Psychology Blog

A not very thorough list of my personal 2008 highlights in mind and brain news, dredged from my memory and reproduced for your reading pleasure:

Funniest (unintentional)
USA Today publishing an alarmist story about ‘digital drugs’ that can, according to the article, mimic the effects of alcohol, marijuana, LSD, crack, heroin, sex, heaven and hell. Sadly not true, although hilarious to read.

Funniest (intentional)
The Web Therapy web series staring Lisa Kudrow as an incompetent psychologist. Wonderfully produced, cleverly satirical and very funny to boot.

Best film
The English Surgeon. A profoundly beautiful documentary about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. Do not miss it. Possibly a working torrent here.

Best podcast / radio episode
RadioLab’s delicious programme on Orson Well’s War of the Worlds broadcast and its subsequent psychological impact. Just pure audio delightfulness.

Best video lecture
A gripping lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy on the ‘psychological torture: a CIA history’.

Most interesting new concept
Brain-computer interfaces to weapons systems pose problems for the definition of a ‘war crime’ if they’re triggered preconsciously, according to an interesting analysis by lawyer Stephen White.

Most interesting interview
A tie between sociologist Harry Collins discussing his work on the social interactions of physicists and what this tells us about what we have to do to be considered an expert and what types of expertise there are, and an Neurophilosophy interview with Heather Perry who trepanned herself and is remarkably reflective about the experience.

Most useful academic article
Nikos Logothetis’ article in Nature about what fMRI is really measuring and what we can and can’t infer about the mind and brain from neuroimaging experiment.

Best example of neurobabble
The cover article on neuroscience-based management in an issue of HR Magazine which has to be read to be believed. Or maybe that’s just your basal ganglia talking.

Most tangential post
I start off talking about blond girls in t-shirts and end up talking about philosophy of mind. Actually, usually happens the other way round in real life.

Best cognitive science art project
Artificially intelligence punk rock pogo robots. Enough said.

Best random clip of TV documentary
A TV presenter is intravenously injected with differing mixtures of the active ingredients of cannabis as part of the BBC documentary Should I Smoke Dope?.

Most overdue decision
The American Psychological Association banning participation in torture. Did it really need all the fuss?

To the bunkers! Most likely to hasten the coming robot war
Pentagon requests robot packs to hunt humans. Uh huh.

Read the original post:
A very rough guide to highlights of 2008

Though, wise people say that it’s good to be a morning person, but not all of us are morning persons. This doesn’t mean that being a night person you are at some fault, there are some benefits that being nocturnal in the life of those who enjoy staying up at night.

Mostly, due to the body’s internal clock, many people become night people and are unable to sleep at night. Apart from this, the growing call center era, where employees are required to work in late night shifts is also making many people nocturnal. Being a night person is not a crime, read on the following benefits of being one.

If you are a night person, you can enjoy night shopping at many malls that are usually crowded during daytime. You can also surf the net faster during midnight when the traffic is down on the net. Another great benefit of being a night person is that you get to enjoy late night parties without feeling sleepy.

You will be surprised to know that some great personalities like James Joyce, P.B. Shelley, Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley and Keith Richards were also night people.

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See the rest here:
Are you a Night Person?

Not many people like spending time alone but those who like enjoy many benefits. Most of the people like parties and social networking and regard lonely people as boring. However, once in a day, we all should try to spend some time alone to reap the following benefits.

Staying alone for a while lets you relax. Someone rightly said that solitude is the best way to unwind and put your mind at peace. When alone, you get time to do many pending works and take many important decisions. In other words, spending time with yourself lets you put things in perspective.

You might wonder, but if you spend some time alone, you will end up spending time with other with more enjoyment. Apart from this, you will learn to be independent when you will spend some time alone by yourself be it for an hour or so.

The best part of being alone for sometime is that you get time to do things that you like and always want to do. In other words, you get time to pursue your hobbies. Try it out yourself by scheduling at least 15 minutes to spend alone with no one around and see how efficiently it calms you mind.

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Benefits of Spending Time Alone

ABC Radio National’s excellent The Philosopher’s Zone recently broadcast a great programme on one of the most influential philosophers in cognitive science - the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The first part of the programme deals with a broad overview of his life and ideas while the second section discusses his most famous work where analysed concepts behind the psychology of perception.

Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist, a philosophical tradition that aims to understand the structure of the mind through the analysis of conscious experience.

Introspection and subjective judgements about the mind get a bad rap in modern psychology but actually form the basis upon which much cognitive science rests.

To study something scientifically, it needs to be distinguished from other things - so we need to decide what sorts of things there are before we can apply science. As philosophy is essentially ‘conceptual engineering’, one of its most important roles is to make sure that these distinctions are based on sound concepts.

Many of the phenomenologists were interested in how we generate these concepts and looked to the structure of the human mind for clues. They came to the conclusion that there may be certain aspects of the mind that lead us to understand the world in specific ways.

Merleau-Ponty strongly argued that perception, including the whole experience of the body, was one of the most important influences and that if we rely solely on an objective and abstract science we will never understand lived-experience itself.

Link to the Philosopher’s Zone on Merleau-Ponty.

More:
Understanding the world through perception

The Philosopher’s Magazine has an interesting interview with David Chalmers on the extended mind hypothesis - the idea that the mind exists not only in ourselves but is extended out to the technology we use.

However, the technology does not have to be computers and digital technology, something as simply as a notebook is enough:

“The central example in our original paper was an Alzheimer’s patient. We called him Otto. Like a lot of Alzheimer’s patients, to get around, he uses external tools to manage his life. In particular, he carries a notebook around everywhere with relevant information and consults it whenever he needs it. So, when a normal person thinks, ‘I want to go to the museum,’ they recall, ‘OK, the museum’s on 53rd Street’ and off they go. When Otto wants to go to the museum, he looks it up in his notebook, reads the museum is on 53rd Street and off he goes.

“We argue this is part of his memory all along. We would say that even before the ordinary person recalled the information, they believed the museum was on 53rd Street. Why? Because that stuff was there in their memory, available, so to speak, for them. Exactly the same is true of Otto: that information was there in his memory, in the notebook, available for him there when he wants it. So we argue even before he read the information from the notebook, he believed that the museum was on 53rd Street.”

It’s interesting to note that language, is, of course, a technology, despite the fact we tend to think of it as something largely internal.

Chalmers also goes on to discuss the limitations of the theory and discusses what the idea implies for our concepts of the mind as they relate to the brain and the material world.

Link to Philosopher’s Magazine interview ‘A Piece of iMe’.
Link to original Clark and Chalmers extended mind paper.

Read the rest here:
Exploring the extended mind