Great CogSci podcast called @hiddenbrain

I'm so glad to report that there is a good cognitive science podcast in the U.S.: Hidden Brain, hosted by NPR reporter Shankar Vedantam and available on NPR and wherever podcasts can be found.

The Dec. 13, 2016 episode, We're More Alike Than Different, Thanks To Peer Pressure's Relentless Influence features an interview with Penn marketing professor Jonah Berger and combines two of my interests: cognitive science and advertising / marketing.

Berger says we tend to be pretty good at recognizing how social influence and peer pressure affect other people's choices. But we're not so good at recognizing those forces in our own decision-making.

It's a great episode, and if you like cognitive science, I highly recommend Hidden Brain.

This makes a great compliment to Australia's outstanding cognitive science podcast, All in the Mind, which I've written about before.

#NewToCogSci: Resources for the Curious

Interested in cognitive science? Lots of us are, and I get questions from readers (thanks!!) asking for resources to this interdisciplinary field, which comprises the "...study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

I'm including three sets of resources, and omitting two. This is due to my own professional and learning biases. I'm a text-based learner and like to read my cognitive science in short bursts (reference material, Twitter, or blogs) or listen to interviews with cognitive scientists. So these biases give me great familiarity with:

• Twitter & Blogs
• Podcasts
• Books & Magazines

I'm not including popular or scholarly non-fiction, partly because there is so much out there and partly because I don't typically read non-fiction (shhh, that's a secret!), so I can't list my favorite cognitive science books here. I'm also not including videos, because I don't have the patience to sit through a video.

Twitter & Blogs
These are in addition to the Twitter feeds mentioned elsewhere in this post (like @SciAmMind and @AllintheMind).

• @mocost (Mo Costandi) writes the Neurophilosophy blog for the Guardian and describes himself as a "Neuroscientist turned writer."
• @neuroconscience (Micah Allen) is a PhD in cognitive neuroscience; meta/social cognition, neural plasticity, connectivity, & mental training. Solid news about all of the above.
• @TheNeuroScience (Stanford) tweets lots of news about neuro- and cognitive science.
• @PsychScience (Association for Psychological Science) tweets news and scholarly articles about all aspects of psychology.
• @TheSocialBrain (Dr. SunWolf) tweets about "neuroscience, social behaviors, and the science of happiness."
• @VaughanBell tweets news & articles about all aspects of cognitive science and science more broadly. He also blogs at MindHacks (which is also on Twitter @mindhacksblog).

Podcasts (oh my!) 

• All in the Mind is a weekly 30-minute radio show from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National. Host Lynne Malcolm covers one brain / cognitive science / mind issue per show. Recent episodes have covered The Science of Compassion, The Psychology of Cults, and How language shapes thought.
  
  They say that it's "a program about the mind, brain and behaviour, and the endlessly fascinating interactions between them;" I say it's a must-listen. See also @AllintheMind on Twitter.
  
• Brain Science Podcast is a monthly hour-long interview with leading scientists in all areas of brain science from independent podcaster and emergency physician Ginger Campell.  This year's shows have featured, among others, neurophilospher Patricia Churchland, Christof Koch, and a detailed review of Antonio Damasio's Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
  
  Check out all 92 episodes, which include detailed show notes and the podcast. If you're new to cognitive science, the first few episodes are a great introduction to various concepts.
  
• On Being. American Public Media's weekly hour-long show features Krista Tippett talking about a variety of spiritual and scientific topics. The most recent episode is about language (Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life); other episodes include Opening to Our Lives: Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness, The Science of Healing Places with Esther Sternberg, and Investigating Healthy Minds with Richard Davidson.

Books & Magazines

As a librarian, I'm very familiar with reference resources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, and there are some wonderful reference sources for cognitive science -- and if you're new to cognitive science as a whole,

Books are linked to WorldCat, so you can see if a nearby library owns the title. You can also easily get from WorldCat to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to order the title for your collection.

• Scientific American Mind is a wonderful magazine with articles written for a scientifically knowledgeable lay audience; topics cover all areas of cognitive science and neuroscience. Recent articles include "How Video Games Change the Brain", "Schools Add Workouts for Attention, Grit and Emotional Control," and Christof Koch usually has a column on Consciousness in each issue.
  
  The website offers a few paragraphs of each article for free, but to read the full article, you need a subscription (through your library or on your own). Each major article offers citations for more reading on the article's topic. Check out @SciAmMind on Twitter, too.
  
  They have a section of Reviews and Recommendations (2012; 2013) which is a good way to find popular non-fiction in cognitive science.
  
