Aug 12
tomquotes
Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and “narrative necessity” rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness,
Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21.
Jul 12
tomquotes, science
Viewed as a language, theory has no substantive content; it is a set of tautologies. Its function is to serve as a filing system for organizing empirical material and facilitating our understanding of it; and the criteria by which it is to be judged are appropriate to a filing system. Are the categories clearly and precisely defined? Are they exhaustive? Do we know where to file each individual item, or is there considerable ambiguity? Is the system of headings and subheadings so designed that we can quickly find an item we want, or must we hunt from place to place? Are the items we shall want to consider jointly filed? Does the filing system avoid elaborate cross-references?
Milton Friedman, in Essays in Positive Economics (1953). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (thanks Dan!)
Jun 24
tompsychology, science
Simon Singh approached his debate with homeopathy-promoting MP David Tredinnick all wrong this morning. He dived into a critique of the studies Tredinnick presented, thus allowing him to maintain the advantage of framing the debate and losing most of the audience with discussion of statistics and control groups [1].
Instead, he should have laughed at the MP and said gently something like “It is undoubtedly true that homeopathy does work, the only question is about why it works. All the evidence suggests that the effect is due to a combination of the power of individual’s beliefs about homoeopathy and the healing benefits of a meaningful relationship with a physician. For every 1 study that says, like David Tredinnick’s three, that homeopathy has benefits beyond those of placebo there are 50 which suggest that homeopathy medicines are inert and all the properties ascribed to them are properties of belief and relationships. Because of this, we need to ask if we want to allow a misguided homeopathy industry to charge us for medicines which we know to be snake oil, and whether there is not some less expensive and less deceitful way we can access the powerful healing effects that placebos such as homeopathy provide.”
On that last point, I’ve had an idea. Homeopathy is fake medicine, and obviously this has lots of benefits. All the power of placebos! Minimal risk and side-effects! Safe to use in combination with conventional medicine! The only downside I can see is that only patients you allow to remain misinformed can benefit and that the homeopathy industry has all this rigmarole involved in the preparation and delivery of the product that necessarily makes it expensive. So why not sell fake homopathic medicine? I don’t see how homeopaths could object if the medical establishment turns their strategy back on them. We could even use their experimental methods to replicate the successful results they’ve found with homeopathic treatment for our fake-homeopathic treatment. Instead of branded pharmaceuticals you can buy generic pharmaceuticals which have the same chemical composition at the fraction of the price, why can’t we buy homeopathy generics which are equally inert? Doctors could be free to prescribe them, saving the NHS money and simultaneously allowing patients access to all the wonderful benefits of placebo.
[1] Not that discussion of statistics and control groups is a bad thing, or a guaranteed way to lose your audience, I just think Singh lost his because of the way he discussed statistics and control groups, and because it wasn’t essential to the wider issues
May 06
tomlinks, politics
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Apr 11
tomMe, sheffield
Spotted in a doorway round the corner from the Union Pool, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:
I am now back in Sheffield, England
Apr 09
tomlinks
- Stephen Anderson on ‘When Data Gets Up Close and Personal’ making a game out of email using personal metrics
- Alec Patton on the RSA’s seminar on the Social Brain and education
- YouTube: Extreme Base Jumping With Wingsuits
- www.wikepage.org/ – free, easy, small, wiki package
- Sachzwang = ‘compelled action’
- YouTube: Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science)
- YouTube: Shockwave traffic jams recreated for first time
- ‘You have chosen to spend your life this way’
- lukesurl.com: Choose Your Own Philosophical Adventure
- Me, In the Exploratorium’s Distorted Room
- Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P.(1994) On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18(4), 513-549. doi: 10.1016/0364-0213(94)90007-8.
- Guardian: Ten rules for writing fiction Will Self: ‘The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.’
