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Matching entries from Jascha Hoffman
Monkey Don't
In 1973, Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, embarked on an experiment to teach sign language to an infant chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky. On the release of the documentary Project Nim, Terrace talks about research ethics, chimp cognition and the origins of language. [pdf]
Mental Snapshots
Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, Russell T. Hurlburt has devised an unconventional method to investigate the mental lives of his subjects. In Describing Inner Experience?, he presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day... [text]
The Philosophical Baby
In her provocative new book, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that babies are in some ways “actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are.” [full text]
Bonfire of the Humanities
Behind the novelist's eye of Tom Wolfe — bestselling author of Bonfire of the Vanities — lies a keen interest in brain science. Wolfe explains why he sees human behavior as more than mechanistic, and genetic theory as little more than literature...[pdf] [text]
Science of the Five Senses
The taste of a ripe tomato, the hook of a catchy song, the scent of a lover’s hair. What is it, exactly, that drives us to seek these things again and again? In a series of talks at the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers and artists will raise a question for the amateur hedonist: If we had a better understanding of the signals our bodies send to our brains, might we take more pleasure from them? [full text]
Israel from the Inside
“Sometimes life is too much, you have to tone it down to make art,” says the Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan. Her own work has evolved over the past fifteen years from rather strange and grotesque fables into some of the strongest graphic fiction on the planet... [full text]
How Faces Share Feelings
In the 1960s, many anthropologists thought that a smile could convey joy in one culture and disgust in another. Paul Ekman had a hunch that this relativistic thinking was wrong. So he took his camera to the island of New Guinea to photograph the faces of the South Fore people ...
[full text]
Criminal Element
Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior...
[full text] [pdf]
Suspect Memories
Taking into account decades of scientific research, New Jersey is reforming its lineup procedures to reduce the number of false identifications. As our reporter discovered the hard way, however, it's never easy to pick a perpetrator out of a crowd...
The Virtual Sketch Artist
For years, crime witnesses have been asked to come down to the police station and describe crime suspects to sketch artists. Recently, though, psychologists have found that when witnesses try to describe a face, they often distort their memory of...
The Birth of the Mind
Gary Marcus, the psychologist who directs the Infant Language Center at New York University, wants to do something that would have been impossible a decade ago: reveal the genetic origins of the mind. Marcus posits that the brain is wired up by the genes to learn from its surroundings, a view considered extreme by many neuroscientists ...
Crash Course
MINEOLA, LONG ISLAND - William "Rusty" Haight has survived more automobile crash tests than anyone else on Earth, and I'm dodging four lanes of traffic with him — on foot. Rusty has flown out from San Diego to testify...
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