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A New Look at Perception (Thank You, El Greco)
The Huffington Post: El Greco was one of the greatest artists of the Spanish Renaissance, and also one of its most idiosyncratic. His contemporaries were puzzled by his fantastic use of color, and even more so by his oddly distorted vision. Many of his figures -- Saint John the Baptist and The Repentant Magdalen and even his own self-portrait -- are unnaturally elongated, as if they are being stretched from toe to head. They found the same perceptual distortion as in the original (and replicated) experiment, as described in a forthcoming paper in the journal Psychological Science. This means that the effect cannot be perceptual.
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Bullies’ accomplices suffer similar levels of distress as victims, finds study
The Vancouver Sun: It’s been more than 10 years since the bullying began, but there are days when Ishani Nath’s memories still feel fresh: the shame, the disconnection, the loss of control. But unlike so many similar tales, the Toronto woman wasn’t a victim in Junior High but rather a perpetrator. Starting at a new school, Nath learned quickly that falling in line with the alpha girls – “selectively ignoring certain people, giggling when others went by, and spreading more gossip than a tabloid” – put her on the fast track to social dominance. What she didn’t bet on was the potential for her behaviour to cut both ways.
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Are Babies Bigoted?
Smithsonian Magazine: In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to communicate: babies. In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have suggested that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that 18-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others. Some of this research, though, has also shed light on babies’ dark side.
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More Career Options May Explain Why Fewer Women Pursue Jobs in Science and Math
Women may be less likely to pursue careers in science and math because they have more career choices, not because they have less ability, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Although the gender gap in mathematics has narrowed in recent decades, with more females enrolling and performing well in math classes, females are still less likely to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) than their male peers. Researchers tend to agree that differences in math ability can’t account for the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. So what does?
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Seeing, and Thinking, Like Sherlock
The New York Times: Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories about the incomparable detective Sherlock Holmes have never been out of print since their first publication in 1887. Holmes collections abound, as do movies, TV series, video games, hats, pipes, T-shirts and calendars, not to mention nonfiction books dissecting the Holmesian method. And now here come two more, one of them, of all things, a Sherlock Holmes self-help book. Maria Konnikova’s “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes” may not make you a master detective, as the publisher notes, but it will teach you how to “observe, not merely see,” a prerequisite to thinking like the great man.
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The Three-Billion-Dollar Brain
The New Yorker: Last week, the Human Connectome Project, supported jointly by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, released its first set of data, a massive set of structural and functional images of the brains of sixty-eight adult volunteers—to almost no fanfare whatsoever. The amount of data, two terabytes, is so great that it poses problems for the Internet; you can download it for free if you like, but the organizers of the project would rather mail it to you on a hard drive. ...