- Podcast: Robert Krulwich of Radiolab on why storytelling should be at the heart of science
- Hunting Grizzly Bear with bow and arrow
- Installing Latex in Ubuntu Linux
- Dan Robert’s article about brain training in the independent, quoting me very kindly
Mar 17
tomlinks
I’ve been listening to podcasts while walking to work
Mar 03
tommisc
Photo taken approximately here, last Sunday
Mar 01
tomquotes
As important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws
Thank you, Al Gore. In his 2008 TED talk calling for a ‘new hero generation’ to deal with climate change
Feb 27
tomMe, psychology
I don’t predict what is going to happen when I watch a film. It isn’t like I can’t, it just doesn’t occur to me. When the bad guy turns out to be a good guy (or vice versa) my friends will say “Well that was obviously going to happen”. But it wasn’t obvious to me.
If you had described the salient facts to me, given me a plot summary, I would be able to make the correct prediction, I’m sure, but something about the way my brain works stops me making the leap from the level of experience to the level of description. I am stuck just experiencing the events of the film, and not representing them in a way that would allow me to draw obvious conclusions.
Let’s call this ability ‘narrative extraction’.
I’ve got some smarts, sure, but I think I’ve got a deductive kind of smarts. This is the kind of smarts that can take a set of facts, or axioms, and crunch through the consequences until you get to inevitable result. I’m good at maths and most logic puzzles. I think narrative extraction requires a different kind of smarts. It is the ability to pick an appropriate set of facts or an appropriate method of description which will provide you with an answer which serves your purposes.
For the film example you need to do more than just experience the characters, you need to classify them by their types, the film by genre, the plot by template and from all that infer what would be the most likely thing for an exciting film.
Moral reasoning requires the same kind of smarts. There’s a famous test of moral reasoning by Kohberg, where children are presented with vignettes (“Your wife is sick and you cannot afford medicine. Should you break into the pharmacy and steal it?” type things). Kohberg ranked children’s moral reasoning, giving the most credit to moral reasoning which invoked logical deductions from abstract moral frameworks.
Gilligan, in her book “In a different voice” has a powerful critique of Kohlberg’s system, on the grounds that it gave credit to one kind of reasoning – abstract logical deduction or calculus (e.g. “Stealing is wrong, but letting your wife die is worse, so I should therefore steal the medicine”) – and not to another kind of more contextually sensitive reasoning (e.g. “If I break into the pharmacy then I might get caught and then I won’t be able to help my wife, so I should find another way of getting the medicine”). This sensitivity to what is not in the question – what is not explicitly stated – is a part of narrative extraction.
There is another important, perhaps more primary, way in which narrative extraction is required for moral judgement. Kohlberg’s vignettes are not just logic problems, which can be convergently or divergently solved, they are also descriptions of the world. Thus they do one of the major tasks of moral reasoning for you – that of going from the nebulous world of experience to the concrete would of categories and actions.
As soon as you describe the world you massively constrain the scope for moral reasoning. You can still make the wrong judgement, but you have made moral reasoning possible by the act of description using moral categories.
Milgram demonstrated scientifically the banality of evil, that normal people could do inhuman things. Did those people who thought they were delivering lethal electric shocks make an incorrect moral judgement? Did they weigh “doing what you are told” against “the life of an innocent” and choose the former? My intuition is that they did not, not explicitly. Yes they made the wrong choice (we too would probably have made the wrong choice), but I believe that they were so caught up in the moment, in the emotion of the situation, that they did not move to the necessary level of description. We, reading this in comfort, are given the moral categories and the right choice is so obvious that we have difficulty empathising with their situation. The narrative extraction has been done for us, so right thing seems obvious. But it isn’t.
Feb 19
tomlinks
- Wim Hof is reportedly the only non-monk to master Tummo, the ability to control your own body temperature to withstand extreme cold
- Benson, Herbert; Lehmann, John W.; Malhotra, M. S., Goldman, Ralph F.; Hopkins, Jeffrey; Epstein, Mark D. (1982) Body temperature changes during the practice of g Tum-mo yoga. Nature 295, 234 – 236 (21 January 1982). “The subjects in the current experiment exhibited a capacity to warm fingers than had previously been recorded during hypnosis and after biofeedback training”
- Havard Gazette: Mind controls body in extreme experiments
- Wikipedia: Biofeedback
- Dogs can smell cancer. amazing
- Software: Use your computer to simulate a typewriter
- Proulx, T., & Heine, S. J. (2009). Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1125-1131.
