2010 California Cognitive Science Conference!

The 2010 California Cognitive Science Conference is this Sunday, May 2nd! The CSSA is proud to host George Lakoff of UC Berkeley and James McClelland of Stanford as our keynote speakers; we also are featuring an amazing set of break-out speakers and presenters: Ming Hsu of UC Berkeley discussing Neuroeconomics, Manuel Vargas of the University of San Francisco discussing free will, Antonello Bonci from UC San Francisco discussing the neurobiology of addiction, Amy Orsborn of UC Berkeley discussing brain-mind interfacing, and Bradley Voytek of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute discussing neuroanatomy and presenting a hands-on demonstration with real brains. We will also be holding "Cognitive Conversations": an interdisciplinary panel on action, volition, and free will with all of our speakers. 

Space is limited, so register now! Light breakfast and lunch is included.

 http://cssa.berkeley.edu/ccsc10

Another "Say What?": Grad School!

Oh man. Graduate school. Eek.

Fear not: ScienceBlogger SciCurious of blog Neurotopia just wrote an advice post on what to look for in graduate schools! This is absolutely priceless insider's info. Although SciCurious seems to be working on the more neurobio side of things (Physiology Ph.D.), and the article talks about biomedical students, the advice is pretty field-neutral so anyone would likely find it useful. It's probably most relevant to CogSci people interested in fields that are mainly lab work, like neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and psychology. Also, she explicitly mentions neuroscience programs, so this is almost custom-made for these folks. Definitely worth a look from all CogSci people who may apply to a lab for grad school.

Here's the article link: Ask SciCurious: So you want to be a biomedical grad student...

MadCog

Link to Neurotopia: http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/

"Voodoo Correlations in fMRI Studies"...say what?!

The neuroscience blogosphere and science reporting in mainstream media has been abuzz lately over a paper published by Vul, Harris, Winkielman, and Pashler¹, titled "Puzzlingly High Correlations in Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition"². A really amazing and clear analysis of the hype/media coverage by ScienceBlogger Neuroskeptic can be found here: "Voodoo Correlations" in fMRI: Whose Voodoo? This makes the paper and the issue really easy to synthesize, and keeps a good grasp on the scientific principles for which research like social cognition and fMRI should always strive. Neuroskeptic even managed to make confusing statistics really clear! I highly recommend reading this one, particularly if you're into fMRI studies at all.

MadCog
¹ You may recognize Vul and Pashler as the authors of "Measuring the Crowd Within", a paper on "the wisdom of crowds": the averaged guess of a group of people is more accurate than the guess of any one person. That's a fun interesting quick one.
² This was called "Voodoo Correlations in fMRI Studies" in the Neuroskeptic article, I'm guessing that must have been an earlier title.

Do I Know You?

Radiolab is one of my favorite things ever.

This is a short clip about a rare disorder called Capgras, in which patients seem to think that their close family members are impostors who look exactly like them. Are the feelings we have for those we love actually essential in recognizing them?? It looks like it is!

[P.S. Professor Ramachandran from UCSD is in this one, and he is great.]

Quicklink: How we avoid running into each other

You know that "dance" that happens when you're walking down a hall and someone is walking directly towards you, and neither of you knows which way to go, so you both try and let each other go but then both go at the same time and repeat for several painfully awkward seconds? Someone's been researching how we avoid that when we walk down the street. How do we avoid crashing into each other? Great article, check it out: http://thequantumlobechronicles.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-day-friend-and-i-were-briskly.html

MadCog

Stroke of Insight

For my fellow CogSci lovers who have never heard of this lady or seen this TED talk, this is one you cannot pass up.

Imagine being a neuroscientist or a neurologist experiencing a stroke--how surreal would that be? Everything you've studied and diagnosed yourself in other people.. all of a sudden it's happening to you.

Well that's what happened to Jill Bolte.

