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First Impressions
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on First ImpressionsI can tell a person’s personality by their face and watching them for a couple of minutes; this is something that I’ve believed quite strongly for a long time. And finally I’ve been proven conclusively – and pleasantly – wrong. There’s a tendency for people to try and ease their brain’s processing load while judging…
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Adrian’s crazy day
Today I had to give two presentations; one summarising a paper about systems consolidation in memory, and another covering my research project this year. The research project presentation had been prepared for quite a while in advance, but as luck would have it, yesterday afternoon we struck on a different way of statistically analysing my…
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Rewarding Behaviour
While browsing through hot-shot Cambridge lecturer and security expert Markus Kuhn’s homepage, I came across these two articles about the detrimental effects rewards can have on performance: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus and Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator. While some may view these articles as part of the backlash against behaviourism, I do…
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Fun New Words
New words and terms I’ve heard at my lab: Fiascotorial, adj.: combinations or permutations of fiasco-like situations. e.g., “And then the squirrel fell into the bowl! Just imagine the fiascotorial possibilites!” Gene-jockey, n.: derogatory term for a geneticist or molecular biology. e.g., “Those gene-jockeys working on the squirrel genome project, they don’t understand that the…
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Reprise
Saw Donnie Darko a second time today, with a friend from Leeds; it survived rewatching quite well. Afterwards, I described my ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ theory of cognitive development to her. It’s a little like Piaget’s controversial theory (although obviously much sillier). Jean Piaget was a psychologist who believed that children when through qualitatively different levels…
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VOR
Are you short or long-sighted? Go and lower your glasses so that your visual field is split in half horizontally (in other words, perch your glasses further down on your nose). Now move your head from left to right, and look through your glasses. Then do the opposite, and look above your glasses. You should…
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Baby Signing
A thought-provoking article on baby signing: babies, if taught properly, can sign when they are only six months old. This expands their range of communication beyond crying, which I can imagine helps parents a fair bit. Apparently learning signing doesn’t delay the onset of speech, either.
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Dancing
In case you’re interested, it might be worth checking out the BBC2 documentary The Dancer’s Body, on Saturday nights; I’m told it’s pretty good. An added bonus is that you should see Prof. Ramachandran on it either this week or next week, since he was interviewed for the programme while I was in the US.…
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Proactive Interference
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…
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Goat brains
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…
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