- Drug treatment combined with skill-specific training proves effective in animal model of rehabititation after complete spinal cord severance
- Vaughan Bell: A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.
- PhDcomics: ‘What is…the thesis?’
- creawriter is a full screen disrraction free text editor for windows, inspired by Omniwriter for Mac
- Mindhacks.com: Vaughan on the Rough Guide Book of Brain Training
- Web resources for Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”
- A Small, Good Thing by Raymond Carver
- IoP Maudsley Debartes: A Born Again Brain (podcast)
- YouTube: This is the only scene I remember from Flash Gordon. It still haunts me when I put my hand into something
- Morality in Star Wars and Star Trek – most science fiction as ‘a new kind of storytelling that often rebels against those very same archetypes Campbell venerated. An upstart belief in progress, egalitarianism, positive-sum games — and the slim but real possibility of decent human institutions.’
- instapaper.com stores things for you to read later (and synchs with your iPhone)
- ‘Our Lives Are Filled With Worthless Crap That’s Destroying the Earth: Here’s What You Can Do’
- Dark Mountain response to John Gray’s review of their manifesto
Feb 13
tomlinks
- Guardian article by shadow cancellor and richard thaler: we want to ‘embed behavioural thinking throughout government’
- Johann Hari: “What about X?” as a rhetorical trick
- Online collaborative doodling: skrbl.com
- Your rights to a refund on an unused rail ticket are covered by National Rail Conditions of Carriage, section 26
- Press release from University of Sheffield about the Rough Guide Book of Brain Training
- Guardian: ‘Turkish girl, 16, buried alive for talking to boys’
- Dougald’s guide to Twitter “it’s like having a little part of you that’s always down the pub!”
- FT.com: Moscow’s Stray Dogs
- Quinn Norton had a magnet implanted under the skin of her finger, allowing her to sense electromagnetic fields
- ‘Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege’
- ‘Politics, according to Berger, ‘begins with asking oneself questions. Everybody, when they wake up at two or three in the morning, asks themselves these questions – but no discourse encourages them.’
- LaMarre, H. L., Landreville, K. D., & Beam, M. A. (2009). The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report. International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(2), 212-231. doi: 10.1177/1940161208330904.
- YouTube: Animal Hypnosis and Trances
- Hemmingway’s Five Rules for writing well
- Diedre McClosky on how she realised that (economic) science was unavoidably affected by ideology.
- Steve Fuller letter in the Guardian: it makes no sense to talk about what people “naturally are” without socioeconomic constraints
- Big Brother Watch
Feb 10
tomquotes
“You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use . . . silence, exile, and cunning.”
James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Feb 10
tombooks, intellectual self-defence, quotes
Susan Neiman’s “Moral Clarity – a guide for grown-up idealists” (2009) is a passionate and literary book about moral reasoning and the achievements of the Enlightenment (especially Kant). The book contains fantastic and acute re-readings of the myths of Job and Odysseus, as well as plenty of examples of Neiman’s own moral clarity – she has a great analyst’s knack of being able to articulate clearly and succinctly exactly what was so pernicious about many of the arguments and actions of the neocon government under Bush. Recommended.
“The Enlightenment gave reason pride of place, not because it expected absolute certainty, but because it sought a way to live without it” (p218)
Feb 10
tomevents
I am on study leave. I’ll be in Berkeley, California, in February and some of March, and then from mid-March I’ll be in New York. I am contactable by email.
Jan 30
tomlinks
- The Significant Objects project: a story transforms the value of ordinary objects
- Wikipedia False Consciousness
- practice at self-control strengthens self-control in unrelated tasks Baumeister, R. F., Gailliot, M. T., DeWall, C. N. & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: Strength-boosting interventions and trait moderators of ego depletion. Journal of Personality, 74, 1773-1802.
