We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:
If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
I wish that more UX designers understood that!
I feel like there’s a connection here between what Kevin Kelly is describing and what I wrote about guessing (though I think he might be conflating consciousness with intelligence).
This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.
This explains rubber ducking.
Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.
I like this skewering of the cult of so-called-neuroscience; the self-help book equivalent of eye-tracking.
A pitch-perfect parody of people that peeve.
A look at our inbuilt confirmation biases.
An excellent rebuttal by Steven Pinker to Nicholas Carr's usual trolling.
It turns out that the brain is a scale-free small-world network in a state of self-organised criticality. Just like the internet.
A detailed look at the troubled history of George Lakoff, the father of conceptual metaphor.
There appears to be a form of synesthesia where people "hear" motion. Watch this video (repeatedly) to test your own sensory perception.
I saw Steven Pinker give a talk recently and he spent a fair amount of time talking about swearing. He has written up that part of the talk into an article for the New Republic.
A good, if somewhat dispiriting, overview of Artificial Intelligence. (There's some nice typesetting on this page)