My clay is setting. It’s a polymer clay, so first you squish it without mercy until it gets soft enough to work. Next you squish it carefully and oh so gently into the shape you want. Then you give it a while until it gets a bit harder. After that, you can toss it around …
In episode 13 of “The Lobby,” I interviewed Chris Marr, of The Content Marketing Academy. Recently, I caught an episode of his podcast. He was talking about the Rubik’s cube, and how he decided to give himself a challenge and learn to solve it. He asked for folk to share their own experiences with this …
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The amazing monkey manages to muster more memory than the miserable mind of man For certain tasks involving short term and working memory, our nearest relatives do better than we do. Check out this YouTube video to watch the chimps make us look like chumps. Chimp vs human! – Working Memory test
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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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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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 …