- Madeleine Bunting: on the modern attention span ‘faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open.’
- Remove YouTube comment idiocy, and replace with quotes from Richard Feynman: Feyntube
- Anonymous facebook employee “We track everything”
- Women and Guns by photographer Amy Stein
- Training the brain with music to remove tinnitus
- The Rough Guide to Brain Training, with words by me, published 14/1/10
- Wikipedia, World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood Incident
- Abstruse Goose: Artificial
- So you think you’ve found leylines? Control comparisons are important, installment #89354
- Naomi Klein: 10 years after No Logo, the biggest brand is the White House
- ‘That a lawyer representing men who have no respect for democracy and liberty can quote Voltaire shows how abandoned that great thinker is.’
- actor and singer Arran Glass was upset by a negative review written by Matt Boothman
- Hyper-binding as a form of intuition
- Haaretz: The Binationalism Vogue: ‘But if the fictitious option is taken off the table, the real dilemmas will finally be revealed. And this is precisely what the talk of a binational state seeks to accomplish.’
Jan 28
tomMe, books, psychology
This chapter was due for inclusion in The Rough Guide Book of Brain Training, but was cut – probably because the advice it gives is so unsexy!
The idea of cognitive enhancers is an appealing one, and its attraction is obvious. Who wouldn’t want to take a pill to make them smarter? It’s the sort of vision of the future we were promised on kids TV, alongside jetpacks and talking computers.
Sadly, this glorious future isn’t here yet. The original and best cognitive enhancer is caffeine (“creative lighter fluid” as one author called it), and experts agree that there isn’t anything else available to beat it. Lately, sleep researchers have been staying up and getting exciting about a stimulant called modafinil, which seems to temporarily eliminate the need for sleep without the jitters or comedown of caffeine. Modafinil isn’t a cognitive enhancer so much as something that might help with jetlag, or let you stay awake when you really should be getting some kip.
Creative types have had a long romance with alcohol and other more illicit narcotics. The big problem with this sort of drug (aside from the oft-documented propensity for turning people into terrible bores), is that your brain adapts to, and tries to counteract, the effects of foreign substances that affect its function. This produces the tolerance that is a feature of most prolonged drug use – whereby the user needs more and more to get the same effect – and also the withdrawal that characterises drug addiction. You might think this is a problem only for junkies but, if you are a coffee or tea drinker just pause for moment and reflect on any morning when you’ve felt stupid and unable to function until your morning cuppa. It might be for this reason that the pharmaceutical industry is not currently focusing on developing drugs for creativity. Plans for future cognitive enhancers focus on more mundane, workplace-useful skills such as memory and concentration. Memory-boosters would likely be most useful to older adults, especially those with worries about failing memories, rather than younger adults.
Although there is no reason in principle why cognitive enhancers couldn’t be found which fine-tune our concentration or hone our memories, the likelihood is that, as with recreational drugs, tolerance and addiction would develop. These enhancing drugs would need to be taken in moderate doses and have mild effects – just as many people successfully use caffeine and nicotine for their cognitive effects on concentration today. Even if this allowed us to manage the consequences of the brain trying to achieve its natural level, there’s still the very real possibility that use of the enhancing drugs would need to be fairly continuous – just as it is with smokers and drinkers of tea and coffee. And even then our brains would learn to associate the drug with the purpose for which they are taken, which means it would get harder and harder to perform that purpose without the drugs, as with the coffee drinker who can’t start work until he’s had his coffee. Furthermore, some reports suggest that those with high IQ who take cognitive enhancers are mostly likely to mistake the pleasurable effect of the substance in question for a performance benefit, while actually getting worse at the thing they’re taking the drug for.
