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Why Walking Helps Us Think - The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/walking-helps-us-think, posted 2014 by peter in cognition health inspiration msm science toread
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
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Scientists agree: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone - Vox
www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6074177/coffee-naps-caffeine-science, posted 2014 by peter in cognition drink health msm science
If you're feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert — there's something you should try. It's more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap.
It's drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap. This is called a coffee nap.
It might sound crazy: conventional wisdom is that caffeine interferes with sleep. But if you caffeinate immediately before napping and sleep for 20 minutes or less, you can exploit a quirk in the way both sleep and caffeine affect your brain to maximize alertness. Here's the science behind the idea.
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Could the lingua franca approach to learning break Japan's English curse? | The Japan Times
www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/08/17/issues/could-the-lingua-franca-approach-to-learning-break-japans-english-curse/, posted 2014 by peter in cognition education japan language toread
Perfection is unattainable: Learning English as a lingua franca (ELF) involves approaching the language as a tongue shared by non-native speakers around the world rather than as a lingo that must be mastered to native-speaker level. Letting go of the idea of speaking 'perfect English' could do wonders for Japanese students' confidence.
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Train your rat: behavioural science at home | Raspberry Pi
www.raspberrypi.org/train-your-rat-behavioural-science-at-home/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=train-your-rat-behavioural-science-at-home, posted 2014 by peter in automation bird cognition diy toread
They’re not just used by behavioural scientists: a Skinner box can be a useful device for training pets, especially pets with a reasonable amount of smarts, like parrots or rats. It can automate the process you may have already used with your pet, where “correct” behaviour is rewarded – walk to heel, get a doggy snack.
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Skinner boxes are also pretty expensive. So Katherine Scott, computer vision and robotics expert, electronics ninja and rat owner/trainer, has built her own, which she intends to release as an open source device when she’s finished refining it.
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Survivorship Bias | You Are Not So Smart
youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/, posted 2013 by peter in business cognition inspiration statistics
, which Wald saw instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest. The holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the planes that weren’t there that needed extra protection, and they had needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and that’s where these bombers are most vulnerable; that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit.
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School is a prison — and damaging our kids - Salon.com
www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/, posted 2013 by peter in cognition education opinion parenting politics
School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.
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Simulating 1 second of real brain activity takes 40 minutes and 83K processors — Tech News and Analysis
gigaom.com/2013/08/02/simulating-1-second-of-real-brain-activity-takes-40-minutes-83k-processors/, posted 2013 by peter in cognition msm science simulation
A team of Japanese and German researchers have carried out the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain, and the numbers are both amazing and humbling. § The hardware necessary to simulate the activity of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses (just 1 percent of a brain’s total neural network) for 1 biological second: 82,944 processors on the K supercomputer and 1 petabyte of memory (24 bytes per synapse). That 1 second of biological time took 40 minutes, on one of the world’s most-powerful systems, to compute.
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Goffin's Cockatoos Can Solve Complex Mechanical Problems, Shows Study | Biology | Sci-News.com
www.sci-news.com/biology/science-goffins-cockatoos-mechanical-problems-01198.html, posted 2013 by peter in bird cognition msm science
In the study, 10 untrained Goffin’s cockatoos faced a puzzle box showing a nut behind a transparent door secured by a series of five different interlocking devices, each one jamming the next along in the series. To retrieve the nut the birds had to first remove a pin, then a screw, then a bolt, then turn a wheel 90 degrees, and then shift a latch sideways. § One bird, called Pipin, cracked the problem unassisted in less than two hours, and several others did it after being helped either by being presented with the series of locks incrementally or being allowed to watch a skilled partner doing it.
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When Does Your Baby Become Conscious? - ScienceNOW
news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/04/when-does-your-baby-become-consc.html, posted 2013 by peter in cognition msm parenting science
Cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of CNRS, the French national research agency, in Paris watched for swings in electrical activity, called event-related potentials (ERPs), in the babies' brains. In babies who were at least 1 year old, Kouider saw an ERP pattern similar to an adult's, but it was about three times slower. The team was surprised to see that the 5-month-olds also showed a late slow wave, although it was weaker and more drawn out than in the older babies. Kouider speculates that the late slow wave may be present in babies as young as 2 months.
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News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
m.guardiannews.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli, posted 2013 by peter in cognition crapification health news
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
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