#discovermagazine

[mayakovsky-jung]

The Surprising Accuracy of Memory

Our memories are more reliable than experts predicted

How reliable is human memory? If you think about something that happened months ago, how many of the details in your memory would be accurate? According to a new article just published in Psychological Science, our memories of everyday experiences are remarkably real. What's more, memory proved to be much more accurate than a panel of memory scientists predicted.

[mayakovsky-jung]

Neuroimaging’s Bias Against Left-handers

...

Left-handed people are under-represented as volunteers in human neuroimaging studies, according to a new paper from Lyam M. Bailey, Laura E. McMillan, and Aaron J. Newman of Dalhousie University.

Bailey et al. analyzed a sample of 1,031 papers published in 2017, finding that just 3.2% of participants were non-right-handed, even though this group makes up about 10-13% of the general population.

These findings are hardly unexpected. The exclusion of non-right-handed people from neuroimaging (especially fMRI) studies is standard practice in the field. If anything, I was surprised by how high the 3.2% figure was.

The reason usually given for the right-handers-only policy is that non-right-handed people are more likely to have atypical brain lateralization of language.

In most people, language functions are found in the left hemisphere of the brain. About 4% of right-handers show right hemisphere or mixed-hemisphere lateralization of language, while in non-right-handers, the rate is about 30%.

Atypical language lateralization isn’t harmful, but it could create difficulties for neuroscientists studying language, by adding variability to the results. So the focus on right-handers makes sense in this context.

But as Bailey et al. point out, the taboo against adextral (non-right-handed) participants has spread far beyond the neuroscience of language:

Researchers studying language-related processes arguably have a principled justification to exclude adextral subjects from their investigations…[but] in recent decades this cautionary practice has apparently spread to most other domains of cognitive neuroscience.

[mayakovsky-jung]

The Dream of ‘Disconnected Psychology’

Does psychology need researchers who ‘don’t follow the discipline’s norms and conventions’?

A thought-provoking paper proposes a way to advance psychology: by encouraging researchers to ignore previous work in the field.

The piece is called Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants: A Quest for Disconnected Academic Psychology and it appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

According to author Dario Krpan, academic psychology is failing to fully explore the space of possible theories. In other words, it is stuck in an intellectual rut (or ruts).

The field of psychology (this also applies to other sciences) currently operates in such a way that the focus is on a relatively narrow subset of [theories] (compared with all possibilities of [theories] that could eventually exist) enforced by various conventions, trends, and politics pertaining to either the field more generally or to various research domains within the field (see Medin, Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2017; Rozin, 2001, 2009)

Psychology has become increasingly blinkered over time, Krpan says. This is because psychologists are expected to base their work on existing psychology, or at least must be able to link it to prior work in some way. Early psychologists did not have this problem, and were hence more creative:

In the early days of the discipline, before the onset of the information age spawned by technological advancements, psychologists were generally forced to work more independently because they did not have access to an extensive “knowledge” network consisting of many psychological sources. Independently developing new methodologies, theories, approaches, and so forth, was therefore a necessity.

This leads Krpan to his proposal, that we should rekindle the spirit of early psychologists, in the form of “disconnected psychology.” A disconnected psychologist would be one who engages in the empirical study of human behavior but doesn’t draw on (or possibly even know about) the rest of psychology.

Krpan argues that today’s conventional, “connected” psychology still has value, but that disconnected psychology should also exist, and that the two would complement each other.

Connected psychology would be responsible for generating knowledge-producing events that involve testing explanations of psychological phenomena produced by many different disconnected and connected psychologists.

[drraptjr]

#Repost @toniblackman ・・・ The science of Hip Hop has so many layers. I'm so in a groove with my life's work. I loved both reading and being a part of this article on LoFi music. Oh, and I got to talk about the meditative qualities of Hip Hop. I don't know whether to Ohm or Owww! What's exciting about this is that so often women innovators are often left out of the narrative especially when it comes to music. DISCOVER Magazine is launched by TIME and grew to become one of the biggest science mags in the world. Music therapist and scholar @michaelviega is also featured in this #discovermagazine piece - Why Lo-Fi Music Draws Listeners In >>> The fuzz and crackle over Lo-Fi music's familiar beats evokes emotions some of us are looking for right now. By Leslie Nemo. Link: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-lo-fi-music-draws-listeners-in Shout out Hip Hop therapists @raptjr and @todaysfuturesound also quoted in the article! #hiphopmeditation #mindfulness #meditation #meditativemusic #lofi #lofimusic #lofibeats#lofihiphop #lofiaesthetic #toniblackman #hiphopambassador #hiphopinnovators #hiphophealing #womeninhiphop #HealingPowerofHipHop https://www.instagram.com/p/CC6nW20A26R/?igshid=jbg6tr1p7vub

[drraptjr]

Proud to be featured in this #discovermagazine piece - Why Lo-Fi Music Draws Listeners In >>> The fuzz and crackle over Lo-Fi music's familiar beats evokes emotions some of us are looking for right now. By Leslie Nemo. Link: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-lo-fi-music-draws-listeners-in @discover.magazine with @todaysfuturesound @toniblackman @michaelviega #HealinPowerofHipHop (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCweogRgFLF/?igshid=1rp55x3hysfye

[sprut6]

...

TIL If a hermit crab finds a new shell it will explore it to see if it will fit. If it doesn’t it will wait by it for a bigger crab  to take it and leave their old shell behind. Other crabs will come along and they will form a line from largest to smallest to all exchange shells. 

This is amazing. :)

[pandeism]

Passage from Michael Newton Keas’ “UNBELIEVABLE: 7 MYTHS About the History and Future of SCIENCE AND RELIGION,” 2019, Page 150, discussing the debate about the TV series Cosmos, and Discover Magazine’s Corey S. Powell’s discussion of the Pandeism of Giordano Bruno. #Unbelievable #Discover #DiscoverMagazine #Cosmos #CoreySPowell #NeilDeGrasseTyson #GiordinoBruno #NicholasDeCusa #Sun #Stars #Planets #Worlds #pandeism #pandeist https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv4jCSenQXU/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=j7n5h7p24hfc

[dlsphjournalism]

DISCOVER MAGAZINE--Eye of the Beholder

BY AMITHA KALAICHANDRAN (FGJ ‘17) - Bobby was an 8-year-old who lived with his family in a small town. His mother, Mary, took him to their family doctor to examine a limp the boy had developed. The doctor suspected a broken bone and referred him to a local emergency room. READ MORE