Beautifully Biased Brains
Quirks and discoveries about our brains, how we perceive intelligence, and why we can't seem to ever fully understand it.
Charlie Gedeon and
Beautifully Biased Brains
The truth is that one day you hate yourself, and the next day you can’t wait to use your gifts.
— Adam J. Kurtz
“As I’ve tried to understand how to become a better conversationalist, I’ve found that I’ve had to overcome weird ideas about what a good conversationalist is like. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think a good conversationalis
... See moreBad UX research does not stink. Anyone without training can create poor research and the output looks just as convincing to the untrained eye. This is the reason why UX research uniquely feels the push for democratization.
Bad research doesn’t stink - Carl J. Pearson, PhD
What The Prisoner's Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything
youtube.com“In the short term, it is environment that shapes the player, but in the long run, it’s the player that shapes the environment.”
If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.
quantamagazine.org • The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses | Quanta Magazine
A sad irony is that the same cognitive bias that makes people ascribe humanity to GPT-3 can cause them to treat actual humans in inhumane ways. Sociocultural linguistics – the study of language in its social and cultural context – shows that assuming an overly tight link between fluent expression and fluent thinking can lead to bias against people ... See more
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) • Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought
The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) • Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought
Psychology was focused on measurable, outward behavior then. I thought to myself: That’s not what I want to understand about my thoughts. What I want to know is: Why do they come, where do they come from, and why do they persist even if they interfere with attention to the here and now?
Tim Vernimmen • The science of a wandering mind
I think it is more helpful to talk about the underlying processes: spontaneous thought, or the decoupling of attention from perception, which is what happens when our thoughts separate from our perception of the environment. Both these processes take place during mind-wandering and daydreaming.