Letters Remain

Tag: neuroscience

  • What’s Wrong With ‘Neurobabble’?

    We know that irrelevant neuroscience jargon increases the persuasiveness of arguments, but why is the current trend of finding a neural explanation for much of human behaviour a dangerous thing? In his warning against reductionism and trusting in neural explanations for largely psychological phenomena, Tyler Burge, Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, describes the three things wrong…

  • Timed Exposure Can Be As Good As Practice

    We know that deliberate practice is an important part of learning (and mastering) new skills–but what role, if any, does mere passive exposure play? Can relevant background stimulation help us to reduce the amount of effort and practice necessary to master a skill? To answer these questions Jonah Lehrer contacted the authors of a recent paper studying exactly…

  • The Science Behind Good Presentations

    We know that cluttered presentations and those with paragraphs of text per slide aren’t good and that the 10/20/30 rule is a guideline generally worth adhering to, but why? Could there be a scientific basis for why some presentations are better than others? Chris Atherton, an applied cognitive psychologist at the UK’s University of Central…

  • Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness

    The addition of “irrelevant talk about neuroscience” makes a previously bad psychological explanation much more persuasive and acceptable. Luckily experts are not fooled by this addition of spurious neuroscience, but as an in-depth look at the study shows, almost all non-experts (including neuroscience students) are fooled and persuaded by the addition of logically irrelevant neuroscience…

  • The Neuroscience of Comedy

    There is one essential condition required in comedy: “some kind of incongruity between two elements […], resolved in a playful or unexpected way”. That’s according to a fairly comprehensive article summarising the neuroscience research conducted to discover more about the phenomenon of why we find things funny (or not). Of particular interest was how we…

  • Penny/Dollar Auction Psychology (The Workings of Swoopo)

    I first heard of the bidding fee scheme/online auction site Swoopo in a Coding Horror post that takes a look at the company’s business plan, calling it “pure, distilled evil”. It’s also a pretty simple (or, as the post said, “brilliantly evil”) plan: It’s almost an exploit of human nature itself. Once you’ve bid on…

  • Seeing with Tongues

    A new breakthrough device, recently covered in Scientific American, restores partial eyesight to the blind by using sensors in the tongue to send sign signals to the brain.  The research comes from neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. Experiments have shown that: within 15 minutes of using the device, blind people can begin interpreting spatial information via the…

  • The Neuroscience of Driving

    Elderly drivers are the most dangerous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news highlighting accidents involving the aged. This is not necessarily the case, research is showing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cognitive functions. In a comprehensive article looking at the neuroscience of driving,…

  • Information Gaps and Knowledge Rewards

    Starting with two great examples of marketing through curiosity (the Hot Wheels mystery car and California Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Anderson looks at how you can use ‘information gaps’ to drive curiosity and then interaction with your customers. Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious.…

  • 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…