Tag: cognition
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Unconscious Plagiarism
Cryptomnesia, according to Wikipedia, is “a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else”. Newsweek has an article discussing this phenomenon; including what appear to be genuine cases of cryptomnesia and the novel tests being conducted by…
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Epiphanies Through Daydreams
Research aimed at discovering how ‘Eureka moments’ are triggered and how these moments of clarity and insight differ from typical methodical reasoning has found that not only are epiphanies more likely when we’re daydreaming, but our state of mind before we tackle a problem is also crucial. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious…
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The Benefits of Child Bilingualism
Outside of the UK, bilingualism (or even trilingualism+) is the norm in Europe and, in some countries and/or regions, even expected. With that said, The Economist takes a look at the effect bilingualism has on a child’s brain. Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that…
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Cognitive Benefits of Exercise
Walter van den Broek (AKA Dr Shock) provides a summary of the research on the neuroscience of exercise, or: the cognitive benefits of an active lifestyle. Exercise⊠improves learning and intelligence scores. increases the resilience of the brain in later life resulting in a cognitive reserve. [attenuates] the decline of memory, cortex and hippocampus atrophy…
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Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures
Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bachâthe Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…
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Social Cognition and Staving Off Dementia
A longitudinal study of health and mental lucidity in the agedâfocusing on the huge retirement community of Laguna Woods Village south of Los Angelesâis starting to show some results. From studying members of the so-called ‘super memory club’ (people aged 90+ with near-perfect cognitive abilities) it is being suggested that not all mental activities are…
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Thought Suppression
After reading this roundup of research into the psychology of thought suppression you will see that the results are fairly conclusive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance. From research into substance cravings, so-called ‘intrusive’ memories, and even depression, thought suppression has been shown to not work and the act of remembering when attempting to suppress has been…
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The Infant Brain, Redux
An interesting follow-up if you enjoyed reading about the development of the infant brain last week: Seed Magazine interviews Alison Gopnik, asking about her research and “why everything we think we know about babies is wrong“. Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that? AG: It’s related to…
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Development of the Infant Brain
Looking primarily at the research of Alison Gopnik, Jonah Lehrer looks at the development of the infant brain. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even…