• The open access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes several entries containing the word "cognitive" which include cognitive science, embodied cognition, and evolutionary psychology. They also cover topics like emotion and consciousness as well as biographical entries on folks ranging from Socrates to Descartes to Sartre.
  
  The SEP's goal is to provide "the philosophical profession and the general public alike with high-quality scholarship on a variety of topics relevant to the human condition," writes Edward Zalta ("The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A university/library partnership in support of scholarly communication and open access," College & Research Library News, Sept. 2006 (pdf))
  
• A great dictionary for understanding psychology terms is Raymond Corsini's 1999 Dictionary of Psychology. The images are terrific (my favorite is the one for pilomotor response) and the definitions are clear and concise. Citation: Corsini, R. J. (1999). The dictionary of psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/Mazel.

• A great encyclopedia is Michael Gazzaniga's The Cognitive Neurosciences, the fourth edition of which came out in 2009. The academic library review magazine Choice calls it a "benchmark resource for the cognitive neurosciences" (May 2010); sections include Development and Evolution; Plasticity; Attention; Sensation and Perception; Memory; Language; The Emotional and Social Brain; Consciousness and several more. Citation: Gazzaniga, M. S. (2009). The cognitive neurosciences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

all icons from Iconfinder (from the 'Nuvola' icon set)

What's your favorite Cognitive Science resource? Feel free to add yours in the comments!

Michael Gazzaniga Now

I've just seen / heard about a couple of interviews with Michael Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience:

He was on the Australian radio show All in the Mind in June, and they introduce him as follows:

One of the big names of the brain is Michael Gazzaniga, whose career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry. His striking experiments continue to uncover the differences between your left and right hemispheres. Today he's on the US President's Bioethics Council, heads up a major project on neuroscience and the law, and is a prolific writer of popular neuroscience. He joins Natasha Mitchell to reflect on the brain's left and right, and the mysterious nature of free will.

He was in Australia for the International Human Brain Mapping Conference, and Natasha Mitchell's 30-minute interview covered split brains, the discovery of "blind sight," and free will. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript; you can also subscribe to All in the Mind via iTunes.

Ross Buck, professor in the University of Connecticut's department of Communication, points me to an upcoming interview in Seed magazine. While the published interview won't appear until the August issue of Seed, you can read the full transcript of the conversation between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga. You can also watch a video of the interview at the Seed Salon. About the interview and video, they say:

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Note that UConn has several of Gazzaniga's books, and I will shortly order his latest, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

For More Information

• Gazzaniga, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York : Ecco Press, 2008.
• Interview: All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, June 21, 2008.
• Interview: Seed, August 2008. Interview transcript online July 1, 2008.
  

Memory and the Reference Librarian

Ah, the intersection of cognitive and information science -- truly a dream for the CogSci Librarian. Today's confluence twins the reference librarian and memory, based on a recent article by Walter Butler in Reference Services Review entitled "Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian."

Butler does a nice job of defining memory and then using some practical examples of how this relates to the work of a reference librarian. I'll summarize the bits I like, but if you are interested in memory, I recommend the article in full because the explanations are relatively simple and very clear, especially with respect to how memory works.

In Butler's introduction, he explains how memory is a "tacit expectation" for reference librarians, and he breaks memory down into three realms:

• Memory in the librarian's brain
• External devices which assist in knowledge storage
• The establishment of memory in the patron's brain

For a great definition of memory, I turn to my trusty reference friend, the Dictionary of Psychology by Raymond Corsini. Memory, he writes, is

1) the ability to revive past experience, based on the mental processes of learning or registration, retention, recall or retrieval, and recognition; the total body of remembered experience. and 2) A specific past experience recalled.

The entry lists 24 different types of memory and provides 16 see also references. My other trusted friend in this realm is the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, which has 48 articles with memory in the title. If you want to learn more about memory, I encourage you to refer to these sources. But I digress.

Butler talks about memory in the context of both neuroscience (where memories are stored) and psychology (describing types of memory). It's fun to mesh the types of memory with the reference librarian's toolkit. For instance, semantic memory -- which refers to "knowledge about general facts," such as "words, chemical formulas, equations, and names" -- might map to ready reference in the librarian's world. Butler refers to Tulving by defining episodic memory as "something which is personally experienced and includes a place and time" -- which might map to the patron's personal interaction with the librarian. Finally, schematic memory, referring to how we perceive objects, people, and events, refers more to the place of interaction -- and maps (heh) to where the interaction takes place: in the library, online, or remotely.

