The physicist within (almost) all of us
Packing these Petoskey stones, fossilized coral, which have been polished by my cousin, into a small suitcase gave me the opportunity to live out the size-weight illusion.
We’ve got a sick orchard, not bad apples
Human exceptionalism incurs another blow. In work published today in Science Advances, my laboratory demonstrates the Bystander Effect in rats: rats are less likely to help in the presence of rats who are not helping – confederate rats or as my students love to say, confederats. On the other hand, in the presence of naive rats, who could potentially help, […]
The Bystander Effect and George Floyd
The Bystander Effect, included in every introductory psychology textbook and course, refers to the consistent finding that individuals are less likely to help in the presence of others than when they are alone. The more bystanders present, the less likely an individual is to help. This is commonly attributed to a diffusion of responsibility, meaning that an individual in a […]
It takes two to give
My mom was supposed to come visit me this past week while I have been teaching in Paris. She was scheduled to arrive Wednesday morning and in a reprisal of our fabulous time together in 2015 (see picture above), we planned to pack our afternoons with art museums and our evenings with concerts. Then, a few days before she was due […]
There is no average patient
As many of you know, I love to hear your stories of your encounters with your brains. Through a circuitous route (no other type appears to exist in my world) that involves a marvelous final MOOC project by Luiz Meier (more on that another time), I was privileged to receive the following description of a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) from Paul Van […]
IFL eye movements
Whenever I teach eye movements, I am reminded of how exciting they are. I like that eye movements appear mundane, common, and perhaps even uninteresting. They fly under most people’s wow-o-cool-o-radar, giving all the appearance of a nuts-and-bolts system without lofty aspirations. Despite this unpretentious appearance, eye movements are incredibly interesting and also of the utmost importance to our social selves. There is so much more to […]
Rats show empathic helping: Replicated and extended!
I am thrilled to say that after roughly 3 ½ years, our work on empathic helping has been replicated by Nobuya Sato and his colleagues. Not only did Dr Sato confirm that rats help other rats in distress but he extended this finding in several ways. Rats help a soaked conspecific Dr Sato and his colleagues published an article entitled “Rats demonstrate […]
From Brian Williams to Vincent Van Gogh to Hellen Keller to you and me
Here are my two cents on Brian Williams and the malleability of memory. Let’s start by fully acknowledging the limitations of perception. Perception of the world outside is very different from the record produced by a camera or audio record. Perception of our innards is even farther from accurate: is that a knife in my stomach or gas? So the information coming in to the brain, information […]
Can you read this?
I am hoping that you play my game and try to read the text above. Go ahead and try before you read the answer below. How’d you do? I am betting that you did just fine. Maybe you had some problems with neocortex, or maybe not. Here is the un-substituted text: How did you read the scramble? Are you aware of how you […]
Faulty memories have served us just fine through evolutionary time
Let’s talk about our memory experiment. There were many features of memory that were of interest when I designed this experiment and I will touch on all of them. But this is a long, actually very long post. So, I will start with the points that I think are the most interesting. The most interesting of all is that, when push comes to shove, we preferentially […]
The brain is sooooo cool! 