The best cognitive enhancer may well be simply making best use of the brain’s natural ability to adapt. Over time we improve anything we practice, and we can practice almost anything. There’s a hundred better ways to think and learn – some of them are in this book. By practicing different mental activities we can enhance our cognitive skills without drugs. The effects can be long lasting, the side effects are positive, and we won’t have to put money in the pockets of a pharmaceutical company.
Link to more about The Rough Guide book of Brain Training
Three excellent magazine articles on cognitive enhancers, from: The New Yorker, Wired and Discover
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com
Jan 14
tomMe, books, events, psychology
The Rough Guide to Brain Training is a puzzle book which incluces essays and vignettes by myself. The book has 100 days of puzzles which will challenge your mental imagery, verbal fluency, numeracy, working memory and reasoning skills. There are puzzles that will look familiar like suduko, and some new ones I’ve never seen before. Fortunately the answers are included at the back. Gareth made these puzzles. I find them really hard.
I have 10 short essays in the book, covering topics such as evidence-based brain training, how music affects the developing brain, optimal brain nutrition and what the brains of the future will look like. As well as the essays, I wrote numerous short vignettes, helpful hints and suprising facts from the world of psychology and neuroscience (did you know that squids have dounut shaped brains? That you share 50% of your genes with a banana? That signals travel between brain cells at up to 200mph, which is fast compared to a cycle courier, but slow compared to a fibre optic cable). Throughout the book I try to tell it straight about what is, isn’t and might be true about brain training. I read the latest research and I hope I tell a sober, but optimistic, message about the potential for us to change how we think over our lifetimes (and the potential to protect our minds against cognitive decline in older age). I also used my research to provide a sprinkling of evidence-based advice for those who are trying to improve a skill, study for an exam or simply remember things better.
Writing the book was a great opportunity for me to dig into the research on brain training. It is a topic I’d always meant to investigate properly, but hadn’t gotten around to. The claims of those pushing commercial brain training products always seemed suspicious, but the general idea – that our brains change based on practice and experience – seemed plausible. In fact, this idea has been one of the major trends of the last fifty years of neuroscience research. It has been a big surprise to neuroscientists as experiment after experiment has shown exactly how malleable (aka ‘plastic’) the structure and function of the brain is. The resolution of this paradox of the general plausibility of brain training with my suspicion of specific products is in the vital issue of control groups. Although experience changes our brains, and although it is now beyond doubt that a physically and mentally active life can prevent cognitive decline across the lifespan, it isn’t at all clear what kinds of activities are necessary or essential for general mental sharpness. Sure, after practicing something you’ll get better at it. And doing something is better than doing nothing, but the crucial question is doing something you pay for better than doing something else that is free? The holy grail of brain training would be a simple task which you could practice (and copyright! and sell!!) and which would have benefits for all mental skills. Nobody has shown that such a task or set of tasks exists, so while you could buy a puzzle book, you could also go for a jog or go to the theatre with friends. Science wouldn’t be able to say for certain which activity would have the most benefits for your mental sharpness as an individual – although the smart money is probably on going jogging. It is to the credit of the editors at the Rough Guides that they let me say this in the introduction to the Rough Guide to Brain Training!
There wasn’t room in the book for all the references I used while writing it. This was a great sadness to me, since I believe that unless you include the references for a claim, you’re just spouting off, relying on a dubious authority, rather than really talking about science. So, to make up for this, and by way of an apology, I’ve put the references here. It will be harder to track specific claims from this general list that it would be with in-text citations, so if you do have a query, please get in touch and I promise will point you to the evidence for any claims I make in the book.
Additionally, I’ll be posting here a few things from the cutting room floor – text that I wrote for the book which didn’t make it into the final draft. Watch out, and if you do get your hands on a copy of this Rough Guide to Brain Training, get in touch and let me know what you think.
Amazon link (only £5.24!)
