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POPSMind, body and goal: the embodied cognition revolutionby
einbar Yesterday 12:01 AM 
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"In one particularly striking study, Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it. They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it".
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POPSTutorial: Concrete vs. Abstract Thinking
The Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham "ends with the narrator changing his mind from rejecting green eggs and ham under any circumstances to trying them and actually liking them. At a concrete level of understanding, the story is about a stubborn person changing his mind. At a more abstract level of understanding, it is about people in general being capable of modifying their thoughts and desires even when they are convinced that they cannot or do not want to do so. This more abstract level of understanding can be appreciated by two and three year old children only if the higher level of meaning comes out of a discussion of the book with a more mature adult. At older ages and higher levels of thinking, this same process of more mature thinkers facilitating higher levels of abstraction in less mature thinkers characterizes the process of teaching abstract thinking. For example, this is how great philosophers, like Socrates and Plato, taught their pupils how to think abstractly. "
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POPSInternet use could improve brain function and speed up decision-making Previous studies have warned that too much computer use could be responsible for increasing levels of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr Gary Small, director of the memory and ageing research centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "Young people are growing up immersed in this technology and their brains are more malleable, more plastic and changing than with older brains," he said.
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POPSInternet 'speeds up decision making and brain function' "The next generation, as (Charles) Darwin suggests, will adapt to this environment. Those who become really good at technology will have a survival advantage - they will have a higher level of economic success and their progeny will be better off." The brains of 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76 were scanned for the study.
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POPSChalmers Johnson on the "Pentagon Bailout" "There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700 billion that the U.S. government is thinking of throwing away on rich New York bankers who have been ripping us off for the past few years and then letting greed drive their businesses into a variety of ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon. "
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POPSHow to Improve Your Self-Control Some people seem to find it easy to resist temptation while others can be relied on to always yield to self-gratification. To a certain extent we have to accept our starting point on the self-control sliding scale and do the best we can with it. 3. How to improve your self-control: Global processing. This means trying to focus on the wood rather than the trees. Abstract reasoning. This means trying to avoid considering the specific details of the situation at hand in favour of thinking about how actions fit into an overall framework - being philosophical. High-level categorisation. This means thinking about high-level concepts rather than specific instances. Any long-term project, whether in business, academia or elsewhere can easily get bogged down by focusing too much on the minutiae of everyday processes and forgetting the ultimate goal.
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POPS“Thinking about Not-Thinking”: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neural response linked to conceptual processing in regions of the default network, suggesting that "meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation."
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POPSThe Body Thinks One of the dangers of some current excitement about AI etc is that it sees the brain as a supercomputer with a bit of meat hanging from it. The last couple of decades in reality show far more research and philosophy into the body as a major, inseparable aspect of thinking, and more importantly feeling, the latter, it has been cogently argued, itself the foundation of reflective thinking.
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POPSCan the Singularity Save Us From Ourselves? Persons who believe firmly in the inevitability of The Singularity might be surprised to learn that the default human society is the closed society, resistant to change. Most of them have never known anything but open societies, born of western civilization’s restless urge to expand intellectual horizons. They live in an exceptional time, in an exceptional society, yet somehow believe it to be the human default. That type of blindness comes from forgetting to study history.
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POPSExploring The Mechanics Of Judgment & Beliefs "We already knew that some parts of the brain are involved in specific aspects of perception and motor control, but many doubted that an abstract high-level cognitive process like understanding another person's thoughts would be conducted in its own private patch of cortex," Kanwisher says.
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POPSHow to Visualize Twitter A great post showing various tools that can be used to visualize the conversations and power of Twitter. Some great examples and screenshots.
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POPSJezebel's response to WP article by Charlotte Allen I love Twitter. I get exposed to things that I am not exposed to. Here is a great response (paragraph by paragraph) to Charlotte Allen's OP-ED piece on Sunday for the Washington Post. "Tongue-In-Cheek"? What a load of bullshit!?! There are lots of responses and all I can say is that article (if you want to call it that) is offensive and full of shit. I really hate it when women hate themselves. Hum, I wonder what Charlotte Allen is thinking or is she going to respond? I love that the editor of the WP responded for her.
