Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:21 — 1.5MB) | Embed
a fun feathered fact Did you know that birds can be superstitious? No, really, I’m not making it up. In the episode, I said I’d provide one link, but I decided to give you two instead. Here’s a short YouTube video about the experiment. Pigeon Superstition Experiment And here’s an approximately 13-minute lecture on the …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:43 — 3.9MB) | Embed
me think me smart me think smart In this episode, we examine the evidence for increased intelligence do to the placebo effect. This study found no placebo effect. In fact, expecting to do better caused people to do worse. Cognition and the Placebo Effect – Dissociating Subjective Perception and Actual Performance In this article, being …
During my interview with Arthur Benjamin, he spoke briefly about the joy of discovering something in mathematics, even if one is relatively certain that the given relationship has been known for years, or even centuries. Along the same lines, I’ve been playing with right triangles of late. They are called Pythagorean triples—three numbers, a, b, …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:27 — 4.5MB) | Embed
It doesn’t have to be true to be useful Today we talk about the placebo effect—when an inactive substance can mimic the action of medicine or other therapies. Here’s a review of many studies and experiments done on the placebo effect. How Placebos Change the Patient’s Brain And here’s a link to episode 25, which …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:26 — 3.1MB) | Embed
Lost in the mountains, with no magic There doesn’t seem to be any one thing that could transform you into a genius, and the search is complicated by exaggeration and fabrication within the research. Here’s a paper on where your idea of your self, and where the circuits that let you regulate said self live. …
I just finished this morning’s session with the vOICe. My performance was less effective than the last few sessions, so far as reach and grab, or reach and get close. I only had visual qualia a few times. More than once, I “saw” it, and then reached for the wrong spot, only to find that …
It’s called, the Tetris effect. People who have played the game Tetris often find that they will start to see those falling blocks as they doze off, as they are just waking up, or even when they blink from time to time as they go about their lives. Though named after one rather addictive video …
I was chatting on Twitter back and forth with @seeingwithsound about the vOICe. My Twitter handle is @lobbyandlab if you’d like to join the conversation. I mentioned that my echo location seemed to have improved since I began working with the vOICe. @seeingwithsound replied that though it was only anecdotal evidence, he’d noticed that his …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:59 — 2.7MB) | Embed
Which part of the brain, off on and when There is nothing simple about the brain. Wherein certain skills can be improved by shutting down one part, those same skills may require increasing activity in another. Here’s a collection of short videos on the flow state of consciousness. The Optimized Brain: A Workshop on FlowStates …