I read this yesterday. It's so incredibly sad, and also weird that just a few days ago I read his final Metafilter post about character actors. I didn't know him or anything, but it was a bit odd to think that we sort of "crossed paths" in that Internet sense just days before he died. RIP, Bill.

Edit: I just did a quick browse through his Twitter feed and the guy was genuinely funny.

Edit 2: One of my favorites, he tweeted on April 19th - "is considering adding "Sent from my iPhone" to all his outgoing email, allowing him to type with reckless abandon and brevity."

My suggestions (the difficulty levels are kind of vague):

Introductory Books:

• Clark, Mindware: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Crane, The Mechanical Mind
• Gardner, The Mind's New Science

Lower-level Books:

• Ariely, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality
• Baron, Thinking and Deciding
• Damasio, Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza
• Dennett, Consciousness Explained
• Eysenck and Keane, Cognitive Psychology
• Gazzaniga, Human
• Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun, Cognitive Neuroscience
• Pinker, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate
• Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain

Mid-level Books:

• Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
• Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs and Supersizing the Mind
• Gigerenzer, Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox
• Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Kahneman and Tversky, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
• Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
• Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
• Johnson-Laird, How We Reason
• Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving
• Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
• Sloman, Causal Models
• Varela, Thompson and Roch, The Embodied Mind

Advanced Books:

• Anderson, The Adaptive Character of Thought
• Churchland and Sejnowski, The Computational Brain
• Koch, The Quest for Consciousness
• Marr, Vision
• Oaksford and Chater, Bayesian Rationality
• Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
• Rumelhart and McClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing

This is just not true and is nothing more than folk wisdom. Several studies, e.g. this one, have found that while intelligence correlates positively with anxiety in people with anxiety disorders, it correlates negatively with intelligence in the general population. Neuroticism, which is the propensity to be affected by negative emotions such as anxiety and low mood, has no correlation with intelligence (in fact the correlation is negative unless you account for test anxiety).

How anxious/unhappy we are and how intelligent we are rely on quite different mechanisms and being of high/low intelligence doesn't really affect your susceptibility to negative emotion. If you're a neurotic/anxious person, then the statement "ignorance is bliss" makes sense to you because your view of the world is coloured by your tendency to view everything negatively, but that doesn't make it objectively true.

I'm sure there is money to be made in neuromarketing, but honestly, the whole industry is a sham. Neuromarketing twists and exaggerates what we know about the brain to tell naïve people the same thing a survey or an eye-tracker would. Somehow, showing that "it happens in the brain" makes it more real. Neuromarketing in its self is a great marketing ploy that harnesses our biases to believe something more when brain pictures are involved. Scott Lillianfeld wrote a great book on the topic.

With that rant over, there's a huge demand for data scientists right now and research skills from cognitive science lend themselves well to market research.

and here's the link to the actual article.

NOTE: Alzheimer's manifested in the brain, but that was not necessarily reflected behaviorally.

EDIT: title should read "later development of Alzheimer's"

This coincides with the ideas in "The Power of Habit". Each habit is a trigger, action, and reward. Once the habit is established firmly, you can reduce or even eliminate the reward and the habit will still happen - trigger, action, trigger, action. To change the habit, you have to catch the trigger and replace it with a different action that gets a reward. You can't just eliminate the action. That doesn't work. The brain doesn't deal with "not" or nothingness very well.

In this talk. Deb Roy shows how the seemingly random "ga ga" slowly evolves into the word "water" (it's quite beautiful, the transition). I wonder if babies are able to interpret each others "ga ga"s and have conversations.

Also very interesting and new is a meta-analysis of WM studies, “Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic Review” (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme). The general summary is that the 20-odd studies didn't transfer very much to other tasks regardless of moderators like age.

And if you're interested in the topic, I've been building up a meta-analysis of my own for just n-back & IQ: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#meta-analysis

Finally, still being revised is a study by Stephenson & Halpern: "Improved fluid intelligence limited to working memory capacity using intensive n-back tasks with a visuospatial component". Scuttlebutt is that they used audio n-back and found no transfer to matrix IQ tests. I'm looking forward to this one.

Needless to say, the DNB mailing list has not been pleased by all this.

I'd like to make a note about this title, and how the article is represented, and further, how some results can be misleading:

First of all, it's been known for a while, now, that aerobic activity stimulates neuroplasticity. However, it's only a minor, tiny deterrent to the neurodegenerative effects of things Alzheimer's and Dementia. If you're already starting to see the effects, it could be too late to slow progress.

Secondly, a lot of things are associated with "slowing progression of Alzheimer's" and not a single one yet is a "causation", these are simply correlations. And there are a ton of them. In fact, I'm working on some Alzheimer's data at this very moment. One of the interesting findings is that years of education are associated with "later onset" ... or is it? Well, the (probable) fact of the matter is that with more education, you have more ability to adapt to losing some cognitive function (such as memory), and most likely, you're really good at hiding the disease. And when it appears, it's far too late.

