Linkstew

Who is George Lakoff and what's he doing with Howard Dean?

As if I weren't already moderately inclined to like Howard Dean, the fact that he's read Lakoff only makes me like him that much more.

You know how Comedy Central has been showing those parody commercials for reality TV shows like "Joe Mormon" or "The Vault?"

Well, if it were real, I would actually watch "Celebrity CAT Scan." And I'm not even that embarrassed to admit it.

Anyway, bed time and snowboarding this weekend.

One of the classic questions of cognitive science is "Why do things look as they do?" Two opposing answers to this question are "Things look as they do because we are the way we are," and "Things look as they do because the world is the way it is."

On the one hand, things look as they do because the world is the way it is. Photons are emitted by light sources, bounce off of things, and into our eyes. The wavelengths of these photons determines the colors we perceive.

But on the other hand, things look as they do because we are the way we are. Any optical illusion is evidence of this, because in an optical illusion we perceive something that is contrary to what exists in the world.

The Cognitive Science classes I've taken here at Berkeley concede the necessity of environmental stimulus, but beyond that are pretty organism-centric. The phenomenon of optical illusions (among others) is taken as evidence that our experiences of the world are dependent on our biology.

But "because we are the way we are" always seemed to be missing something for me, and today I figured out what it was.

Why do things look as they do?

Because we are the way we are because the world is the way it is.

We see the colors we do because our eyes are visible to a specific wavelength of light. Why are our eyes sensitive to visible light instead of infrared? Because the majority of the light that reaches the surface of the earth is in that wavelength. Why does the wagon wheel illusion occur? Because the proximity heuristic used to help solve the motion correspondence problem was more accurate than other failed (and hence unknown) heuristics, which gave the organisms with those heuristics an advantage.

If our species had developed on a world where gravity behaved differently, or where other wavelengths of light predominated, we would be different organisms, and we would most likely experience the world differently. Our brains were shaped by the environment in which they developed, making our experiences just as much a product of our environment as they are a product of our biology.

(Please note that I am not talking about "nature versus nurture." That's a whole other can of worms that I'm not even going to get into.)

Heh, the silly things I think of while taking a final:

One Final, Two Final,
Red Final, Blue Final,
But only if you're a Synaesthetic.

Sheesh, last semeser I came up with a jokeless punchline, and this semester I come up with Dr. Suess does Cognitive Science. I suppose it's worth noting that Synaesthesia had nothing to do with my final as evidence of how ridiculous I am.

By the way, of particular interest on that linked Synaesthesia page is the use of stroop effects to prove the existance of synasthesia. That's so neat. I love CogSci. I want to do this sort of thing when I grow up.

On the bright side, I'm done with finals.

State Dependent Learning is a pretty well studied phenomena. But in addition to the effects of chemical states and moods described on the linked page, evidence has also been found that a person who studies in the same environment in which he or she is tested will perform better.

So here I am studying for this final and thinking about State Dependent Learning (which has nothing to do with network protocols, I assure you). I'm wired on caffeine right now, but that's not a problem, because I'll be equally wired on caffeine while I'm taking the test. Hell, I'll probably be consuming caffeine while taking the test. I figure I'm not going to be able to take the test in my bedroom, so I'm not going to be able to do anything about the location factor.

But what I'm really pondering is Music. Of course I've been listening to music while studying, but I certainly won't be able to listen to music while taking my final. Instead, when I'm taking tests, I always have some song or another that I hum to myself. Obviously, to be maximally effective, it should be a song I listened to a lot while studying.

So let's see what I've been listening to today:

• Amon Tobin - Bricolage
• Amon Tobin - Permutation
• Amon Tobin - Supermodified
• Lamb - Lamb
• Moby - Play
• Moby - Play: The B-Sides
• Moby - 18
• Radiohead - OK Computer
• Radiohead - The Bends
• Radiohead - Kid A
• Radiohead - Amnesiac

Most of these are conducive to my studying because they either have no lyrics or I can easily ignore the lyrics. In contrast, I cannot study to TMBG no matter how much I love them, simply because I get distracted by unignorable lyrics.

Heck, the song I had stuck in my head during Monday's final was Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box off of Amnesiac, so I should be in good shape to focus on a song I've been studying to during the final tomorrow.

Assuming, of course, I actually study instead of writing about studying.

I know there have been studies of the effect of music on learning, but I don't have time to look them up right now and see if they thought to investigate state dependent learning effects as part of those experiments. Did they test the performance of the subjects with and without music? Did they poll the subjects to see if they were thought about the music they studied to while they were being tested? These would all be interesting questions to know the answers to, and seem extremely important to any study of the effects of music on learning.