Living In A Lucid Dream
I love the way that Claire L. Evans writes.
Link tags: neuroscience
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Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
SpeedCurve | The psychology of site speed and human happiness
Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:
If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
I wish that more UX designers understood that!
The Technium: Dreams are the Default for Intelligence
I feel like there’s a connection here between what Kevin Kelly is describing and what I wrote about guessing (though I think he might be conflating consciousness with intelligence).
This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.
Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking | Psyche Ideas
This explains rubber ducking.
Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.
Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks
I like this skewering of the cult of so-called-neuroscience; the self-help book equivalent of eye-tracking.
Facebook will destroy your children’s brains | by Martin Robbins @mjrobbins | Science | guardian.co.uk
A pitch-perfect parody of people that peeve.
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science | Mother Jones
A look at our inbuilt confirmation biases.
Op-Ed Contributor - Mind Over Mass Media - NYTimes.com
An excellent rebuttal by Steven Pinker to Nicholas Carr's usual trolling.
Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain - life - 29 June 2009 - New Scientist
It turns out that the brain is a scale-free small-world network in a state of self-organised criticality. Just like the internet.
Who Framed George Lakoff? - ChronicleReview.com
A detailed look at the troubled history of George Lakoff, the father of conceptual metaphor.
Moving Dots Demo
There appears to be a form of synesthesia where people "hear" motion. Watch this video (repeatedly) to test your own sensory perception.
What the F***?
I saw Steven Pinker give a talk recently and he spent a fair amount of time talking about swearing. He has written up that part of the talk into an article for the New Republic.
Skeptic: The Magazine: Featured Article
A good, if somewhat dispiriting, overview of Artificial Intelligence. (There's some nice typesetting on this page)