Apparently - yes. If you think verbally (with internal speech, pronouncing words in you mind), it is now technically possible to read your inner speech. Also, if you are dreaming about some actions (and thus, possibly, if you are imagining doing certain actions; see mirror neurons and everything), these actions can also be read.

The caveat though is that to read your mind

• you'll have to be placed in a giant fMRI machine
• It would take hours, or at least dozens of minutes (!) to answer even a simplest question, like "is he now thinking DOG or TABLE" (choose one out of two), and you'll have to provide "templates" for both DOG and TABLE upfront ("Now please think TABLE really-really hard").

So although it gradually becomes more and more possible, still right now mind-reading can not be implemented in practice. However I would not answer a decisive "NO" to this question. To some extent it is already "yes", and no doubt there will be further developments in this area.

I don't think it's about having all the information, it's about processing natural language into a question the computer can understand. Engadget has an interview with one of the people working on Watson which is pretty interesting.

If I remember correctly Dan Ariely mentions similar experiments in his book Predictably Irrational. It actually goes even further. Our most basic desires like taste and smell can be manipulated in predictable ways. For example you can conduct an experiment where you influence how much someone likes the taste of beer or chocolate. We like to think of our tastes and opinions as reflecting a 'unique' and 'independent' self but that's simply not the case. We can be manipulated quite easily.

Thich Nhat Hanh appears to be the key figure regarding mindfulness. I enjoy his book, "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching", but it's far more reaching than just mindfulness practice as it gets into buddhism itself. He does cover mindfulness too, though. I believe he's written other books that focus more on the practice.

Regarding sitting meditation, I first learned from this youtube clip. It gets somewhat wacky, but the actual "how to" part is legit. Some good books I've read since then are:

• "Happy to Burn" - Roger Wells (It was referenced in the "Mind Performance Hacks" book)

• "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" - Shunryu Suzuki

• "Mindfulness in Plain English" - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana (There's a free copy of an earlier edition on the internet somewhere)

Dan Ariely talked about something like this in Predictably Irrational, where Israelis judges were more inclined to give parole to prisoners at certain hours of the day and less inclined at others. The hours they were more inclined were those after eating or food breaks.

If you are fascinated by rationality, decision making, behavioral economics etc., Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a great read.

Robert Cialdini in his book Influence: Science and Practice (p164f) mentions that food makes people more relaxed and open to others opinions, that is why e.g. in politics votes are being swayed over dinners. further he goes on:

> [Razran (1938 & 1940)] found that his subjects became fonder of people and things they experienced while they were eating.

So, I guess that makes a clear case: We like what we encounter while eating. And obviously if you add some romance, a bit of alcohol, nice music, pleasant conversation, good perfumes (& pheromones), and that people grow to like things more that they spend longer time with - dinners are a good first date. Maybe the principle of consistency also plays a role - once you commit to spending a dinner with someone you will try to justify to yourself that you did so, by 'inventing' more reasons. Additionally, the spending-dinner-together, especially if the less choosy partner (usually the male) pays might create a certain feeling of indebtedness that could also lead to further dates/actions.

But tbh I think there is too much (socially constructed) pressure and other first dates might be more valuable, e.g. a coffee (caffeine increases the heart rate, which in turn is often interpreted by the one experiencing it as physical arousal as reaction to the other person) with cake (sweet, pleasant + warm coffee = excellent creation of sympathy) that might be a better version.

I'm not sure where that is from, but there was a study indicating that couples that are rated as "not matching" by outsiders often met during emotional events - e.g. rollercoasters, concerts, ... take your date to some exciting place - that gives you endorphins and other fun hormones which create a stronger bonding.

That would require your brain to be more powerful than wolfram alpha and google's servers combined. We are just rational enough to have gotten where we are and no more. (Re)read "Predictably Irrational" and notice that we're confused mostly by situations we would never encounter in the wild.

This answers me greatly, not at you but at all these irresponsible health care practitioners f-cking something so delicate and amazing as someone's life because they don't care, can't be bothered or don't want to be there.
It's one of the main reasons, apart from the fact that I enjoy and find mental health fascinating, that I want to get into the field.

You can read about these (appointment , progression dynamic etc) in this article as well

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/welcome_to_the_decade_of_games.html

The complete list of game mechanics can be found here http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/

EDIT:Added a link

If you enjoyed this, you should definitely read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.. I saw him at SXSW and he points out all kinds of stuff like this.. One of his big examples is how Starbucks doesn't sell donuts because then we would immediately compare them to Dunkin' Donuts and realize we're getting ripped off on Starbucks' coffee..

I'm a PhD student currently studying meditation & attention. I'm early in grad school but here are a couple of my favorites so far. If you put the titles into Google Scholar they should be pretty easy to get, but if you're interested in one and can't find it, PM me your email address & I can send it along.

