Links With Your Coffee - Thursday
- denialism blog : Now I can't wait to see the Golden Compass (what kind of daemon do you have?)
- Not-so-deliberate: The decisive power of what you don't know you know: Sciam Observations
When we choose between two courses of action, are we aware of all the things that influence that decision? Particularly when deliberation leads us to take a less familiar or more difficult course, scientists often refer to a decision as an act of "cognitive control." Such calculated decisions were once assumed to be influenced only by consciously perceived information, especially when the decision involved preparation for some action. But a recent paper by Hakwan Lau and Richard Passingham, "Unconscious Activation of the Cognitive Control System in the Human Prefrontal Cortex," demonstrates that the influences we are not aware of can hold greater sway than those we can consciously reject.
- Cognitive Daily: Can you "use the force" to find things faster?
People who study visual search have found anecdotally that just "relaxing" and looking for objects based on "gut instinct" can often be more effective than actively directing attention to a search. Jeremy Wolfe calls this "relax" strategy "using the force." You can try it out. You'll be looking at a figure with two types of shapes:
- YouTube - Super News! "Goodbye, Mr. Rove" (Against All Odds)
America’s Lagging Health Care System - New York Times
Americans are increasingly frustrated about the subpar performance of this country’s fragmented health care system, and with good reason. A new survey of patients in seven industrialized nations underscores just how badly sick Americans fare compared with patients in other nations. One-third of the American respondents felt their system is so dysfunctional that it needs to be rebuilt completely — the highest rate in any country surveyed. The system was given poor scores both by low-income, uninsured patients and by many higher-income patients.- OVERCOMPENSATING: The Journal Comic With a Seething Disdain for Reality.
Comments
Re: The Force - there was something last month that came out regarding sight and predator awareness in our primitive ancestors. It turns out that while we may consciously scan the terrain for say a lion and see nothing our unconscious vision is very good at separating the patterns of predators from game etc out of the background.
I don't see how that should be surprising. If you consciously notice the "wrong," first image, you are able to make a conscious decision, without subconscious influence.
Or is the article trying to make it surprising that we notice, or are affected by subconscious things? I thought Tyler Durden proved that already.
That Cognitive Daily thing with the split circles had a really retarded flaw. A cultural, language-script bias: I read left to right, top to bottom. OF COURSE I'm gonna spot the object in the first image quicker... That was really dumb...
I get a feeling this is all connected to chess, though. When you start out, you make all your moves strictly based on "conscious" decision making: If I do this, then he'll do that, and then I can do that... But as you get better at the game, the easier moves (the early moves, particularly) are made with a different decision making process -- you can "just see it." And except for the occasional gaffe, players are remarkably capable of telling the difference between a position that requires deeper scrutiny (the "conscious" process), and one that you can "just see."
It's an interesting example of how our brain -- and other things in nature -- does things that we do not yet understand. The best description I've seen for it "Pattern Recognition." Some descriptions I've seen, which I don't like, include "intuition," "magic," "God," and "The Force." Oh yeah, and "gut instinct."
Dagnabbit, I'm bummed nobody has anything to say in this thread :/ I think that's the best comment I've made on this blog for a long time :)
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