The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark
Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of […]
Cancer and the Threat of Death (2007)
Full title: Cancer and the Threat of Death: The Cognitive Dynamics of Death-Thought Suppression and Its Impact on Behavioral Health Intentions Learning that one has cancer is a terrifying thought. A natural reaction would be to suppress that thought, which can affect the way we approach and seek treatment. This study investigates the cognitive association between […]
Brain Bases for Auditory Stimulus-Driven Figure–Ground Segregation (2011)
Notice how you tend to selectively pick out a specific sound (e.g. your name) from a crowd of other sounds? Teki et. al (2011) developed a new stimulus to capture the complexity of natural acoustic scenes like these. By integrating the patterns over time and frequency, they demonstrate that human listeners are remarkably sensitive to […]