All Articles http://www.scidav.org/allNews_viewer/rss dav 2009-07-24T01:46:33Z Making Decisions http://www.scidav.org/science_somatics/decision_making Yesterday, my colleague Becca Stoloff and I presented an experiment that we've been piloting to a group of fellow brain imagers. They gave us some really good feedback, but I'd say the most useful thing was forcing myself to go through the literature again and try to boil it down to about 10 minutes of cognitive neuroscience that a moderately well-educated grad student would understand. In particular, I came up with the following idea for a table that describes one way of slicing up the kids of influences on decisions we make all the time:   "Right Answer" "Best Answer" "Any Answer" External / World perception,  "decision theory," neuroeconomics Free choice selection Internal / Body reaction time studies, reaching studies optimal control theory (actually "best" here is still usually defined by external constraints) Perhaps free choice timing? dav 2010-11-24T01:34:08Z Making Things Up http://www.scidav.org/science_somatics/making_things_up (draft) I was taking a class based on (I think) Body Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation. The teacher said something like this: "Science has shown that one cell has more intelligence than your entire brain." Holy crap. It took me a while to wrap my head around what someone would actually have to believe in order to say something like that. This is quite different than, say, belief in ESP or subtle energy or any of that - this statement implies that one cell could be "more intelligent" than a collection of about 100 billion cells. How could someone think something like that? And why was I the only person in the room that seemed to have such a reaction of shock and disbelief? Well, I have no idea about any particular person, but I've witnessed a number of common themes. The most seemingly central factor is that it's really easy to have an experience of someting just by thinking about it. It may be even easier to experience something that someone else suggests - particularly after going through a set of nice relaxation techniques or meditation or the like. This is very much the kind of thing that we were guided to do in this class - we were instructed to send our consciousness to a single cell (which we were assured was certainly possible). And I'm sure lots of people did have that experience. I went along and had such an experience myself. But the crucial thing is that in the end, I did not believe that I'd actually visited a real cell in my body - but rather that I'd imagined such a journey. dav 2009-11-08T07:18:10Z R environments and argument passing http://www.scidav.org/techno/r_environments (or, My God!  It's full of LISP!) This article presupposes a reasonable knowledge of the R statistical programming environment . I highly recommend it, but you're not going to learn the basics here! I will, however, attempt to shed some light on some technical issues you might run into when scripting with formula objects. This would most likely be for model fitting and plotting using the excellent lattice package, but I'd be happy to hear about other applications. The only reason I'm writing about this is because I have not seen any coherent explanation of this stuff anywhere.  If you know of a better write-up somewhere, please let me know! So, I've finally been driven to write something on this sciencey-blog thing I've been planning, because I just finished something that is so derned complicated that if I don't write it down now, I'm afraid I'll forget it. First off, here's a short list of functions that can melt your brain while writing R code: dav 2009-07-24T01:38:44Z