• This one's a classic:

Valentine, E. R., & Sweet, P. L. G. (1999). Meditation and attention: A comparison of the effects of concentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 2(1), 59–70. doi:10.1080/13674679908406332

• Short term meditation training improves attention:

Tang, Y.-Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feng, S., Lu, Q., Yu, Q., et al. (2007). Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(43), 17152–17156. doi:10.1073/pnas.0707678104

• A good introduction:

Treadway, M., & Lazar, S. (2008). The Neurobiology of Mindfulness. Clinical handbook of mindfulness.

Quick notes:

• If you're unfamiliar with what Dual N-Back is, this is a good place to start reading.
• This is a dual n-back "Training" game heavily influenced by the wonderful Brain Workshop.
• If you experience any technical problems running the game, please let me know what browser and OS you're using in the comments. Thanks!
• Let me know if you would like to see support for another language.

A 2006 study (Science Direct: Abstract: <em>Drivers overtaking bicyclists: Objective data on the effects of riding position, helmet use, vehicle type and apparent gender</em>) found that wearing a helmet would cause drivers to pass more closely to the cyclist. Not quite the same thing, though it's possible that the effect manifests itself between people.

>are the charges against him ones like anthropomorphising ...

I haven't heard such—are you saying that's how you feel?

As with all popular science literature, consider the format, consider the audience. His Africa writing seems to aim at an "around the campfire" travelogue/memoir feel: more than half of "A Primate's Memoir" is devoted to his wanderings through East Africa, and in all of the baboon-centric chapters he only gives the actual results of his research in passing, in the occasional offhand sentence. It's colorful, emotional, personal, and deeply affective writing.

If you want his most rigorous science, read his papers:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=rm+sapolsky

Otherwise, he takes the usual great pains not to misrepresent the research, as do all science writers, which he discusses in his introductions. If you can point to where he fails, I'd be curious to hear it.

Deacon primer - these are my personal notes on his work, as I read through his papers and books. Could be helpful for people here.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A_NphWbHe1giIlBYXdDcAcGiTgKoKF8hvzs8ADnAABE/edit

This sounds really interesting. Unfortunately, I have no experience in this field. But it spontaneously reminded my of this TED talk: At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

Lots of great responses here. I'm just going to chime in with this here TED talk by Jill Bolte about her stroke that left her left brain incommunicado and what that meant for her thinking. Probably most people here have already seen it, but it really is quite amazing enough to repost.

ok, you're probably right.

I read all about it in the programming subreddit when it happened, which is why I was surprised to see it in a different time and place. I'm doing my phd now, and I can't tell the difference between one day ago and one year ago.. how's taht for a cognitive phenomenon?

here's on of the more popular articles from the study. published in Journal of American Medical Association

I'll track down another study and post results from this sample in which they analyzed the college entry exams of the nuns and predicted (with great accuracy) whether they would develop alzheimer's 40+ years later.

Slow integration leads to persistent action potential firing in distal axons of coupled interneurons

Sit still and focus on your breathing.

Mindfulness in Plain English is really not so long and is an easy read. The reason they are longer is because although the idea is simple it takes some time to understand it.

I'm reading The Science of Fear, and read Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and a couple others that approach this topic in the past year. This stuff is amazing and scary and profound. The way our minds waylay us if we're not specifically on point is just crazy. Some of the heuristics work even when you're warned that they're being applied; and even when the RESULTS are pointed out, your mind will still insist that the 'wrong' answer is the 'right' one.

I've just read through the first chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English and It sounds too good to be true, but i'm definatly going to give it ago. How have your experiences of meditation helped you by the way?

I just skimmed the paper. It was about as well-written as this news report.

• In the main experiment, people did a kind of speed/accuracy letter identification task, on which people often make errors. Researchers recorded EEG activity so that they could identify the error-related negativity (ERN), the EEG waveform that we make when we're aware we made an error. It's your cortex saying "oops!"

• Anxiety was measured with two scales after the main experiment. Men and women exhibited very similar levels of anxiety overall.

• In the letter task, men and women were both pretty accurate (93%). This is troubling, because studies like these rely on subjects making lots of errors. (Each subject performed 480 trials. If your average subject got a 7% error rate, that's about 33 trials to analyze.)

• Neither gender nor worry scores alone affected the strength of the ERN response. This is all about the interaction between gender and worry; women who worry had stronger ERNs.

I'm not totally convinced that their conclusions are justified by their stats, but this is not my area of expertise. For those interested, here's the paper link.

Thankfully we have tools that allow us to think and visualize outside the 'here and now' and fully understand the reality of the situation.

How is that racist?

>First attested in 1599. Origin uncertain, but likely from Old Norse nigla and/or nugla.

Source & source.

Or were you trolling me? :P

Yeah, I would have liked to see them engage with Chemero's proposal since he's after just this concern (he even mentions in chapter 5 "one important criterion for goodness of theory is its fruitfulness as a source of models that can then be applied to data"). I took Goldinger et al to be asking whether EC is a fruitful or sterile framework. Empirically that's decided by whether or not it can produce interesting questions/predictions/models so it seemed strange they didn't address Chemero's proposed "guides to discovery in radical EC".

