Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Cognitive Science

That may be bad news for me, but is it bad news for people in general? Does the fact that as much as fifty percent of our waking hours find us failing to focus on the task at hand represent a problem? Michael Corballis doesn't think so, and with The Wandering Mind, he shows us why, rehabilitating woolgathering and revealing its...

What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they ve found have much to teach us.

In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths show how algorithms developed for computers also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have...

The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the...

Even if you've never seen a zombie movie or television show, you could identify an undead ghoul if you saw one. With their endless wandering, lumbering gait, insatiable hunger, antisocial behavior, and apparently memory-less existence, zombies are the walking nightmares of our deepest fears. What do these characteristic behaviors reveal about the inner workings of the zombie mind? Could we diagnose zombism as a neurological condition by studying their behavior? In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply...

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once observed, "Will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see."

Author J. N. Schad takes this idea and looks at the inner workings of the brain to explain the thoughts, perceptions, actions, and mysteries of the human mind. He maintains that the information we acquire and the dynamic "a priory" state of the mind are what render our life experiences and decisions. He makes a case for this by analyzing brain functions and the way the brain processes information.

All of this boils down to one question: What...

Why psychology is in peril as a scientific discipline--and how to save it

Psychological science has made extraordinary discoveries about the human mind, but can we trust everything its practitioners are telling us? In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that a lot of research in psychology is based on weak evidence, questionable practices, and sometimes even fraud. The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology diagnoses the ills besetting the discipline today and proposes sensible, practical solutions to ensure that it remains a legitimate and reliable science in...

Making art has always been 'costly' (money, time, political threats, survival fitness, ...). So why do we bother? It's all part of what prevents human brains (as opposed to those of animals and computers) from being terribly maladaptive.

The key lies in (Piaget's) constructivism. While we might intuit that meaning is conveyed via a medium/media, how then is art (e.g., the Mona Lisa) distinguished from artifact (e.g., a light bulb)? The book reconsiders the notions of 'intelligence' and 'communication' from a multidisciplinary array of discourses, ultimately proposing a...

It's happened to all of us at some point. You walk into the kitchen, or flip open your laptop, or stride confidently up to a lectern, filled with purpose--and suddenly haven't the foggiest idea what you're doing. Welcome to your idiot brain.

Yes, it is an absolute marvel in some respects--the seat of our consciousness, the pinnacle (so far) of evolutionary progress, and the engine of all human experience--but your brain is also messy, fallible, and about 50,000 years out-of-date. We cling to superstitions, remember faces but not names, miss things sitting right in front of us, and...

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our...