Social exclusion hurts: and how [Article]

A US-based psychologist, Kip Williams, was strolling through a park when a mis-thrown Frisbee caught him on the back of his head. Unhurt, he picked it up and threw it back to one of the players. They threw it back to him. Briefly he was involved in their game, before the Frisbee players stopped passing it to him and returned to their back-and-forth routine.

A relatively unremarkable social interaction, the scientist was nonetheless surprised at how hurt he felt at being excluded from the game and hurried off to his lab to ascertain what is happening in our brains when we feel left out.

Read on

Our connected brains, memory & recall [article]

Dr Ben Martynoga writes about the connected brain in the School of Life:

 The information, entertainment and connectedness that the internet provides is highly compelling and often hugely useful. However ultimately we have to decide which devices to use, when to use them, and when to simply turn them off. 

An Ode to the Brain – Video

A nicely done video mash-up of talks, clips & images that feature various speakers & experts on the brain: The material sampled for this video comes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran’s TED Talk, Bill Nye’s Brain episode, BBC’s “The Human Body”, Oliver Sachs’ TED Talk, Discovery Channel’s “Human Body: Pushing the Limits”, and more.

The Monty Hall Problem and Schrodinger’s Cat [Article]

Scott Adams discusses the Monty Hall Problem & Schrodinger’s Cat, and our brains inability to understand reality at its most basic level.

Monty Hall is a game show host. You are given a choice of three doors. One has a car behind it, the other two have goats. If you pick the door with the car, you win it. Your odds are 1-in-3.

So you pick a door, but before it opens, Monty opens one of the other two doors to reveal a goat. He asks if you want to switch from the door you initially picked to the other closed door. Your brain says the odds are the same for any closed door, so you stay. But in fact, the odds are twice as good if you switch doors.