Scientific American Mind (Feb)

The February edition of Scientific American Mind is out and there are a number of interesting freely available articles online. First, there is a review article that (among other things) lists the web's best psychology / neuroscience blogs: Cognitive Daily, Mind Hacks, PsyBlog, The Neurocritic, and The Frontal Cortext all get favorable mentions. (I read all these blogs, by the way, and can recommend them all).

Then there is the fascinating column by Scott Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz on "brainscams" that they dedicate to the late skeptical psychologist Barry Beyerstein. (Beyerstein, incidentally, was interviewed [mp3] on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe shortly before his death). The column debunks three persistent myths: (1) that we use only 10% of our brain, (2) that some people are left-brained and others right-brained and (3) that we can use alpha waves to aid relaxation and achieve a more profound consciousness.

Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse argue that widespread public misconceptions (like most Americans believing there is incontrovertible evidence of WMD in Iraq before the war) is not due to "politically motivated disinformation campaign[s]" but to "common types of reasoning errors, which appear frequently in discussions in the news media and which can easily fool an unsuspecting public." Specifically, they think public misconception engendered by the media is due to the straw man fallacy and, a variation thereof, what they call the weak man argument (in which someone attacks the weakest argument of an opponent, falsely implying it is representative of the opponent's arguments).

Finally, Chip Walter attempts to answer the mystery of why we kiss and, in doing so, he surveys a host of intriguing recent findings that are starting to shed some light on why kissing evolved and what its biological effects are today.

Skeptics circle #79

The 79th edition of the skeptics circle is out at Podback Blog - and its theme is, of all things, LOLcats. I think we best not even ask... My favorite entries: Greta Christina asks "What's the harm in a little woo?", Polite Company playfully suggests you date a nerd and Skeptico explains why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Audio: James Flynn on intelligence

Professor James Flynn delivered an excellent lecture [mp3] on intelligence and, specifically, how best we can understand the Flynn effect, at an RSA meeting at the end of 2007. Some of you might remember Flynn featured prominently in Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant article on race and intelligence that I blogged about in December.

I highly recommend listening to the lecture - it's fascinating and Flynn is as eloquent as he is erudite.

(Hat tip: BPS Research Digest)

Scientology

Never mind this post, it's just me participating in a Google bomb organized by Anonymous.

Scientology is most certainly a dangerous cult.

Video: A cement cast of an entire ant colony

I just came across probably the single coolest science video I have seen in ages: a six minute excerpt from the documentary Ants: Nature's Secret (which won the special jury prize at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 2005). The documentary itself focuses on the work of Bert Hölldobler (who co-wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning The Ants with E. O. Wilson), but the excerpt (embedded below, or click here to go to YouTube) features Walter Tschinkel's amazing cement cast of an entire ant colony. (The cement technique itself seems to have been pioneered by Moreira et. al.). I highly recommend watching the video - it gets especially interesting after about 2 minutes.



(See also: ABC's article on Tschinkel's work, BLDG Blog's fantastic entry on Nest-Casting, and Ask a Biologist's podcast interview with Hölldobler in which he discusses the documentary [click here for the mp3]).

Research blogging

I have been participating in the Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3) initiative, which attempts to highlight serious, thoughtful blog entries on peer-reviewed research (using icons). The aggregation system I mentioned before has now gone live on the great site Researchblogging.org. Basically, whenever a blog author wants to make use of the new system, they go to the Researchblogging site, enter citation meta-data into a form which then spits out code that gets included in the relevant blog entry. Then Researchblogging.org aggregates all the blog entries that contain the code, lists them on the website and categorizes them into subject-areas.

Have a look at the site, it's a fantastic way to discover more academic blogs and entries on serious research.

Skeptics Circle #78

Sorry I'm late on this... The 78th edition of the Skeptics Circle is out at The Skeptical Surfer. There are a bunch of great articles but my favorites are: Greta Christina's post on how alternative medicine is untested by definition, Knudsen's News' great satirical piece and The 327th Male's thoughtful "How to be a nice skeptic" (also see the follow-up).

Embodied cognition in the popular press

This is by now quite stale, but the Boston Globe recently published a pretty good article on embodied cognition. The article covers the idea itself, its history, its possible practical applications and some criticisms. My view on the matter (by no means original, of course) even gets echoed:

"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.

"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this,"' Markman says. "But the thing in psychology is that it's not all anything, otherwise we'd be done figuring it out already."