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‘Mind in Motion’ Review: No Ideas but in Things
How are we to think of how we think? Are our minds a separate internal world in which we manipulate mere proxies—symbols, ideas, representations—for real things? Are they software running in the brain whose connection to the real, “external” world is then a further mystery in need of explanation? Or is it rather that we are embodied all the way down, such that even our most abstract thoughts—about mathematics, say, or relations between ideas—are still creatures of our creaturely nature? In “Mind in Motion,” the distinguished cognitive scientist Barbara Tversky makes the case that our embodiment as living, acting creatures is no mere add-on to our problem-solving cognitive capacities.
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Fake News Can Lead to False Memories
Voters may form false memories after seeing fabricated news stories, especially if those stories align with their political beliefs, a study shows.
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How Child Passengers Can Distract Drivers
Since emerging as a fad in the 1980s, “Baby on Board” stickers have persisted as a staple of rear windshields and bumpers on cars and minivans. According to urban legend, the death of an infant
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AI ‘EMOTION RECOGNITION’ CAN’T BE TRUSTED
As artificial intelligence is used to make more decisions about our lives, engineers have sought out ways to make it more emotionally intelligent. That means automating some of the emotional tasks that come naturally to humans — most notably, looking at a person’s face and knowing how they feel. To achieve this, tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon all sell what they call “emotion recognition” algorithms, which infer how people feel based on facial analysis. For example, if someone has a furrowed brow and pursed lips, it means they’re angry. If their eyes are wide, their eyebrows are raised, and their mouth is stretched, it means they’re afraid, and so on.
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One Secret To Success: Take Your Brain On A Vacation
When was the last time you completely unplugged from work and truly relaxed while on a vacation? Turned the phone off, let the emails go unanswered, allowed the “out of office” reply to do its job so that you could forget about yours, and took a real break from the office? Thanks to advances in technology, the lines between professional and personal life are increasingly blurred. We are all guilty of responding to a work email while at the beach or taking a work call while on a family trip. In fact, 66% of American employees admit to working while on vacation, and 78% say they feel comfortable taking time off only if they know they can still access work.
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You 2.0: Tunnel Vision
Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing? Two researchers have dubbed this phenomenon scarcity, and they say it touches on many aspects of our lives. "It leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help you to manage scarcity, but in the long term only make matters worse," says Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Several years ago, he and Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton, started researching this idea.
