Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 30 January 2012
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As an illustration of the power of priming experiments to produce astonishing findings, a recent study shows that people tend to underestimate their age (but not their father’s) after listening to the Beatles’ song « When I’m 64 ». The study was published in Psychological Science.
"We asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/ yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040."
The effect is both statistically significant and fairly important: it really seems that the song induces a downward bias in a subject's estimation of his own age. Incredible? Maybe, but not more so than other priming studies. It has been shown, after all, that subjects primed with words related to old age walk more slowly than others (here); that infants are twice more likely to help an adult spontaneously after they have seen two puppets facing each other (rather than turning their back to each other) (here); that people are more generous when they are holding a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee (here). Strange as they are, those are widely cited results. Yet, the Beatles’ song experiment was not greeted with the same enthusiasm. Why was that?
Read more: Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age
Blogs from ICCI contributors
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- Olivier Morin
- Wednesday, 11 January 2012
- Blog Olivier's blog
ICCI contributors also blog elsewhere. I am happy to recommend two new blogs: Hugo Mercier's Social by Design on Psychology Today is devoted to popularizing his and Sperber's argumentative theory of reasoning. It will teach you the truth about gulliblity (trust me). Simon Barthelmé's Dahtah will enchant statisticians, pop-psychology debunkers, and anyone who is tired of the Mismeasure of Man. One excellent post laments the use that is being made of cognitive science to blame the problems of the poor on bad decision-making.
How much trust should we put in experimental results?
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- Olivier Morin
- Friday, 07 January 2011
- Blog Olivier's blog
Thinking back on the year 2010, cognitive scientists will probably remember it as the year the Hauser affair broke out after years of rumors. That summer, a Harvard investigation committee found Marc Hauser responsible for eight cases of "scientific misconduct". The most serious problem involved a missing control condition in an experiment published in Cognition. Since the experimenters were blind to the conditions they were testing, a weird and important mistake cannot be entirely ruled out. (See here.) The other seven cases involved various forms of sloppiness - whether it was guided by dishonesty is still hard to know. Then informal accusations of misconduct started pouring in, from colleagues and former students. Scientists who spoke against Hauser, like Gordon Gallup or Michael Tomasello, concentrated their attacks on various failures to replicate his results.
This post is not about Marc Hauser. Whether he was guilty of true misconduct or unintentionally produced false results matters less than the fact that we ('we' stands for us, cognitive scientists with an interest in morality, religion or culture) were fooled into accepting this work. "Accepting" is an understatement. We hyped it up, we based arguments upon it, we advertised it to philosophers, anthropologists and the greater public as an example of good science.
The situation would be a little more comfortable if we had not been serving for many years as self-appointed ambassadors of the Scientific Bushido to the social sciences and humanities.
Read more: How much trust should we put in experimental results?
Denis Dutton (1944-2010)
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- Olivier Morin
- Thursday, 30 December 2010
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In twelve years of existence, Arts and Letters daily hardly ever let a day pass without publishing its three witty three-liners. On the 28th of december, the feed was unusually late. It quickly resumed to announce the death of its founder, Denis Dutton.
Reading the reports (here and here), you may notice that all the authors seem to have started by searching their mailbox for his name. I did the same. The fact that we all found some fond memory there tells you a lot about the man. He was probably the first philosopher to understand how the web could be used.
In addition to being a celebrated editor and writer, Denis was a member of our Institute, which he supported from the beginning (and even before, in the days of Alphapsy). His words of encouragement, the readership he brought us, helped keep us on track. Last year, the site hosted a long, lively (and sometimes bitter) debate about his book, The art instinct, a darwinian theory of art (here and here). Incensed by our review, he was still patient enough to answer it at length, with sound arguments, and his usual wit. An opinionated and influential man, Denis could dislike his opponents as much as he liked controversy, for which he certainly had a knack. His various crusades, from the hilarious charges against postmodernism to his (less felicitous) campaign against global warming science, testify to that. He was not just any polemicist: he was the one who first gave scholarly debates a URL.
camphor - ammonia = anniseed x peppermint
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- Olivier Morin
- Sunday, 09 May 2010
- Blog Olivier's blog
How can we count? Where does our arithmetic capacity come from? A lot of progress has been made on this question, thanks, in no small part, to the work of cognitive scientists like Susan Carey and Stanislas Dehaene. The picture that emerges from this kind of work looks something like this: many animals are equipped with crude but roughly efficient devices that help them estimate quantities. Those devices are ready for use, they require very little in the way of cultural fine-tuning. In addition to that, we can try and track discrete quantities (those expressed by numbers) and make operations on them, but this capacity is woefully limited, and it requires a lot of cultural input to really get off the ground.