Chay

"No One Knows What The F*** They're Doing -- Or, The 3 Types of Knowledge"

Got a super article that is a repost from Bradley Voytek, the Cal neuroscientist whose research I mentioned in this other blog post. This article brought me back to my freshman year when I thought "Oh my god, I used to think I was pretty smart but everyone here knows so much more than me!", particularly the part of that year when I figured out what Cognitive Science was like, and thought "DAAANG this field is massive, and there's so many smart people, how could I possibly learn everything and become as smart as them?!" Sound familiar? Fear not. Read No one knows what the F*** they're doing.  (if it wasn't evident by the title, this article contains profanity, so don't be offended.) If you've ever beat yourself up for not knowing something, or been intimidated by that person in class who seems to be the fountain of All Relevant Knowledge, or ever tried to eat poisonous berries, this article will help you understand why you feel that way, why that other person thinks they know everything, and puts forward a really useful way of framing knowledge. You should definitely read this if you are planning to learn anything in the next forever (aka that's you). Thinking about this kind of stuff is especially important for scientists, who are often straddling the very edge of knowledge, and even more so for cognitive scientists, 'cuz our field is pretty brand spankin' new and people think up new stuff all the time. Take a read: http://jangosteve.com/post/380926251/no-one-knows-what-theyre-doing

 MadCog

Quickpost: Profile of Nobel Prize Winning Neuroscientist Eric Kandel

It's important to know the leaders in any field you're studying. For us interested in the brain, some of the most exciting discoveries come from neuroscience -- so when I found this great profile of Eric Kandel on Scientific American, I couldn't resist posting it. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology (with a couple other scientists) in 2000 for discovering how plastic the brain is -- that we don't learn by changing neurons, but instead by altering the connections (synapses) between them. Fabulous article, unfortunately SciAm has it locked behind a pay wall, so make sure to click if you're from Berkeley or have institutional access: http://www.nature.com/scientificamericanmind/journal/v18/n5/full/scientificamericanmind1007-32.html

MadCog

Sorry Man, the Altruism ain't it.

Kinda like opposable thumbs and tool use, for a minute there scientists thought that altruism was a distinguishing mark separating humans from chimps, because chimpanzees in captivity were rarely very nice towards chimps outside their own group. That minute is over: a study published in PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science, an online science journal anyone can read fo' FREE) by some researchers in Germany and Cote d'Ivoire says they've found chimps in the wild who display very altruistic behavior towards other chimps. And this isn't like scratching some stranger's back -- apparently the chimps adopted baby chimps that weren't even theirs! That's a big deal, because it isn't easy to raise and feed a baby. This brings up some interesting questions about altruism and whether it's favored by evolution in primates. Hmmmmm.

Here's the article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008901

MadCog

Quicklink: Robots as Warmachines?

What does the soldier of the 21st century look like? It may start looking like your Artificial Intelligence projects -- in fact, the military has used robots, or "drones", in battle for over five years. For some of the possibilities and implications, check out this opinion piece from the Independent, a UK newspaper.  The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

Can fMRI machines one day be used to READ MINDS?!

The Mind Readers

Dude. You have to read to believe. And I've read some science experiments done in official journals on this---it's not science fiction anymore.. oOoooOoOoh *ghost noises*

Chay

Sweet pictures of brain-imaging machines

What do magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and positron emisson tomography (PET) machines look like? Check out these amazing illustrations of imaging machines. This is really informative even for people familiar with how these machines work, and the clear explanations make these pictures just as rad if you're just learning about them.

MadCog

Cal Neuroscientist

Locally grown neuroscience, hurrah! Here's an article by a Neuroscientist who just finished his PhD at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute on campus (just on the other side of GPB, kinda near Tolman). CSSA is good friends with Bradley Voytek, who  runs our Feel Dead Brains night for us each semester and gives a really amazing talk on the brain and neuroscience...and of course he brings a slew of brains and skulls and spinal cords plus gloves for everyone to play with. He's extremely knowledgeable and very accessible; it's always very fun to hear his talks. Which is why I was so excited to see his name in this Mind Hacks article.

The article Voytek wrote is about working with hemicraniectomy patients...that big scary word just means these patients had a sizeable part of their skulls surgically removed temporarily, usually due to some illness or infection causing really high pressure in the cranial cavity. Too much pressure on the brain can mean dead cells, and dead cells can mean dead patient, so they pop off part of that skull to let out some of that pressure. Voytek explains it in the article concisely in detail if you're interested. Anyway, he and a team of Cal and UCSF researchers have been testing EEG on these patients. What, and why? EEG (electroencephalogram) is a way of measuring the electrical activity of the brain, with some electrodes on a cloth cap placed over the scalp (IMHO, the best way to learn about this is to participate in an EEG psychology experiment on campus -- often they pay or give Psych course credit) Problem is: there's so much bone and tissue between brain and electrodes that the signals diffuse out, and pinpointing exactly where something happens is hella really hard. Enter the hemicraniectomy patient: without so much skull in the way, the EEG signal is much clearer. Anyway, read what he says instead: http://blog.ketyov.com/2009/12/research-paper-hemicraniectomy.html

I also have links to the PubMed article of the research Voytek is publishing, 'cause it ain't in print yet, and a download link to the actual article, both courtesy of the above-cited Mind Hacks article.

