From my hammock this morning. A little out-of-focus.
Bill Nye: Without evolution, “your worldview is crazy, untenable.”
Angry old man Bill Nye argues that we have to eradicate creationism, because “we need scientists and engineers.”
Evolution is fascinating to me… and an integral part of how I see the world. But it is preposterous to propose that one can’t be a scientist or engineer without believing in evolution. Partial list of people who did not believe in evolution: Galileo, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Mendel, Gutenberg, Faraday, etc.
Science is a process, not a body of facts to be memorized.
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“It’s easy to manipulate people”
One of my favorite interviews. Robert Cialdini not only uses sneaky-clever psych experiments to study the art of persuasion, he also goes out and learns from car salesman, direct marketers, etc.
http://vimeo.com/74153462
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NPR: Ecstasy is “safe” but also entails playing “Russian roulette”
The CDC reports that over 80 thousand people die each other from alcohol-related causes. And over 20 thousand people die from prescription drug overdoes.
But NPR is fear-mongering about 4 deaths from drugs incorrectly sold as MDMA, a drug that NPR declared to be safe and potentially beneficial last year.
Note that the DEA’s scare tactics are based on the potential that pills sold as ecstasy are not pure MDMA, an extremely infrequent problem that could be eliminated if the government ended its ban.
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“I do not wish to accept the honorary degree you have offered me.”
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I hosted this panel discussion on Richard Feynman’s letters at the LA Public Library:
http://vimeo.com/74085608
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“I love birds because they provide the perfect point of entry to the natural world.”
Red-whiskered bulbuls – a bird native to SE Asia that showed up in our walnut tree. Took me over 2 hours to figure out what they were.
Quote is from Nicholas Lund at Slate.
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Would we be healthier if our doctors lied to us?
At Slate, the famous memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus proposes that implanting false memories could change our behavior for the better:
AG: Could false memories be used for therapeutic purposes—like reducing alcohol consumption? EL: Absolutely, yes. I’ve had people say to me, do you think you could cure all kinds of problems with the false-memory technique? I hope other people will give it a try.
It’s hard to imagine how this would be implemented: If somebody signs off on having a false memory implanted, then won’t it be harder for them to accept that memory as factual?
It’s analogous to the problem of how to harness the power of the placebo effect. Doctors could be instructed to try a placebo before a “real” treatment, in cases where the life of the patient is not at stake and the potential benefits outweigh the costs. But the patient would have to sign off on this, presumably reducing the effectiveness. Maybe health insurers could offer patients the option of “pre-clearing” the use of placebos (with a lower premium?)
It seems extremely inefficient that our whole system of Western medicine forbids providers from harnessing one of the most powerful natural healing mechanisms.
But allowing providers to practice deception is also fraught with peril!
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Surprised by a dying cat
Here’s another classic. Even better, here’s David Hubel’s Nobel lecture from 1981, in which he explains the happy accident that led to their discovery.
Hubel and his partner had connected a microelectrode to a particular neuron in a cat’s visual cortex. They were trying to get the neuron to fire reliably in response to visual stimulation (a black dot). But nothing worked. And then all of a sudden, it started firing like crazy. Turns out this particular neuron was “turned on” by the shadow of the glass slide as it was inserted into their projector – a sharp black line moving across a light background. What’s more, it would only fire when the black line was at certain orientations. It had no interest in a black dot at all.
This was one of the first papers to show that some neurons in our cortex (our upper brain) are very specifically tuned to a very narrow set of stimuli. And it spawned a huge course of “single unit” studies in which psychologists test individual neurons throughout the brain to see which environmental conditions will make them fire. Still a huge part of brain research.
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Is Your Brain Really Necessary?
In a famous paper in the early 1980’s the pediatrician John Lorber asked “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” He examines hydrocephalics who – despite losing over 95% of the volume of their brain – continue to function in the everyday world and often have IQs over 100. (Hydrocephalics experience a build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain.)
I first learned about this paper from my neurolinguistics teacher Suzie Curtiss. Suzie was studying epileptic children who had a whole hemisphere of their brain removed but went on to live normal lives. These cases raise wonderful questions about the nature of intelligence and the incredible ability of the brain to adapt (“plasticity”) to serious injuries or novel environments.
This is the first post of its type…. famous papers which turned a field upside down or challenged conventional wisdom. Note that I’ve linked to a Science magazine article about Lorber, rather than his original academic paper, since I couldn’t find the original online.