by Reena Kapoor
It's with great delight that I want to point you to links that provide the transcripts from two podcasts The Power of Plasticity that I heard recently on All In The Mind. The podcasts were created by Natasha Mitchell who interviews two scientists about the new findings and scientific evidence for the idea that the human brain - even the older, adult one - is much more malleable than we think. And that we have the power to make powerful changes even to the brain's physical circuitry, by altering our thinking!
Continue reading "Could it be...free will?" »
by Anurag Wadehra
In a recent post, I mentioned how gross statistical correlation can be fodder for all sorts of vacuous, partisan claims. In fact, even many respectable areas of science are not immune from similar abuses.
For instance, evolutionary psychology seems to be a science ideally suited for prime time news. Since it attempts to discern evolutionary adaptations behind common social and psychological phenomena, ev-psych is fraught with peril. Many explanations for modern human behavior get sugar coated in evolutionary terminology and can come across as "just so stories" which are hard to verify in absence of historical data or deeper causal mechanisms. Combine its speculative nature with the media's appetite for juicy human stories, and we have a parade of scientific surveys that assert:
Bad guys really do get the most girls [New Scientist Magazine]
Continue reading "Statistics and Evolutionary Psychology: Just So Stories " »