Butler suggests that these types of memory relate to three areas of reference librarian tasks, which he selects from the Reference and User Services Association (2000) Guidelines for Information Services, where librarians are considered ...

1. Service providers: Butler talks about working or short term memory and long-term memory for librarians as service providers with this example of a patron who asked where he can find the chemistry books: "The location of chemistry books is the long-term, schematic memory [for the librarian], whereas the user is the new, short-term memory, which has the potential to become an episodic memory." Reference librarians may use systems such as written lists, browser bookmarks, or folksonomy tags as external memory devices.
2. Educators: Written notes for the patron, handed to her after the session, may serve to reinforce learning. Further, Butler suggests that an interview closure tool such as a short survey could serve as an external memory aid to help "trigger ... both the short-term memory and possibly strengthening associative long-term memory." Butler wonders how this kind of tangible memory tool might be used for phone transactions; I would argue that an email might serve to reinforce what the patron learned during the phone conversation . For IM / chat / electronic encounters, the physical act of typing back and forth with the librarian may serve as an additional learning function for the patron.
   
3. Knowledge managers: Librarians need a lot of memory to manage their knowledge! There are many different types of knowledge to manage in the librarian's world: awareness of their users, technical and resource literacy, and the ability to appropriately share this information with their patrons are a few that Butler mentions; he adds that "the institution [must] practice memory skills" as well -- the librarian's knowledge is great, but it does the institution good if the librarian can share her managed knowledge with new colleagues.

Going back to librarians as educators, I was struck by Butler's assertion that if librarians use "diagrams to show a process of structure, users may be able to secure memory better." Remember (ha!) that next time you are tempted to draw a Venn Diagram to illustrate some complex library math.

And then go ahead and draw the diagram!

For More Information

• Butler, Walter. (2008) Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian. Reference Services Review, 36(1), 97-110. Available through Emerald online, or @ your library.
• Corsini, Raymond. (1999) Dictionary of Psychology. Routledge. Possibly available @ your library.
• Smelser, Neil J. and Paul B. Baltes. (2001) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. Sometimes online and possibly available @ your library.
  

Neuroscience in PloS

Have you seen PloS? The Public Library of Science "is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.." I've referred to two of their articles and I was intrigued by Bora's recent post at A Blog Around the Clock about PloS One and its efforts to publish in all areas of science, including various aspects of cognitive science.

Here is a recent interesting articles in PloS One:

• Are Animals Autistic Savants from PloS Biology, where Giorgio Vallortigara and colleagues critique Temple Grandin's question "Do animals have privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts?" and Grandin responds. And here's a blog post, Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants in which the article is summarized in, um, plain(er) English for us non-scholars.

And check out the articles @ PloS One in these categories -- all free for the world to read!

• Computational Biology
• Computer Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• Neuroscience

(Academic) Librarians, make sure you're making these journals available to your patrons. PloS is indexed in PubMed It's not indexed in Biosis, PsycINFO, Scopus or Web of Science, and sadly, Ulrich's doesn't indicate that it is indexed in PubMed. Indexers ... consider adding PLoS!

For More Information

• About Open Access, from the Public Library of Science.
• Vallortigara, Georgio and colleagues. (2008) Are Animals Autistic Savants PLoS Biology 6(2): e42. Grandin responds.
• Zivkovic, Bora. "PLoS, it rhymes with floss: Interview with Liz Allen." A Blog Around the Clock February 19, 2008.

Fun with Brains & Consciousness

I've seen a couple of fun cogsci / brain / consciousness items lately & thought I'd share them:

From Sunday's New York Times article about comedian Steven Wright comes this new joke:

“I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.”

And the LooseCannonLibrarian points me to neuroscience stamps featured on BoingBoing today:

For More Information

• Keepnews, Peter. A Strange Career Takes an Odd Turn New York Times, February 10, 2008.
  

Beyond Belief

Here's a terrific conference I wish I could have attended:

The ScienceNetwork's sequel to the 2006 Beyond Belief conference, the 2007 Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 was designed "to undertake together an ongoing reconnaissance of Enlightenment ideas in the light of advances in primarily cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary biology, physics etc. though not by any means scanting history, philosophy, law." Heady stuff!

You can watch videos of the presentations online; these links take you directly to the following speakers' presentations:

• Daniel Dennett
• Jonathan Haidt
• David Sloan Wilson
• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
• V.S. Ramachandran
• Patricia Churchland

and many more! Read brief bios about the speakers and check out the ScienceNetwork's recommended reading list based on the conference theme.

