New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Do Memory Sports Champions Have Savant Syndrome?

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

By Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow

Mark Aarøe Nissen is a 22-year-old math student at Aarhus University, Denmark, with extraordinary memory abilities. He has competed in memory sports for several years. He can recite the number Pi to more than 20,000 decimal points, recall thousands of names, faces and historical dates and remember the order of a pack of cards.

Micro-Inequities: 40 Years Later

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

In 1973 Mary Rowe, while working for the President and Chancellor at MIT, coined the notion of micro-inequities, which she defined as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be ‘different.’ " Examples of micro-inequities include:

• checking emails or texting during a face-to-face conversation

• consistently mispronouncing a person's name

• interrupting a person mid-sentence

• making eye-contact only with males while talking to a group containing both males and females

• taking more questions from men than women

• confusing a person of a certain ethnicity with another person of the same ethnicity

Bertrand Russell - Face to Face Interview (BBC, 1959) - YouTube

(HT: John Corcoran)

When The Brain's Biological Clock Goes Haywire

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Our perception of time varies greatly depending on our age, mood, stress level and psychological health and stability. Psychological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia, can mess with the brain's time keeping mechanism and warp our estimation of time. Patients suffering from these disorders are unable to properly coordinate events in time. Patients over- or underestimate time intervals ranging from several seconds to minutes.

How does this happen? How does the brain manage to keep track of time and what goes wrong in psychological disorders? Our senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) use specialized sensory systems with task-specific neurons to process sensory input. Yet there is no specific sensory system for time. So how does our sense of time come about?

List of Feminist Philosophers

Wikipedia has numerous pages containing lists of people working in various areas of philosophy. I noticed that the list of feminist philosophers is exceptionally short. Some of you have remarkable and enviable wiki skills. If you fall into this category, could you please help adding to this list. Feel free to leave suggestions in the commet section.

Women working in philosophy of language

As you may have seen over at Feminist Philosophers, Derek Ball has started a list of women working in philosophy of language. It's still very incomplete. Please add suggestions here in the comment section or edit the document online.

Can we please put an end to our elitist biases?

Kukla had an excellent post over at Leiter Reports a few days ago about whether the tendency to pursue an MA before your PhD is a good thing or a bad thing for philosophy as a profession. I think this is an important question but I must admit that I found many of the comments (or unintended implications of the comments) enormously puzzling (if not straightforwardly offensive). At some point during the debate there seemed to be somewhat of a consensus that if you pursue an MA after your bachelor's degree before pursuing a PhD, then your chances of becoming a great philosopher (as opposed to a good philosopher) are greatly diminished. Some commentators did offer reasons for thinking this (whereas others didn't), but I must admit that I didn't quite understand those reasons.

Self-restraint in refereeing

Dear author,

I regret to inform you that Awesome Bigname Philosophy Journal cannot accept your paper for publication. After having googled the title of your paper, and failing that, lines from your abstract and paper, our referee discovered your identity. He found that you are a nobody from an lackluster university, without a tenured or tenure track position but only a lowly [adjunct teacher, grad student, postdoc etc], and [a woman, black, non-English speaker etc] to boot. Therefore, after a perfunctory glance at your paper, the referee has decided that your paper is not of high enough quality to be published in ABPJ.

We pass on referees' comments in the hope that they may prove useful. We receive over n submissions each year, and must reject many very competent papers, especially those written by people on the bottom of the academic ladder. We hope that your work will find a home in another journal, though obviously one not as highly regarded as ABPJ.

Best wishes,

The Editor.

Remembering Things From Before You Were Born: Can Memories Be Innate?

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

In the supernatural thriller Memory, written by Bennett Joshua Davlin, Dr. Taylor Briggs, who is the leading expert on memory, examines a patient found nearly dead in the Amazon. While checking on the patient, Taylor is accidentally exposed to a psychedelic drug that unlocks memories of a killer that committed murders many years before Taylor was born. The killer turns out to be his ancestor. Taylor’s memories, despite being of events Taylor never experienced, are very detailed. They contain the point-of-view of his ancestor and the full visual scenario experienced by the killer.

Though the movie is supernatural, it brings up an interesting question. Is it possible to inherit our ancestors’ memories? The answer is not black and white. It depends on what we mean by ‘memory’. The story of the movie is farfetched: there is no evidence or credible scientific theory suggesting that we can inherit specific episodic memories of events that our ancestors experienced. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that you will suddenly remember your great-great-grandfather’s wedding day or your great-great-grandmother’s struggle in childbirth.

