Entries Tagged 'Science' ↓

Dave at Cognitive Daily posted an interesting article about a listener’s ability to discern the differences between high-quality (256kbps), low-quality (128kbps), and really low-quality (64kbps) MP3 samples. I was able to choose them all correctly using my ears, my MacBook Pro’s sound card, and studio quality in-ear monitors.

Let’s see how humemes readers do. Here are the MP3’s he used in a different order:

Copland 1:

Copland 2:

Copland 3:

Santana 1:

Santana 2:

Santana 3:

After you’ve listened, post your guesses in the comments.

An article at the New York Times by Benedict Carey talks about how we’ve become acclimated to ignoring the psychological shortcomings of individuals in our social groups to make our social interactions easier.

From the article:

In the modern vernacular, to say someone is “in denial” is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it’s not a problem.

Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people.

This opens up all sorts of questions regarding our own self-perceptions of honest, forthright behavior. While I’m not sure how effectively social scientists and psychologists are truly able to quantify the number of allowances of dishonest behavior, it is an interesting study nonetheless.

Benoit Hardy-Vallée made a post over at his blog Natural Rationality about Sciencehack, a moderated science video aggregator.

Here are a few videos I’ve found on the site and hope you enjoy:

The 34th edition of Encephalon, a quick guide to the previous two weeks worth of neuroscience news, has been posted at Distributed Neuron.

From Encephalon 34:

To start, Jake Young gives us a great analysis of a study of human and macaque visual cortices. Researchers dissected and analyzed the brains of people who had lost vision in one eye, comparing the results to a controlled study of macaques who had been partially blinded. It’s a fascinating analysis that also demonstrates the limits of fMRI.

Here is a video of an introduction speech for the class Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs given by Hal Abelson of MIT in 1986: