Dreams

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200710/dreams-night-school?page=3


As I mentioned in class on Monday, I’m very interested on why we dream, so I decided to research the topic. A study done by Antti Revonsuo on rats, showed that rats who were deprived of REM(the part of the sleep cycle in which you dream) sleep were unable to preform basic survival skills. Revonsuo believes this is because dreaming helps one practice for real life danger. A majority of our dreams involve threats that we could come into contact with in everyday life(i.e. car accident, robbery, attack) because they’re setting the stage for us to practice how to function in these situations. However, many researchers believe that dreams do more than help us practice for potential threats. They can also help us learn and solve problems in a creative way. Either way, dreaming doesn’t seem as senseless as it use to.

Improving on Tradition

I wanted to share two interesting examples of people trying to improve everyday systems for the sake of cognitive optimization.

The first is a simple attempt to improve the layout of the keyboard, which was originally designed to slow typing down. The Dvorak Simplified keyboard was developed in the 30's, and has been shown to allow for significantly faster typing speeds, but has yet to become widely adopted. More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

The second interesting example is a "constructed language" called Ithkiul. The most interesting and relevant aspect of this creation is the claim that "a fluent speaker of Ithkuil... would think 'about five or six times as fast' as a speaker of a typical natural language."

More on that here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil#Possible_advantages

And to hear an example of how the language sounds, click here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ithkuil_sentence.ogg

Could a speaking a different language really increase the speed of one's thinking ability?

Are languages and other evolved media of communication like typewriters inherently flawed by their organic nature, or are they do they exemplify a give and take necessary for cognitive systems to be adapted by large populations?

RSA Animate – Language as a Window into Human Nature

RSA Animate – Language as a Window into Human Nature

This isn't a post just sending it out for you too watch.

RSA is one of my favorite sites, especially when they animate these fantastic lectures.

-Francesca

God on the Brain

http://documentaryheaven.com/god-on-the-brain/#

To continue with the video we watched last class, I found a documentary I watched a few weeks ago that featured Dr. Ramachandran's experiments on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. The documentary focuses on temporal lobe epilepsy and the brains relationship to religion.

I would definitely recommend watching the whole thing, but those pressed for time can find the segment on Dr. Ramachandran at about 18:30 into the video. The experiment was like the one we saw in the video during class. He measured subjects's galvanic skin responses to words flashing on a screen. He performed this experiment on people with temporal lobe epilepsy and people without. The words were a mix of neutral, religious and sexual. He found that epileptic patients had more intense responses to religious words, and the normal subjects had more intense responses to sexual words (which is normal).

Also, at around 22 minutes in, there's a really interesting segment on a Canadian scientist who is experimenting with artificial magnetic fields that go across the temporal lobe and allegedly creates the same religious sensation that an epileptic person would have. Again, I would definitely recommend watching the whole thing, but if not that's fine. I would love to hear your thoughts on these experiments and anything related to the topic.

-Taylor Quinn

Your mind's eye

http://www.all-about-psychology.com/optical-illusions.html

This video is a little bit long..but it's definitely worth watching. Scroll down a little bit and it is the first video on the page by Al seckel. He is a scientist who does extensive research on visual illusions and how different people perceive them and so forth. He makes a point of showing how things that look the same can become very different by a simple change. Our brains really don't need a lot of information to make something different from another. Another very interesting bit- He shows an image of a cross with two balls crossing over one another. He does it the first time with no noise, and the second time with a little sound effect. Now, the balls seem to be bouncing off one another, however they are in fact doing the same thing as they were the first time. Just by hearing this little noise our brain sees it as being different and our visual perception changes. Definitely make sure you try to watch the whole thing, there are definitely some funny parts to it as well. Especially the little girl drawing the picture of her mommy "pole dancing" and the true meanings behind all of these examples.