This post is not about that theory ; it is about how lovely these theories, and the field as a whole, have become - how subtle, how nuanced, how specific if you compare it with the clumsy nativism and blunt blank-slateism that used to rule over the psychology and philosophy of counting. There was a time when believing in innate constraints on thought meant being a devotee of Immanuel Kant. There was a time, oh you spoiled twenty-first century reader, when you had to prove the most obvious hypotheses against the dogmas of associationism. In thosed days, people thought of cognitive faculties as general competences, unconstrained by anything, independent of modalities, built by general associative learning alone. Yes, ours is a lucky time to read psychology in.
Now, if you are not yet about to send a thank-you email to the closest psychologist of arithmetic in your area, here is a story to nudge you. It involves Francis Galton and his nostrils.
Religion science: if you pay the piper, do you call the tune?
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- Olivier Morin
- Friday, 19 February 2010
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A hot debate has been taking place these last few days, in the comments section of Harvey Whitehouse's recent post on religion. Part of the dispute has to do with the way cognitive scientists working on that topic might be influenced by the money they get, particularly from a Christian foundation that hopes to promote a more favorable view of religion by funding research in that area, albeit in a nonintrusive way. What, everyone wonders, does funding of this kind do to the work it finances? Is Christian-funded research biased? Is it more likely to present religious people with a rosy mirror?
This question has been adressed systematically by a recent paper looking at broad trends in the sociology of religion (found via The Immanent Frame). The authors, David Smilde and Matthew May, looked at thirty years of religious sociology in five high-profile social science journals, and (among other things) they looked for correlations between funding types and 'pro-religiousness'. Articles were classified as pro-religious when they considered a religious independent variable and a non-religious dependent variable (say, how being baptized affects your likelihood of being in jail), and concluded that the religious variable had 'positive socio-evaluative effects' (baptized people are less likely to go to jail). As for funding type, they looked more precisely at the papers whose authors were funded by foundations with obvious Christian sympathies like the Pew Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, etc. - compared with papers whose authors had money from other sources, and with papers not funded at all.
Bottom line: authors financed by Christian foundations are more likely to write pro-religious papers than authors who declare no funding at all, but the same applies to all financed authors, wherever their money may come from - governments, or non-religious private foundations. This is just one of many surprising findings.
Read more: Religion science: if you pay the piper, do you call the tune?
Conversation Hackers
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- Olivier Morin
- Saturday, 12 December 2009
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Olivier Morin and Sophie Claudel
Human argumentation is at the center of recent (and less recent) psychological work. We are learning a lot about our ability to argue. But the motivation behind human arguing is less well known. What makes us want to argue back at other people, even when we know they won't be convinced ? Internet Trolls know a few answers to that question. We are studying their culture from the inside.
"Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking and you won't be able to argue back" - Ram Mohun Roy (HT: Hugo)
A few weeks ago, the web was all abuzz about with one of those stories people are so fond of discussing online. A Canadian woman, who couldn't work because of a depression, lost her sick-leave benefits over a few photographs that were displayed on Facebook. She was smiling on the photographs. The anecdote provoked widespread outrage and rekindled the endless debate over Internet privacy.
But the story in itself did not interest Steve that much. Where other people see a scandal, Steve sees an opportunity for fun. That night, he logged himself on a forum devoted to discussing the condition and problems of depressive people - one among a dozen medical forums where Steve, under a variety of aliases, is a regular. He quickly spotted the thread where the Facebook scandal was being discussed, licked his lips, and began typing something like this:
"It serves her right, if you ask me. You can't defraud insurance companies and think of yourself as a responsible person. It's not the victimless crime it appears to be. Depression is not a real disease anyways."
