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Part II: Speed
For a more productive life, daydream
By Brigid Schulte May 16, 2014 -- Updated 2115 GMT (0515 HKT)
Time2
(CNN) -- In 1990, a 25-year-old researcher for Amnesty International, stuck on a train stopped on the tracks between London and Manchester, stared out the window for hours. To those around her, no doubt rustling newspapers and magazines, busily rifling through work, the young woman no doubt appeared to be little more than a space cadet, wasting her time, zoning out.
But that woman came to be known as JK Rowling. And in those idle hours daydreaming out the train window, she has said that the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series simply "fell into" her head.
Mark Twain, during an enormously productive summer of writing in 1874, spent entire days daydreaming in the shade of Quarry Farm in New York, letting his mind wander, thinking about everything and nothing at all, and, in the end, publishing "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
Such creative breakthroughs in leisurely moments are hardly unique to literature. Physicist Richard Feynman idly watched students in the cafeteria goof off by spinning plates. For the fun of it, he began to make calculations of the wobbles. That "piddling around," as he called it, led to developing the Feynman diagrams to explain quantum electrodynamics, which resulted in a Nobel Prize.
Legend has it not only that Archimedes had his "eureka!" moment about water displacement while relaxing in the tub, but that Einstein worked out the Theory of Relativity while tootling around on his bicycle.
Though Protestant work ethic-driven Americans have tended to worry about the devil holding sway in idle time, it turns out idle time is crucial for creativity, innovation and breakthrough thinking. And now we know why. Neuroscience is finding that when we are idle, our brains are most active.
It all has to do with something called the brain's default mode network, explains Andrew Smart, a human factors research scientist and author of the new book, "Autopilot, the Art & Science of Doing Nothing."
[322 words]
Time3
The default mode network is like a series of airport hubs in different and typically unconnected parts of the brain. And that's why it's so crucial. When the brain flips into idle mode, this network subconsciously puts together stray thoughts, makes seemingly random connections and enables us to see an old problem in an entirely new light.
Using brain scans, psychologists John Kounios and Mark Beeman have found that just before that moment of insight, the brain turns inward, what they call a "brain blink," and lights up an area believed to be linked to our ability to understand the poetry of metaphors. A positive mood and taking time to relax, they found, were critical precursors to these a-ha! moments.
That's not to say that being idle all the time is the answer. Sir Isaac Newton was steeped in the study of physical science when he sat in his garden in a "contemplative mood," idly sipping tea after dinner one evening, noticed an apple fall straight to the ground, and came up with the Law of Gravity.
"To be most creative, you need this oscillation between deep study with focused attention and daydreaming, which is why you may have your great ideas when you're in the shower," Smart told me. "They can come into your consciousness when you're not busy."
Smart himself typically takes long, leisurely walks during the workday and carries a notebook with him to capture any interesting thoughts or ideas that his default mode network may burble to the surface.
[253 words]
Source: Edition
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/16/opinion/schulte-daydreaming-productivity/index.html?hpt=op_mid
Why every face you draw looks a little Neandertal
BY ERIKA ENGELHAUPT 10:15AM, MAY 7, 2014
Time4
Let’s try an experiment: Draw a face. Nothing fancy, just an oval with eyes, nose, mouth, some hair.
What you’ve produced probably looks like a cartoon Neandertal. Just about everyone tends to draw faces with the eyes too high on the head, resulting in a low forehead and a rather cretinous look.
It’s not just a matter of artistic talent. Psychology researchers (not to mention generations of art teachers) have noticed that everyone does it. That got Claus-Christian Carbon, who studies visual perception, wondering. Why don’t we know where people’s eyes are on their head? After all, humans are intensely social creatures who are highly attuned to reading each other’s faces. The eyes, in particular, get a lot of our attention.
In reality, your eyes are right about in the middle of your head, measured vertically. But most people draw them definitively above center.
“Even in painting courses, people start with exactly this bias,” Carbon says. “It’s absolutely familiar to researchers, but there was nothing in the [scientific] literature about it.” (You might remember Carbon from my recent post about the 3-D Mona Lisa; I learned of his work studying visual perspective in that painting when I called him about this study.)
