Disqus - Latest Comments for Gary Fisk

Re: What’s in a Memory?

Gary Fisk — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:43:04 -0000

The idea that memories are based on association has a long history. James Mill and John Stuart Mill were interested in association back in the 1800s. John Stuart Mill proposed that phenomena were associated based on laws of similarity, continguity and intensity, but later revised this to similarity, contiguity, frequency and inseparability (Boring, 1929, p. 229). In other words, similar items are associated with one another, things that occur together are associated, and so on.

Association is essentially a description of memory. The more vexing problem is to figure out how these associations are occurring in the brain.

Experimental evidence suggests that episodic memories are represented throughout the brain. The visual elements are stored, for example, in visual cortex and the emotional elements are in areas involved in emotion. It is not clear at the moment how all of this is coordinated into a single memory. The answer to this question is quite important to the study of consciousness, but it is difficult to study. Science tends to be well suited to breaking a complex phenomenon down into small parts but is not so well suited to seeing how all the small parts (the components of memory, in this case) combine to produce a larger phenomenon.

Re: Pedantic

Gary Fisk — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:56:52 -0000

Hmm, sounds like me and the other academics I know. I apologize for being a bit too pedantic in my comment on your memory post the other day. Us academic types just get a bit too carried away sometimes.

I had an idea. Maybe I should change the name of my new blog to the Pedantic Professor. It's partly true, partly toungue-in-cheek. It seems quite pedantic to use the word pedantic like this, which I like. What do you think?

Re: What’s in a Memory?

Gary Fisk — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:06:38 -0000

I've given this a bit more thought.

Discovering the fundamental processes of association would be the holy grail of psychology in many ways. Most psychological phenomena, like memory, learning, and cognition, could be viewed as examples of association. It would be very powerful if one process could explain such diverse functions.

Being a powerful idea, however, might also be a downside. The concept is so broad that it ends up being a bit vague. It wouldn't be specific enough to have much value. For example, if made a claim that all psychological processes are based on association it wouldn't really explain much in the end because it would be a catch-all type statement.

Re: Jason Microwaved Coffee

Gary Fisk — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:21:15 -0000

Jason - It's really much better if you microwave the water first, then add the instant coffee. :-)

Re: My Buddy the Blacksmith

Gary Fisk — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:27:21 -0000

The last time that I talked to Trent he said that he was pitching a show to HGTV that would involve blacksmithing. Have you heard how this turned out?

Re: A GTD Approach to Organizing and Reading Your Feeds

Gary Fisk — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:17:49 -0000

I like the idea of sorting feeds by location. It's very much like creating to do lists organized by location except that the feeds are creating the lists.

Do you have any suggestions for filtering feeds so that one could focus more upon the articles that are most interesting? This would be particularly important for sites like Reddit and such that have a low signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., many more uninteresting articles than interesting articles). Sorting by priority would seem to be a step toward filtering, but it would still require reading through the lists to find the interesting articles.

Re: A GTD Approach to Organizing and Reading Your Feeds

Gary Fisk — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:25:44 -0000

The social filters of Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc. may be working better that I realize. If I had to go through all of the new web pages that are created each day it would probably be much less interesting than the stories that these sites point out. It just seems that there is a lot of the news of the wierd or "look at this funny picture" kind of posts on these social news sites.

Re: The New Trend in Online News Writing?

Gary Fisk — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:11:32 -0000

This could be an attempt to capture the short attention spans that readers have on the web. On the other hand, maybe it's just bad writing technique. I often read undergraduate essays that are just one huge paragraph from beginning to end, which is the opposite of what you've described above. There are also some who tend to overuse bullet points and thereby turn their writing into one list after another. I think that this phenomenon is the result of writing without a clear sense of organization and purpose.

Re: The Death of University Standards is the Death of America

Gary Fisk — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:31:56 -0000

I suspect that part of the reason for this trend is to increase enrollment. The administrators of some colleges and universities are under tremendous pressure to increase enrollment. More students means more tuition money. It also looks good on an administrator's resume to say that enrollment increased as a result of their management. An administrator's success is measured largely in terms of enrollment growth.

Of course, it sounds much better to say that the tests are being dropped to ensure fairness. Nobody would want to admit to lowering standards.

Re: Hacking and Grinding: The Balance Between Passion and Self Control

Gary Fisk — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:56:24 -0000

Nice post Daniel.

I think that your ideas of hacking and grinding correspond to the psychological concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, respectively. Intrinsic motivation refers to things that we do because we enjoy the activity in itself. Extrinsic motivation describes activities done solely to bring about a particular outcome. There is no interest or pleasure from the activity. The only thing that matters to extrinsically motivated people is the outcome. A good example of both of these is fishing. Some people enjoy fishing and fish as a hobby, which is intrinsic motivation. On the other hand, some people fish for a living. Their extrinsic motivation is to get paid at the end of the day and they could probably care less about fishing as an activity.

It is good to balance these if you can by finding a career that you care about. There is some evidence though that getting paid for doing what you love can decrease the intrinsic motivation for doing the work (the overjustification effect).

@Brooks: I partly agree with you that extrinsically motivated people are more prone to burn out, but I think that there is more to it than that. There are plenty of people who start in careers that they truly care about only to get frustrated by the lack of pay or poor working conditions (e.g., artists, musicians, teachers, nursing, etc.). This suggests that intrinsic motivation is probably not enough, by itself, to prevent burnout. Stress and the amount of work required to be successful are also important elements that make people more likely to burn out.