That said, by his own admission, the closest proposal for a model of a topic in "real cognition" Chemero presented was of gear-solving problems (on page 93). If you take that proposal to be on the right track, then maybe it's a start toward a general model of problem solving. Even so, mainstream Cognitive Science has provided a lot of formal models (as Goldinger et al. note), so IMO EC has a long way to go to prove itself as a fecund framework.

I found this paper to be particularly enlightening on the subject. Give it a read!

I guess it is. Most of the evidence I learned was in class from professors and from various reading we were assigned in class that I no longer have access to now that that classes are over. In those classes (I'm still in undergrad so I have tons to learn and most was from freshman and sophomore year) we discussed more of the evolutionary trend in behavior and brain structure as opposed to genetics.

but I remember two of them I bookmarked in a folder after some digging:

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1533/3281.short

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661303003334

edit: I hope those are the right ones. I only skimmed them through. :/

The article appears to be a summary of a fairly large body of work: over the past few years, there's been several relevant papers by the researchers mentioned in the article.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;q=pitta+volman+jacob+glial&amp;btnG=Search&amp;as_sdt=0%2C22&amp;as_ylo=&amp;as_vis=0

That's why I said you had to answer the question honestly as you and your family will be the ones making a statement to police. If you honestly believe that he is a danger to himself or others then you have a moral obligation to report it and have something done. If you don't you need to pursue other options. I'm willing to bet there are some sort of community mental health organizations in your area that could advise you better on this.

If you can get him on meds and in therapy there is hope. He will most likely have relapses the rest of his life with an occasional hospitalization required to adjust his medication.

This video on neuroplasticity popped up the other day and I was impressed with the advances they are making in treating schizophrenia and PTSD. If you can get him into therapy you might see if your doctors would consider methods along those lines. I believe the game they have them playing in the video is something similar to the Dual N-back game. If you want to try to get him to play I wouldn't propose it as a cure to his problem because he will most likely react negatively towards and consider it an "evil". If instead you let him catch you playing it yourself and hype it a bit he might want to play it just for shits and giggles.

Good luck, what you're dealing with is pretty rough stuff.

Dude.. NEVER install realplayer. It's not worth it. Ever.

Just install Real Alternative if you really get stuck with rm/rmvb/whatever-shit-only-works-with-realplayer formats and you can play them easily in vlc or whatever other player you like. It even handles the real media content in browsers.

Same goes for QT Lite to handle any Quicktime content.

(I am sure that there must be similar workarounds for Linux as well.)

Damn, you are extreme. Alternatively you could suppress genes that lead to poor impulse control, addiction, depression, etc.

Relevant: Part 1: https://vimeo.com/7515623 Part 2: https://vimeo.com/7681585

An interesting rough parallel exists in Boltzmann machine learning, namely the way you derive an approximate gradient necessary for learning requires generating a sample or pseudosample from the model distribution (i.e. what the model "believes"). Most of the time, you accomplish this by running a Markov chain for a few steps.

Stretching this metaphor, it's conceivable that the way your mind gets better at language/communication is by "running on auto" in order to measure the difference between the (good) stuff in your working memory and the stuff implicitly encoded in your language pathways.

It's also conceivable that this is a reason why we dream -- it's our brain's way of making sure that what's getting stored isn't muddled with all this other somewhat plausible but ultimately nonsensical crap that we experience in dreams, which our brain needs to find by "free-running" for a while in order to stamp out. Given that dream-state sleep has been linked to memory consolidation in numerous studies, I wouldn't be surprised if more evidence eventually supports this "contrastive learning" view of dreams.

>Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Texas at Dallas.

The paper is available here:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;q=&quot;Cortical+Map+Plasticity+improves+learning&quot;+reed+riley

To quote myself:

> Awesome, and well-deserved. For those who, like me, kinda know about Pearl's bayes nets but want to learn more, or operationalize their abstract knowledge, I highly recommend the Stanford Probabilistic Graphical Model course. It's still in its first week, so it's not too late to join.

I don't know that I can provide you with a clear answer on this, except to say that the ability to count is not unique to humans, or even animals.

The venus flytrap can count.

So I do not think that counting itself is a unique property to humans. Basic human societies also have a concept of numbers, but at the most basic it can be something as simple as "one, two, many".

Counting comes from humans' ability to conceptualize things as individual concepts, and then create additional concepts for multiple groups of those things, as abstractions. So it requires disambiguating "one" from "one human", to understand "one" as an abstract concept unrelated to the one person.

For a much deeper dive, you may be interested in Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez.

One thing I noticed is that aside from saying the first entry by Oliver Sacks kindled your interest for neuroscience, the article didn't explicitly elaborate on the claim in the headline, i. e. how they changed your life. Did they really or were they just thoroughly enjoyable to read? To me those are qualities I don't like to conflate, and since I'm chewing through books rather slowly, important for the decision of whether to read it or not.