( ... I wish podcasts were available, but a DVD is supposed to be available soon ...)

Thanks to Salman's Science & Religion blog for the link!

For More Information

• The ScienceNetwork
• Beyond Belief 1,"Science, Religion, Reason and Survival." the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA. November 5-7, 2006.
  
• Beyond Belief 2,"Enlightenment 2.0." the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA. October 31 - November 2, 2007.
  

Gratitude is Good for You

It turns out that gratitude is good for you. Robert Emmons is one of the fathers of the study of gratitude in psychology, and I've seen his name around the blogosphere a lot lately. I decided to investigate.


Emmons & Michael McCullough's 2003 article "Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-being in Daily Life" illustrates some of the effects of gratitude on well-being, exercise, and sleep. The studies suggest that a daily, long-term commitment to thinking about things for which one is grateful result in " ... substantial and consistent improvements in people’s assessments of ... global well-being." (p. 385)

The article describes three studies. The first showed that undergraduates who were randomly assigned to focus on gratitude ("generosity of friends" & "the Rolling Stones") were generally happier, exercised more, and slept more than those who were randomly asked to focus on "hassles" ("messy kitchen" & "stupid people driving"). This 9-week study was the longest of the three and had the most significant health effects with respect to sleep & exercise. However, subjects only kept track of their gratitude or hassle-o-meter only on a weekly basis.

The second study also focused on randomly-assigned undergraduates who kept a daily record of their gratitude or hassles. This study was in effect for 13 days and gratitude subjects "...experienced higher levels of positive affect during the 13-day period" (p. 383) but had no significant difference in any health measures. The third study assessed adults suffering from chronic disease for three weeks rather than two; subjects were randomly asked to keep a record of daily gratitude and their overall well-being or just a daily record of their overall well-being. Subjects' spouses or significant others were also asked to keep a log of the subjects' overall well-being.

The third study showed that folks in the "gratitude manipulation" group showed an increase in positive affect and a reduction in negative affect, and that "gratitude intervention" improved the amount and quality of subjects' sleep. More significantly, the spouses and significant others agreed with the grateful subjects' self-assessment and rated them "... as higher in positive affect." Other than sleep, however, there were no other health effects seen; this is likely because the study lasted only 3 weeks and not 9 as in Study 1.

Emmons and McCullough caution that the long-lasting and long-term effects of "gratitude manipulation" and "gratitude intervention" are unclear. And of course, there are lots of suggestions for future research. But hey, what can it hurt to practice gratitude manipulation?

For More Information

• Berkeley Groks Science Radio Show Podcast (2007). Interview with Robert Emmons. Nov. 21.
  
• Emmons, Robert. (2007). Thanks! : How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
• Emmons, Robert, and Michael McCullough. (2003) "Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-being in Daily Life." (pdf) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 84(2). pp. 377-389.
  
• Fernandez, Alvaro (2007). How "Saying Thanks" Will Make You Happier (interview with Robert Emmons) Huffington Post, Dec. 11.
• PsyBlog (2007). Practicing Gratitude Can Increase Happiness by 25%. Sept.
  

Finding CogSci Podcasts

In case you're wondering ... here are some ways to find nifty cognitive science & other podcasts.

Here's a Google search trick I use to find podcasts of interviews with folks whom I'd like to hear: inurl:podcast + "name of person" (in quotes). The command inurl:podcast means that the word "podcast" has to be in the URL, which gives you a good chance that the link will actually lead to a podcast. This does result in some false positives, but it's a pretty reliable search.

A search for this: inurl:podcast "david sloan wilson" yields 6 results, including an interview with Wilson on the site of publisher's of his recent book.

A search for this inurl:podcast "positive psychology" brings up over 200 results, many of which are interviews with scholars working with positive psychology.

Lists of psychology & cogsci podcasts:

• The British Psychological Society has a Research Digest Blog with some nifty posts. One feature of this blog is a section called "Elsewhere (for when you've had enough of journal articles" (heh) which lists some mainstream (frequently the Manchester Guardian) coverage of psychology & cognitive science, including podcasts.
  
• The BPS also has a blog post called Psychology Podcasts: a Clickable List which is a nice list of podcasts about psychology. Christian Jarrett maintains the list and is happy to post new links to the site.
• This Week in Science features some cognitive science / cognitive psychology; see their list of posts in cognitive science.
• University of California San Diego faculty member Rafael Nunez has posted entire 80-minute lectures for his Introduction to Cognitive Sci class.
  