Re: The Rift Between Us

Gary Fisk — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:32:09 -0000

Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason says that about 40% (if I remember correctly) of Americans haven't read any books in the past year. The definition of "book" in the cited survey was broad. For example, it included romance novels and the Bible. Newspaper readership is also down from the past, although some of that may be due to people reading from online sources.

The term "elite" has been used by some people as an insult, but the truth is that it doesn't take much reading to be part of the intellectual elite if most people choose to be aliterate.

Re: Why McCain Will Be the Next President

Gary Fisk — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:38:13 -0000

I don't think that you can make a strong prediction about this election based on the Bradley Effect. There is evidence of a reverse Bradley Effect in this year's Democratic presidential primaries from Southern states. Obama has done better than poll predictions in Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. If Obama can win even a few southern states it might be enough to help him win the election.

I have some links about this topic on a blog post.
http://gdfisk.blogspot.com/search?q=bradley+eff...>

Re: ChaCha

Gary Fisk — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:00:02 -0000

Some teachers are concerned that students will use services like these to cheat on exams. On the other hand, some would argue that memorization of facts is not valuable any more when all the information is just a few key strokes away. The real question now is how much does a person have to know or memorize to function properly in society?

If you're interested in this topic, you should check out The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. The title is extreme, in my opinion, but he does raise some interesting questions about a potential decline in literacy caused by over dependence on information technology.

Re: Scientists Read Images Directly Out of the Brain

Gary Fisk — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:09:56 -0000

This is very cool. This was accomplished in cats several years ago, so it is not too surprising that reading visual images straight out of the brain can be done in humans.

The visual system is the part of the cerebral cortex that is understood the best. This finding is relatively straight forward in some ways because the lower level areas of visual cortex have a direct correspondence to specific sites on the retina (retinotopic organization). In other words, part A in the retina goes to part A of the primary visual cortex, part B goes to part B of the primary visual cortex and so on. So if you knew what areas of primary visual cortex were being activated you could develop a good idea of the image that was being processed by the retina.

The reason I'm going into this level of detail is to make the point that it is going to be much more difficult to do this kind of thing with thoughts, intentions, decisions and other cognitive phenomena. These are not nearly as well understood as vision. But maybe it will be possible to process cognitive processes like this someday.

Re: Exploring Coffee

Gary Fisk — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:18:13 -0000

I'm not a coffee expert, but I do like good coffee. I definitely recommend Cafe Campesino, the one in Americus. Fair trade is a bit more expensive, but I think it is worth it.

http://www.cafecampesino.com

Re: 10 Computer Shortcuts: Obvious to Techies but Unknown to the Rest (Plus: New World Record)

Gary Fisk — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:20:39 -0000

Some useful shortcuts for cut, copy and paste:
control-x: cut
control-c: copy
control-v: paste

These are much quicker than selecting the commands from the "file" menu with a mouse. These commands work in both word processors and the windows file manager.

Re: What’s in a Memory?

Gary Fisk — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:43:04 -0000

Association is essentially a description of memory. The more vexing problem is to figure out how these associations are occurring in the brain.

Re: Pedantic

Gary Fisk — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:56:52 -0000

Re: What’s in a Memory?

Gary Fisk — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:06:38 -0000

I've given this a bit more thought.

Re: Jason Microwaved Coffee

Gary Fisk — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:21:15 -0000

Jason - It's really much better if you microwave the water first, then add the instant coffee. :-)

Re: My Buddy the Blacksmith

Gary Fisk — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:27:21 -0000

The last time that I talked to Trent he said that he was pitching a show to HGTV that would involve blacksmithing. Have you heard how this turned out?

Re: A GTD Approach to Organizing and Reading Your Feeds

Gary Fisk — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:17:49 -0000

I like the idea of sorting feeds by location. It's very much like creating to do lists organized by location except that the feeds are creating the lists.

Re: A GTD Approach to Organizing and Reading Your Feeds

Gary Fisk — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:25:44 -0000

Re: The New Trend in Online News Writing?

Gary Fisk — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:11:32 -0000

Re: The Death of University Standards is the Death of America

Gary Fisk — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:31:56 -0000

Of course, it sounds much better to say that the tests are being dropped to ensure fairness. Nobody would want to admit to lowering standards.

Re: Hacking and Grinding: The Balance Between Passion and Self Control

Gary Fisk — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:56:24 -0000

Nice post Daniel.

Re: The Rift Between Us

Gary Fisk — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:32:09 -0000

The term "elite" has been used by some people as an insult, but the truth is that it doesn't take much reading to be part of the intellectual elite if most people choose to be aliterate.

Re: Why McCain Will Be the Next President

Gary Fisk — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:38:13 -0000

I have some links about this topic on a blog post.
http://gdfisk.blogspot.com/search?q=bradley+eff...>

Re: ChaCha

Gary Fisk — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:00:02 -0000

Re: Scientists Read Images Directly Out of the Brain

Gary Fisk — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:09:56 -0000

This is very cool. This was accomplished in cats several years ago, so it is not too surprising that reading visual images straight out of the brain can be done in humans.