After you watch the video write a brief discussion including 1) Why you picked that video, 2) What you expected to see, 3) What you actually saw and if you liked it or not, 4) What interested you the most? 5) How does the text discuss the material covered in the Ted Talk?
Make a list of key terms and concepts you used in your post.
Let me know if you have any questions,
--Dr. M
http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html
This was a fun and interesting TED talk to watch – and while it doesn’t explain a lot about what Bobby McFerrin is doing with this demonstartaion, it is essentially claiming that humans have the encoding for the Pentatonic scale built into their brains.
A couple of Wiki’s for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_McFerrin - Information about this demonstration is at the bottom of the Wiki entry for McFerrin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale - The Pentatonic Scale.
The Goldstein text does not specifically address this topic, though it does have some interesting information regarding how our brain creates tonotopic maps. These maps are dedicated to certain frequencies, and allow us to code for sound according to the way the neurons fire in response to sounds it has been trained to hear. The textbook explains that this was studied by researchers who trained an owl to distinguish between different frequencies, and the compared the owls neural tonotopic map to that of a monkey who served as the control (and was not trained to differentiate the sound). The owl had many more neurons dedicated to responding to the particular frequency than did the monkey.
This finding may be counter to the idea of an inborn Pentatonic scale because perhaps we have been trained through our shared experience of music to have the neural dedication for this scale. I will love to see the research that this TED Talk video inspires, and I imagine the findings could go either way in the case of the human brain.
This week I watched a short talk by Josh Silver on glasses. We have been talking about monocular and binocular vision lately in class and I found this talk interesting. Josh explains that on average 60% of the world’s population needs some kind of eye correction. Whether is be glasses, contacts or Lasik surgeries it can be expensive. I personally have had glasses for 14 years, contacts for 11 years. Glasses and contacts can be expensive. I personally just bought a new pair of frames for over 300 dollars and spend over 100 dollars a year on contacts. Without them I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I have looked into Lasik eye surgery but have been to chicken to go through with it. It cost approximately 1,000 to 3,000 dollars per eye depending on how bad your vision is.
Josh explains in this talk that the number of optometrists to people who need eye correction is terrible. There aren’t enough optometrists out there to help everyone who needs help. He came up with a way for anyone to make their own glasses that really work. He has called them Adspecs. They are simply glasses that you add water to the lenses and when you look through them you can see. He started his research in 1985 and currently has over 30,000 in use today. He sells his glasses for 19 dollars but is trying to decrease that price as much as possible because majorities of the people who need eye correction are people who are living in poverty.
If these glasses really work like he says they do I think this product can really help a lot of people who can’t afford to get the help they need. I went online and found a website that answered more of my questions such as how long will they last, where can I buy them, can they be adjusted more than once? They are made of polycarbonate and can last a long time if taken care of. They are designed to be adjusted once, and then the adjusters are sealed and removed. I haven’t found a place to buy them other than in wholesale quantities for the developing world.
http://www.adaptive-eyewear.org/home/
http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles.html
1) I picked this TED talk because I thought it sounded interesting. Scott Kim creates puzzles. He defines puzzles as something that is fun to solve and has a right answer. He believes the difference between toys and puzzles is that toys have no particular goal, where as puzzles are an art form and have an ending goal which is to solve it.
2) I expected this TED talk to show many different forms of puzzles. I expected the puzzles to vary in difficulty with other types of puzzles besides the typical jigsaw puzzle that I am familiar with.
3) Scott Kim showed many different types of puzzles. He showed figure ground puzzles, as well as anagrams. Anagrams are words that can be flipped to see another word completely. For instance Scott Kim’s name was designed so that when flipped spelled out inversion. The figures he showed were difficult to decipher at first, and then as he showed the answers to the puzzles they seemed easy. It was as if once you knew the answer, it was impossible to look at the puzzle and not see the answer immediately. He described how the anagrams and puzzles are designed to trick our perceptional senses.
