Cognation

Is self-control at age 4 a predictor of lifelong success? Rolf & Joe look at new studies that replicate and extend Mischel's marshmallow experiments, discussing why some kids can wait longer for a bigger treat and what the test itself means. Links: Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159–1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661 The Atlantic: Why Rich Kids are so Good at the Marshmallow Test

Our guests, Dr. Sheila Macrine and Dr. Jennifer Fugate, discuss the concept of "embodied cognition" and its implications for the classroom. They argue that traditional cognitive psychology has ignored the fact that the brain is situated in the body, and that learning happens most effectively if it is connected with our body and our environment, rather than learned abstractly.

Developmental psychologist Matthew Gingo joins to discuss his research on morality and deception. Why and under what circumstances do parents and their children lie to one another? We discuss his paper entitled "What they don't know won't hurt them: Parents' judgments about lying to their adolescents", published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (2019)

Joe and Rolf once again scry the future with bold and entirely accurate predictions about the year 2022

Joshua Miele is a blind scientist and inventor living in the Bay Area. Amongst his many initiatives is the Blind Arduino Project, where participants learn how to navigate a world of maker electronics that are really designed for the sighted. He talks to Joe and Rolf about his work to bring accessible and useful tools to the blind community. He teaches blind soldering classes, and he has worked to make braille maps easily accessible. He discusses what technology in recent years has helped the blind, and what hasn't. Blind Arduino Blog: http://blarbl.blogspot.com/ Josh's Handle: @BerkeleyBlink Mailing list for the Bay Area blind arduino monthly meeting: babamm@groups.ioSpecial Guest: Joshua Miele.

In Annie Murphy Paul's new book, "The Extended Mind", the philosophical idea of our minds extending beyond the physical boundaries of the body are explored. Rolf and Joe talk to Annie about the implications of this idea, and how it might be used to improve the way we think in a number of contexts.Special Guest: Annie Murphy Paul.

The NIH Toolbox is the result of an ambitious project supported by the National Institutes of Health to develop a comprehensive, standardized, and highly accessible test battery to be used in research. Dr. Julie Hook is the Product Manager for the project and is in large part responsible for the development of the Toolkit. Rolf and Joe discuss with Julie a wide ranging set of topics related to the science of cognitive, sensory, and motor testing, including some of the core design principles and theortical considerations.

Bestselling author known for making complex topics accessible to readers, Tom Vanderbilt's recent book is Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Rather than buying into the idea that learning is for kids, Tom takes the "beginner's mind" to challenging new skills, such as singing, juggling, and jewelery making, where he starts at ground zero and works to achieve a level of competence. Rolf, Joe, and Tom discuss the value of learning for its own sake, brain plasticisty in new skill learning, how drawing can be a meditative practice while shifting processing to earlier regions in the brain, and many other topics. We forgot to ask about a CogNation discount, but Tom Vanderbilt's book is available here at AmazonSpecial Guest: Tom Vanderbilt.

Enough with 2020. Rolf and Joe present their predictions for what lies ahead in 2021.....

Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Bernard Baars, a leader in the field of consciousness research. Dr. Baars has recently published "On Consciousness", which is a compendium on his work integrating research in psychology and neuroscience on what consciousness is and how it functions. TSpecial Guest: Bernard Baars.

David Rosen and Scott Miles of Secret Chord Laboratories (secretchordlaboratories.com) talk to Joe and Rolf about musical preference, the role of surprise in these preferences, what's going on in the brain, and how COVID is affecting the way we listen to music. Discussion paper: "A Statistical Analysis of the Relationship between Harmonic Surprise and Preference in Popular Music" (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00263Special Guests: David Rosen and Scott Miles.

An update on Episode 4, where we first discussed the phenomenon of the "Frey Effect" in which sounds are heard as a result of pulsed microwave radiation. The Frey Effect was proposed to be involved in attacks on the US embassy in Cuba. Could this also be going on in the US embassy in China? Rolf and Joe discuss further, and give a call out for any expertise that could be added.

