over 400 years , in spite of large increases in general levels of education and social mobility . Significance There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility . In England , 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time . Half the population was illiterate in 1,800, and not until 1,880 was compulsory

  • A meta-analysis questions the cognitive benefits of physical activity.

    Updated: 2023-07-07 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 07, 2023 A meta-analysis questions the cognitive benefits of physical activity . I give up . If anything was supposed to have been proven I would have thought it would be that exercise has a beneficial effect on brain health and cognition . Now Ciria et al . offer the following in Nature Human Biology : Extensive research links regular physical exercise to an overall enhancement of cognitive function across the lifespan . Here we assess the causal evidence supporting this relationship in the healthy population , using an umbrella review of meta-analyses limited to randomized controlled trials RCTs Despite most of the 24 reviewed

  • Why music training slows cognitive aging

    Updated: 2023-07-05 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 05, 2023 Why music training slows cognitive aging A team of Chinese collaborators has reported experiments in the Oxford academic journal Cerebral Cortex titled Functional gradients in prefrontal regions and somatomotor networks reflect the effect of music training experience on cognitive aging which are stated to show that music training enhances the functional separation between regions across prefrontal and somatomotor networks , delaying deterioration in working memory performance and prefrontal suppression of prominant but irrelevant information . I'm passing on the abstract and a clip from the paper's conclusion , and can send

  • What Babies Know from zero to 1 year - core systems of knowledge

    Updated: 2023-07-03 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 03, 2023 What Babies Know from zero to 1 year core systems of knowledge The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has sent out to reviewers the précis of a book , What Babies Know by Elizabeth S . Spelke , Harvard Psychology Dept . The abstract of her précis : Where does human knowledge begin Research on human infants , children , adults , and non- human animals , using diverse methods from the cognitive , brain , and computational sciences , provides evidence for six early emerging , domain-specific systems of core knowledge . These automatic , unconscious systems are situated between perceptual systems and systems of explicit

  • Managing the risks of AI in pragmatic ways.

    Updated: 2023-06-30 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , June 30, 2023 Managing the risks of AI in pragmatic ways . I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a recent commentary by Venkatesh Rao on the tragedy of the Titan submersible , which was a consequence of Stockton Rush , the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions , taking a number of design risks to reduce costs and increase profits . The bulk of Rao's piece deals with issues in the design of potentially dangerous new technologies , and the final paragraphs deal with managing the risks of artificial intelligence in pragmatic ways . AI risk , understood as something very similar to ordinary kinds of engineering risk such as the risk of

  • Mechanisms that link psychological stress to the exacerbation of gut inflammation.

    Updated: 2023-06-28 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , June 28, 2023 Mechanisms that link psychological stress to the exacerbation of gut inflammation . Schneider et . al describe one mechanism by which psychological stress deteriorates our health the enteric nervous system relays psychological stress to intestinal inflammation . Here is their abstract : Highlights Psychological stress leads to monocyte-mediated exacerbation of gut inflammation Chronic glucocorticoid signaling drives the effect of stress on IBD Stress induces inflammatory enteric glia that promote monocyte recruitment via CSF1 Stress provokes transcriptional immaturity in enteric neurons and dysmotility Summary Mental

  • The vagus nerve, heart rate variability, and subjective wellbeing - a MindBlog self experiment

    Updated: 2023-06-26 05:00:00
    : , , Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , June 26, 2023 The vagus nerve , heart rate variability , and subjective wellbeing a MindBlog self experiment In this post I pass on to MindBlog readers a NYTimes article by Christina Caron that has been republished several time by the newspaper . It is a sane account of what the vagus nerve is and what it does . The vagus is the main nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system . Unlike the sympathetic nervous system , which is associated with arousal of the body and the fight or flight” response , the parasympathetic branch helps us rest , digest and calm down . Numerous experiments have shown that increased activity of the nerve

  • Turing, von Neumann, and the computational architecture of biological machines

    Updated: 2023-06-21 05:00:00
    : , , Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , June 21, 2023 Turing , von Neumann , and the computational architecture of biological machines I pass on the abstract of a PNAS perspective article by Hashim M . Al-Hashimi motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me In the mid-1930s , the English mathematician and logician Alan Turing invented an imaginary machine which could emulate the process of manipulating finite symbolic configurations by human computers . His machine launched the field of computer science and provided a foundation for the modern-day programmable computer . A decade later , building on Turing’s machine , the American–Hungarian mathematician John

  • The psychological illusion of "The Good Old Days"

    Updated: 2023-06-20 15:23:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Tuesday , June 20, 2023 The psychological illusion of The Good Old Days Mastroianni and Gilbert open access do a nice study illustrating that the the universal perception of our ongoing moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible . Their abstract : Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining . In a series of studies using both archival and original data n 12,492,983 we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining , that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this

  • How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives?

