I would like to see some neuroscience research as to why nervousness/anxiety seems to cause cluttered speech / stuttering. Does attending to others' perceptions of you use up resources, like a musician who can't keep up with the fast tempo? Does an analogous thing happen with musical performances? Do people improve when they don't have to look at ( Read more... )

In the last 2 hours, I created a little shell app in Python, which presents flashcards for vocabulary learning. I'm happy because I never touched Python code before ( Read more... )

Can blind people perceive race? What about those who were born blind (who learn about race in a mostly unsupervised way)?

How does their conceptions of race affect their attitudes?

Are there cases of former racists who lost their prejudice because of going blind, thereby realizing that they really couldn't tell the difference afterall? "OMG! My ( Read more... )

Yesterday, after the advice-seeking, I presented David with my ideas for automatic model induction ( Read more... )

My view of natural language: there is a huge communicative gap between any two human beings: our thoughts need to be serialized in order to fit through the information bottleneck that are our communicative channels. This channel is 1D, slow and noisy. Things are not so bad, because one can usually (but not reliably) convey the concepts that one is ( Read more... )

The advertisement for the Symposium on the Synergy between Implicit and Explicit Learning Processes, like all good Symposia, asks a few very general questions for people to think about. I would say it is the most "intellectual" and more interesting part of a conferece, where people try to compare and integrate different viewpoints and ideas from ( Read more... )

Schunn, Klahr - Self vs Other Generated Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery suggests that people are more skeptical towards others' ideas than their own. They also mention microworld discovery tasks, which is a lovely idea.

Human communication is really lossy... even when the two people use the same logic and the same architecture. Maybe the goal of my formalization dreams could be couched in terms of bridging this gap: even if we both understand and use the same "logic of common sense", neither of us speaks a language that can express it easily. Hopefully, one day, ( Read more... )

The Distorted Tunes Test (via patrissimo) is probably useful in music cognition research.

I got 26/26, unsurprisingly. I'd probably have some trouble with a rhythm test, though.

I've met people who call themselves tone deaf. I wonder how they would score here. So maybe people who can't sing in key aren't being reckless: maybe they just have bad pitch

I tend to be overly critical of myself ( Read more... )