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The Doomed Dream of an AI Matchmaker
... Of course, the dating-app questionnaires of today aren’t the same ones people were completing in 2013. And although major apps already use machine learning to note users’ preferences and to suggest prospects, it’s possible that as AI improves and as dating sites collect more personal information from users, the result could eventually be more fine-tuned matches. But exactly how these algorithms are meant to anticipate human chemistry remains unclear. Unless dating companies have access to some new and groundbreaking information, one big problem remains: Romantic compatibility is largely still a mystery.
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The Rare Disease That Stops People From Feeling Fear
Imagine jumping out of an aeroplane and feeling nothing. No rush of adrenaline, or quickening heartbeat. ... "In that situation, SM and other individuals with amygdala damage will go nose-to-nose with relatively unfamiliar experimenters, which is something that healthy control participants with an intact amygdala would essentially never do," says Alexander Shackman, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, US. The finding suggests that the amygdala may play a role in organising how we respond to the social world.
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Exposure to Bright Light Can Help Fend Off Winter Blues. The Time to Start Is Now
Our bodies can be quite sensitive to changes in daylight because we rely on it to regulate our circadian rhythms and our sleep-wake patterns. And because our internal body clocks don't keep a perfect 24-hour cycle, the master clock in our brains needs a daily reset. "Light through the eyes" is the cue for the reset, explains Michael Terman, a retired professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University. That's why exposure to morning light is so important. "What we are doing is resetting that drifting circadian clock to synchronize with the outdoor world," Terman explains.
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APS Comments on U.S. Government Shutdown and Science
Read APS President-Elect Pam Davis-Kean’s full statement on the potential government shutdown.
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Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows
... All of this work hints that our interactions might be more harmonious if we were more in sync with one another. But evidence from a new technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) hyperscanning, which can track brain activity during real conversations, complicates that idea. This method is exciting because it allows researchers to observe two brains in action at the same time. With hyperscanning, we can see how people’s brains respond to one another during real-time conversation.
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Is Overconfidence Avoidable?
New research examines overconfidence among tournament chess players to investigate if it is prevalent in an environment that should discourage it.
