On Being a Baby

children are like the R&D department of the human species. They???re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you???re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don???t have if you???re actually making things happen in the world. And when you???re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don???t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We???re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we???re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

via seedmagazine.com via mocost

On the topic of Children's Day, some up to the minute research-fueled developmental psychology thinking about just what it is like to really be a child, and no, not some cheap faux inner-child, but the real thing, the real McCoy, the real child. And why is it they are the very strange little creatures that they are, and why might Nature find them being this way is so important to its Humanity.

The Mind Bites

Mind bites presents 83 beautifully illustrated reasons why I fled from Psychology.

characteristic pseudoscience cynicism so thick, you could cut it with a knife -- I'm sure to be the object of someone's RDD for that remark.

"This and that from the research into the mind and brain.

"If you have an interesting study, please flickr message me the finding and reference and I'll make it into a mindbite when I have a mo."

Learning Makes Itself Invisible

Learning SHOULD Be Fun: Tom Stafford writes "In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n_i4b4Wy-M&hl=en&fs=1]
You can try this for yourself, either in any teaching you do, or any learning. Often we will get blocked at a particular stage in our learning. A normal response is to try harder, and to focus more on what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong. Sometimes this helps, but sometimes it just digs us further into our rut. The way out of the rut is to re-focus on experiencing again."

See also Tom's essay on the always-additive nature of learning at School of Everything: "Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or do something that you couldn't appreciate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big picture. If you learn the meaning of a new word, you won't be able to ignore it like you did previously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won't ever be able to see cups like you used to before."

Happiness is contagious

Los Angeles Times: "Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor’s sister’s friend can give you a 5.6% boost.

“Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don’t even know,”"

apropos to the Season, and yet another cognitive chicken and egg problem elegantly solved by a simple cultural ritual

The dance of consciousness

Mind Hacks - The dance of consciousness: "Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us."

As Bucky Fuller famously observed: "I seem to be a VERB."

Purves Lab: See For Yourself

Purves Lab / See For Yourself: Explore how the research in the Purves Lab seeks to explain why we see and hear what we do. Several new demos have been added to the See For Yourself section of the website.

Things are not what they seem. nor are they otherwise -- I'm delighted to report that the Dale Purvis group at Duke U have scored in the Top 100 Scientific Discoveries of 2007 for their work on the deep links between music and vocal speech. Mind you, I told Dale his work was "the most significant advance in our theory of music since Pythagoras (or even Ptolemy)" which IMHO makes their research way more than just the top of 2007

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer - Google Tech Talks September, 21 2007.

ABSTRACT: Brain and computer were wed mid-twentieth century by the McCulloch-Pitts model neuron and Hodgkin-Huxley equations for digital firing in biological neurons. Since then, brain neurons, synapses, firings and networks have been considered analogous to electronic switches, states and circuits in classical computers. But despite extraordinary advances and bold predictions, consciousness seems ever more elusive.