4) One of the puzzles Kim Scott shows is the game rush hour. This game is designed to be interactive, with the player sliding cars in horizontal and vertical motions in order to move the red car out of the grid. I’ve played these game many times myself, and have found that it can get very challenging and sometimes will win by luck alone. Kim Scott elaborated on this game by adding square pieces instead of the rectangular pieces which can only move in one way. The square pieces however can move in multiple directions. He also discusses the site shufflebrain.com which is the website his wife and himself are designing for puzzles in social media. I also thought it was interesting when Kim Scott discussed mental fitness and games like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. These games are fun and good for your mind and he said its part of the health kick to stay healthy longer.
5) My text discusses this topic throughout many chapters. Goldstein discusses how our perceptions are different even if we are looking at the same stimuli. Our brain takes the sensations and then constructs the image to create what our brain believes we
This TED talk also made me think of the main themes from Visual Intelligence. Sometimes our brain mis-constructs stimuli based on the rules which our brains have developed as a shortcut for perceiving the world around us. Puzzles are based on these rules of construction and bend our brains until we start to think about things differently.
Terms: Figure ground, anagrams, puzzles, mental fitness
1) I picked Pawan Sinha’s video On How Brains Learn to See. http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html I choose this video because in class we have been talking about monocular vision and binocular vision, we also have discusses the way our brain constructs movement and things such as that, so a video on how the brain learns to see seemed very relevant.
2) I expected to see a lot of brain studies, and studies down regarding what hemispheres of the brain are responsible for seeing different things. I also expected to see how the brain develops in a child and how they learn to see from when they are first born.
3) Pawan Sinha discusses blind children in India. Chances of getting treatment are extremely slim to none, because they focus on adults and there are not enough hospitals to treat children with eye problems. If they do get treatment they receive help from nonprofessionals who don’t know what they are doing, and make things worth. Also, they say after you are five years old your brain can no longer learn how to see even if you are cured. Sinha thought it was wrong to not help a child, and loosing the ability to learn doesn’t sit well with him. There aren’t a lot of studies about how the brain learns, so he wanted to provide care for children who need medical treatment, and he wanted to test the limits of the brain and how it learns things, so he started project Prakash. Prakash means life, and he wants to bring life into children. Prakash is made up of three things outreach, treatment, and study to help children, especially blind children. First they do an initial screening to see if these “profoundly” blind children have any sense of sight. They then take them to a hospital for a professional examination. Then the child is given treatment to help them see and recovery is possible for many of them, they have treated successfully 200 children. Vision following extended congenital blindness was a study done on someone blind, and she completely learned how to see when she was given treatment. Sinha is convinced that recovery is feasible even after age 5, which was previously thought that the brain wouldn’t be able to teach itself how to see even if they were treated. Recovery process involves images, regions, and objects, the brain integrates these three things but nobody knows how. If shown circles and squares they can identify them, but identifying real world objects is difficult, because of shadows and things they have not seen before, but after three months they make huge improvements and this is because of movement. The one thing the visual system needs in order to learn the world is motion. It helps people identify things that they wouldn’t be able to identify if the object wasn’t moving. Sinha did his research by putting a camera on his babies head to help visualize what vision is like to an infant. Sinha’s work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
4) This presentation was very interesting to me. All of the research that he did was innovative and very informative and interesting. The thing that interested me the most was his research and how they conducted it. Putting a camera on the head of an infant is a really good way to see how they perceive the world and what it is like for blind people who recover their sight see the world at first, this helps them treat people and make the recovery process easier for them.
5) This is relatively new research that has been done, so there is not a lot about this specific information in my text, but this article emphasizes that motion helps people identify objects and see things more clearly. This goes with Gestalt approach that we have discussed in class, which states, that we see things as wholes, and will place parts together in order to make them whole. This is what the children in recovery were doing with a circle and what we would see as a square place over the circle, they identified this as a whole objects of three different objects, but when they put motion into the square they correctly identified the two objects. This is an innovative study and we will learn a lot more about the visual system through this study and studies like this.
