Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "They took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student's face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby's sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object. This difference in social interest was evident on day one of life--implying again that we come out of the womb with some cognitive sex differences built in."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the 'masculine' toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "Such anatomical diversity may be caused in large part by the activity of the sex hormones that bathe the fetal brain. These steroids help to direct the organization and wiring of the brain during development and influence the structure and neuronal density of various regions. Interestingly, the brain areas that Goldstein found to differ between men and women are ones that in animals contain the highest number of sex hormone receptors during development. This correlation between brain region size in adults and sex steroid action in utero suggests that at least some sex differences in cognitive function do not result from cultural influences or the hormonal changes associated with puberty--they are there from birth."

Language Log: Trees spring eternal

Language Log: Trees spring eternal: "'things are trees' idea over many millenia of hominid inquiry into nature. A believer in evolutionary psychology might even suppose that our brains have learned to think that things are trees, genetically as well as memetically."

Untitled Document

Untitled Document: "The world - David Hume writes - is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died' ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779"

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview: "The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic."

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective: "In a word, the answer is ritual. Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic 'education' in modern human societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of token-token relationships to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees Sherman and Austin. It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associations. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details for some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the objects and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light."