Regular readers of the CogSci Librarian will know that these are among my favorites:

• Ginger Campbell at the Brain Science Podcast covers lots of interesting cognitive science topics, including consciousness, memory, body maps, and more.
• Natasha Mitchell's All in the Mind podcast covers all kinds of topics, such as intuition, music, and vision, as well as interviews with Daniel Dennett & Steven Pinker.
  
• The New York Times "Science Times" podcast often features psych / neuroscience stuff. See New York Times & scroll down to Science Times, or subscribe in iTunes.

Blogged with Flock

Rama @ TEDTalks

Vilayanur Ramachandran was recently featured on TEDTalks.

He talked about creativity & the brain, using these three concepts to illustrate his points:
1. Face perception
2. Phantom limbs
3. Synesthesia
Fascinating, as always.



eta: the embedded video no longer works. This link will take you to his talk at TED.

PowerPoint & CogSci

Interesting book called Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations by Stephen Kosslyn, chair of the psychology department at Harvard. Kosslyn is a cognitive neuroscientist who has written quite a bit about both cognitive psychology and Graph Design for the Eye and Mind (Oxford, c2006). This book talks about PowerPoint design in general with a focus on graph / chart design.

Kosslyn takes issue with Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in which he says Tufte "claims that the PowerPoint program is inherently flawed. He has found the problems with this tool so pervasive and destructive that he challenges the very idea of using it to communicate." Instead, Kosslyn says, after he began "... keeping a lot of the problems in PowerPoint presentations ... [he] ... realized that virtually all of them occur because the presentations failed to respect fundamental characteristics of how we humans perceive, remember, and comprehend information." (both quotes p. 2)

His goals, therefore are simple:

1. Connect with your audience
2. Direct and hold attention
3. Promote understanding and memory

And the book gives some concrete suggestions for how to do this with PowerPoint. One of my favorite cog sci tricks, the Stroop Effect, is mentioned several times -- in suggestions of what NOT to do (unless you're teaching about perception). Kosslyn reviews the problems with many charts, graphs, and other visual designs, including a discussion about "pointers" on this FEMA chart created after Hurricane Katrina.

In the Cog Sci realm, Kosslyn lists a few "capacity limitations" which affect how people process PowerPoint presentations. Most interesting to me are the memory limitations such as "privileges of the first & last," where you more easily remember the first 1-2 things in a list and the last 2-3, but not the middle several; and "multiple memories" where "retention is vastly improved if people ... store information in more than one type of memory." For this, Kosslyn urges presenters to "show ... a picture of an object and name that picture" to enhance memory.

If you're new to teaching or creating PowerPoint presentations, this is a good book. I found it a bit basic, but I have been working on my PowerPoint designs from a cognitive / teaching perspective (as a lay person) for some time. I was heartened to see that many of my techniques are cognitively sound, and I was inspired to change a few things here & there.


For More Information

• Atkinson, Cliff. beyond bullets [blog]. See also his 2005 and 2007 updated book Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate and Inspire. Redmond, Wash: Microsoft Press.
  
• Kosslyn, S. M. (2007). Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also his other publications in WorldCat.
  
• PresentationZen, FEMA Chart Becomes Brunt of Joke, and more from PresentationZen ("Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional presentation design").
  

Another Reason I Blog

This blog was originally intended to provide a spot to put articles, links, etc. I found that would interest "my" faculty & staff at Hampshire College's School of Cognitive Science. I became more and more interested in the interdisciplinary topic of cognitive science as time went on, especially psychology, but also computer science, education, and animal science. And philosophy. Well, ok, just about all aspects of cog sci interest me. As part of my own education, I would browsed through journals in the field so I'd know what "my" faculty were thinking about. As part of my job, I purchased books in the various fields, and I used the blog to highlight new books & databases. The focus of the blog was intended to be exclusively cognitive science.

Then I left Hampshire, and that was very sad because the faculty there is great fun. I have kept up my interest in cognitive science and I have taken to listening to podcasts during my 2.5 hours in the car each day. The combination of the two has led to many blog posts, as I try to synthesize what I've learned and share it with the world. Posting about what I've heard helps me remember what I've learned within the cognitive science realm.

On the other hand, I am a working librarian and a teacher of library science at Simmons Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science (at their Mount Holyoke College campus). There is some overlap between cognitive science and information science (think usability) and everyone likes to or needs to search, so some posts appeal to both the cogsci audience and the LIS audience. Also, I suspect that many of my regular readers are educators of one kind or another, so the periodic posts about teaching appeal to the cog sci audience.

