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  • Change Blindness

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    1–2 minutes

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    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.

  • Armchairs and onions

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on Armchairs and onions

    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…

  • Synaesthesia

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    3–4 minutes

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    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…

  • Behaviour

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    1–2 minutes

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    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!’”

  • Discourse markers

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    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.

  • SBC

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    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.

  • Garden path

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    2–4 minutes

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    2 comments on Garden path

    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…

  • Emotions

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    1–2 minutes

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    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…

  • Neuro and Psych

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    2–3 minutes

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    There were two things that caught my attention today in lectures. The first was a list of symptoms of mania (an abnormal emotional state, the opposite of depression): i. Unfounded elation ii. Hyperactivity iii. Talkativeness and “flight of ideas” iv. Distractivility v. Impractical, grandiose plans vi. Inflated self-esteem vii. Reduced sleep …and I thought, ‘I…