Tag: #ProblemSolvingMind
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How Occam’s razor guides human decision-making
A rather complex but very interesting article was published @PennLibraries and (somewhat more recent) @bioRXiv But for those who want to understand by a lecture, I can recommend the Simons Faoundation lecture from Joshua Gold (also available on Youtube: How Occam’s Razor Guides Human and Machine Decision-Making) Occam’s razor is the principle stating that, all…
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Ten tips for facilitating emergent processes
I just discovered a nice medium article/blog entry from Sonja Blignaut on working towards emergent solutions for wicked situations. I just summarise, but details are in the article. Facilitating emergent group processes requires a different kind of facilitation. When you’re not working towards a predetermined outcome, following a pre-designed agenda, the following principles are helpful…
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Can Creativity Be Stored? Yes, and It Should Be
For those of us who are not creative, it is difficult to imagine how creative people work.The explanation for the messy creative person and the uncreative brainstorming session can be found in research by Poornika Ananth and Sarah Harvey published in Administrative Science Quarterly. They had a big study of creative individuals in theatre and architecture, and…
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Brain-Behavior relationships
“Improving the study of brain-behavior relationships by revisiting basic assumptions” discusses how scientific communities tacitly agree on assumptions about what exists (called ontological commitments), what questions to ask, and what methods to use. All assumptions are firmly rooted in a philosophy of science that need not be acknowledged or discussed but is practiced nonetheless. In…
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The Art of Abduction
Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete. A medical diagnosis is an application of abductive reasoning: given this set of symptoms,…
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As a human it would be quite easy to spot
Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI A human player has comprehensively defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go, in a surprise reversal of the 2016 computer victory that was seen as a milestone in the rise of artificial intelligence. Kellin Pelrine beat the machine by taking advantage of…
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Beware the “lure of models”
Scientists cannot help but use models says Mark Buchanan. Models help to clarify the consequences of theoretical assumptions, or to draw out complex lines of cause and effect … Without simplified conceptual models, scientific communication itself would be largely impossible.Of course, mathematical models also underlie some of the sciences’ most impressive achievements, like e.g. today’s…
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How mathematics invented new realities
Although Euclid’s ideas about geometry in 300 BC were rooted in physical reality, the field became ever more abstract throughout the twentieth century.In her new book, historian Alma Steingart reveals how this push for abstraction was mirrored by, and often triggered, parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. (Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism…
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Intellectual humility
Intellectual humility involves recognizing that there are gaps in one’s knowledge and that one’s current beliefs might be incorrect. For instance, someone might think that it is raining, but acknowledge that they have not looked outside to check and that the sun might be shining. Research on intellectual humility offers an intriguing avenue to safeguard…
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Cognitive Computational Neuroscience
Cognitive science has developed computational models that decompose cognition into functional components. Computational neuroscience has modeled how interacting neurons can implement elementary components of cognition. It is time to assemble the pieces of the puzzle of brain computation and to better integrate these separate disciplines. Modern technologies enable us to measure and manipulate brain activity…
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“CAUSEME” to benchmark causal methods
The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rarely feasible. However, a rapidly increasing amount of observational and simulated data opens up the use of novel data-driven causal methods beyond the…
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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2021-22
The latest Human Development Report, “Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World”, launched September 8 by UNDP, argues that layers of uncertainty are stacking up and interacting to unsettle life in unprecedented ways. The last two years have had a devastating impact for billions of people around the world, when crises…
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Prediction: multi-scale pattern completion of the future
The notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive sciences.One prominent framework is of a “Bayesian brain” that explicitly generates predictions and uses resultant errors to guide adaptation. The prediction-generation component of this framework may involve little more than a pattern completion process. Brain-like systems can get…
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Over-reliance on English hinders
Several studies report a ‘bilingual advantage’ for cognitive control: the ability to plan, focus, and execute a wide array of tasks is better among bilinguals compared with monolinguals, in particular among older adult bilinguals. Nonetheless, this bilingual advantage is not replicated consistently, as the effect is heavily modulated by task, age of participants, and bilingual…
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Take your time to consider the possibilities and options
Representations of possible actions pervade human high-level cognition, and shape how we plan, attribute causal responsibility, comprehend language, and make moral judgments.There are too many ‘possible actions’ for us to consider them all. Recent studies offer a strikingly convergent picture of how we call to mind a limited, useful set of possible actions to consider.This…
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“decrease the mental-self-processing & a synchronization with the interoceptive and exteroceptive-self-processing”.
I stated in a previous post the insight into our neurology of meditation, in order to attain our goal to keep it simple, but often fail to realize it. I already suggested, we need “to kill our darlings” in order to be open to the full context of the terrain we’re exposed to. A recent paper…