1.I chose to watch "Ramachandran on your Mind". I picked this video because it related to a reading that we had in class about Synesthesia. I wanted to learn more about it because it is a really interesting phenomenon that occurs in certain people. I know that there isn’t really a set explanation for why this occurs; however I figured that the speaker would give his opinion on why he thinks it occurs.
2.I expected this video to explain what Synesthesia is and how our brain works when this is happening. I was hoping that it would show examples of what people see when they have Synesthesia even though it’s pretty easy to image what they see.
3. In this video, Ramachandran discussed what Synesthesia is. Every time someone that has this sees a number they see a color too. They also can see different colors associated with tones. These people are completely normal in other respects. He discussed some facts about Synesthesia as well. It runs in families which show that it has a genetic component. It is eight times more common in artists, poets, musicians, and other similar artsy people. Ramachandran also explained his theory on Synesthesia. He says that the color are and the number area of our brain are next to each other and these signals get mixed together and there is a cross wiring. Why does he think this cross wiring is occurring? There is an abnormal gene that causes this cross wiring. This gene causes a trimming and mutation in the gene which gives the color with perception of numbers and tones. He used an example of an artist saying that Juliet is the sun. Other people would say that she is warm like the sun. Juliet is the sun is more metaphorical thinking then saying she is warm like the sun. Artists are more creative hence why it is more common in artists, poets, etc. Lastly, he says that we all have a bit of Synesthesia. He explained this by having two images, one with curved lines and one with jagged lines. When asked which one was “kiko” people will say the image with jagged lines because our brain extracts the sound we hear and what we see to associate them together. The “k” sound is associated with the jagged lines.
4.I really liked his explanation of why Synesthesia occurs because it makes sense to me that there is some type of cross wiring occurring between color and numbers/tones. He also had a sense of humor which made the ted talk more interesting.
5.My text doesn’t discuss Synesthesia but it does talk about how the brain transfers information through neurons to give us an experience. These nerve impulses that occur in our brain are what gives us these perceptions.
http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html
1- I chose this specific ted talks because I am really fascinated by Dr Ramachandran, and because I know the majority of his work can be easily tied into this class.
2- I expected to find a pice on the evolution of our brain neurons. Ramachandran is a neurologist, and the title eludes to some sort of brain structure that benefited humans in culture building... something that would have seperated us from our wild animal friends.
3- I definately enjoyed the peice. I have to admit though I've read some of his work before I was taken back a bit by the energy this man has! I watched the clip twice so I could make sure i got all the terms because he gets going and he's like a machine spewing out facts and droppin names faster than i can process it all. Ramachandran is looking at mirror neurons, which are basically metaneurons in the frontal lobe that not only activate when we do an action (like type on a keyboard) but also fire when we see another person do that action (like when billy types on the keyboard). not all nerons do this, but by eaves dropping on the brain Ramachandran believes about 20% of those action metaneurons have this mirror sensation. so that's grat and all, but wheres the wicked awesome stuff? It's over in the somatosensory cortex... theres some more of those awesome mirror neurons hanging out in there. so heres where it gets fun, when we see someone reach out and touch billy's arm now, our nice sweet empathatic mirror neurons begin firing as if we are also being touched on the arm. however, we don't literally feel this because we have those handy touch and pain receptors hiding just below the skin which holler back at the brain that we are in fact not being touched, and that they may empathise all they want, but our arm will not feel that sensation for itself. Well, not untill we get a good dose of anesthetic in it, then those somatosensory neurons fire away leaving us with the actual sensation that sally is touching billy's arm and somehow ours too. Ramachandran brings it all home when he describes a nice way to massage a painful phantom limb by rubbing someone elses actual limb. those somatosensory nerves send a little message to the phantom limb nerves that it is being touched, and there are no pesky little skin receptor nerves to argue, so the massage can go on as planned. two arm rubs for the price of one!
