At the heart of matter... is glue, or rather gluons binding the quarks that make up protons and neutrons which make up all physical matter. The glue of the gluons is called the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and the strongest of them all. The weakest is the force of gravitation, which is a great glue that connects and binds all the physical objects of the universe, orchestrating the grand symphony of the galaxies. Glue is everywhere, without glue we are nowhere. Glue is that substance which keeps things from falling apart, and as such becomes the ultimate metaphor for God, that supreme force which ever upholds the integrity of existence.

This blog is a little homage to the God of glue, who is simply a metaphor for the endless creativity of our wonderful, adhesive and cohesive universe, which is simply a manifestation of the infinite wisdom of the Godhead, which is simply the head of God's being — this being being none other than this infinitely wonderful universe, which nonetheless could simply be a dream in the mind of God! A slightly sticky situation there! Got glue?


Cognitive Psychology

 

Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain

— Tom Stafford, Matt Webb —

(Chapter 1: Inside the Brain)

 

 

 

 

It's never entirely true to say, "This bit of the brain is solely responsible for function X."

 

 

 

Small, isolated strokes can deactivate very specific brain regions... Seeing what these people can no longer do in these pathological cases, provides good clues into the functions of those regions of the brain.

 

 

 

Our decision-making systems are assembled from neurons rather than silicon. We're not software running on hardware. The two are one and the same.

 

 

 

Cognitive psychology is the psychology of the basic mental processes — things like perception, attention, memory, language, decision-making. It asks the question, "What are the fundamental operations on which mind is based?"    

 

 

 

 

We can use neuroimaging (EEG, PET, MRI) to look inside the head at the brain, to inform how we think the brain runs the algorithms that make up the mind.

 

 

 

 

Experimental psychologists have spent more than a hundred years refining methods for getting insight into how the mind works without messing with the insides, what we call cognitive psychology.

 

 

 

 

What cognitive psychology basically tries to do: reverse engineering the basic functions of the mind by manipulating the inputs and looking at the results.

 

 

 

 

Small things have big effects and sometime big changes in circumstance can produce little obvious difference in how we respond.

 

 

 

 

People aren't consistent in the same way software or machines usually are. Two sources of variability are noise and learning.

 

 

 

 

We don't automatically respond in the same way to the same stimulus every time. This sometimes happens for no apparent reason, and we call this randomness noise.

 

 

 

 

The very act of responding first time around creates feedback that informs our response pattern for the next time... almost all actions affect future processing.

 

 

 

 

The rigor and precision of the methods developed by cognitive psychology are still vital, but now they can be used in tandem with methods to give insight into the underlying brains structure and processes that are supporting the phenomenon being investigated.

 

 

 

 

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