In this half-hour episode, Rolf and Joe discuss research by Jennifer Mitchell and colleagues ("Dopamine, time perception, and future time perspective") showing that the drug tolcapone, which selectively increases dopamine in frontal cortical regions, has the effect of reducing the error in estimating how much time has passed. Individuals tend to systematicaly underestimate how much time has passed (think of impatient kids asking "are we there yet?"), and in this double-blind study, tolcapone nearly eliminated this effect, most dramatically for a 60 second interval. Implications of the study are discussed, including what this says about an "internal clock", whether you should rush to get this drug, and how time perception is related to depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. We do not discuss the role of tolcapone in ending the world.

Since 1999, National Novel Writing Month has exploded in popularity, becoming one of the most creatively productive events in the world every November. Participants buckle down and write a 50,000-word novel in a month, many enjoying the social support from the NaNoWriMo community. Founder Chris Baty joins us to talk about what he's been up to lately, as well as share some thoughts gained from his writing career. We talk about creativity, the power (or not-power, depending on your inclination) of narrative, what we would contribute to a post-apocalyptic team, and the anxiety of wanting to contribute more.Special Guest: Chris Baty.

30 min episode A connectome is a representation of every connection between neurons in the brain. Recent brain-slicing technology, in addition to image recognition tools, has begun to make this science-fiction idea become a reality. Rolf and Joe discuss the recent publication of the largest completed connectome to date, that of the fruit fly drosophilia. The database for the connectome is publicly available, and includes huge amounts of data about every one of the approximately 25,000 neurons mapped to date. Paper: A connectome of the adult drosophila central brain (2020) OR access the database yourself at: https://neuprint.janelia.org/

Season 2 premiere! How do people behave in a pandemic? Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan talks about how we alter our behavior in the face of pathogens. A repertoire of responses (such as avoidance) referred to as the "behavioral immune system" is a way for humans to avoid pathogens BEFORE our biochemical immune system encounters them. A pandemic such as COVID-19 may trigger this behavioral immune system, but using far different information than our evolutionary ancestors ever had. Joshua Ackerman's research page at MichiganSpecial Guest: Joshua Ackerman.

Chris Mattman, Principal Data Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about bridging the gap between lab scientists and data scientists, his work with DARPA unearthing the dark web, machine learning in autonomous planetary rovers, and other cool stuff he's been doing. Chris Mattman's page at NASA More information about the Memex program at DARPA can be found here. Chris's forthcoming book, Machine Learning with Tensor Flow (2nd ed.) will be available soon. CogNation listeners can get 40% off all Manning products by using the code "podcogn20" when ordering from [Manning Publications](manning.com).Special Guest: Chris Mattmann.

David Sobel, a developmental psychologist from Brown University, talks to us about the importance of play in learning. He has recently been collaborating with researchers around the country to investigate how children interact with exhibits in childrens' museums. One recent finding we discuss is that parent-child interaction styles can have a strong influence on what children learn. Research at the Causality and Mind Lab and further resources can be found here.

Guest Dr. Aaron Schurger talks to us about his research on the meaning of the "readiness potential", which has been referred to as "the brain signature of the will". Although this neural signal was already famous from research in the 1960s, it was Benjamin Libet's infamous experiments in the 1980s that proportedly showed that the readiness potential preceded an act of free will by a few hundred milliseconds. More recently (in press), Dr. Schurger and his colleagues have convincingly demonstrated that the readiness potential is not in fact predictive of an act of free will, but instead comes from a lack of a proper experimental control. Resources: Here is what a classifier is (a topic that comes up that may be unfamiliar to some). For advanced readers, check out AdaBoost, a tool that increases performance in classifiers and other types of machine learning. Papers "The Time Course of Neural Activity Predictive of Impending Movement" (Basbug, Schapire, & Schurger, TO BE PUBLISHED SOON) An accumulator mod