As for the life changing part, an example for me is "Thinking, Fast and Slow": I'd say that the ideas of Kahnemann really did, by changing my perception of the part of me that decides what I do. This view of two systems, the intuitive, heuristic system 1 and methodical, slower system 2 is a powerful and readily accessible tool for me. Often, when system 1 going on its way unperturbedly, about to be doing something dumb, I suddenly realize whats going on and can formulate the problem with in these System 1/2-terms and then decide to intervene.

Of course (especially non-hard-science) books are also valuable when bringing pure enjoyment and being more on the "interesting facts" side than the "building useful habits" one. And this distinction is also not at all perfectly correlated to how life changing of an effect they might have, as the example of someone captivated by an interesting book on a topic and thus studying in that field shows.

So when getting a book recommendation I am really interested in which of these effects it had on them. In any case, thanks for the nice list of great books! I think I will next look for a copy of "Why Zebras don't get Ulcers".

I guess so. I do understand and agree with your point. Then it becomes whether or not Gladwell really perceives what he's doing to be that.

What I'm trying to get at is a broader, ambiguous opinion that just because it is unscientific does not necessarily make it useless.

Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

A more comprehensive approach to development of cognition can be found here

An inconceivably vast number of things. Check this out:

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-Little-Memory-Foreword/dp/0674576225

There is a cheaper version:

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-R-Luria/dp/B000IY5L7A

People have different ways of framing cognitive science, coming at it from different fields; e.g. based on neuroscience, psychology, or using computers as a metaphor. If you haven't read Piaget, this is a good place to start. Piaget's scientific methodology (mostly observing his own two children) was awful, but his framing and conceptualization is brilliant and was revolutionary in the field of developmental cognitive psychology.

Jean Piaget &quot;Six Psychological Studies&quot;

I'm not sure about whether you can "improve your intelligence," but you absolutely can improve your cognitive functioning. Check out Barbara Oakley -- Learning How to Learn.

Coursera -- Learning how to Learn (free!)

Amazon Books -- Learning how to Learn

And honestly, don't worry about your IQ as a number -- it only measures your ability to take the test! Just work as hard as you can. Seriously, though, do the Coursera thing. There is so much great advice on there!

No immediate expertise, but not naive to this stuff either. I never heard of LSD being described as anything like autism, although weed can exacerbate a lot of the social stuff I have that make me think I might be on the spectrum.

If I had to relate LSD to one 'sober' activity, it'd be meditation. I found some commonality there.

There's an anecdotal thing about LSD and tolerance for autistic/aspie people. The trend seems to be higher tolerance, which I found too (I felt little to no effect from 140ug), but you'll find the opposite as well (on reddit threads for example).

I recently stumbled upon this book which you might find interesting? I didn't read it.

I can't answer for the experience of those who are spiritually enlightened, but a lot of these questions come down to the cognitive nature of consciousness. Can I suggest you read Susan Blackmores's book "Consciousness, An Introduction"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Consciousness-Susan-Blackmore/dp/144410487X

I cannot speak for the this the GP's brother's ability, but there are... distinct differences in art style between drugs. Fun look.

It may be a bit outdated now, but I read The Seven Sins of Memory years ago, and really enjoyed it.

OPINION! These days Yes, C++ is a waste of your time and a relic of a language. I would not learn it as my first language. /OPINION It has been modernized over the years and is still actively in development.

There are lots of lists out there none of them line up with each other. But the most important number is that there are half as many C++ jobs on average as there are C#, Java, or Javascript jobs.

https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/most-popular-programming-languages/

I was one of the first test subjects for Borland C++ 1.00 beta something back in the day (circa 1990) I developed in C++ for 10 years. I can confidently tell you that you do not have to know C++ to succeed in the CS industry.

If you want to learn a "nuts and bolts" programming language I would recommend Rust over C++ for it is replacing C++ for OS function rebuilds across the board.

https://www.rust-lang.org/

I learned Rust for giggles last year and it has a neet way to do memory management called Ownership. It is one of the few truly memory-safe languages out there, thus it's being used to rewrite anything that is security conscious.

Not a point, but an outlook:

"Artificial" means man-made as opposed to &quot;natural&quot;. Man is natural. The things man creates are natural. There is nothing artificial about a computer. What we call "artificial intelligence" has to do with what appears to say, "I am like you, Burnage". Therefore, Google can be considered artificial intelligence by those who think of it as a librarian. Remember, "computers" used to be people who compute - the name was applied to the machines after the people. Any machine-computer was once like an artificial intelligence machine because it did the work of a "real" (familiar) computer (hence the name). You called the machine a "computer" because it resembled your friend Bob who was a computer.