4- well, it was all interesting. maybe it was good science, and a bit of good humanitarianism mixed all together, or maybe it was the excited man gushing about nerves in a quite infectious way. either way, I give it two thumbs up!
5- the book is an older edition, so there is no mention of mirror neurons or the neat things they do. the text gives a lesson on nerves, neurons, the somatosensory cortex, somatic senses, and touches on the phantom limb phenonmenon. of course the book was alos published before thier discovery, so i didn't expect much.
http://www.ted.com/talks/evan_grant_cymatics.html
1.I picked the video Evan Grant: Making sound visible through cymatics because I felt that it would tie in pretty well, based on the title with what we have learned about our vision and also with Synesthesia. Just going off the title, I thought it would be a good video to watch because it connects two senses, similar to what happens in the case of synesthesia.
2. I hoped that this video would be interesting and also that it would explain something that is similar to a common form of synesthesia where when a person hears a tone, this sound is also accompanied by a color.
3. The video actually showed how, by using cymatics, a creative technologist named Evan Grant was able to create pictures by using sound waves. Based on the frequency of these sound waves, the higher the frequency, the more complex the pattern becomes. This is a field that has been studied by people for hundreds of years starting with Galileo Galilei, but still not very much is known about it. As technology develops, the closer that cymatics also gets to making great advancements. Grant mentioned that the noises that dolphins make were being recorded and then turned into cymatic representations and that they hope to soon be able to use these to try and understand better how dolphins communicate with each other. Cymatics isn’t just a technological way to look at sound, it also create beautiful designs. Grant also implied that by studying these different designs, researchers might also gain insight into how the world was formed by using this visual interpretation of sound.
4. My favorite parts of this video were when a metal sheet was somehow hooked up to a device that was creating different tones and as the tone changed, the design created by the vibrations of the sound waves. Grant also played a little bit of a Pink Floyd song with the changing cymatic patterns.
5. Because this is an area that is not studied by very many people, my text did not have any information on cymatics. I did find an interesting website. This site doesn’t really give any more information on how these images are made, but it does have a gallery with a lot of cool photos and even has instructions on how to make your own device to create these images.
http://www.cymatics.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
1. I picked this video because video games could be considered my poison of choice. I remembered the chapter from Visual Intelligence on alternate realities and it felt like real life applications to something I'm already incredibly familiar with would be interesting.
2. Honestly, I wasn't certain what to expect. I can tell you I didn't expect for someone to suggest that the general populous immerse themselves in video games or other alternate realities MORE. I wasn't expecting someone to emphasize that people can be MOTIVATED by video games.
3. This is going to be a touchy subject. Video games, in my experiences on campus, is a controversial topic among students because everyone has their view of what video games are, their purposes, and the types of people that put themselves in this kind of environment. Jane has this kind of view of people as well. She feels that people play games because the real world doesn't tend to be emotionally accommodating for some individuals (500 million gamers that play video games for around 3 billion hours a week. Jane McGonigal estimated that in order for people to be adequately trained for the real world, they would need to spend 21 billion hours combined. Her theory suggests that games can motivate people in the ways that the world can't sometimes. She believes this is why people completely immerse themselves in these alternate realities sometimes. Jane suggests the way to motivate people, is the way to find a way to bring the can-do attitude that people achieve in video games and bring those "Epic Wins" into the real world to help people tackle real life problems.
4. My absolute favorite part of the video is the acknowledgment that motivation is an issue. I like the concept that we have people being trained in SOMETHING, but we as a group of people...need to find a way to utilize that training.
5. The text discusses the philosophical applications of alternate realities and describes alternate realities as something people experience. Visual intelligence did the same. In these alternate realities, the alternate reality FEELS as if it is actually the reality. I feel like the question quickly becomes, "How much virtual reality should be used at the expense of actual reality?"