He clicked 'Send', and waited for the angry reactions to pour in.
Japanese smileys vs. Ekman faces
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- Olivier Morin
- Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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Some medias and the blogosphere (see here, here and here) are celebrating a new study published in Current Biology, allegedly showing that recognition of facial expressions is not universal. Psychological universalists and relativists never seem to get tired of chewing that old bone of contention.
There are two aspects to the study. The first is a very nice exploration (by means of eye-tracking) of the way Asians process facial expressions, replicating the earlier work of Masaki Yuki and colleagues three years ago (read what Karim wrote of it at the time). Japanese subjects tend to focus on the eyes instead of the mouth to decode emotions - as one could have guessed from looking at Japanese Smiley faces : (^_^) for 'happy', (T_T) for 'sad', and other such (*_*) ...
Yet the authors don't stop at that fascinating result, and go on to try and prove another point : that because of this difference in face-processing style, East Asian subjects and 'Caucasian' subjects are not equally good at recognizing some of Paul Ekman's supposedly universal facial displays of emotions, like disgust and fear. And indeed East Asian subjects are significantly likelier than Caucasians to misinterpret happy or fearful faces.
As Neuroskeptic points out in his excellent coverage of the experiment, the difference, though, is really tiny...
How much of a difference does culture make ?
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 24 August 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
In my latest post, I mentioned a very nice study that looked at differences in face-processing between East Asians and Westerners. Though it made a couple of fascinating points, the study also claimed that Asian culture strongly hindered Asians from understanding Western emotions. In fact, their statistically significant result was much too weak to warrant that conclusion. A recent pamphlet has been looking, among other things, at what makes scientists confound the statistical significance of an effect with its importance. The debate over the significance of significance has precedents in cross-cultural psychology.
I just finished Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey's vital pamphlet, The cult of statistical significance: how the standard error is costing us jobs, justice, and lives. These two economic historians did an excellent job of convincing me that everyone in the human sciences (medicine included) should heed their advice and read the book. It's quite a nice read, too - except when the authors let the gossip and the anecdotes run loose, which makes you feel like you're squeezed at a conference buffet between two economy professors talking shop and lambasting some unknown colleague. Anyway, the book's message, old and banal as it can be in certain circles, is a crucial one.
It is about null-hypothesis significance testing. Before you stop reading, please remember that it is the tool you use in order to prove reviewers that your data are worth publishing. It is the mandatory p < 0.05 threshold over which there is no publishable truth. It has become the de facto golden standard of scientific validity.
This kind of significance testing has been under attack for many years in various fields, including psychology.
Incest in France
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- Olivier Morin
- Friday, 24 April 2009
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The French used to be astoundingly tolerant of incest, but times are changing. Cover of the 1984 single Lemon Incest, a song featuring Serge Gainsbourg with his daughter Charlotte. Videoclip here.
Mutually consensual incest is a classic puzzle for moral psychologists : on the one hand, it harms neither the lovers nor society, on the other hand, most people think there is something seriously wrong about it. That's what Jonathan Haidt illustrates with a famous scenario of brother-sister incest, the story of Mark and Julie.
"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other."
Haidt famously found that most people strongly rejected Mark and Julie's behaviour, even though the scenario carefully forestalls any bad consequences that might result from it. But, unlike Haidt's subjects, the French authorities (on whose territory the scenario takes place) do not consider that Mark and Julie's behaviour deserves punishment. In Virginia where Jon Haidt teaches and (I guess) hired his subjects, incest is a Class One Misdemeanour, punishable by one year of jail (see here). In France (and in many other countries where brotherly cuddling is seen with a friendly eye, such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Turkey, Japan, Argentina and Brazil), Mark and Julie risk nothing. So far.
In March of this year, a group of right-wing deputies submitted a very strange proposition to outlaw incest when (at least) one of the participants is under legal age. The text stands good chances of being adopted.
How Grandma stopped worrying, and started to love cognitive anthropology
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 10 March 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
In the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a paper by Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. proposes "an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief." The Independent comments the study in the following way: "A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences (...) The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.".
