Category: #Sensemaking
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Statistics is not measurement
“Statistics is not measurement: The inbuilt semantics of psychometric scales and language-based models obscures crucial epistemic differences” This article provides a comprehensive critique of psychology’s overreliance on statistical modelling at the expense of epistemologically grounded measurement processes. It highlights that statistics deals with structural relations in data regardless of what these data represent, whereas measurement…
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Stubborn Goals: the adaptive value
“The adaptive value of stubborn goals” Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise…
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Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions
“Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions” People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect – blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be…
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October 7, 2025
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” William Shakespeare Dear Friends and Fellow Humans, I turn 70 today. For 7 decades I’ve had the privilege of living out my childhood dream, which was simply to UNDERSTAND. After spending more than half a century meeting people from all over the world…
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From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: “Music”
“From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: The Transformative Power of Music” The human brain physically embodies rhythmic sound in a remarkablesymphony that has the power to heal. People resonate to music. They respond positively in ways that suggest that the rhythms of the brain and body, like neurons, breathing, or cardiac rhythms, are engaged when you listen…
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Computational Framework for cognitive biology
“Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition” Progress in understanding cognition requires a quantitative, theoretical framework, grounded in the other natural sciences and able to bridge between implementational, algorithmic and computational levels of explanation. This review article reviews recent results in neuroscience and cognitive biology that, when combined, provide key components…
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Known and Unknown Biases
“Known and Unknown Biases: A Framework for Contextualising and Identifying Bias in Animal Behaviour Research“ (This article discusses the bias in animal behaviour research, but – as known to most readers, I hope – humanes too are members of the animal kingdom 🙂 Biases in animal behaviour research are inevitable consequences of our societal and…
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De Wilde Ziel
De Wilde Ziel – Leven met de natuur als leraar: herontdek je wilde kant.Craig Foster, 2025 (origilele titel: “Amphibious Soul”) We zaten op een rots en ik vertelde Tom verhalen over mijn jeugd, over onze houten bungalow en over de nacht van de grote overstroming. Ik vertelde hem over het flesje met brieven en buitenlands…
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