Posts

February 05, 2013

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4:35 PM | Virtues of Cognitive Workout: New Research Reveals Neurological Underpinnings of Intelligence

How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without nurture, innate advantages vanish. What about genes? They matter too. After decades of research most psychologists agree that somewhere between 50% and 80% of intelligence is [...]

September 10, 2012

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5:58 PM | Correcting Creativity: The Struggle for Eminence

By the time he put the finishing touches on the Rite of Spring in November of 1912 in the Châtelard Hotel in Clarens, Switzerland, Stravinsky had spent three years studying Russian pagan rituals, Lithuanian folk songs and crafting the dissonant sacre chord, in which an F-flat major combines with an E-flat major with added minor [...]

April 27, 2012

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12:01 PM | The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology

In 1996, Lyle Brenner, Derek Koehler and Amos Tversky conducted a study involving students from San Jose State University and Stanford University. The researchers were interested in how people jump to conclusions based on limited information. Previous work by Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists found that people are “radically insensitive to both the quantity [...]

March 19, 2012

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7:08 PM | Jonah Lehrer and the New Science of Creativity

Bob Dylan was stuck. At the tail end of a grueling tour that took him across the United States and through England he told his manager that he was quitting music. He was physically drained – insomnia and drugs had taken their toll – and unsatisfied with his career. He was sick of performing “Blowin’ [...]

January 19, 2012

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5:38 PM | The Science of the New Musician: How N.Y.U. Professor Gary Marcus Became a Guitar Hero

Gary Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, an MIT graduate and a juggler, unicyclist and photographer. A few years ago he set out to conquer one field that had eluded him his whole life: music. “I had no musical talent whatsoever,” he described to me from his office, which sets a few blocks [...]

December 08, 2011

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1:00 PM | Jonathan Haidt and the Moral Matrix: Breaking Out of Our Righteous Minds

Meet Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia who studies morality and emotion. If social psychology was a sport, Haidt would be a Phil Mickelson or Rodger Federer – likable, fun to watch and one of the best. But what makes Haidt one-of-a-kind in academia is his sincere attempt to [...]

November 04, 2011

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12:01 PM | A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain.

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there [...]

September 22, 2011

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4:17 PM | Cognitive Biases in Sports: The Irrationality of Coaches, Commentators and Fans

The Minnesota Twins are my favorite baseball team. So I was ecstatic when, back in June, they went on a nine game winning streak to come within a few games of first place. But I was also confused: they were plagued by injuries, AAA players filled half their roster, they weren’t scoring very many runs [...]

August 18, 2011

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1:00 PM | Why We Care about Chimpanzees: The Origins of Human Morality

Chimpanzee research is a hot topic this summer; it has been discussed on the big screen, in the New York Times, and in the science blogosphere. The debate is complicated; there are government funding issues, several ethical dilemmas to consider, and potential benefits to human health at stake. However, all of the discourse boils down [...]

July 29, 2011

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10:08 AM | What makes us happy? Alexis de Tocqueville vs. Kanye West

I’m a big Kanye West fan. He is an immensely talented individual who has sold more albums and gathered more acclaim than most musicians have in several life times. His widespread artistic reverence is well deserved too; as a producer, lyricist, and performer he is one of the best. Yet, the most intriguing part of [...]

July 17, 2011

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1:00 PM | Confirmation Bias and Art

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, [...]