Cat Reacts to Optical Illusion
A cat sees a printed version of the Rotating Snake Illusion and reacts as if its moving. The cat’s owner, rasmusab, said the cat did not react to a different illusion on paper, and in fact, lost interest in the snakes after a few exposures. So he began to wonder how other cats react to illusions, and produced a form you can submit to relate your own cat’s experience.
“Laughter and mirth are not the same thing. I can elicit laughter by electrically stimulating parts of the brain,” the neurologist Richard Restak said the other night, onstage at the Rubin Museum. Beside him, at individual tables, sat three New Yorker cartoonists, Zach Kanin, Paul Noth, and David Sipress; a crowd of cartoon-and-neuroscience enthusiasts, many of them wearing colorful scarves and little glasses, were gathered in the audience. The event, part of the museum’s Brainwave festival, intended to explore the mental processes involved in creating and understanding cartoons; the crowd was eager to laugh—a screen showing E. B. White’s famous line about humor, dissection, a frog, and its innards went over big—but audience members soon found themselves quietly studying a diagram of the brain and hearing a speedy description of its parts and their functions.
“It’s a holistic thing,” Restak said. “You can’t just look at one part of this picture. […]” He described the parts of the brain that help people comprehend such things. “The occipital, that’s where the cartoon is seen. The parietal gives you the ability of seeing the whole picture. And here’s the important part for the cartoon: the temporal pole. It contains perhaps hundreds of thousands of scripts, or schemas…. This is the occipital area; this is the where. In the diagram I showed you, the picture of a kitchen, it gives you the whole totality of it; it tells you what the things are: the dishes, the water, et cetera. The dorsal, which is this part on top, is important for scanning the cartoon, what scripts are being evoked, what’s coming out of the temporal pole. This all occurs before reading the caption.”
He went on to describe the processes involved with language, as well as the mesolimbic reward system. “Funny cartoons activate the system,” he said. “Cartoons are great brain enhancers.”
Scientists are beginning to understand how people tune in to a single voice in a crowded, noisy room.
This ability, known as the “cocktail party effect,” appears to rely on areas of the brain that have completely filtered out unwanted sounds, researchers report in the journal Neuron. So when a person decides to focus on a particular speaker, other speakers “have no representation in those [brain] areas,” says Elana Zion Golumbic of Columbia University.
The ability to extract sense from auditory chaos has puzzled scientists since the 1950s, Golumbic says. “It’s something we do all the time, not only in cocktail parties,” she says. “You’re on the street, you’re in a restaurant, you’re in your office. There are a lot of background sounds all the time, and you constantly need to filter them out and focus on the one thing that’s important to you.”
But until a few years ago, how the brain did this was a mystery. That’s changing, Golumbic says, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to monitor many different areas of the brain as they listen to multiple voices.
A better understanding of the cocktail party effect could eventually help people who have trouble deciphering a single voice in a noisy environment, says Edward Chang, an assistant professor of neurological surgery and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
That’s a problem for many people as they get older, he says. It’s also a problem for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, Chang says, adding that he saw this problem up close when a person with the disorder volunteered for an experiment that involved trying to focus on just one of two speakers.
“This person had significant problems with the ability to select the correct speaker,” Chang says.
Understanding precisely how the brain solves the cocktail party problem could also allow machines to do a better job deciphering human speech, Chang says. That could mean better cellphones and less frustrating conversations with the computers that often answer phone calls to customer service hotlines.
Pac-Man, Tetris, SimCity & Other Classic Video Games Opening Friday at the Museum of Modern Art
The question “what is art?” has not been answered so much as exponentially dismantled in the past 100 years, such that, at present, it’s more or less meaningless to assert that some higher aesthetic realm exists apart from the splash and topicality of street art, product design, or advertising. Museums find themselves not so much curators of high culture as interpreters of what’s happening now, including such “low” arts as, say, graffiti, hip hop, rock photography, and, most recently, video games.
Which brings us to the Museum of Modern Art’s video game exhibit opening this Friday. Does the idea make you gasp? Well, according to MoMA Senior Curator Paola Antonelli in the video above, you are “in a dramatic minority… out of space and out of time.” Is she for real? It really doesn’t matter, since the final word on what is or isn’t art rests with… well, no one, really. And that is, in my humble opinion, a salutary legacy of the modernist revolution in the arts. Maybe if everyone’s a critic these days, then everyone’s also an artist, but especially those designers and programmers who gave us such enduring classics as Pac-Man, Tetris, SimCity, and Myst, all of which have made the cut in MoMA’s exhibition.
