I recently picked up Hallucinations,
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Nov 122012
Thinking Meat roundup
Animal behavior, Brain and mind, Psychology
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Oct 252008
While I’ve been busy editing and writing and getting the yard ready for next spring, a number of good Thinking-Meat type stories have appeared in the media. So without further ado, here’s a selection of links to articles for your weekend reading pleasure.
Slate examines the moral and social dimensions of the evolutionary psychology behind why people get huffy, with the obligatory tie-in to the presidential campaign.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, a neuroscientist and a science writer note some of the ways our brains mislead us, describing several studies that illustrate how the line between misinformation and truth becomes blurred in the brain (again with a campaign tie-in).
Scientific American has published this article by Carl Zimmer about the search for links between genes and intelligence. (Note: Lest you think you’re going crazy, I’ll reassure you now by telling you that yes, the even-numbered pages do seem to be duplicates of their respective preceding odd-numbered pages. I don’t know why, but it’s free current content from Scientific American, so I won’t complain.)
Zimmer is evidently a busy man; here’s another article from him in Discover Magazine about the emotional importance of human facial expressions.
This next article, from the Telegraph, is about a month old, but somehow it slipped past my radar at the time. It describes experiments in which crows outperformed great apes in transferring a learned skill from one situation to another.
And finally, something a bit more speculative but certainly intriguing, another article from the Telegraph discusses some new research into whether television and movies affect whether we dream in color. There’s some evidence that people who grew up with black-and-white media may be more inclined to dream in black and white than those who grew up with color TV and movies.
Jul 032007
Why we dream is even harder to figure out than why we yawn. This article from the New York Times talks about a trend toward seeing dreams as carriers of psychological meaning (rather than, say, the more or less meaningless byproduct of physiological processes in the brain that happen while we’re asleep). The article, which struck me as a little disjointed but still interesting, discusses the “big dreams”, the memorable ones that resonate emotionally, in particular dreams about people close to you who have died. I was interested to read that one researcher believes that dreams of the dead vary as people go through the stages of grieving, and I wish more space had been given to the whole sequence of grieving and the related types of dreams.
Dreaming of danger
Psychology
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Oct 302005
I’ve heard a number of theories for why we dream. It seems to be related to consolidating memories, including memories of physical skills we’re learning. Perhaps it also helps the brain process the stimuli it has received during the day, including emotions that we don’t really know what to do with. Maybe what’s going on in our brains when we’re dreaming is like what goes on when we’re awake, except that the conscious mind is not there to organize 0ur mental activity. I don’t think anyone really knows. One theory is that in some dreams, we rehearse what to do if we’re faced with a physical threat. Here’s a news story about a sleep disorder in which people act out their dreams in sometimes violent ways (trying to set the bed on fire, kicking a hole in the wall). Usually when you’re asleep you’re body is immobilized, so you don’t actually do the things you’re dreaming of doing; in this disorder, the mechanism for immobilization fails somehow. A new study shows that people with this disorder also have more violent dreams than most people do. If this is sort of an exaggerated version of a natural phenomenon, it may tell us something about why we dream.