The nature of consciousness and what mechanisms result in its creation is something philosophers and (more recently) scientists have been arguing about for a very long time, and we have yet to figure it out. Despite this there are many theories as to what neurocomputational mechanisms underlie sentience, some of which can be found here and here

You're good with Python / R, no need for C++ in my opinion. Other than that I agree with the other posts. I wanted to suggest that you try out this book, which I found really really helpful:

https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Modeling-Cognition-Behavior-Farrell-ebook/dp/B07814BSKC/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=computational+modeling+cognition&amp;qid=1638378516&amp;s=digital-text&amp;sr=1-3

You'll need to start by understand how models are fit to data, which is typically done via maximum likelihood estimation. This will show you how to do that. If/when you move to Bayesian approaches, understanding basic MLE really well will be super helpful background.

And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it; and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!

— Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky

New chapters still appear semi-regularly. Be sure to check out the PDF version.

Noise is a strange way to put it. Would you say the path of a stream is "noise"? That implies randomness. The stream cuts into the hillside based on the terrain around it. As the stream flows, it also changes the terrain as it moves the dirt and deepens channels. I think the brain is much like this, and creativity is the places where streams happen to intersect. It is not "noise" but rather history that determines when and where this happens.

Mostly inspired by this Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sebastian_seung.html

TED has gone from awesome science talks to ridiculous feel-good superficialities in less than two years. So sad.

Environmental enrichment has been shown to promote neural growth in rats, and while it may not directly "increase intelligence," it does seem to enhance learning and memory-related processes. These changes can often be observed even at the genetic level. EE, translated to human terms, roughly means that you're doing yourself a favor simply by not sitting on the couch and fapping all day

Example paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&amp;_udi=B6T0F-3XD3RCG-12&amp;_user=446477&amp;_coverDate=09%2F30%2F1999&amp;_rdoc=1&amp;_fmt=high&amp;_orig=gateway&amp;_origin=gateway&amp;_sort=d&amp;_docanchor=&amp;view=c&amp;_searchStrId=17...

I should start doing a literature search before I comment. heh.

EFFECTS OF HIGH-FREQUENCY ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS ON HUMAN EEG: A BRAIN MAPPING STUDY

......

The spectral power coherence of the EEG under different EMF conditions

There's less research, but still quite a bit! Scholarpedia has a few pages on tactile / haptic perception which might make a good place to start, eg http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Tactile_object_perception and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Haptic_perception_of_force

Reminds me of a case I read about where a woman who had some type of blindness but wouldn't admit that she couldn't see... something like that anyway. I think she would say that she just didn't want to say what the object was that she couldn't see. Found a brief reference in the link below.

Think I found the term, Anosognosia

Looks like it was temporary compromised. I ran it through hybrid analysis

Looks like the email associated with the bad actor is also associated with a lot of win32 backdoor trojans in other samples on Hybrid Analysis.

> Go crazy - I am interested, but I am afraid I have already contributed most of the links I can think of :)

Here it be: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Narratology-Computer-Science-Research-Group/199950600040940?sk=wall

Please post those two links on there as well -- maybe we can have some nice discussions.

Let's just basically keep this group around and post stuff when we find something interesting. It's probably better than a forum or a mailing list, although we could do that as well some day.

Case-based reasoning sounds interesting. I printed it out and will read later :)

Is there a way I can request that people in this thread take my survey? I am currently in grad school and working on my thesis. The topic is Clinician’s Perceptions of Clinical Factors Associated with Internet Addiction. If you have ever worked with clients that may be addicted to the Internet please take my survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VFNGNCB

Also if you have any collegues who you think meet the criteria please forward the link to them! I greatly appreciate your help!

Regarding parapsychology and whether it works, we have published a book with many examples of psi in action in the fields of stock and crypto trades, elections, sports betting, horse racing and the lottery. We also include the history and theories about remote viewing and associative remote viewing.
21 chapters, 20 contributors, 2 appendixes, 400 endnotes, bibliography and index, 715 pages.

Both Dean Radin (Amazon review) and Stanley Krippner (paragraph we can use) have written very positively about our book.
Debra Lynne Katz, Ph.D.
Jon Knowles, M.A.
Associative Remote Viewing

I would recommend the book Consciousness by Annaka Harris (Sam Harris's wife). It's a very high level overview of many different theories around consciousness. She spends a little too much time with panpsychism IMO, but otherwise it's a fantastic read.

There are parts of it that go into the study of "self" and "ego death" through the use of psychedlics (and other means like meditation).

You spoil me! I'm very rarely encouraged to broaden my reading. Usually I'm advised that I should narrow my focus.

When I'm not reading widely, my work focuses (broadly!) on decision. Simon, comes up A LOT. Von Neumann is another frequently cited figure.

I'm not sure why, but when I started reading Sciences of The Artificial, I found it disappointing. I guess that by the time I started to read it, I had seen so many of the key ideas cited and explained in so many places that the original felt mundane somehow - kind of like how some classic films can seem full of cliches because of all the times they've been imitated in subsequent films. I stopped reading it hoping that I would be better able to appreciate it when I'm wiser and older.