Scientific references and links used in researching the book
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com
Jan 08
tomlinks
An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment—an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then “abolished”? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But no theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
B.F.Skinner, last words of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
Jan 06
tomquotes
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety
Benjamin Franklin, from notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly, February 17, 1775
Dec 30
tomlinks
- In 1938 Frank Sinatra was arrested by the Bergen County, New Jersey sheriff and charged with carrying on with a married woman
- Amy Mount’s Copenhagen climate talks blog
- Couzin et al (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433(7025), 513-516 ‘We
also demonstrate how groups can make consensus decisions, even though informed individuals do not know whether they are in a majority or minority, how the quality of their information compares with that of others, or even whether there are any other informed individuals. Our model provides new insights into the mechanisms of effective leadership and decision-making in biological systems’
- Wired from 1994: Tetris as pharmatronic – Tetris inventor: ‘For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can’t stop.’ Why? ‘His clinical psychologist business-partner: “The main part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens almost immediately. Insight means emotion: small, but many of them, every two, three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions (that) force you to continue and make it very addictive. The third is automatization: In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit, a motivation to repeat.”
- Writing Tips for Non-writers
- What Philosophers Believe: David Chalmers and David Bourget recently canvassed several thousand professional philosophers for their views on a range of central philosophical issues.
- Two references on feedback helping consumers cut energy consumption here and here (thanks Julie Dirksen)
- ‘To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.’
- ‘Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries.’ (thanks Dan)
- ‘Properties of the nervous system that are key to its function and that many of us naively regard as unique to neurons are actually expanded, elaborated, specialized versions of properties that are also present in organisms that lack brains, nervous systems, or even neurons…and that aren’t even multicellular. This is precisely what we’d expect from evolutionary origins, that everything would have its source in simpler precursors.’
- The Beck Record Club covers Songs of Leonard Cohen
- Mark Changizi on what we can deduce about Alien vision
- Break the Inverted Pyramid to put science news in context
- YouTube: Lambchop cover ‘This Corrosion’
- Guardian interview with one of my heroes, Peter Tatchell
- Guardian: Tom James’ article about ten years of regeneration in Sheffield and across the UK
Dec 18
tomquotes
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde, in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1895)
Dec 13
tombooks, intellectual self-defence, politics, psychology
I am reading Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, edited by Carried McLaren and Jason Torchinsky. The book is a funny, smart and sometimes shocking collection of articles from Stay Free Magazine and blog. I first came across Stay Free when I was researching the psychology of advertising and was impressed by their sophisticated take on how adverts affect consumers’ decision making. They discuss in Ad Nauseam how advertising is often misunderstood, with people relying on an intuitive ‘Advertising doesn’t effect me’ view or swinging to the opposite extreme of the ‘Sinister Advertisers Manipulate Consumers with their Mind Control Tricks’ position. Both positions distract from the very real, but not magical, power of advertising.
The book has a great discussion of Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction, the book that launched the idea that subliminal, and often sexual, figures are embedded in random features of adverts such as in ice cube shadows. The idea of these ‘embeds’ is nonsense, of course, but great fun to look for and a great distraction from the real persuasive content of the advert. The book also has a chapter on the origins of modern advertising practice in 19th century pharmaceutical advertising (the manufacturing of ailments for which ready made ‘cures’ can be sold has been covered by Vaughan on mindhacks.com before, in relation to the mental health). Packed with critical analysis of the advertising industry, more informative history and some shocking examples of how consumerism has worked its way into many aspects of our daily lives, this book is essential intellectual self-defense, managing to be critical and aware without ever being sanctimonious or hysterical.
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com
Dec 13
tomMe, psychology
Last night I had two dreams in which I was being chased (once by a tour-de-france cyclist in Venice, once by a giant snake in a field, since you ask). I was thinking that being-chased dreams are probably my brain rehearsing escape behaviours – a night-time training programme built in by evolution. Thinking more on it, I realised that I have never had a chasing dream, only being-chased dreams. Is this because being-chased is more adaptive to rehearse, or because of something peculiar to my idiosyncratic psychology? Let’s find out, please vote using the poll below:
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Nov 26
tomMe, misc
Inspired by badscience:
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