Jim davies
30 articles-
Why AI Lags Behind the Human Brain in Computational Power
It might be more accurate to think of many of the brain’s 10 billion neurons as being deep networks, with five to eight layers in each one. -
Why Your Sleeping Brain Replays New Rewarding Experiences
It turned out that, yes, the participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated to win.Illustration by Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on the women’s foil team. She’s from Ottawa, where I live. Whenever she […] -
Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn’t Matter
Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. It’s the “most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity humanity has evolved,” he writes, the power to “see and feel […] -
What If You Could Describe Your Dreams While Dreaming?
The potential to hack our dreams opens a new frontier for mental research. -
Can You Treat Loneliness By Creating an Imaginary Friend?
Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the tulpa will start talking back.Photo Illustration by LeaDigszammal / Shutterstock Did you ever have an imaginary friend? If you didn’t, chances are you know someone who did. Imaginary companions, as scholars call them, are […]
-
The Neural Similarities Between Remembering and Imagining
The act of recalling something that happened to you looks very much like what happens when you imagine something new.Photograph by HBRH / Shutterstock Imagine a living room. Not yours or your friend’s or one you saw in a home makeover show, but one purely from your imagination—perhaps your ideal living room. You should have […]
-
Our Conflicted Feelings For R2-D2
Lucas’ droids are halfway between human and inhuman, so we can both love and ignore them.
-
Why You’re Biased About Being Biased
The more we convince ourselves that we don’t have certain biases, the more likely we are to exhibit them.
-
Why the Dark Side of the Force Had to Be Dark
You don’t have to look very hard to see that our culture has some pretty powerful associations between colors and feelings. As a recent example, the new Pixar film Inside Out has characters representing emotions, and the color choices for these characters—red for anger, and blue for sadness—feel right.Red, specifically, is one of the most […]
-
Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing
Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why does […]
-
Some Music Is Inherently Bad—But People Can Be Convinced Otherwise
Artistic appreciation is a deeply subjective process, perhaps the most essentially personal thing that humans do. But are there some explanations for why we like what we do? Why, for instance, does a particular song get popular?Some of it has to do with the quality of the music—and by quality, I mean that there’s something […] -
The Death of Hundreds Is Just a Statistic—But It Doesn’t Have to Be
Imagine that tomorrow I were to show you a newspaper article describing a deadly wildfire. Do you think you’d be more upset upon reading that 10,000 people died than if you read that five people died? This scenario makes people engage in affective forecasting—predicting their future emotional states. We expect that hearing about 10,000 deaths […] -
Finding the Perfect Amount of Creativity in Cars & Religion
There is only a certain level of novelty that most people are willing to tolerate. -
Why Are You So Smart? Thank Your Mom & Your Difficult Birth
Our inability to care for ourselves as babies is a key to the genius of our species. -
New Year’s Resolutions and the Science of Willpower
The “marshmallow experiment” has become a famous way to measure the self-control of children. (This is a version of the test made for entertainment, not research, purposes.)Every year since 1988, my friend Lou and I have picked a New Year’s resolution together. We meticulously keep to each promise for exactly one year. The 2014 resolution […]