These last few years, it's become more and more difficult to tell my old folks about the kind of work that I do. Like Nicola, I often get the question: What exactly is that topic you're working on? And the answer: "cognitive anthropology", seldom satisfies anyone. Results have been scarce and progress uneven. Recently, my grandmother enquired, in a way that was slightly more earnest than usual, when it was that I would finally "get my exams" and find a proper job.
But I regain confidence every time I hear that a major anthropological problem has been solved by Neuroscientists using fMRI brain scans. Today, such a thing happened, and I feel that for once, I will have something to say next time we meet at the kitchen table. It will be something like this:
Read more: How Grandma stopped worrying, and started to love cognitive anthropology
Astounding! Readers use their imagination when reading
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 03 February 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
Everyday, in spite of the critics, neuroimaging keeps on producing vast increases in our understanding of culture. This week, for example, Boing Boing and Physorg enthusiastically comment on an fMRI study "forthcoming in Psychological Science" (though not yet online on the journal's website). The study discovered that "readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations".
For those unacquainted with the subtleties of Neuroscience, the authors explain: "Readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing. Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."
In other words, when you read the following sentence:
"It was a dark and stormy night"
You actually think of a night that is dark and stormy. You build, so to speak, a mental picture of it. And that image is in your head - in your brain. But there's more.
Read more: Astounding! Readers use their imagination when reading
How automatic are human social skills?
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- Olivier Morin
- Thursday, 29 January 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
This January in Biology and Philosophy, philosopher Mitch Parsell questions the view that some parts of social cognition, like face-perception or gaze-following, are independent mechanisms working independently from other cognitive processes - what philosophers call "informational encapsulation". I cut-and-pasted a few excerpts.
This is a face with a pair of eyes. Your eyes are sensitive to the label attached to this picture; your attentional response would have been different if it had read "this is a car" (Kingstone et al. 2004).
"Our success as a species depends on efficient, real-time processing of social information. Recognizing a conspecific as a threat or an opportunity needs to be done fast, before the threat has been visited upon us or the opportunity has passed...
Descartes' skull
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- Olivier Morin
- Sunday, 11 January 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
(This post was writtten last week - see post-scriptum)
In these times of financial and social crisis, the French government is at work. On January the 12th, an interministerial commission will be gathered in Matignon by French Prime Minister François Fillon, and presided by his assistant Jean de Boishue, a man known for his controversial positions and action concerning France's rioting youth. The reunion will most probably grant a wish that has been in the PM's mind since at least 1996: offer his electors of La Flèche, a well-to-do, sleepy town in Western France, the skull of René Descartes.
"I have a clear and distinct notion of myself, as a thing that thinks and occupies no extension in space, and (...) a distinct notion of my body, as a thing that has an extension and does not think"
(René Descartes, Méditations Métaphysiques).
Everyone remembers Descartes as the most vocal supporter of a radical distinction between body and soul, commonly called dualism. Dualism is held by psychologist Paul Bloom (as it was held by Descartes) to be a natural and innate feature of our thinking about the human mind. On this blog, Paulo Sousa and Mitch Hodge have questioned whether humans are really intuitive dualists, after all. Well, even if they are, Bloom and others should find a way to reconcile their thesis with Fillon's eager pursuit of a skull thought to belong to the man who thought it had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of his mind...
Social neuroscience under attack
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 05 January 2009
- Blog Olivier's blog
"A disturbingly large, and quite prominent, segment of social neuroscience research is using seriously defective research methods..."
This is one of the conclusions of an exciting paper (download here) first-authored by Edward Vul, in press in Perspectives on Psychological Science. It's a methodological critique of studies showing implausibly high correlations between brain responses and social behaviour. What's implausible is not the existence of the correlations - few people today claim that thought proceseses are not localized somewhere in the brain. It's their sheer size. Given the margin of error that we can plausibly estimate for behavioral measures and measures based of brain activity, correlations should not reach a certain ceiling - yet, in social neuroscience, they do...
Cartoon Faces
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- Olivier Morin
- Wednesday, 24 December 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you're conversing is very different from your image of the person you're conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he's an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-and-hair package. It's precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and - simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line - Charlie Brown.
