The Real Cocktail Party Effect

"So what do you do?"

The social devil on my right shoulder wants to say, "I solve the right problems at the right level for the right reasons." The social angel on my left shoulder more often wins and I say, "I do research." That opens the door to the logical follow-up, "What do you research?" The angel responds with "Learning", but the devil wants to say "Neuroscience."

When I say the n-word, the conversation frequently stumbles or stops. It intimidates people which is not the best way to continue a conversation. I like the term "learning" because everyone has experience with learning. Later I sneak in the neurobiology. Usually I try to leave them with a "take home message." (It is hard to stop the teacher in me.) One of my favorites is the importance of feedback timing in procedural learning (starting on p. 125), not your usual cocktail chitchat but still interesting.

Book Review: We Are All Weird by Seth Godin

I'm a big Seth Godin fan. I tore through his latest offering We Are All Weird and want to share it with the world. It is a manifesto, a concise document meant to change something in the world. The basic idea of We Are All Weird is that normal is not so normal anymore. The world is weird and getting weirder. It would behoove everyone, from marketers to academics, to recognize it and move forward.

It is a fun and challenging read, a rare and welcome combination. There are amazing examples of the world getting weirder that range through time and location. Since I read it on the Kindle, I was able to quickly dig deeper into the wide reaching references.

It was eye opening to hear Seth's take on one of my personal passions, the education system. He points out the current limitations of encouraging everyone to be normal. You lose both ends, the highest and lowest achieving students. We now have the tools and techniques to restructure the education system to reach every student more effectively. We can address the lower achieving students, who are frequently studying the wrong material for the wrong reason. We can also encourage the higher achieving student to the greater levels by becoming leaders and teachers.

I do take issue with his, often improper, use of the normal or bell curve. One of the primary prerequisites for assuming a normal distribution is a single variable that is at least interval scaled. For example, weight can be be understood by using a normal curve. However, Seth plots cultural behaviors from various decades on a normal distribution. Cultural behaviors are not a single variable and are nominally scaled. Additionally, normal distributions are only theoretical. Actual data (if appropriate) should be displayed in a histogram. This might appear to be a minor point, but when he misuses statistics he loses scientific face. He can make his argument without misusing statistics.

I recommend We Are All Weird, but get Linchpin first.

Publication: A critical review of habit learning and the basal ganglia

I'm proud to present my latest publication - "A critical review of habit learning and the basal ganglia."

Abstract: The current paper briefly outlines the historical development of the concept of habit learning and discusses its relationship to the basal ganglia. Habit learning has been studied in many different fields of neuroscience using different species, tasks, and methodologies, and as a result it has taken on a wide range of definitions from these various perspectives. We identify five common but not universal, definitional features of habit learning: that it is inflexible, slow or incremental, unconscious, automatic, and insensitive to reinforcer devaluation. We critically evaluate for each of these how it has been defined, its utility for research in both humans and non-human animals, and the evidence that it serves as an accurate description of basal ganglia function. In conclusion, we propose a multi-faceted approach to habit learning and its relationship to the basal ganglia, emphasizing the need for formal definitions that will provide directions for future research.

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