(Part 4) Top products from r/cogsci

I just read a book on introversion that argues strongly against "brainstorming" and other design-by-committee ideas using a different example from Apple: Steve Wozniak designing the hardware for the original Apple computer almost entirely on his own.

Perhaps crowds do best in answering questions with definite answers but limited availability of facts, but individuals do best when innovation and creativity are required, provided the individual is talented and knowledgable on the subject.

I can't recall where I originally heard that handedness influenced drawing, but here are some relevant sources that I found:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1418831
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16350613

Interestingly, the second link says that in children handedness did not influence the subjects like it did the adults.

> My hypothesis is not that children (and people in general) see a letter and then spend time flipping it back and forth in the x-z plane, but rather that the mind encodes the memory of the object/symbol in a non-specific orientation in the x-z plane, so when it is recalled, there is a chance that it is seen from "the other side".

This definitely makes sense, and perhaps it is the case for some people? I know that for me, the symbol is encoded in a non-specific orientation, but not in a specific plane. I think that the part of my brain that does symbol processing bypasses my spatial perception - so it essentially all 2D. From a certain viewpoint I might see a pattern in a wall that looks like a face or a letter, but when I change my perspective it disappears.

I do know that symbol processing takes place in different parts of the brain depending on the language the person knows. Chinese speakers process characters differently than people who learned a language with an alphabet. (I know this from the book Proust and the Squid which is fascinating.) So, my thought is there are many factors that might be influencing these mirroring errors, but your theory is definitely a contender.

There is an element of truth to this. Abilities are built upon previously learned abilities. Even thinking abilities are tied to "embodied metaphors" learned at a young age (originally researched by Lakoff & Johnson' "Metaphors We Live By"). The only aspect of this is that no form of knowledge has perfectly symmetric learnability with any other. If you can squeeze the concept into a metaphor you know you can learn it more easily but sometimes the metaphor will take you to wrong conclusions.

In terms of "intrinsically physiologically easy" things that can be learned, in the extreme we are constrained by our mesoscopic existence to learn only embodied metaphors that resemble the mesoscopic world we live in. This is why Newtonian physics is easier than quantum physics (microscopic) or relativistic physics (macroscopic). This is what Dawkings is talking about in this Ted video.

We form embodied metaphors based on how we physically interact with our world as children. This is also the basis of the GOMS model for user interfaces to machines and computers (the basis of mouse-window operating systems - first at Xerox Alto, then Apple Lisa & Macintosh, then Microsoft, et al.).

You learn time arrows by experiencing them. You learn basic math by filling containers and seeing the addition and subtraction. You do not see quantum or relativistic effects so you never have a proper intuition for how them work. You only learn about them abstractly and if very lucky you develop an "alternate universe" intuition for them through abstraction. It never becomes "purely intuitive" though. It will always surprise.

Could and does! Have you heard of dynamic systems theory? Here's a book by Anthony Chemero that uses dynamical systems theory to answer some problems embodied mind theorists have.

And of course there's always machine learning, which has some great applications for Bayesian statistics, map theory, and linear algebra, and there's game theory, and there's statistical decision theory, which is great for modeling simple organisms/intelligences.

Personally, I was a cognitive science major at my undergrad institution and I took a bunch of math classes (mostly statistics). I'm going on to an interdisciplinary PhD program in perceptual science next year. While the university I'm going into doesn't have a cogsci department, they have a program that can "certify" you in cogsci, and I plan to do that as well.

Go for cogsci! We need more mathematicians. :o)

From the way this first bit is framed, I wonder if you've ever studied or encountered any of the work that would fall under the aegis of "developmental systems theory". It seems like a lot of the ground you're trying to cover in terms of the distinction between genetic influences on evolution and epigenetic/cultural influences has been covered in great detail by developmental systems theorists from an anti-gene-centric perspective, and you should probably be engaging or at least acknowledging it. Susan Oyama's The Ontogeny of Information and Oyama/Griffiths/Gray's edited volume Cycles of Contingency are a couple of good texts to get acquainted with the DST approach and its (fairly far-reaching) philosophical implications.

Tomasello's work is very good and these results are interesting. It'll be fun to see how the Chomskian die-hards twist and turn to convince us that we should ignore experimental evidence.

Here are two of Tomasello's recent books:

Constructing a Language

Origins of Human Communication

Read The Freedom Manifesto, now! It might save your life.

If you are fascinated by rationality, decision making, behavioral economics etc., Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a great read.

I apologize for the x-post, but it appears /r/cogsci doesn't allow self.posts, so I submitted it again. Sorry, but methinks relevant to /r/cogsci.

Given that Daniel Dennett has recently published a book on thought experiments called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, I thought it would be good to show one of Dennett's most famous intuition pumps.

This section of the movie is based on Daniel Dennett's though experiment first published in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology and reprinted in his famous compendium with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind's I.

The original paper is available here and elsewhere online.

The movie itself is a documentary and dramatization of several themes in the book The Mind's I and includes an interview with Douglas Hofstadter earlier on (a name that should be familiar to many /r/cogsci folks)

The cogsci-relevant parts of the movie are a bit dated, but still relevant nonetheless.

I'm no expert, but I thought The Mind Within the Net: Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting by Manfred Spitzer was a great introduction to neural nets and how they might relate to neurophysiology and cognition.

Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi, Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development

A nice overview of connectionist theory and what neural networks can tell us.

I took a course on Cognitive Science last term and the text we used was An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Vol. 3: Thinking, supplemented with a few other readings.

It's part 3 of a 4 part series that "employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results. Each chapter tells a coherent scientific story, whether developing themes and ideas or describing a particular model and exploring its implications."

Before you get too far into the artificial intelligence you may want to update your knowledge of the real thing: Steven Pinker's the stuff of thought and How the mind works will get you most of the way.

And read or skim The Big Book Of Concepts by Murphy. He shoots holes in some very basic assumptions of GOFAI and AGI and points out how weak is our knowledge of the structure of human thought.

Stephen Palmer, Vision Science: From photons to phenomenology

http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Science-Phenomenology-Stephen-Palmer/dp/0262161834

Mind Design II: http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Design-Philosophy-Psychology-Intelligence/dp/0262581531

Another idea: Search for schools that have cognitive science programs. Look for reading lists for PhD qualifier exams in cognitive science.

Also this:
Stephen Luck's book

Embodied cognition is one area

Some links: Language Log; Wikipedia entry; Geoff Pullum's book.

Meh, forgot the links:

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0547247990/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Neurobiology-Reflections-Political-Philosophy/dp/0231137524