Both of these links are videos that people have linked on the page the video with Jane is posted and if you have an hour and a half to two hours to sit down and watch them, they were fascinating to me. They offer counterarguments as well as agreeing with some aspects to this video at various points.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791
http://kotaku.com/5479125/points-for-toothbrushing-the-gaming-speech-everyone-is-talking-about
http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html
1)For this blog I picked the Bobby McFerrin link. The main reason I picked it was because I had been searching the website and came across his name and it just spoke to me. Plus it said he "hacks your brain with music" and music is something that everyone has to enjoy.
2) What I expected to see was a white guy basically standing up talking about the importance of music and how it shapes the way we think about certain things. It was interesting also how I naturally associated Bobby with a white man and it turns out he was an older black man. I thought that the topic would be this older white guy walking around with a mic talking about music but using old classical music. Which I still find interesting and enjoy listening to but I just wanted to see what Bobby had to offer.
3) What actually happened was a older Black man started out by just instructing the audience, very briefly with out even talking. He stood in a spot and hummed the tune that he wanted and motioned for the audience to follow in his footsteps. He made a scale going up and down and eventually with out any instruction he had the audience humming to his every footstep. After the two and a half minute showing of having the audience follow him he sat down and talked very briefly. Saying that it doesn't matter where he is at in the world the audience will naturally follow his tune after the first 10 seconds of setting up the pitch and letting them understand what he is doing. I liked this a lot because it shows the simplest ways of education and that learning doesn't all need to come from a powerpoint or textbook, that simple things like having an audience follow you on a scale and make the scale together with out even communicating what the next not should be can still be educational. It shows that you need to not take for granted the way people are able to learn, and that for some education isn't all about a classroom setting.
4)The thing that interested me the most was how he was able to keep the audience following his notes. He showed them three different notes to make them understand the way the pitch went and after that it was up to them to associate the pitch of the hum which ever direction he stepped. This goes along with what I was talking about earlier and how he says that no matter where he is at the audience will still always pick up the idea or concept. I enjoyed how this is considered to be educational and that you don't always need a classroom setting to be considered a teacher. He took what he knew and applied it in the simplest form and people were able to enjoy it and learn from it. Plus starting out a presentation the way that he did will make it so that more people are likely to listen in the long run. So overall I thought the way he conducted himself and taught through example was very impressive. I just really enjoyed how he didn't have to use a boring and read from the lines lecture that half the audience is bored of, he was able to use new and different ways to help educate people on a subject that they are more likely to take home with them also.
5) In my text I looked up information about hearing in general and found a lot of information on the audibility curve. Which is how Bobby was able to start his whole experiment that the audience followed. He was able to give them a pitch and the audience was able to replicate it. Audibility curve is a plot of minimum sound pressure level in decibels needed to just detect a tone. He gave them a tone to follow or hear and they were able to use it. The text also talked a lot about the loudness, intensity, and frequency of the different tones that humans are able to pick up on. He wasn't screaming into his mic he was giving them a tone he thought was acceptable for them to follow and it was up to the audience in the end to make up what pitch they thought would come next whether it be high or low. The last thing that related to this was the relationship between pitch and frequency. My text says they call the psychological unit of pitch the mel and arbitrarily set the pitch of a 1,000 HZ tone equals 1,000 mels. What this shows is that pitch and tone are related they do not need each other to exist. Saying that doubling the frequency doesn't double the pitch. Overall I thought that this short 4 minute experiment was more learning than any lecture I could have sat through. Plus it made it more interesting for me to go out and want to find information on this subject just to understand why Bobby was able to get the audience to follow his pitch.
Terms - Mel, frequency, pitch, loudness, audibility curve, decibels.
Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see
1.) I chose this video because it seemed like an interesting topic and figured that it would tie nicely into what we have been discussing in class. Also, whenever the video started the speaker talked about the two main problems that any child in India has. The first problem is that you are very likely to develop a disease in the eye that will leave you blind. The second problem is that you are very unlikely to get medical treatment for your disease to avoid the blindness. This is the case of someone who learned how to see after she was blind; therefore this is why I chose this video.
