In terms of both “fluency” (the total number of uses they named for each object) and “originality” (measured by their use of words that were far removed from the object’s obvious purpose), those who assumed the persona of “eccentric poet” scored highest. Those who took on the role of “rigid librarian” scored lowest, while participants who were not given a stereotype placed in the middle.
Category: ideas
Being Irrational Is Good (Sometimes), Says Study
“We know people aren’t great at making choices, and sometimes the choices we do make are downright weird. (See: politics.) Well, take heart, fellow humans: It’s actually pretty common to make odd, irrational decisions – and, according to a new study, it might even be for the best.”
‘The Dress’, One Year Later: Scientists Know More About Why People See Different Colors In It – And Now There’s ‘The Jacket’
Some factors evidently make no difference (genetics), while certain factors you’d think were entirely irrelevant do seem to correlate. And researchers have finally found another image for which people’s color perceptions vary wildly; you can take an online test and help with the research.
Losing Yourself In The Cloud – And Getting Yourself Back
“The underlying concern with the Internet is not whether it will fragment our attention spans or mold our minds to the bit-work of modernity. In the end, it will likely do both. The deeper question is what can be done when we realize that we want some control over the exchange between our brains and the Web.” James McWilliams proposes an answer to that question.
Love Drugs: Should We Treat Suffering Caused By Romance The Way We Treat Mental Illness?
The FDA just approved a drug said to increase women’s libidos. Some doctors prescribe Prozac to people who want to lower or suppress their sex drives. It’s not unheard of for women to check themselves into psych wards after a nasty breakup. And there’s an entire ugly history of medical attempts to “cure” homosexuality. How to untangle the ethical knots these issues tie?
In Defense Of Small Talk: It’s Not A Hollow Waste Of Time, It’s An Important Social Lubricant
“Small talk is not wasted talk. … [It] allows strangers to make crucial first connections across demographic lines. And it’s far from meaningless. People are rebelling against it today in a misguided dismissal of social graces that seem old-fashioned, boring, or wasteful. In fact, we’ve never needed such graces more.”
Did Pre-Money Barter Economies Ever Actually Exist? Was Adam Smith Wrong?
“Imagine life before money. Say, you made bread but you needed meat. But what if the town butcher didn’t want your bread? You’d have to find someone who did, trading until you eventually got some meat. You can see how this gets incredibly complicated and inefficient, which is why humans invented money: to make it easier to exchange goods. Right? This historical world of barter sounds quite inconvenient. It also may be completely made up.”
Google’s Computers Are Now Creating Art. And People Are Buying
“If you feed enough photos of your uncle to a neural net, it can learn to recognize your uncle. That’s how Facebook identifies faces in all those photos you upload. Now, with an art “generator” it calls DeepDream, Google has turned these neural nets inside out. They’re not recognizing images. They’re creating them.”
Is The Internet Degrading Our Ability To Remember Things? (Or Is It Something More?)
“It is sometimes suggested that in time the worry that the internet is making us forgetful will sound as silly as early fears that books would do the same. But the internet is not an incremental step in the progression of written culture, it is revolutionising the way we consume information.”
Digital Scanning Is Revolutionizing The Way We Study Evolution
“The digital format makes it possible to distribute raw data about specimen anatomy around the world in an instant, with the potential to throw the datasets wide open, allowing direct assessments of repeatability and compilation into ‘super-datasets’ from which everyone works. Such a systemic change could transform the entire study of human origins and evolutionary biology writ large.”