Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
The Presidential Election
Politics on a weblog is like picking up a stick of old, wet dynamite. You might grab it and absolutely nothing happens, or it might very well explode in your face. It is for this reason that I try to avoid political discussion on prefrontal.org. Every weblog must have a focus, and there are more [...]
Quote of the Week - Gigerenzer
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology department once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]?’ It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive, and you don’t understand them” - Gerd Gigerenzer
The Neuroscience of Running
Just over a year ago I began running as form of regular exercise. I was looking for an outdoor activity that I could do year-round in New Hampshire and found running to be enjoyable in both warm and cold weather. It took a few weeks to (literally) get up to speed, but I have [...]
Quote of the Week - Feynman
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” - Richard Feynman
Quote of the Week - Tukey
“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.” - John W. Tukey, 1986
Quote of the Week - Fisher
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, [...]
Principal Components of Individual Differences
I have been spending the last few weeks exploring principal components analysis (PCA) of functional imaging data. PCA has been around for over a century, having first been invented by Karl Pearson in 1901. I have always been taught that PCA was a powerful data reduction technique, allowing a handful of components to [...]
Summer Teaching: Discover Technology
I always hope that a pause in the stream of weblog posts will be justified. The last several weeks have been pretty quiet around prefrontal.org, but I do like to think that the time went to a good cause.
For most of July I have been in Lawrence, Kansas as an instructor for the KU [...]
Quote of the Week - Rousseau
“We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being and born a man.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762
Good Science vs Public Awareness (Iacoboni)
In cognitive neuroscience debates are usually quite subdued and people rarely, if ever, point fingers negatively. However, in the last 24 hours there has been a rather dramatic reversal of this norm in a debate that has carried on for several years now: whether Marco Iacoboni and his collaborators overstep the bounds of good [...]