Does anyone really know the answer? Ever? That's the point of this excerpt from a short essay by novelist Harlan Ellison: . . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about…
I’d never seen anything like this before (I learned about it after reading a post at SoupyTrumpet). It’s a song based on a speech Barack Obama delivered in New Hampshire on January 8, 2008. The music is performed by will.i.am of the rap group Black Eyed Peas, assisted by a…
I learned of the issue of "downer cows" by reading a report on Common Dreams: You wouldn’t think you could “spin” a video that shows slaughterhouse workers electric shocking downer cows, “water boarding” them, jabbing their eyes with herding paddles and ramming them with forklift blades while they squeal in…
I attended Barack Obama's speech in St. Louis on Saturday night. I was among a numerous other people attending -- the press reported that about 20,000 people were present. To get into the arena, those attending had to follow the line for several blocks, leading up to the door. We walked…
We don't attend to everything we see. As Andy Clark has written in Natural Born Cyborgs, our brains don't bother to create rich inner models of the world. We can't create such models because there is simply too much information out there for us to process it all. Further, the world is generally available to revisit periodically, so why bother? In other words, we use the world as its own best model--we "cheat" (because we must cheat). But this cheating can be exposed through dramatic experiments. I've previously posted on some of those experiments here (by Quirkology). Here are some additional experiments demonstrating our need to "cheat." In this experiment, done by Dan Simons and Dan Levin, only 50% of the subjects noticed that the person to whom they were talking had changed. Here are additional demonstrations by Simons, along with a bit of explanation. Here's a more elaborate write-up on the "door" experiment. And see here. When I use the word "cheat," I'm being facetious. Our strategy of using the world as an adequate model is one of the many cognitive heuristics we must use in order to survive.