Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

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Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous posting about the relationship between play and games here.

Play in my mind (and in my teaching) if often connected with humor. As it turns out, recent research indicates that this connection has an evolutionary history. As this article argues, humor is a part of our “mammalian inheritance, and [is] closely related to rough-and-tumble social play.” Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago Sachin Kalbag, then at Digit, contacted me to write an article for a special for the magazine’s fourth anniversary issue. The topic at hand was Digital Convergence, what it is, and what does it mean for our future? Read the rest of this entry »

MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and robots can really mess things up in our mind - and we fall into, what has been called, uncanny valley. Read the rest of this entry »

When does the brain make up YOUR mind? Does this question make any sense?

Anyway, this was prompted by an article that showed that “Researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.” Hmmm… Read the rest of this entry »

Two interesting articles about religions and magical thinking. The first from the Economist is about how scientists are attempting to explain religion in evolutionary terms. As the article says, “religion cries out for a biological explanation,” though previous attempts have not been very successful. However, it looks like that may be changing Read the rest of this entry »

Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today’s column titled “Stop the mutants” is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous writing, it is well written, thoroughly researched and extremely thought provoking.

That said, this blog posting is not about biology but rather about something relatively mundane, a mention of East Lansing, MI in Olivia Judson’s column. East Lansing of course is the home of Michigan State University! Read the rest of this entry »

Oliver Sacks has a fascinating piece in today’s NYTimes (titled Patterns, as a part of his NYTimes blog, Migranes, perspective on a headache). Oliver Sacks describes the visual auras he has suffered through his life as follows:

tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins.

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Nicholas Carr has an interesting post (titled Rewiring the mind) on the findings of a recent study into the information seeking behaviors of scholars. (The full study in pdf format can be downloaded here.) Carr seems to suggest that these results indicate a fundamental change in human cognition. I have to agree that new technologies do generate (and require) new forms of literacy - but I am not sure I completely agree that interaction with information on the Internet is changing how we think. Worth reading and discussing…

Image credit: breezeDebris via Flickr

A new study (with brain scanning no less) indicates that the more expensive the wine the better it tastes. As the MindHacks article (Higher price makes cheap wine taste better) reports, participants rated the more expensive wine as being more likeable even it was indentical to the, so called, cheaper wine. Here is the most important quote:

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A video, brought to you by Slate, titled “How smart are chimps?” Read the rest of this entry »