With Christmas less than two weeks away, I imagine many of us have babies on the brain. Apparently I did, because when I went looking for a paper to discuss, what jumped out at me was this paper on infant cognition (Preprint for those without access). It’s not an especially splashy paper; it’s not getting the news coverage of the latest AI developments or the claims of a theory which can reconcile gravity and quantum theory (a claim which awaits independent verification). But I suppose that’s in keeping with the themes of Christmas too. So, what can we learn by showing eight month olds movies of rolling balls?
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cognitive science
Science Book Review: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness
At various times while reading Anil Seth’s engaging and accessible Being You, I was reminded of the people in Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable, the subject of a previous blog post. Thomson was documenting the distinct experiences of people whose perception of themselves and/or the world around them depart substantially from what is typical: people who think they are tigers or dead or who can have their orientation to the world flipped instantaneously. Seth is giving an account more generally of why perception works the way it does, and so I found myself regularly wondering if his model accounts for the full breadth of perceptual experience. That is a testament both to how memorable Thomson’s accounts were and to how compelling Seth’s writing is that I believed his model probably could.
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Science Corner: Bird-Brained Schematic
Popular idioms aside, birds can actually be quite intelligent, with some species demonstrating the ability to use tools and to develop complex social dynamics. This despite some substantial differences in the anatomy of bird brains compared to those of mammals, particularly humans. A recent set of publications revealed stronger similarities at the level of cellular organization and the way neurons are connected even without the same higher-level anatomical organization. More specifically, bird brains lack a cerebral cortex, an anatomical feature of mammal brains, but they do have pallium which were found to be wired like the cortex.
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Science Corner: Seeing is Remembering
My mom tells a story of the day she believes she watched me learn object permanence. I was playing with a farm set; I’d drop all of the people and farm animals out of sight behind the barn, then gleefully move it to prove my toys were all still there. We all figure out at a very early age that our moms, our dads, our toys and everything else are persistent objects that we can see again and again. We learn this feature of reality well before we are aware of our own thought process, so most of us never a chance to reflect on how fundamental this concept is to our cognition, or what life might be like if our minds worked differently.
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Science Corner: S-U-C-C-E-S… Leave off the Last ‘S’ for Science!
Since I’m interested in the challenges of science communication, I enjoyed this exploration of how to apply the science of communication to communicating science. (Although I’m not overly fond of the terms ‘science denial’ or ‘science denier’ for reasons related to my thinking here.) Even if science isn’t your thing, the very practical insights and tips are relevant to any situation where you are communicating with people who understand the world differently from yourself. For example, the advice seems just as applicable to the challenge of clarifying misconceptions about the Bible. [Read more…] about Science Corner: S-U-C-C-E-S… Leave off the Last ‘S’ for Science!