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