2.) I expected to hear a story about a child who developed blindness due to a disease and then despite the obstacles sought out medical treatment and now is probably a story that many children hope for themselves.
3.) It was very interesting to hear the girl’s story. Especially since the treatment is so rare. The speaker was very personable. He spoke of his son and how he was developing the same disease in his eyes that many other children. When they sought out treatment doctors didn’t give his child much hope. Of course the parents were heartbroken and after the speaker found out that not only was his son a suspect of this, but many other children. He said that his heart went out to those children and therefore he felt an obligation to help these children. He then started a program in India for these children. He wanted to provide money for these children for medical treatment and make them feel as though there was actual hope. His program went to a school for the blind and then tested each of the children to sort out if this disease was causing permanent damage. He spoke that the white of the lens and showed pictures damaged with Cataracts. He did operations on these children still with some hope. He said within three weeks later these children’s diseases have decreased. After his treatment the children gain sight in their eyes. I really liked the video. It was very uplifting to hear the cases of the little children receiving hope and treatment through this man’s program as well as funding from the Ronald McDonald charity as well.
4.) What interested me the most about this video was the Cataract in the lens and how that causes it to change colors. I also liked the idea of someone trying to make an impact in another person’s life. In this case, the speaker was trying to help children less fortunate. These children are expected to lose sight in their eyes and they have the knowledge that there is nothing that they can do about it except wait for it to happen. These families don’t have the money to seek our treatment therefore are forced to seek the only treatment available, which is by a non-educated, non-degree doctor. How are these children supposed to keep hope for themselves, those around them, and for their futures if they are expected to accept a life where they have no control over the outcome? It was a sad story, but a possible start to a happy ending.
5.) The book briefly discusses cataracts. Cataracts start as a clouding that develops in the lens of the eye, or envelope. The degrees of cataracts can vary in degrees from slight to complete obstruction of the light that passes through the lens. In early aged children the cataracts damage to the lens can increase which causes nearsightedness (myopia). Gradually, over time, the cataract turns a shade of yellow and then produces a shade of blue colors. Cataracts typically progress slowly, but the usual outcome is complete blindness to potential blinding if it goes untreated. Cataracts usually affect both eyes, but almost always affect one eye before it affects the other.
****Cataracts, nearsightedness, myopia, lens, blindness, envelope
I picked this video because I saw that another student watched it. As I was reading their post, it seemed really interesting to me. So I stopped reading and went to watch it, then came back and read the rest of the post to see their reaction to the video.
The description states "Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between cerebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples." I expected it to be taught in the sense of medical terminology.
He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters. He was very entertaining when explaining these examples because he made it sound like it actually happened to him. He talked a lot about how people with brain damage would see their mom or dog and would say "that looks just like my mom, but that's not them." Then if they talked to their mom over the phone, they would say "that was my mom" opposed to "that sounded like my mom, but it's not her, it's someone else."
I liked when he talked about the phantom limb. He had a patient/friend who had nerve damage to one of his arm's. After being in a sling for a while (when the arm was still paralyzed) they had to amputate. The pain in his 'arm' continued in the phantom limb portion. Ramachandran fixed this at about $3 (he states it). He used a mirror and a box and had his friend look in the mirror of his complete arm and his phantom limb. The pain miraculously disappeared.
He also talked about Synesthesia and how it is hereditary. It is eight times more common in artists, poets, musicians, and artists. Ramachandran had a theory of Synesthesia: he states that the color and the number area of our brain are next to each other and these signals get mixed together and there is a cross wiring in the brain.
