claimtoken-51656045da7eb Although I knew I wanted to do cognitive neuroscience from early on in my graduate training, it would be years before I actually started taking pictures of brains with a giant magnet. Part of … Read More →
A Story Behind a Paper – Part I
Happy New Year! I let The Magnet quench over the holidays, and am firing it back up with something a little bit different. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a longish series inspired … Read More →
MOOCs as capital-biased technological change
X7Q73MX48QHW Last week my Twitter feed briefly turned into a kind of massively open online course about MOOCs, in response to this thoughtful critique by Aaron Bady of an earlier post by Clay Shirky advancing an … Read More →
Implied audience in high-profile psychology papers: Beyond the “nice lady on the subway.”
My dad emailed to say he didn’t quite follow last week’s post. I did a gut check and decided I was OK with this. Part of what I’m trying to do with this blog is … Read More →
It is not enough that Marcus succeed, Hinton must also fail.
In the New Yorker’s Newsdesk blog last week, Gary Marcus expresses his skepticism of “deep learning,” an approach to artificial intelligence pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton that received some unusually high-profile coverage in the Times. I … Read More →
I’m all for replications and reporting of null results, but what about the bees?
I may have seemed a bit hard on meta-analysis last week, but I should say that there’s really no way to mount a good scientific argument without some form of it. You have to consider … Read More →
If America’s Boyfriend were a Cognitive Neuroscientist…
Last week, America’s Boyfriend Nate Silver made meta-analysis cool beyond belief. The image of a lone geek, sitting at the end of a vast pipeline of data, and turning it into something everyone wants to … Read More →
Diversity of Tactics in the Neurobiology of Language
If you are looking for something to eat in San Sebastiàn early in the evening — as you might be if you were, like me, a jet-lagged scientist forced to walk in the dark to … Read More →
The giant soda ban as epistemological crisis
This sounds like the setup to a joke, but I really was just minding my own business on a bench in Washington Square Park when I was approached by a perky young woman with an … Read More →
What’s it like to be a brain?
I started reading Elizabeth Costello because the premise was irresistible to me: an academic who, when invited to give talks about her literary work, gives herself over to impassioned sermons on vegetarianism. I have often … Read More →