Some topics, however, are weighted heavily to LIS and probably appeal more to my LIS colleagues, friends, and even former students. My occasional rants about marketing are a good example, as are the rarer posts about reference, or anything labeled "library science."

Why the mix of topics and audiences? I want to naturally, personally, show scientists & psychologists what we librarians do and how we think. It's partly my nature to be inclusive, but it's partly a mechanism through which I can demonstrate the "marketing" of library science without being dreadfully obvious about it. I read somewhere -- and I can't go back to the source, because I read this a few weeks, months, years ago (you all know how memory works, right?!) -- that it's a good idea for academic librarians to publish in the non-library literature to highlight what they do in a venue where their faculty colleagues congregate. I definitely can't get published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences or Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which some of you might read, but ... I can publish here and reach a few faculty / graduate students in cognitive science and psychology and philosophy.

It's a big Internet, but the nice thing is we can get to know each other in ways we can't quite in real life. So ... that's another reason I blog.

Welcome to readers of these science-y blogs ...
* BPS Research Digest (from the British Psychological Society)
* the Brain Science Podcast
* Channel N
* Combat Philosopher

and all you Googlers!

Events I Wish I Could Attend

Coupla interesting events at UConn / Hampshire that I wish I could attend. Darn work, always getting in the way. Anyway, they're fun to think about, and maybe you can attend one or the other...

From the University of Connecticut, comes this announcement of their Cognitive Science fall colloquium schedule:
C.L. (Larry) Hardin, Syracuse University (Philosophy) Friday Oct 12, 4 pm BOUS 160 (the Alivin Liberman Room)
Title: TBA
Larry Hardin is the author of the groundbreaking book Color for Philosophers (librarian alert: subject heading = Color (Philosophy) heh heh) and numerous articles on color, perception, and the mind-body problem.
His talk will focus on color and is co-sponsored by the UConn Philosophy Department.

And from Hampshire College's Culture Brain & Development program,
Thursday, October 18 at 5:30 p.m. at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
"Autism: What does it mean to be a spectrum disorder?"
Public Lecture by Roberto Tuchman, M.D.
Location: Franklin Patterson Hall Main Lecture Hall, Hampshire College

ABSTRACT
The labels of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) or Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) are commonly used to describe individuals who have varying deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication, social skills and a restricted repertoire of interests or repetitive behaviors. These labels are now used interchangeably with autism. The criteria for determining who is and is not affected by autism are based on arbitrary clinical behaviors. The characteristic clinical feature that set autism apart from other disorders of brain development associated with communication and behavioral problems are impairments in reciprocal social interaction. Is there more autism or are we just recognizing it more? How do we define social deficits? What are the causes of autism and what factors biologically and culturally impact the social phenotype? How do early deficits in social communication lead to the clinical phenotype of autism, and what are the cellular and neural mechanisms that define the social constructs that determine social cognition? These questions will be discussed from the perspective of child neurology. The focus of the discussion will be on the changing criteria of autism over time and how this has affected the concept of the "normal" social phenotype. Examples of etiologies of autism will be discussed. The early social constructs that determine an individual's distinctive social phenotype will be demonstrated. Our present understanding of the neuronal networks responsible for social behavior will be reviewed and discussed in terms of intervention strategies for social communication disorders.

About the speaker:
Roberto Tuchman, M.D., FAAN, FAAP, is the director of Autism and Related Disorder Programs at Miami Children's Hospital Dan Marino Center (note football connection) and director of Developmental and Behavioral Neurology at Miami Children's Hospital. Dr. Tuchman is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. See some of his publications in PubMed. He is a graduate of Hampshire College (73).Yay Hampshire grads!

CogSci to PsycINFO?!

It's not often that my cognitive science interests and my library science interests overlap, but here's one of those times. This note came into my email & I thought it might interest others:

APA Invites You to Participate in a Cognitive Science Survey

Dear Colleagues,

As a result of some requests from librarians, APA is seriously considering the development of a cognitive science add-on to PsycINFO. This enhanced version of PsycINFO would feature a new coverage list of journals not currently covered in the database, as well as new index terms. Searching across the entire database would be seamless.

We'd like to hear your thoughts about this idea. Please go complete a brief survey online (note: it really was brief!) - and enter our raffle for a chance to win a $350 Amazon gift certificate.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Cordially,

Susan B. Hillson
Manager, Customer Relations

PsycINFO/American Psychological Association 750 First Street, NE Washington DC 20002-4242 shillson@apa.org

Podcast / Interviews I've Enjoyed

I've heard some very interesting podcasts / interviews lately & instead of blogging about each one, I thought I'd just list them with a very brief note about what was relevant for cog sci.