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POPSCreating Friendly AI Imagine, for a moment, that you walk up and punch an AI in the nose. Does the AI punch back? Perhaps and perhaps not, but punching back will not be instinctive. A sufficiently young AI might stand there and think: "Hm. Someone's fist just bumped into my nose." In a punched human, blood races, adrenaline pumps, the hands form fists, the stance changes, all without conscious attention. For a young AI, focus of attention shifts in response to an unexpected negative event - and that's all.
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POPSMind Reading Is Now Possible "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.
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POPSIs national security more important than the rights of individuals? If we place "national security" above the basic constitutional rights of citizens, and before the inalienable human rights which are bestowed upon all men by our Creator, exactly what is it that we are we fighting for? National security rests solely in securing and preserving the sanctity of those rights. What has been misunderstood is the definition of "nation." The security of the nation does not just mean protecting land or physical structures. The nation is not embodied in any physical building, nor in any abstract ideology. The nation is embodied in the individual citizens who live in it. The People are the nation, and the nation cannot exist without the People. The national security of any nation can only be assessed by examining the security of the freedoms and liberties of the People in that nation. (L.c.)
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POPSAn argument for better restraint in prescribing brain meds I have lived with depression since I was about 6 years old. I found myself wary about depression medications as they became popular, thinking, these things are altering you BRAIN, for God's sake, these are chemicals with effects on the tissues that have you apprehending who you ARE, interpreting sensory data, making decisions! It is a delicate precision instrument that should not be fucked with chemically when one can help its problems organically (say, with cognitive therapy, persistence in behaviors counter to those the illness compels, etc.) Brain drugs most definitely have their place, but they have seeped out of that place in the last 25 years or so. For the sake of general public safety and health, I hope that trend reverses itself. If more folks like this Doc speak up, there is hope for that.
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POPSInfant Collaborators & the Evolution of Speech Full paper We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill – as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of chimpanzees – and then at a version based on shared intentionality – as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of human 1- and 2-year-olds. We thus see the following transformations: gaze following into joint attention, social manipulation into cooperative communication, group activity into collaboration, and social learning into instructed learning. We conclude by highlighting the role that shared intentionality may play in integrating more biologically based and more culturally based theories of human development.
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POPSThinking Like Rats: Why Humans Fail To Act Tough words! I do think though, that Man's incredible ability to adapt to his surroundings is "enabling" him to be able to put up with an unfathomable amount of shit, before it really hits the fan...so to speak. (pollution, climate change, global hunger, overpopulation, war etc) Comfort zones are incredibly difficult to give up. I hope that changes...and soon!
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POPSI'M GAME Certainly there are skeptics who disagree with these researchers and claim that no amount of "mental aerobics" can prevent a decline in one's brain functioning... The writer of this article, Victoria Wesseler is a lifestyle, gardening and culinary writer and a weekly featured columnist. Is good to know how others could "brain exercise"...For me being in clipmarks do the same because I spend hours and not even realize how much time has flown by
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POPSHow'd they steal my idea? As part of my mental health clinic, I've been using hipness to promote my patients attainment of long term happiness. Now I see that collecting and tagging those elements can be sold. Maybe I'm in the wrong business?
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POPSThe Scientific Method - Lecture Notes This is just a Table of Contents. See here for the notes themselves: http://www.inquiringminds.org/education/syllabus-cotton-scalise-lecture-notes.html Check out the source to, there's excellent material there for teachers for example (about science, skepticism, pseudoscience, etc.).
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POPSColourful beginning for humanity "Colour symbolism is an abstraction and we cannot work this abstraction without language; so this is a proxy for trying to find in the archaeological record real echoes for the emergence of language," Dr Barham told the British Association's Science Festival.
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