Go Brad!

MadCog

Link between Down's Syndrome and Alzheimer's

Here's a quickie. Just too fascinating to pass up. If you've learned about Alzheimer's in your neuroscience class, you might remember those pesky amyloid proteins (Thanks, CogSci127!) but this is a neat, quick, and revealing explanation of what's going down with those. And of course, the moral of the story here is that the quick, observant scientist catches the discovery. Reminds me of a very fun quote from famous science fiction writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "Hmmm, that's funny ...""

Here's the article, from ScienceDaily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100115182639.htm

MadCog

Synesthesia and the McGurk Effect

Synesthesia is when several senses are activated by one stimulus; a "crossing" of the senses, such as words with color, people with smells, tastes with shapes, even music with colors. It has a prevalence of about 1% of the population (link). (Wiki)

Our linguistic comprehension system uses a combination of visual and auditory information (when available) to figure out what sort of sounds are coming out of the other person's mouth. The McGurk effect is what happens when deviouscurious cognitive linguists trip up this system by dubbing one sound over a video of someone saying another sound. This is really best demonstrated by this video: VIDEO!!! (Wiki)

So, a coupla researchers who knew about these phenomena thought, hey, I wonder if synesthetes who associate colors with words will experience different colors when they're put under the spell of the McGurk effect. What a rad question, and a great way to prove the validity of synesthesia, which in my opinion, is kinda hard to get your head around if you don't have it. (the first few times I read about it, I was thinking, well couldn't these people just be making it up? O subjectivity, how unprovable thee art!...except when someone designs a cool experiment like this). Check out the article from ScienceBlogs: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2010/01/synesthesia_and_the_mcgurk_eff.php

Or the article on the SciBlog article from MindHacks: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/01/beyond_crossed_sense.html

MadCog

Illusions

Since we are putting on the conference this semester, I thought a fun revisit to the (loose) theme of last year's conference would be fun.

Click here!
Take a look at how your brain tricks you into perceiving the world. It makes you wonder.. what beliefs has your brain deceived you into concluding?

Rethinking Dolphin Intelligence: morally defensible?

I hesitated a moment when deciding whether or not I should make this the first post on this blog...but it was just too outlandish, slightly provocative, and just plausible enough that I decided I just had to post it.

The CSSA blogs!

Welcome, UC Berkeley Cognitive Science students, and anyone interested in cognitive science*!

Cognitive Science is a fast-paced, "hot" field, with new research coming out all the time, and it's really exciting. But it can be difficult to find out about all this new stuff, and articles straight out of academic journals are often challenging to understand. This blog is meant to make it easier for anyone with a blossoming interest in Cognitive Science to know what's new and exciting in Cognitive Science. You can expect to see posts regarding academic articles, research, reviews, blogs, books, people, events, and anything else pertinent to Cognitive Science. This blog will be maintained by the UC Berkeley Cognitive Science Students Association. (who's that? Keep reading!)

If you've checked out the Cognitive Science interdisciplinary major program at UC Berkeley, then you've heard of the Cognitive Science Students Association (CSSA). We're a small group of Cal students dedicated to building community with anyone interested in Cognitive Science and any of the related fields. Since Berkeley has no formal CogSci department, we hold events to support CogSci students and enrich their curriculum, such as our "Feel Dead Brains" neuroanatomy talk and hands-on ,workshop, "Professors Eat Too" (PET) events where students share a meal with a professor in the cognitive sciences, class schedule workshops, socials, and our newest event, the annual California Cognitive Science Conference, bringing together students and researchers from on campus and across the world to hear talks, view demonstrations, participate in workshops, and submit and appreciate undergraduate research in the cognitive sciences. It's pretty fun.

Various CSSA members will contribute to this blog. MadCog is the 2009-2010 CSSA treasurer, and is REALLY into reading blogs about the brain, mind, behavior, cognitive, and cognitive science. She is a third-year cognitive science major at Berkeley and has been a member of CSSA since 2009.

* Whoa! You mean, you've never heard of the awesomeness that is Cognitive Science? Don't worry, I did all the googling for you. Here's the wiki, the UCB major page, the Berkeley CSSA website, the Cognitive Science Society homepage, and the Institute of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at UCB (because that page has the best cognitive science logo image out there.)