Study of Color Discrimination and Short-Term Color Memory

We are conducting a study of color discrimination and short-term color memory. I would be grateful if you would participate in the study. You'll need to use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the color of a square to fit the color of a second image. It will only take about 5-10 minutes. Click on the link below to begin.
www.synesthesiaresearch.com/study

CFP: Diversity in Philosophy conference (yes...white men welcome, too!)

CFP: Diversity in Philosophy conference!

Sally Haslanger writes:

Even more important, we would really like to encourage people - including WHITE MEN - to apply for the site visit training.  It is important that we have allies involved because having mixed teams will be more effective than just a group of women....who are feminists, besides!

Visit the Site Visit Program

For Our Danish Co-Blogger

From the January 7th New Yorker

Not long ago, the Times of London published an article examining "why everyone wants to be Danish." It covered Danish society (according to scientists, Danes are the world's happiest people), Danish fashion ("a leather trim here, a matelot stripe and an edgy trilby there") . . . Danish sperm donation (last year, more than five hundred British women were artificially inseminated in Denmark—an ad for one clinic read, "Congratulations, it's a Viking!"). A "How Danish Are You?" quiz asked, "You like your skies a) Blue b) slate grey c) slate grey with vultures circling the carrion of slaughtered youth." 

The journal reviewing process isn’t anonymous. Did you really think it was? Think again!

You have worked on your paper on this extraordinarily complicated and remarkably interesting solution to the knowability paradox for four years. You finally got it right. After polishing the piece, vetting the ideas at department colloquium talks and workshops and incorporating feedback from cohorts, you submit to a top-ten mainstream journal. Then you patiently, very patiently, wait a year and a half and get a rejection. Hostile referee reports! They HATE the paper.

First do no harm: New insights into the treatment of epileptic seizures

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Jim Abrahams witnessed his son Charlie, who had childhood epilepsy, undergo frightening seizures. The boy would convulse and loose consciousness. Medications didn't help. As his seizures continued, his cognitive abilities slowly deteriorated. Jim, who wasn't a medical doctor, decided to start investigating alternative treatments. After days in the library looking through books and medical journals, he found a book on childhood epilepsy written by Dr. John Freeman, the director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The book described that a diet that mimics the metabolism of starvation by cutting most dietary sources of carbohydrates and proteins could in some cases cure drug-resistant childhood epilepsy.

You can move external objects with your mind! It's called synthetic telepathy

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Lou, who once set several major league baseball records, suddenly could barely keep his body upright during practice. He would fall while running bases, stumble over curbs and mishandle fielding plays. His wife, Eleanor, was concerned. Her husband held records for most consecutive games played, 2131 to be exact, and most career grand slams. Though Lou said it was just a phase, Eleanor got on the phone with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Charles William Mayo wanted them to come right away. They arrived on June 13, 1939 and six days later on Lou’s thirty-sixth birthday the doctors told Eleanor that her husband suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Lou Gehrig died less than two years later.

Negative thinking as a path to happiness? Review of Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, New York: Faber and Faber

"So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter," said Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and one of the founders of the study of personality. Scientists have studied the effects of mirthful laughter, positive thinking and optimism on feelings of self-worth, mood disorders and depression since the 1970s.

In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking British author and Guardian feature writer Oliver Burkeman takes issue with "the cult of optimism," the convention that phony smiles, jovial laughter and positive thinking is a surefire path to happiness. Positive thinking is the problem, not the solution, Burkeman teaches us. He believes people have come to trust that a "Don't worry. Be happy" attitude toward life is the only route to contentment. People seem to be of the conviction that if you have negative thoughts and see your own limits, you cannot be happy. So to be happy we must set out on a journey that changes your mindset from negative and inhibited to enthusiastic, fervent and animated. We are told to visualize our dreams and goals, eliminate the word "impossible" from our vocabulary and put a big fabricated smile on our physiognomy. All that actually can lead to unhappiness, Burkeman says.

Identical twins are not genetically identical: Potential consequences for the Minnesota Twin Study

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

When I was a child one of my favorite books was about a pair of identical twins who decided to switch clothes. They looked so much alike that their parents had had to dress one in blue and the other in green. The twin boys fooled their parents for a long long time. An obedient 3-year old, I was thrilled by their ingenuity and boldness.

Though parents can usually tell the difference between their identical twins--grandparents, teachers, neighbors and peers sometimes cannot. And for good reasons. Identical twins very often look almost exactly alike. No surprise there, if identical twin share all of their DNA.

