A well-made video that gets into the issue of whether we can ever know that two different people experience color the same way. This video comes from a great youtube channel, VSauce, which you should definitely check out.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.
We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
Here is a shorter version of the podcast I made for my class:
Why smart people sometimes do dumb things
“No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term ‘dysrationalia’ (analogous to ‘dyslexia’), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure every important mental faculty, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?”
“Religious belief drops when analytical thinking rises.
“Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-critical-thinkers-lose-faith-god/
“Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they’re not aware of or able to control it. It’s a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases — which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences — are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit.”
“You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you can’t control these split-second reactions. As the milliseconds are being tallied up, you know the tale they’ll tell: When negative words and black faces are paired together, you’re a better, faster categorizer. Which suggests that racially biased messages from the culture around you have shaped the very wiring of your brain.”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice
What would life be like if you were missing emotions that others have? What would be the consequences of life without fear? Would it be a blessing or a curse?
Article on a woman who doesn’t feel fear.
https://www.yahoo.com/health/meet-the-woman-who-feels-no-fear-108746157003.html
Part of a podcast, Invisibilia, about the same woman
“Researchers are now corroborating what some trauma sufferers have happened upon by chance: Focusing on a highly engaging visual-spatial task, such as playing video games
, may significantly reduce the occurrence of flashbacks, the mental images concerning the trauma that intrude on the sufferer afterward.”
http://www.livescience.com/19894-tetris-treat-ptsd-flashbacks.html
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Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html?_r=0
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The process of transferring information from STM to LTM involves the encoding or consolidation of information. This is not a function of time, that is, the longer a memory stayed in STM, the more likely it was to be placed into LTM; but on organizing complex information in STM before it can be encoded into LTM. In this process of organization, the meaningfulness or emotional content of an item may play a greater role in its retention into LTM. As instructional designers, we must find ways to make learning relevant and meaningful enough for the learner to make the important transfer of information to long-term memory.”
TOK Topics 