But..there’s nothing to cause the shadow! What’s going on here? Biologist Joe Hanson explains:
An insect like a wasp or a water strider can rest atop the water, held up by surface tension. This means that the cohesive force of the water molecules sticking to each other is stronger than the force of the bug being pushed down by gravity. This works because it spreads its weight out over a large surface area (like snowshoes).
That creates a slight indentation in the top of the water, changing the direction that the light coming down is refracted and re-directing it slightly sideways (that’s where the bright halos around the dark areas come from). And what’s the absence of light?
A shadow! You can see Hanson’s illustrative diagrams at the link.
The “broken windows” theory of policing holds that when a community tolerates minor examples of disorder and petty crime, such as broken windows, graffiti, turnstile-jumping, or drinking in public, people are more likely to commit more serious crimes.
As a law-enforcement theory, it’s controversial. But whether or not it’s true on a city-wide level, I think it’s true on a personal level.
My “broken windows” are the particular signs of disorder that make me feel out of control and overwhelmed. […]
[Examples include:] Unsorted mail; Messy stacks of newspapers; Cluttered counters; Dirty dishes […]
Does fixing a broken window really matter? After all, in the context of a happy life, a pile of unsorted mail isn’t a big deal. In themselves, perhaps, these broken windows don’t matter much. But enforcing small signs of order make us feel more in control–and happier.
Smithsonian Magazine’s 2012 Photo Contest
The editors of Smithsonian magazine have just announced the 50 finalists in their 10th annual photo contest. They’ve kindly allowed me to share several of these images here, including some great shots from each of the competition’s five categories: The American Experience, The Natural World, People, Travel, and Altered Images. Be sure to visit the contest page at Smithsonian.com to see all the finalists, and vote in the Reader’s Choice Awards as well.
Pictured above: “Exploring the Night” A lone hiker viewed the path before him as the Milky Way rose in the night sky above Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. Taken by Jason Hatfield, Lakewood, Colorado, in May of 2012.
Intriguing research suggests that positive psychology can help you weather the routine ups and downs of life and also build resilience for times of greater difficulty.
Here are three ways to capture the benefits of positive psychology.
Express gratitude. Gratitude is a thankful appreciation for what you have—from a roof over your head to good health to people who care about you. When you acknowledge the goodness in your life, you begin to recognize that the source of that goodness lies at least partially outside yourself. […]
Leverage your strengths. To reap the benefits of your strengths, you first need to know what they are. […] Certain strengths are most closely linked to happiness. They include gratitude, hope, vitality, curiosity, and love. These strengths are so important that they’re worth cultivating and applying in your daily life, even if they don’t come naturally to you.
Savor the “good.” Most people are primed to experience the pleasure in special moments, like a wedding or a vacation. Everyday pleasures, on the other hand, can slip by without much notice. Savoring means placing your attention on pleasure as it occurs, consciously enjoying the experience as it unfolds. Appreciating the treasures in life, big and small, helps build happiness.
Shannon Novak, a New Zealand-born fine artist, commissioned us to image 12 piano notes as inspiration for a series of 12 musical canvases. We decided to image the notes in video mode because when we observed the ‘A1’ note we discovered, surprisingly, that the energy envelope changes over time as the string’s harmonics mix in the piano’s wooden bridge. Instead of the envelope being fairly stable, as we had imagined, the harmonics actually cause the CymaGlyphs to be wonderfully dynamic. Our ears can easily detect the changes in the harmonics and the CymaScope now reveals them–probably a first in acoustic physics.
Capturing the dynamics was only possible with HD video but taming the dynamics of the piano’s first strike, followed by the short plateau and long decay phase, was tricky. We achieved the result with the help of a professional audio compressor operating in real time.
Behold, the Kindle of the 16th Century
In his own book, published in 1588 and modestly titled The Various and Ingenious Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli, the designer outlined his vision for a wheel-o-books that would employ the logic of other types of wheel (water, Ferris, “Price is Right”, etc.) to rotate books clockwork-style before a stationary user. Ramelli planned to use epicyclic gearing – a system that had at that point been used only in astronomical clocks – to ensure that the shelves bearing the wheel’s books (more than a dozen of them) would remain at the same angle no matter the wheel’s position. The seated reader could then employ either hand or foot controls to move the desired book pretty much into her (or, much more likely, his) lap.
