-
The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
This past thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said. She is 76. Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are.
-
Why Music Causes Memories to Flood Back
When Laura Nye Falsone’s first child was born in 1996, the Wallflowers album “Bringing Down the Horse” was a big hit. “All I have to hear are the first notes from ‘One Headlight,’ and I am back to dancing … with my brand-new baby boy in my arms,” she says. “It fills my heart with joy every time” When Carol Howard’s early-onset Alzheimer’s worsened, often she couldn’t recognize her husband. She once introduced him as her father. But if she heard a 1960s Simon & Garfunkel song playing, Howard, a marine biologist who died in 2019, could sing every word “effortlessly,” her husband says. This ability of music to conjure up vivid memories is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers.
-
Battle of the Brains: Pigeon vs. AI Learning? It’s Pretty Similar
The champions of unclouded thought were recently put to the test in a study that sought to explore if an illogical puzzle could be more easily solved by an animal with the associative learning approach of a computer. It saw researchers put a group of pigeons to the test to investigate their performance in a series of categorization tests compared to that of artificial intelligence (AI). Once those bird brains got going, it became apparent that their “brute force” approach to learning meant that actually, they were pretty closely matched to their coded competitors. Pigeons are creatures fuelled by simple motivations such as survival, reproduction, and the pursuit of seed.
-
She Taught Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever on Happiness. Then She Burned Out
Burnout isn't just for cubicle warriors and workaholic entrepreneurs. Nobel prize-winning geniuses and beloved celebrities burn out too. And so do experts on happiness, apparently. Yale psychologist Laurie Santos is famous for teaching the university's most popular class ever -- on happiness. Her insights on how to achieve the good life were so incredibly popular that they have even been turned into an online class taken by millions of people. If anyone should know how to maintain their psychological balance, it's Santos. But as she revealed to Time recently, the relentless stress of the pandemic even managed to burn her out.
-
Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman
... My first experience of an adversarial collaboration was about 40 years ago. My wife, Anne Treisman, and I were studying a new paradigm involving apparent motion and priming. It's a nice effect. There's a lot of work on it. And quite a few studies since have followed up on this work. Anne and I had many ideas, and we designed a large number of experiments, most of which succeeded. There was only one trouble. We didn't agree on the nature of the phenomenon, and we had different stories about the role of attention in the effect.
-
In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human
Last summer, a piece of artwork generated with artificial intelligence took a first prize at the Colorado State Fair. To me, the image looks like a view from the back of the stage at an opera. You see the backs of three singers, then, past them, vague squiggles and forms that may or may not be an audience, and all around, dominating everything, the fantastical Lord of the Rings-style palace where they are performing. The artwork looks cool at first glance, but after a second it feels kind of lifeless. “As I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted,” L.M. Sacasas wrote in his newsletter on technology and culture.