See how they fly like lucy in the sky: Positive effects of magic mushrooms on the brain

By Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow (Cross-posted from Psychology Today)

Whether "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was a product of the Beatles' experimentation with psychedelic drugs is still a subject of great debate among Beatles fans and music experts. But it was no secret that the lyrics of many of the pop legend's famous tracks was inspired by LSD, including "I am a Walrus," "Tomorrow Never Knows," and "What's The Real Mary Jane." The Beatles' creating during a hallucinogenic trip is not a rare case of acid-driven creation, invention or discovery. The double helix structure of DNA occurred to geneticist and neuroscientist Francis Crick while he was tripping on the Lucy drug and low-level tech Kari Mullis hit on the idea behind Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a now widely-used technique for amplifying a single piece of DNA by a factor of 100 billion, while cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway one night in his car on LSD.

Logical Properties of 'It Seems'

I am currently finishing a paper on the semantic and logical properties of 'seem'. As 'seem' is a subject-raising verb, we can treat 'it seems' as a sentential operator. This raises the question of how this operator behaves logically. Is it hyperintensional? Does it distribute over conjunction? Over disjunction? Over conditionals? Does it commute with negation?

I think it's fairly obvious that 'it seems' is hyperintensional. It seems to Lois Lane that Superman is not Clark Kent but it doesn't seem to her that Superman is not Superman. The other questions are harder.

Kids as super-witnesses: Storing raw and uninterpreted data in memory may carry testimonial advantages

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

The U.S. legal system gives preference to adult testimony in court cases. In 2002 Thomas Junta was accused of killing a man in a Massachusetts hockey rink quarrell in 2000. Thomas’ son 12-year-old Quinlan Junta was a key defense witness for his father but his testimony did not convince the jury. Thomas was found guilty and sentenced to 6 to 10 years in state prison.

The magical number seven, plus 67,883: The extreme limits of memory retrieval and how to get there

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

In his famous paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University argued that our working memory, our ability to hold information in our minds for a few seconds, is limited to 9 items. That's fewer items than the items of a regular out of town American phone number. In light of this you might wonder what to say about cases of people with extreme memory abilities. Chao Lu holds the Guinness world record in reciting Pi, a record dating back to 2005. Lu recalled 67,890 digits of Pi in 24 hours and 4 minutes with an error at the 67,891st digit, saying it was a 5, when it was actually a 0. How is it possible to retrieve this quantity of information accurately through working memory? Is it magic? After talking to several people working in memory sports, we found out that it's not.

You don't need to be conscious when you think about hard problems. But what is the role of consciousness then?

You are preparing for your upcoming exam, reading through thousands of pages. Suddenly you realize that you forgot to pay attention to what you actually read. You were reading along but your thoughts were elsewhere. "Good God," you think. "Hours of wasted time." You turn back the pages and start over. This time you make sure you pay close attention.

Recent research, to appear in the journal PNAS, suggests that you may be wasting even more time by doing that. You don't need attention to comprehend what you read or to do math. In fact, you may not even need consciousness. The researchers, located at Hebrew University, used a technique known as Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to suppress consciousness in some 300 research participants for a short period of time. In CFS a series of rapidly changing images is presented to one eye, whereas a constant image is presented to the other. When using this technique, the constant image supposedly is not consciously perceived until after about 2 seconds.

Four people who gained superhuman abilities from brain injuries or missing senses

At our lab in St. Louis we are working with several people with superhuman abilities, also known as “savant skills.” My research assistant Kristian Marlow and I are also currently finishing a book entitled The Superhuman Mind (under contract with an agency, see updates here). We are blogging about these cases almost daily over at Psychology Today. The following are four brief stories about some of the individuals we are working with.

Women and Wiki

Bryan Jackson recently wrote to Sally Haslanger to ask why there were no women on the list of metaphysicians on wikipedia. Sally shared this very good question with a few philosophers who have been interested in similar questions. After some discussion via email Sally started revising the entry. I have no idea how to revise wiki entries or what the rules are for making revisions, but I strongly encourage wiki-tech-y people to make further improvements to the list. Below the fold you can see the old wiki entry, which Bryan was referring to, and the entry as of tonight.

On the Origin of Analytic Metaphysics, again...

The lore we are told inspired by, say, Putnam (not a disinterested spectator) and more recently Huw Price, who thinks we delude ourselves, is roughly this: after the founders of analytical philosophy had successfully ridden philosophy of its thirst for metaphysics, Quine, discerning a crack in Carnap's edifice, re-opened the door to our deposed Queen, μεταφυσική, in "On What There Is" (and "Two Dogmas"); with the door ajar and Alvin Goldman and Dan Dennett distracted by 'naturalizing' everything, Hillary Putnam developed a Quine-ean argument from the authority of science for the really real existence of numbers and, more significantly, David  Lewis -- perhaps spurred on by some Antipodes -- drove a truck through the opening by embracing modal realism. 