    Updated: 2023-06-10 15:39:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Saturday , June 10, 2023 How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives This post is primarily directed to Austin TX people who will be attending the Sunday 2 p.m . July 2 meeting of the Austin Rainbow Forum that is now in its 5th year . We will be discussing the topic of what spirituality means to each of us , and what its role in our lives is . Look below to see how the three major AI chatbots responded to my request for some guidance on how to moderate such a discussion . nbsp Also I'll pass on this youtube video titled What To Remember To Be Happy pointed to by Rainbow Forum discussant David Soileau . nbsp Question to the

  • A new place for consciousness in our understanding of the universe

    Updated: 2023-06-09 05:00:00
    I want to point MindBlog readers to an article by Thomas Lewton that I enjoyed reading. It describes how theorists are trying to make sense of mysteries like quantum mechanics and the passage of time by reformulating physics to include subjective experience as a physical constituent of the world. Lewton cites a number of authors who contributed to a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Volume 28, Numbers 9-10, 2021)

  • Negativity drives online news consumption

    Updated: 2023-06-07 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , June 07, 2023 Negativity drives online news consumption Why paying attention to the news can come close to being a receipe for clinic depression . An open source article from Robertson et . al Their : abstract Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions , hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption . Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories . Specifically , we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials N 22,743 Our dataset comprises 105,000 different variations of

  • A simple heuristic for distinguishing lie from truth

    Updated: 2023-06-05 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , June 05, 2023 A simple heuristic for distinguishing lie from truth Work by Verschuere et . al shows that a simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allows people to discriminate lies from truths : Decades of research have shown that people are poor at detecting deception . Understandably , people struggle with integrating the many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judgement . Heuristics simplify difficult decisions by ignoring most of the information and relying instead only on the most diagnostic cues . Here we conducted nine studies in which people evaluated honest and deceptive

  • Gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women

    Updated: 2023-06-02 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , June 02, 2023 Gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women Sobering but not surprising analysis by Jugman et . al Significance Gender inequality is associated with worse mental health and academic achievement in women . Using a dataset of 7,876 MRI scans from healthy adults living in 29 different countries , we here show that gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women : cortical thickness of the right hemisphere , especially in limbic regions such as the right caudal anterior cingulate and right medial orbitofrontal , as well as the left lateral occipital ,

  • Some notes on “Constructing Self and World”

    Updated: 2023-05-31 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , May 31, 2023 Some notes on Constructing Self and World” I’ve just listened to one of Sam Harris’ podcasts in his Making Sense” series titled Constructing Self and World . 8221 It is a conversation with Shamil Chandaria , who is a philanthropist , serial entrepreneur , technologist , and academic with multidisciplinary research interests . During the conversation a number of ideas I am familiar with were framed in a very useful way , and I’m wanting to put down and pass on to MindBlog readers my thumbnail summary : nbsp There is a strong similarity between the predictive processing brain model that has been the subject of numerous Mind

  • To fulfill its promise, artificial intelligence needs to deepen human intelligence.

    Updated: 2023-05-29 05:00:00
    : , . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , May 29, 2023 To fulfill its promise , artificial intelligence needs to deepen human intelligence . For MindBlog readers interested in AI , I have to point to another must-read article by Ezra Klein Below are some clips that try to communicate his central points . And no , I'm not using ChatGPT to generate this post , because of several of AI's limitations that he notes . Klein starts by noting the many ways in which the internet has not fullfiled its promise , overwhelming us with more information than we can process , degrading our political discourse and attention spans , and leading us multitasking which not only diminished our

  • Miracle Berries Day in Biopsych!

    Updated: 2023-05-04 21:00:23
    All of the students experienced a strong sensation of sweetness while sucking on lemons, and many asked for a second piece! Then the party became even more interesting when a couple of students decided to see how their Oreos would taste.

  • Flipping Classes and Fun With Play-Doh

    Updated: 2023-04-21 17:05:50
    My friends in the Facebook group “Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience” have shared so many exciting resources, but my favorite was the Play-Doh neuron project. Because I’ve been teaching remotely for three (!!!) years now, I never had a chance to do this. Yes, I could have asked […]

  • Autism Prevalence: Reflections from a Mom

    Updated: 2023-04-14 16:55:07
    When Karla was little, I found that I had to educate my pediatricians about autism. They said they’d read about it in medical school, but it was so rare that they never expected to see a case. Services in the public school were non-existent, and given my responsibilities with a […]

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