I found Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making a very entertaining read. But I feel that decision is a subject that really does benefit from good textbooks - especially the more prescriptive parts of decision science. Lot's of fully worked examples are great for learning the math, but they're not great for the flow of a narrative.

Getting my hands on a copy of Baars' book looks like it's going to cost me a trip to the library. But since it's so highly recommended, I'll make the effort.

I like this one: Predictably Irrational by Dan Arieli

The author is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics and have several books and a documentary about decision making and its cognitive flaws. It's científic and unbiased in the terms you describe but also has a very accessible language.

Well, I wouldn't say it is useless for being unscientific. He poses theories that resonate with many people. This type of creative thinking has the potential to help science by having other scientists test, and potentially confirm, them. The problem comes from the presentation of these theories as fact, or at least not coming outright and saying they are not. Again, I know part of the fault is with those who allow themselves to be duped, but Gladwell's hands aren't clean in this either.

I have not read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

That sounds an awful lot like Daniel Kanheman's research on cognitive biases, which is the basis for his Nobel-awarded contribution in Economics, prospect theory.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes two ways in which the brain forms thoughts:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious

• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

>I've removed this post, because I really can't see the relevance that it has to cognitive science.

Burnage, thanks a lot, I really appreciate that. I also appreciate how you actually went to the wikipedia article and read the following section:

Criticism

Some usability professionals have expressed their dislike of the term "user", proposing it to be changed.
Don Norman stated:
One of the horrible words we use is "users". I am on a crusade to get rid of the word "users". I would prefer to call them "people".

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) is an academic in the field of cognitive science, design and usability engineering and a co-founder and consultant with the Nielsen Norman Group. He is the author of the book The Design of Everyday Things.

Do you care to retract your ignorant decision now? In the future you should try to show a little bit more respect and less ego. If you still fail to realize how this post is relevant to cognitive science, then perhaps you are not qualified to be a moderator of this subreddit? Regards.

Mindfulness in Plain English is a good start. You can get a free ebook here: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Good luck! Give a shout if you have specific questions, I've been reading about it for awhile and might be able to point you in the right direction.

Try this: Mindfulness in Plain English.

Everyone has trouble turning off their constant stream of thoughts... it's normal really. Learning to meditate is a hard work but you really do get better at it every time you try it. Even if you spend the entire time not being able to clear your head, the effort you're putting into it is helping and after a few sessions you will notice it getting easier. (Another hurdle at the start is finding a comfortable position... that gets easier too.)

Dan Arielly talked about this stuff in Predictably Irrational.

What I wonder is how it works with longer term goals. Say I make a good wage, and they offer me bonuses for overall performance across six months. This isn't the same at all as a one shot short term bonus; my long term bonus doesn't create near as much stress for me as a shot at an immediate 2 month bonus would.

Also, recommended reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Oddly enough, the whole plot hinges on what happened when somebody started questioning these fundamental assumptions about science.

Mindfulness in Plain English is incredibly good book. I practice little different style of meditation myself (Zen-meditation, zazen), but I would say that this book should be must read for beginners in any kind of meditation.

http://xkcd.com/628/

I did a poll with my friends to see if I could replicate the results of the random number between 1 and 20 game and I got a couple of people that deliberately picked invalid numbers (outside of the range or not an actual number). I thought that was funny (and oddly appropriate) and wondered what percentage of people would do that in a larger experiment.

I've also read that there is a pattern to how people pick configurations in the game Battleship (avoiding the edges and stuff like that), so I'd be interested in that as well. Or what people pick for passwords.

There is so much cool stuff here waiting to be mined by a good researcher. I'm aware that there are some neat books on choice like Predictably Irrational, The Paradox of Choice, Nudge, and so forth, but I'm not sure there is anything specifically on random choice. I have read an academic study on random number generation but that was more about generating sequences of 1's and 0's and sure enough people are bad at doing so in a truly random way but could improve with training. My interest isn't whether people are random (I'm quite sure they aren't!) but what sorts of patterns you can identify.

I'm working through this of his. I like it. I'm about 7/10 through it.

I've read all of his books except the dog one.

And since we're on the topic: Gad Saad is having him on his YouTube channel soon.

EANF# significant The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology).

I read a book by Rita Carter called - Mapping The Mind and in it she argues it is a fallacy and that both sides of the brain are equally capable.

The example you provide is not about metaphors, and not what this article is referring to.

In your example, you make a distinction between "fast" and "slow" decisions. What you are talking about is the distinction between decisions made without "conscious", prefrontal input (that is, extremely rapid decisions made by our subcortical structures, based on past experience but made without consciously accessing those past expereriences) and decisions made with conscious deliberation (slower decisions made by accessing our prefrontal structures and mesial temporal (memory) structures). There are about 100,000 articles on this distinction, but for a layperson summary you could start with Lehrer's How We Decide.