We love linear stories [Carnap --> Quine --> Lewis], don't we, so even the descriptive metaphysics of Strawson's Individuals (1959) can't quite be squished into, shall we say, our conceptual scheme. Now consider the following paragraph written in 1930:

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining its professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers were where sensitive to the advances of recent science as well to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguishes essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes [by Whitehead--ES] are a notable addition.--Ernest Nagel (1930 "Alfred North Whitehead," republished in Sovereign Reason, p. 154.)

 

Liars and Truth-Tellers

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share the comic (but not to sell it). Thanks to Kevin Lepore for the reference.

A Few Puzzles for a Rainy Sunday

Five old puzzles to brush up on your logic skills before the GREs:

(1)
Yesterday I ran into my colleagues Eric Wiland and John Brunero, who were trying to sneak out to watch the baseball game. I asked Eric:
"Is any of you a truth-teller?"
Eric said something that sufficed for me to know the answer to my question. Are Eric and John liars or truth-tellers?

The Harvard IAT test, implicit beliefs and quick hiring and tenure decisions

Inspired by one of Mohan's older posts, I finally got around to redoing the Gender - Career Harvard IAT. I completed it twice. The first time, I sort of cheated. I really didn't want "female" to be associated with "family." I got the result I wanted (or close enough): "Your data suggest a slight association of Female with Career and Male with Family compared to Male with Career and Female with Family." But I really was kind of cheating. I thought carefully about the questions before answering. Well aware of the reasons behind my "good" results, I decided to complete the test again. This time I focused on doing it as fast as possible (as they actually do request in the instructions). The results now revealed my gender biases: "Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family."

Job market season: Pain, dating and the value of collective reputation

It's that time again: Undergrads finishing up will soon be sending out applications to Ph.D. programs and grads finishing up are about to head out on the job market. Though choices might be limited owing to financial restraints, there likely will be some who will have the opportunity to choose among several departments.As I advice students about this on a daily basis, and reputation plays a crucial factor in the desirability of a department, I thought it would be worth mulling over what makes a department  reputable.

Continue reading "Job market season: Pain, dating and the value of collective reputation" »

In response to the claims of partisans of Xphi, there has been a tendency to deny that intuition matters much in philosophy (or even exists for philosophical purposes recall recent discussion by Jennifer Nagel on Williamson here; a topic that Catarina and Brit have explored recently here; here, for more etc.)) But in my recent readings I found a lovely (critical!) account of the "rules of the game" in Maudlin:

The rules of the game in this sort of analytic project are relatively clear: any proposed analysis is tested against particular cases, usually imaginary, for which we have strong intuitions. The accuracy with which the judgments of the analysis match the deliverances of intuition then constitutes a measure of the adequacy of the analysis. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the question of how the intuitions are arrived at is left to the side: getting the analysis to deliver up the right results, by hook or by crook, is all that matters, and this, in turn encourages ever more baroque constructions. But if we care about intuitions att all, we ought to care about the underlying mechanism that generates them...--Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics of Physics, 146-7.

Now Maudlin's book got published in 2007. So, it is certainly possible that in response to Xphi and more general methodological self-reflection analytical philosophy is in a period of transition. But the "rules of the game" were once very clear, and we should be skeptical of claims to the contrary.

Intuitions and "The Rules of the Game"

In response to the claims of partisans of Xphi, there has been a tendency to deny that intuition matters much in philosophy (or even exists for philosophical purposes recall recent discussion by Jennifer Nagel on Williamson here; a topic that Catarina and Brit have explored recently here; here, for more etc.)) But in my recent readings I found a lovely (critical!) account of the "rules of the game" in Maudlin:

The rules of the game in this sort of analytic project are relatively clear: any proposed analysis is tested against particular cases, usually imaginary, for which we have strong intuitions. The accuracy with which the judgments of the analysis match the deliverances of intuition then constitutes a measure of the adequacy of the analysis. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the question of how the intuitions are arrived at is left to the side: getting the analysis to deliver up the right results, by hook or by crook, is all that matters, and this, in turn encourages ever more baroque constructions. But if we care about intuitions att all, we ought to care about the underlying mechanism that generates them...--Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics of Physics, 146-7.

Now Maudlin's book got published in 2007. So, it is certainly possible that in response to Xphi and more general methodological self-reflection analytical philosophy is in a period of transition. But the "rules of the game" were once very clear, and we should be skeptical of claims to the contrary.