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