Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ Category
Thoughts on Sapir-Whorf
November 4th, 2010
Well, actually this WSJ article never really references the (in)famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis linking language properties to patterns of thought, but it should, because that’s what it’s about. Some notable quotes:
- Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
- Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
- The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
- In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn’t remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: “The vase broke itself,” rather than “John broke the vase.”
…in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.
Brains, man, brains.
April 16th, 2010
A Croatian girl apparently awoke from her coma speaking German.
The girl, from the southern town of Knin, had only just started studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German TV to become better, but was by no means fluent, according to her parents.
Since waking up from her 24 hour coma however, she has been unable to speak Croatian, but is able to communicate perfectly in German.
Assuming this isn’t just an awesome hoax, we need to figure out how to induce this kind of state artificially.
Dreaming Rats
April 2nd, 2010
…Wilson and Kenway Louie described the behavior of rats that had been trained to run on a circular track. As expected, running on the track generated a distinct pattern of neural firing in the rat hippocampus, a brain area essential for the formation of long-term memory…
… as before, Wilson kept the electrodes in place while the rats drifted off to sleep… The scientists examined 45 dreams and found that 20 of the dreams repeated the exact same patterns of brain activity exhibited while running in a circle. In fact, the correlation between the dream and the reality was so close that Wilson could predict the exact position of the rodent on the track while it was asleep.
I’m sure you want to read Jonah Lehrer’s article about dreaming.
Numbers Are New
April 1st, 2010
You’ve probably heard of bands of people in Australia or Amazonia whose concept of number is limited to, “1, 2, 3, 4, many.” Here’s a really good article describing that phenomenon in a lot more detail.
One especially interesting result was the notion that people intuitively distribute numbers on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one. As it turns out, children do this, too.
It is Pica’s belief that understanding quantities in terms of estimating ratios is a universal human intuition, due to the fact that ratios are much more important for survival in the wild. Historically, faced with a group of adversaries, we needed to know instantly whether there were more of them than us. When we saw two trees, we needed to know instantly which had more fruit hanging from it. In neither case was it necessary to enumerate every enemy or every fruit individually. The crucial thing was to be able to make quick estimates of the relevant amounts and compare them; in other words to make approximations and judge their ratios.
Memes Can Be Good For You
February 27th, 2010
I stumbled across this nice summation in reading through Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Leading up to this passage, Dennett argues against the common conception of memes as mental viruses that necessarily do harm to their hosts by specifically describing the ability of religions to organize individuals into cohesive groups.
Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing group curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.
I still haven’t seen any really convincing work demonstrating the predictive capabilities of memetics (though I certainly could have missed something), but the field does provide some really elegant mechanisms for describing certain kinds of phenomena.
d’Alembert’s Dream
February 25th, 2010
I would call Denis Diderot’s essay d’Alembert’s Dream a study in 18th-century cognitive science.
Also it’s my birthday! I’m older now.
books, neuroscience, old dead white guys, science | No Comments »
Monkey Syntax
December 9th, 2009
It seems that the Campbell’s Mona Monkey of the Ivory Coast uses syntax in its communication:
If the Zuberbühler team’s observations are correct, the Campbell’s monkeys can both vary the meaning of specific calls by adding suffixes and combine calls to generate a different meaning. Their call system, the researchers write, “may be the most complex example of ‘proto-syntax’ in animal communication known to date.”
I’m sure these little guys couldn’t learn sign language, and that’s a shame.
A Vending Machine for Crows
November 30th, 2009
Let’s Talk About Dolphins
November 4th, 2009
Yeah, yeah, we all know dolphins are smart, but seriously, they’re smart:
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
It gets better. Read the rest of the article.
Let’s Talk About Ants
October 19th, 2009
This blog could easily turn into a collection of TED talks. Here’s Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon talking about emergent behaviors in ant colonies.
TED, animals, ants, neuroscience, science, video | 1 Comment »