MetaFilter posts tagged with psychology and Cognition

Aaron Beck & Cognitive Therapy

Non Prosequitur — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:05:20 -0800

“The psychoanalytic mystique was overwhelming. It was a little bit like the evangelical movement.” How Aaron Beck and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helped increase empiricism in psychotherapy.

Extending the Mind

homunculus — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:50:55 -0800

How Google Is Making Us Smarter: Humans are "natural-born cyborgs," and the Internet is our giant "extended mind."

Consider my opinion changed.

fantabulous timewaster — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:58:48 -0800

Overcoming Bias [via]

Dopamine

homunculus — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:30:25 -0800

A New State of Mind. "New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process."

Chick Sexing

parudox — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:14:53 -0800

"Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex." It's a dirty job (YT). Sexing chicks early is important so that the cockerels can be separated and culled^ or fed to be broilers^. The obvious differences take weeks to develop, so when the vent sexing method was developed in Japan in the 1920s, professional chicken sexers became sought after. After years of training, they can sex a thousand day-old chicks an hour with 99% accuracy. In many cases the sexer cannot say why he made a particular decision. The method is learned mostly empirically and is not open to introspection, which has made it of considerable interest to philosophers and cognitive scientists. Vent sexing is in decline, however, owing to development of feather sexing (i.e. using breeds with differences in feather length or color). Would you like to learn to sex chicks? There are plenty of resources, such as A Guide to Sexing Chicks (1935). Better yet, The Specialist Chick Sexer is a modern treatment (there is an extract and another poultry essay available). You can sex all fowl, actually. Cognitive scientists, philosophers, and psychologists all like chicken sexing. Biederman (of geon^ fame) and Shiffrar showed (PDF) that novices can be trained to decent accuracy with explicit perceptual clues. There's a discussion of chicken sexing in the defunct PSYCHE-B cognitive science listserv (more useful archive here). Scroll down to see it, particularly Bruce Mangan's post. (There was an earlier post, and the main link is good if you can get access.)

The Reinvention of the Self

blacklite — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 10:44:20 -0800

Neurogenesis Neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, was something we were all taught was impossible after a certain point. Professor Elizabeth Gould, doctor of psychology at Princeton, has claimed that it happens all the time. (more) Now, she and her team at Princeton are saying not only is our brain always changing, stress and environment directly affect brain development.

Cognitive Daily

srboisvert — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:18:59 -0800

Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.

lagado — Wed, 06 Jun 2001 22:47:06 -0800

FRANCISCO VARELA (1946 - 2001)^* One of the more quietly influential thinkers of our times. A neuroscientist turned immunologist whose formulation of the theory of autopoiesis (with Humberto Maturana) has challenged conventional thinking in areas as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Ecology and AIDS research.
The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.
On 28th of May, Varela's own autopoiesis ceased.
*pointer via fmh

fable — Tue, 08 Aug 2000 21:37:53 -0800

How Culture Molds Habits is a fascinating article. Read this article, tally another point for nurture. I've long thought this was true, but Nisbett's supposedly gathered rather a lot of data proving it is so. The article raises some interesting parts of the study, but I think the ramifications bear some considering. I'd be interested in reading the full study when it's published, but I haven't a clue where to get the Psychological Review. And can you imagine what the advertising execs will do with this stuff? Ads tailored to the way you think. Wheee. It does, of course, raise some fun questions about religion and politics.