• WNYC's Radio Lab is a fun 50-minute show covering various aspects of science very loosely defined. I just listened to the show on Time from 2005, and it was a fascinating look into various aspects of people's perception of time. Hosts Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich speak with Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Jay Griffith, and physicist Brian Greene.


• ETA I found it ... There was a great interview recently on WHYY's Radio Times, with Marty Moss-Coane, about bonobos. "How do baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world and what can we learn from them about human behavior? Penn researchers Dorothy Cheney and ROBERT SEYFARTH, who joins us in the studio today, have been studying baboons and monkeys in their natural habitat for over 20 years. Their work is documented in a new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Radio Times, June 7, 2007. Archive no longer available.


• Dr. Ginger Campbell, of the the Brain Science Podcast, recently interviewed Elkhonon Goldberg, author of The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford, 2001). Interesting discussion of the pre-frontal lobes, and how they relate to the other structures of the brain. Campbell also discuss some ideas about why the left and right sides of the brain differ, as well as several important ways in which the cortex, and especially the pre-frontal lobes differ from some of the older parts of the brain.
  


• The SETI Institute has a terrific radio show called Are We Alone; the SETI's mission is "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe." They seem to like cognitive science, at least enough to have had a recent episode on consciousness called That Thinking Feeling (mp3). Show hosts Seth and Molly interviewed a bevy (?) of neuro* & *philo* folks, including Marvin Minsky, author of The Emotion Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2007); Nicholas Strausfeld, Neurobiologist at the University of Arizona at Tucson, who talks about how smart cockroaches are, and how he knows; and Susan Clancy, author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Harvard, 2005) (because of "sleep paralysis"?!



• ETA ... Australia's All In The Mind offers another great episode, this time entitled Nature? Nurture? What makes us human? It's a podcast of the start of the 2007 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture series, and it features bits of Matt Ridley's lecture, in which he speaks about his book Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins, 2003). Following his lecture, Natasha Mitchell speaks with Professor Robert Williamson A.O. and Rhonda Galbally A.O, for a fascinating discussion of the "nature vs. nurture" debate. note to former reference students: Dunedin features prominently. A print transcript of Ridley's lecture is available, as is a podcast, in addition to the All in the Mind podcast.

All shows are highly recommended!

Library Journal's Best Sci-Tech Books, 2006

Interesting list of the Best Sci-Tech books of 2006 in the March 1, 2007 issue of Library Journal:

Science's Big Picture // Best Sci-Tech Books 2006
By Gregg Sapp — March 1, 2007
"From our prehistoric past to the promise and perils of our future, the top science titles of 2006 offer plenty to ponder."

The list includes some titles of interest to armchair cognitive scientists, such as (links to WorldCat; reviews on the LJ site):

• Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Harvard Univ.


• Firlik, Katrina. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. Random.


• Kandel, Eric R. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. Norton.


• Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking.

Difference Between the Future & the Past?

New Scientist reports on several studies which suggest that there may not be such a difference between the future and the past, at least in our brains. From the free abstract on the New Scientist web site, author Jessica Marshall writes:

"IMAGINE your next vacation. You are relaxing on a beach, waves lapping at the shore, a cool breeze wafting through the trees and the sun caressing your skin. Fill in the details. What else do you see? Now, remember yesterday's commute. Again, a picture emerges. You are on the train or in your car, or maybe just wandering from your kitchen to your desk. Can you remember what you were wearing? Perhaps you have forgotten that part already.

"Without breaking sweat, you can hurtle yourself backwards or forwards in time in your mind's eye - what is known as 'mental time travel'. One of these visions really happened and the other was fantasy, yet the act of conjuring them up probably felt very similar. It's as if, embedded somewhere in your brain, there is a time machine that can take you forwards and backwards at will."

Turns out that fMRI's show very little difference in the brain when people are thinking of something in the past or imagining something in the future.

From an evolutionary perspective, this might make sense, according to University of Toronto neuroscientist Endel Tulving: "It is hard to imagine how personal recall alone might be evolutionarily useful, but if remembering how cold and hungry you were last winter helps you realise the benefits of putting food away for the next one, or convinces you to plant a few of your grains instead of eating them all, you stand a much better chance of surviving than someone who cannot project themselves backwards and forward in time. 'I cannot imagine how civilisation could emerge from brains that cannot imagine the future,' Tulving says."