This article is talking about the influence that relational frames induced by metaphor have over our slower, frontally-mediated decisions. That is, by using a metaphor (e.g., "crime has infected our city"), you induce a frame in the listener (e.g., sickness), which activates some memories, biases, and general knowledge (e.g., those related to sickness) but not other memories, biases, and knowledge. The point of this article was to show how much influence these activated memories and knowledge have over our decisions.

More generally, the point of articles like these is to counter the "intuitive-seeming" types of points that you are trying to assert. Often, we assume that we can rationally "think" our way through things and reach reliable conclusions -- so much so that you suggest we needn't bother with research like this. In fact, as this and many other articles show, our "rational" thought is heavily influenced by factors we tend to be only minimally aware of (if we are aware at all), such as single words used when framing the question we are thinking about.

I wish. The science is still really new. It lacks formalization and cohesion.

The best I can do is give you my consumer behavior textbook. I've read it a zillion times and it's pretty good, but it still seems like a hodgepodge of research-derived frameworks. http://www.amazon.com/Consumer-Behavior-J-Paul-Peter/dp/0073529850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1295628472&amp;sr=8-1

Still, pretty goddamn cool.

Don't be fooled. Example:

the incidence of schizophrenia is twice as high in those born and brought up in cities.

According to wikipedia, the life-time incidence of schizophrenia is only 0.3–0.7%. Thus, according to the article, if you live in a city your chance of getting schizophrenia is 0.6-1.4%. An impressive increase? No I don't think so.

Also

Previous research has shown that people living in cities have a 21% increased risk of anxiety disorders and a 39% increased risk of mood disorders. In addition, the incidence of schizophrenia is twice as high in those born and brought up in cities.

21%/39% increase of what baseline?? significant Out Of The Mouths Of Pups.

The team followed the Baltimore students’ math performance through 9th grade and, from grades 6 to 9, tested specific math-related abilities, such as timed computation and decomposition -- i.e. the ability to deduce which numbers in a group add up to a target number.

No Fair! They're timing the solution to an np-complete problem! Teaching Language Arts, Math, &amp; Science to Students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities.

Recommended reading: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio R. Damasio.

Also several of Steven Pinker's works.

It's an approach Lesh and others have developed, originally as a way to give students activities that would elicit certain kinds of learning so that the changes would be observable in more detail rather than being simply detected by a pre and post test. Success with the method led to interest in using it as an approach to teaching. It is detailed in <em>Beyond Constructivism</em> (Lesh and Doerr, 2003).

Models and Modeling perspectives involve "Model-eliciting activities" or MEAs which are said to be activities in which students develop and refine models as a part of participating in the activity. The idea of models here is not strictly a mathematical model, but (I think) refers more broadly to a representational system. The point of this being that such systems change not only the way students act, but the way they see a situation.

"Seeing" involves an interpretation system, and so learning that involves models is said to provide a student with powerful interpretation systems.

A recent paper on the subject that deals with students learning stats is:

Lesh, R. (2010). Tools, Researchable Issues & Conjectures for Investigating What it Means to Understand Statistics (or Other Topics) Meaningfully. Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Application, 2(1), 16.

So, for affect and metacognition, if the task involved reflecting on and evaluating emotional or cognitive states (like how much time was spent on different categories of activity in problem solving) one conjecture is that students could learn something meaningful about self-regulation by participating in such an MEA.

In the paper above, students are said to be manipulating FLOW... See paper. :)

Well, I'm no expert on him, but you might try The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams its got two essays that are pretty good.

The Interpretation of Dreams has a nice account of his Africa trip, which you may have heard the song inspired by it, Peter Gabriel's Rythm of the Heat. It also goes into his "collective unconscious" idea, which is good.

The other essay is more political, but a nice foundation about why individuals relate to institutions in society, etc.

His wikipedia page has a pretty good summary of his biography, which is really weird and interesting!

This is classic case of replacing fact with belief.

Having "belief" strong enough to ignore science....is horrible, and will lead to the end of mankind.

I like Jane Healey's Your Child's Growing Mind: Brain Development and Learning from Birth to Adolescence.

This has nothing to do with the method of loci. Read Rhetorica ad Horennium.

The method of loci is a way more powerful means of achieving retention than worrying about optimizing one's study environment.

this is an easy-to-read treatment of laterality. It's nine years old, but if you want an introduction to the subject this is a really good place to start:

http://www.amazon.com/Left-Brain-Right-Perspectives-Neuroscience/dp/0716731118

You'd learn a lot by traveling and observing people all over the world, or to your own cities various ethnic neighborhoods, but if you're going to read books to learn a kinesthetic subject, besides those works already suggested, also read Edward T. Hall's works; specifically, The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language.

this is the book I used: http://www.amazon.com/Neuroanatomy-Blumenfeld-through-Clinical-Cases/dp/0878930604

It will give you the foundation..and the clinical aspects of it make it easier to grasp the material.