1. I watched Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds. It was a very interesting talk. She began the talk by saying that we often can tell what a person is thinking just by looking at them. Saxe went on to tell us we all have a part in our brain that is specifically used to think about how others think. This part of the brain is called the right temporo-parietal junction or the RTPJ. The RTPJ is only used to determine the thoughts of others. Therefore, this is a quality that all of us has and are born with. Saxe then explains that this part of the brain develops through childhood into early adolescence as other parts of the brain do. She shows interesting examples of children prediction what a person will do in a given situation and why. There are definite distinctions between ages in the understanding of the children. She then states that there are also differences among adults within the RTPJ. She conducted a study that showed how people judge the moral decision of a person in a few different hypothetical situations. There were differences among people but there was a general trend in the results. Saxe then tested her hypothesis that if a magnetic pulse is applied to the RTPJ section of the brain, it would change their moral judgments. This was seen to be true although the differences were not great.
2. I expected to see a video on how we perceive certain things about a person or a situation that can lead us to predict their thoughts. That is the reason I chose to watch this video.
3. What I really saw was an explanation of how a specific part of our brain is dedicated to thinking about how others think.
4. What interested me the most about this talk is that we actually have this very specific part of the brain. This part of the brain focuses on nothing else but what other people are thinking. Also very interesting is that it can be manipulated to make different judgments about others thoughts.
5. My text does not talk about this topic as it is not exactly a topic of sensation and perception. I did find some additional information on the internet.
http://www.extravolution.com/2009/09/hows-my-rtpj.html
This site compares Saxe’s ideas with those of JP Mitchell. He claims that there is not enough evidence to state that the RTPJ is only responsible for the judgments we make about others’ thoughts. He also says that there are ethical issues getting in the way of studying the RTPJ such as changing someone’s moral judgments using magnetic pulses. On the other hand, Mitchell says he thinks there is a future in this research and may help us to better understand “the hard problem” of consciousness.
http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles.html
1.) The reason I picked this video was because I love puzzles! Ever since I was little I have been putting puzzles together. I buy the puzzles with thousands of pieces and love to put them together when I have some extra time on my hands. I even have a framed puzzle of a flower hanging in my room!
2.) In this Ted Talks video I expected to see a lot of different forms of puzzles and maybe introduce me to puzzles I have never seen before.
3.)In this TED Talks video Scott Kim talks about puzzles and states that they are fun to solve and they have a right answer, as opposed to everyday problems and toys and games which are things that you play with that don't have a particular goal. Scott Kim says that puzzles are an ancient art form, like a joke, poem, trick, or song, and the best ones are the most memorable. Example of puzzles with memorable impact are: Figure Ground, puzzles that alter your perception, such as the famous vase/profile. Scott kim created his own picture of figure and ground. Another memorable puzzle is rush hour, puzzles that invite you to make your own. An example of this is a slidings block puzzle. The next memorable puzzle is the discover magazine. This puzzle acts as investigative reporting, such as gene sequencing. I enjoyed the video and it related to the reader and my text a lot more than I expected it would!
4.) The topic that interested me the most was the figure ground type puzzle because we have been learning about figure and ground all semester and the video even gave the vase/profile illusion as an example.
5.) My text discusses information about figure-ground segregation. It states that one approach to studying figure-ground segregation has been to focus on the contour that divides the two areas in reversible figure-ground displays. We can understand why we tend to see just one area at a time as figure in a reversible figure-ground display by considering how likely it would be that a vase and two faces would have exactly the same contours and that they would so happen to be viewed so their contours exactly coincided.
1) http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
I chose this video because it relates to reading people’s mind’s which appeals to many of my interests. It does not relate as directly to ‘S&P’ as some other Ted talks I’ve watched but it was an incredible 16 minute video with lots of good information.
2) I expected the video to talk a lot more about reading body language and other forms of nonverbal communication. In this way I thought information about facial recognition, and inference based on contextual and environmental stimuli would be the focus.
3) I loved this video and thought it was awesome. Dr. Saxe, an MIT neuroscientist, began studying not so much ‘reading minds’ in the classic sense of a psychic, but on the more classic sense of making decisions about what decisions other people might make in a given situation.