Fascinating in its own right, but this has implications for reference librarians faced with patrons who mis-remember dates, names, and other essential components of their reference question. Marshall paraphrases Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter: "False memories are not memory deficits at all but by-products of a normal, healthy memory." Not only are our patrons not intentionally misleading us, perhaps their mis-remembering is actually normal -- and even evolutionarily based.

At a minimum, it might make me more sympathetic as I try to help people who swear the article was published in 1990 or 1991 -- when it turns out to have been published in 1988.

Future recall: your mind can slip through time - being-human by Jessica Marshall in the March 24 2007 issue of New Scientist. Available through LexisNexis in your library, or for a fee on their web site.

Science (Fact) Writing

John the Science Librarian just blogged Cognitive Daily: How to report scientific research to a general audience in his entry called Writing about science.

Since I have some time on my hands (not teaching this semester, gasp!), I've been reading a lot of popular science, so this topic is especially relevant. I've been thinking about what makes a science article (either spoken or written) that I like to read. I am rather fussy. You can tell some of my favorite sources for science writing:

- The New Yorker.
- The New York Times Science News (especially their weekly Science Times podcast!)
- Wired -- their in-depth articles rival anything in the New Yorker.
- Australia's radio program All In The Mind
- Harvard Medical School's fall lecture series Science in the News (a wee bit uneven, but the writing is properly geared to a mass audience -- science + clear).
- and a new old favorite - MIT's Technology Review

Strangely, I never warmed to Scientific American or their Sci Am Mind spin-off. I like my science more techie and/or more cognitive. I sometimes enjoy New Scientist, but I don't read it regularly.

Read the Cognitive Daily article's detailed suggestions for good science writing, or check out the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog for the summary.

(thanks, Emily!)

Baby Cognition

I'm finally getting around to reading a New Yorker article I'd clipped back in September:

THE BABY LAB. By: Talbot, Margaret. New Yorker, 9/4/2006, Vol. 82 Issue 27, p90-101. Online at the New America Foundation.

It's an investigation into Elizabeth Spelke's work at Harvard's Laboratory for Developmental Studies. The New Yorker does a good job summarizing the article:

"Margaret Talbot reports on the influential research of Elizabeth Spelke, a fifty-seven-year old cognitive psychologist who, over the past three decades, “has created a series of ingenious studies that have given us a picture of the baby mind which is far different from the long-standing view of it” (“The Baby Lab,” p. 90). Talbot writes that Spelke’s “signature idea,” which overturned many standard psychological precepts, is that “babies come into the world mentally equipped with certain basic systems for ordering it.” Karen Wynn, an infant-cognition researcher at Yale, says, “Spelke has done more to shape our understanding of how the human mind initially grasps the world than anyone else.” Talbot writes, “Spelke’s findings about how babies perceive objects—as solid and continuous, and perduring even when you don’t see them—have been widely replicated and are now firmly established in the infant-studies curricula. But her more ambitious theories of ‘core knowledge’ have their critics.” One of her most contentious ideas is her conviction that boys and girls are born with essentially the same cognitive tools. “We have a tendency, when we think intuitively about ourselves and other people, to greatly overemphasize differences,” Spelke says. “We think that differences we can see on the surface signal some deeper, underlying difference, and I think this is almost always an illusion.” "

If you're interested in infant cognition, or how scientists create experiments to test things -- especially in infants & toddlers -- this is a great read.

Consciousness hits the big Time

A former Hampshire colleague points me to the Jan. 19, 2007 of Time magazine, whose big story is The Mystery of Consciousness. It includes the cover article by Steven Pinker, in which he defines (in layman's terms) the Easy Problem & the Hard Problem:

"The Easy Problem ... is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved." (which can likely be done with existing technology)

"The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. ...
"To appreciate the hardness of the hard problem, consider how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything."

- A Clever Robot, Dan Dennett's response to Pinker -- they disagree on whether the Hard Problem exists.
- How The Brain Rewires Itself, in which Sharon Begley explains neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone's experiments with real and imaginary piano players. Turns out that the brains of those subjects who actually practiced the piano for 2 hours at a time and those who simply thought about practicing were expanded in similar ways.
- a short history of Understanding The Brain via various aspects of brain science, including ancient beliefs, psychology, anatomy, and neuroscience.

Plus a short definition of various aspects of consciousness by scientists such as Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and Bernard Baars, as well as some additional graphics and videos. It's a good introduction to consciousness and some other aspects of cognitive science.