cognitive-science 8

Our brains remember some things better. Explaining that way makes it stick. Here are the eight things, most important first, that help you: Structure explanations memorably: Face. You remember faces before facts. So cast characters: “Imagine you’re a courier carrying a packet.” Prefer archetypes to real names — less baggage, more imagination. Place. You’re reading down a list now — and the top feels more important. That’s spatial wiring. Turn any concept into a map. Use higher, deeper, nearer, inside, … Tale. You read #1 and #2 first because they came first. Your brain built a cause from that sequence. Time creates cause for free. “Because” makes anything believable. Scale. “Two feet tall” lands instantly. “60 cm” forces you to convert. Your brain doesn’t measure — it compares. Give it reference objects, not just numbers. Deliver explanations memorably: ...

A cool psychology experiment. A student asks someone for directions. People carrying a door pass between them. Students switch. They check if the person giving directions has noticed that it’s a different person. Many people don’t notice the switch.

Angry or negative people can be bad for your brain.

Cognitive daily. Are rich kids more troubled than poor kids? How do we decide what we’re seeing? What else are we doing when we watch a movie? What are we doing when we watch a movie? etc.

We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.) First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution? ...

What we can do with brain scans today.

Excellent kuro5hin article on the brain and Turing machines. While on brains, kuro5hin also talks about geniuses.

The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis says that the brain evolved more for its social purpose, than for finding food and things like that. Incidentally, Google’s collection on evolution is as comprehensive as ever.