Developmental psychologists have a standard test for childhood cognitive development where the subject is let in on some piece of information (e.g. that there are actually M&M’s inside a crayon box) and asked how someone else who did not have that same piece of information might respond. Changes in how they respond are than tracked throughout development.
In this video the example involved a pirate’s sandwich being blown to the ground by a gust of wind, and having a second pirate place his sandwich on the treasure chest in the same position as the original. The important questions where then “Upon his return which sandwich would pirate #1 think was his?”, and “Is pirate #1 a bad guy for taking that sandwich?” Three year olds are unable to realize that, not knowing about the gust of wind, pirate #1 would probably take the sandwich in the same position he left his. Although 5 year olds are able to tell the difference and make the right selection, they still place inappropriate blame on pirate #1. At 3 years old it’s not surprising that they would place blame on pirate #1 because, but at 5, when they clearly know that he only accidently took the sandwich they still say that he’s mean and nasty. By age 7 we develop the ability to recognize that the whole situation is merely unfortunate rather than an immoral situation (though the 7 year old comically insists that the wind ought to get in trouble).
She found that a particular region of the brain, the right tempero-parietal junction (RTPJ), is used during these types of decision making processes but for almost nothing else. In essence this is the area of the brain in charge of thinking about what other people are thinking about a problem. This brain region however is only about 25% specialized in this area of the brain in childhood and is not fully specialized until well into adulthood.
A similar situation was set up for adults where two people sit down for coffee and one goes to get sugar for the other’s coffee. There are three situations which were studied. In one case the label on the jar said poison but is actually sugar. The person puts the poison in the cup because they think it’s poison though no one dies as a result (attempt). In another situation the jar says sugar, and the person puts the sugar in the cup (fine). And a third situation in which the jar is marked sugar but it is actually poison (accident). Naturally most people when asked to place blame on the person putting the sugar into the coffee place most in the attempt situation, a moderate amount in the accident situation, and no blame in the fine situation.
A test was done in which a magnetic pulse is sent into the RTPJ area of the brain to cloud and confuse i’s functioning. When she did this to adults the ‘fine’ category was unaffected however the blame was far less in the ‘attempt’ category and far higher in the ‘accident’ category (they almost equaled out) indicating an almost childlike, impaired, or retarded level of moral decision making.
4) I absolutely love what neuroscience is doing with longstanding philosophical issues such as the ethical ideas discussed in this video. They raised several issues at the end about what someone might do with this technology, the idea being that eventually you may be able to eliminate people’s ethical capabilities. Dr. Saxe maintained that right now all it can really do is change the way you think about how other people think about moral issues, and that supposedly it doesn’t change your own ethical behavior. This seems strange however since one would think that your beliefs about what others think would greatly influence your own ethical behaviors. If you don’t think someone should be blamed for willingly putting poison into a coffee cup why would you not be more inclined to do the same?
5) There have been two or three very important themes running throughout this course both in the textbook and the reader. The first is that perception is actively constructed not passively experienced. Another is that the brain is the most important part of the construction process, acting as the ‘computer processing center’ of the construction. And yet another is how in depth and sophisticated the whole process is in reality yet how automatic and effortless it all seems to be.
In these broad ways this video perfectly follows along with very unique and interesting research about how we perceive not just objects and physical features but also entire scenarios and events. We do in fact construct all that we perceive even when we are percieving how others are interacting with their own environments. Just as it seems as though we see lines, shapes, and colors just as they are, so too it seems that when we see others act and make judgments about their actions this too is done passively in line with the reality of the situation.
We have become so well adapted to accurately predicting how and why other people are acting as they do that we do not realize it is subject to the same constructive processes as our most basic visual sensations. It takes a uniquely constructed test (e.g. about pirates eating cheese sandwiches, or poisoned coffee) and sometimes sophisticated technology (i.e. the magnetic pulse device) before we can understand where, when, how, and why our brains are constructing what we perceive, feel, and think.