Left to right, Top to bottom: Siddartha (Osamu Tezuka, Buddha), Tintin (Hergé), Homer Simpson (Matt Groening), Charlie Brown (Charles Monroe Schulz), Fido Dido (Joana Ferrone and Sue Rose), Dora the Explorer, Mickey Mouse (Walt Disney), Astroboy (Osamu Tezuka), Son Gôku (Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball).
Scots, Birds, and Names
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 09 December 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
"The chaffinch is "a most common of European finch species is noted for its powerful and typical song. Chaffinches have an innate ability to sing, but also adapt to the songs of ‘teachers’ in their vicinity. This explains the curious incidence of regional variation in their song, a trait their song shares with human speech. This poem is a map of Scotland, or at least those areas in Scotland where the chaffinch is endemic. It shows the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie." (Strange Maps).
Gorgeous! even more so if you consider that variations in the birds' names might reflect variations in the birds' songs. After all, many species of birds are named after their most typical song. Since the birds' dialect is itself culturally transmitted, then the distribution of birds' names would be influenced, simultaneously, by animal-to-animal cultural transmission (songs being copied from one bird to the other), animal-to-human transmission (birds being named after their song), and human-to-human transmission (people naming birds after the fashion of their country).
4 Stone Hearth 54: marriage and Japanese toys
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 02 December 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
This is the 54th issue of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. The next issue will be hosted by The Greenbelt.
Anthro-bloggers this fortnight have written countless posts celebrating the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss ( here's a review at anthropology.info, and another here at Savage Minds). Lévi-Strauss, I have been told, is not much of a webbie, but if he had been surfing the web this month, his absolute favourite piece on the web would have been this one. The author combines kinship systems theory, classification systems theory, database engineering and Graph Theory, to ask how one could cram a gay married couple into an official database. The answers are hilarious - and utterly Lévi-Straussian. (Here, via Savage Minds)...
Do we bend it like Beckham?
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 25 November 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Robert Boyd likes to illustrate prestige-biased imitation with this picture of David Beckham lending his name and face to sell razorblades. Advertisement moguls (not exactly the epitome of scientific rigor) claim that having Beckham on the ad greatly improves its efficiency, and big business executives (not exactly the embodiment of rationality either) are willing to follow them. Let us suppose that they're right. Let us make the additional supposition that Beckham's face does not work merely by attracting people's attention on the ad (for it would imply that our friends, the rational businessman and the rigorous ads mogul, would be wasting too much money on a trivial result). Then, we have to conclude, people are buying these razorblades on the recommendation of David Beckham.
Now, Robert Boyd remarks, David Beckham is just a footballer - sometimes a poorly-shaven one at that. Why would one copy his choice of razorblades?
This week: social learning and cooperation
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- Olivier Morin
- Sunday, 23 November 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Community and Religion: poor predictors of the bliss of nations
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 11 November 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Let me begin with this video - it was shot last Sunday in Jerusalem, in the Basilic where the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Jesus Christ, is vigilated by two opposing platoons of Armenian priests and Orthodox popes, under the surveillance of two Muslim families, helped by the occasional police patrol.
(Hat Tip: Le Monde via Yasmine Bouagga)
I know, I know, this is an unfair, demagogic, uselessly provocative way to introduce the topic of today. The reason I couldn't help but show it is because it reminds me of endless "Street Fighter" afternoons. I would love to play the man in the red satin robes.
But to my point: many recent posts, papers and articles are discussing whether strong community ties and religious beliefs reliably contribute to happiness. That they do is widely believed, on the basis of previous studies of self-reported happiness in the USA. Several theorists, for example Jonathan Haidt, in his paper 'Planet of the Durkheimians', made the very Durkheimian point that a strong, holistic, cohesive social system (in Durkheim's example, a catholic, collectivist, family-bound social life, compared to a protestant, "anomic", individualistic one), with a coherent and authoritative belief-system, is the kind of social system we evolved to be in. It ought, therefore, to make us happy. And indeed, inside the USA, religious people give more and they report being more happy with their lives...
