Mssv

One of the running jokes while I was in San Diego was the that professor who was nominally overseeing all the research in the lab was considerably absentminded. Never mind the times when he would phone up the lab to ask us what the time was because his watch wasn’t working, or when he’d ask [...]

Most amusing question asked at the BA Festival of Science: “Do people who ate goat brains when they were young get schizophrenia?”
This was at a panel session of top UK psychologists and neuroscientists. After the laughter died down, one of the panel members volunteered, “I ate goat brains when I was young.” A few seconds [...]

Change Blindness is an interesting psychological phenomenon that’s attracting a lot of research these days. There are a number of theories about why it occurs, and from a quick look at the literature I’m inclined to think it’s something to do with the role of attention and something called re-entrant processing.

One of the great things about being in UCSD right now is that I get to go to any classes I want, free of charge (unlike the poor saps who have to pay hundreds of bucks for the privilege - of course, they need course credit…). So at one of the recent cognitive neuroscience classes [...]

People might be wondering what it is that I’m doing in San Diego, beyond my rather nebulous description of ‘research’. Right now I’m working in the research labs of V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego Center for Human Information Processing on an experiment to investigate an interesting condition called synaesthesia. Synaesthesia [...]

Quote of the day: “The thing with behaviour is that we don’t know what subjects are thinking. I don’t know whether my rats are pressing the lever because they know they’ll get heroin - and I don’t know whether children will be surprised because they think ‘Hey, the laws of gravity have changed!’”

I exhausted my link-finding ability today after constructing a post to Metafilter about discourse markers such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. Read and enjoy.

I got an email today from my psychology supervisor, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen (the autistics guy) who said that unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to give us an extra supervision for the exams since he’s flying out to Kosovo to help with their new child psychiatry service. I think that is impossibly neat.

There’s an interesting phenomenon in language comprehension called the ‘garden path effect’. Proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1979), it basically meant that when you are reading or hearing a sentence, you split it up into chunks (you parse it), and due to something called ‘late closure’ you keep on adding as many words as possible [...]

While I have some issues with neurobiology lectures, I definitely don’t with our supervisions. They’re usually a great mixture of brainstorming and learning of interesting facts.
Take, for example, today, when I learned that when cats are hostile to each other and their hair stands on end, it’s because their hair makes them look much bigger [...]