So Carbon and his colleague Benedikt Emanuel Wirth, both at University of Bamberg, started by asking people to draw a face in a blank box. The results were predictably high-eyed. Next he tested how people did when given a little nudge. These people, 106 of them, got to look at a picture of a face for 30 seconds and then draw it from memory. And in 21 cases, Carbon let people flat-out copy from a photo sitting right in front of them.
Sadly, they only did a little better by copying.
Finally, Carbon and Wirth looked at depictions of faces in research papers by three well-known researchers who study face recognition. And yep, the pros failed.
So the researchers came up with three hypotheses,reported in March in Perception, to explain why normal people, and even people who study faces for a living, might not be able to put eyes in the right place. Here they are, in my own subjective order of increasing weirdness.
[366 words]
Time5
Hair-as-hat hypothesis: People don’t think of the hair as part of the head, but as sitting on top of the head like a hat (at least when they’re drawing a face). So they relate eye position to what’s seen as the “face” rather than considering where the eyes are on the head as a whole.
Head-as-box hypothesis: People don’t take the convexity (roundness) of the forehead into account, so the top of the head is assumed to be lower than it really is.
Face-from-below hypothesis: Babies first see faces mostly from below, and this view sets a mental map of sorts that is hard to erase later in life.
So far, the results seem to favor the second hypothesis, head as box. Analysis of the relative length of the faces that people drew showed the heads to be too short compared with the models they were based on. The hairlines, on the other hand, were drawn in the correct relative position, causing the forehead to be too small.
“As humans we have trouble assessing round shapes,” Carbon says. “Herman Munster has a really nonconvex head. That’s maybe the only person in the world whose head you might estimate correctly.”
To nail down whether the head-as-box effect is a general phenomenon, the researchers plan to see whether people have similar misperceptions of other rounded objects. “We will start with animal faces and then go further to everyday objects such as teakettles, cups, mugs and bottles,” Carbon says.
While misplaced eyes and many other visual illusions make it seem like our brain is making mistakes, “these perceptual failures are often actually extreme performance,” Carbon says. The area from the eyes to the mouth contains the most important information about a person’s emotional state, so that’s what we tend to zoom in on.
As for why we keep drawing people looking like Neandertals, Carbon says it’s just a coincidence. But as long as we keep doing it, the team writes, “Neandertals live on, at least in our depictions.”
[335 words]
Source: Sciencenews
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/gory-details/why-every-face-you-draw-looks-little-neandertal?mode=topic&context=49
Birds have clever solution for a cuckoo conundrum
Time6
Like a lot of birds, superb fairy wrens of Australia have a problem: Cuckoos lay their eggs in the fairy wrens’ nests. This is called brood parasitism, and it’s how cuckoos manage to have their baby birds raised well without any effort on their part. They leave the messy parts of parenthood to other birds.
Those other birds, though, don’t want to spend their time and effort raising someone else’s kid, especially when that kid might push out the chicks that actually belong in the nest. But the fairy wrens don’t prevent Horsfield’s bronze cuckoos from laying eggs in their nests because the cuckoos look too much like Accipiter hawks, which prey on fairy wrens. Make the wrong call when trying to stop the invader and the fairy wren might end up dead.
Superb fairy wrens have come up with another solution: Mama birds sing to their eggs. This incubation call teaches her babies a password. After they’ve hatched, the babies repeat that password as a begging call, and that tells mom to feed her children. The closer the begging call is to the incubation call, the more food the babies receive. This system works because incubating cuckoos fail to learn the password (scientists aren’t sure why, though).
Now Sonia Kleindorfer and her colleagues at Flinders University in Australia have found that moms that are more aware of the cuckoo threat are better teachers to their incubating young. Their study was published May 6 in Biology Letters.
The researchers conducted an experiment in which they played the songs of either the bronze-cuckoos or a control, the striated thornbill. Mama fairy wrens that heard the cuckoo calls increased the rate at which they made their incubation calls, telling their babies the important food password over and over, more often than those moms that heard the thornbill calls.
The mama birds that heard the cuckoo calls were led to believe that there were cuckoos nearby and that the threat of brood parasitism was greater. Therefore, it was more important that the wrens teach their young the password because there’s a greater chance they’ll need to know it, the researchers suggest.
[358 words]
Source: Sciencenews
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/birds-have-clever-solution-cuckoo-conundrum?mode=blog&context=116
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发表于 2014-5-26 21:41:05
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