Read more: Community and Religion: poor predictors of the bliss of nations
Picture of the week: a Sangaku
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- Olivier Morin
- Sunday, 09 November 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
This five-meters long triple tablet was hung in 1797 in the Onnma shrine in the Aichi prefecture (Japan) and contains 30 problems. It is called a Sangaku, a mathematical ex-voto representing solved geometrical problems. A book about Sangakus is forthcoming, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry.
What do our friends interested in the anthropology of maths (Christophe, Helen, Hugo...) think of this interplay of religion and geometry? As for me, growing up in catholic Brittany, I have seen my share of weird ex-votos (the last one on my list was this toy boat, last June), but this tops everything else...
(found on Science News).
"No evidence of Human Mirror Neurons"
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 03 November 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
If I were a sociologist of science, I would jump on mirror neurons - they are the perfect object if you want to study a scientific controversy today.
On the one hand, Mirror Neurons, found in several regions of the macaque cortex, have been hypothesized, by mainstream cognitive scientists, to underlie language, theory of mind, culture, empathy, art, social cognition in general, the success of an advertisement campaign promoting a famous brand of underpants (as Jonah Lehrer noted: "You know that mirror neurons have jumped off the shark when they're used to explain Abercrombie and Fitch"), and many other things, that have only one thing in common: they are extremely discreet, not to say absent, in the only species we are 100% sure has mirror neurons - macaques.
On the other hand, in a piece published in Current Biology based on data published in the Journal of Neurosciences, I. Dinstein suggested that they can hardly be found in humans, and J. Neurosciences editors seem to concur. To understand how that is possible, we need to step a decade back in time.
Maori Memories
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- Olivier Morin
- Saturday, 25 October 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Pictures: a Maori man (right), and writer Georges Perec (left), whose book W ou le souvenir d'enfance (W : a childhood memory) is a twisted autobiography dwelling on his absolute lack of childhood autobiographical memories.
The debate over maths in the Amazon: still counting points
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- Olivier Morin
- Tuesday, 23 September 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Another paper, in Cognition, about the mathematical abilities of Amazonians. This time, the Gibson/Everett view scored one point. They claim that language for numbers is not what allows us to use concepts of exact quantities for big sets. It merely helps us to keep them in mind.
[from the abstract] number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality.
The opposite side is nonplussed about the study. Stanislas Deahaene shared his disbelief with The Telegraph.
Elizabeth Spelke talks of possible experimental biases in New Scientist. You can read the paper here (no screen).
Abortion puzzles, part two
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- Olivier Morin
- Saturday, 13 September 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Last month, Nicola posted here on an apparent paradox in the doctrine of anti-choice activists. The paradox is the following: if embryos and foetuses are human beings in every relevant respect, so that killing them is murder, why is it that anti-choice activists typically refuse to punish aborting mothers - while of course they want infanticide to be punished? There was a lively discussion with Benoît Dubreuil and myself - still going on, feel free to join!
Now I found, through Collin Farrelly, another puzzle that might shed light on this first puzzle of abortion...
Neurotheology as an American Myth
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 07 July 2008
- Blog Olivier's blog
Over at The Immanent Frame, historian Leigh Eric Schmidt has a paper about the current fMRI craze in religious studies (actually, The Immanent Frame has several posts about neurotheology). According to Schmidt, neurotheology is just one manifestation of a deep trend in American thought. American spirituality, he claims, always loved to explore the interface between technology and religion, and more broadly, emphasized the psychological aspects of religious experience, at the expense of the insitutional or ritual. This attitude may have paved the way for cognitive science and fMRI studies of religion - what some call the "Holy Mix".
But the main interest of Smith's post lies in the long and sad story of spiritual gadgets that he tells...
Another possible alternative explanation for IFT
What's wrong with "intentional stance"?
Possible alternative explanation for IFT
Crushing a dispute with a smile (ahem, a bared-teeth display)
Impartial intervention, or pragmatic intervention?
Not fairness, not mutual interest ... cognitive dissonance maybe
A couple of references
Emotions as regulators of social behavior
Women are not allowed by social group to own their bodies
"Rigtheous" women and "promiscuous" men