The Psychonomic Society launched its latest journal, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications last week. We will celebrate the new journal, under its acronym CRPI—which is pronounced “Creepee” but in a nice way—for the remainder of this week. Tomorrow we will hear from the founding editor, Jeremy Wolfe, and his thoughts about how the journal will […]
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(This post is an edited and abridged version of the opening article to the #symbodiment special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review authored by Bradford Z. Mahon and Gregory Hickok. The full article can be found here.) The question of how word, object, event and action meanings are represented and organized in the brain has […]
A different sort of American Revolution took place in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The rift was again between the US and Britain, with those American upstarts once more insisting on going their own way. But this was a quiet revolution, so quiet that few people even noticed it. It was a revolution in how we […]
According to William Shakespeare, eyes are the windows of the soul. This opinion was shared by Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, reflecting early Anglo-French poetic harmonization. By contrast, Neil Shubin in his book Your Inner Fish offered a slightly less ephemeral opinion: “When you look into eyes, forget about romance, creation, and the windows into the soul. With their molecules, genes, […]
What does Beyoncé have in common with Pamela Anderson, but not with Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie? And what is it that Britney and Angelina have in common? Apparently, Britney and Angelina gave birth to their babies by caesarian section whereas Beyoncé and Pamela gave birth naturally. This is the only thing I know about […]
When the Egyptian King Intef died some 4,000 years ago, his tomb was inscribed with a song that encourages its audience to live a life of what came to be called hedonism: “Revel in pleasure while your life endures… never weary grow/In eager quest of what your heart desires.” Some 3,800 years later, the pursuit of happiness was […]
There is a lot more to color than most people realize. For example, color has been instrumental in experimental tests of the long-standing controversy about whether one’s language determines one’s mode of thinking. Do we all perceive colors in the same way, regardless of whether we have different words for, say, blue and green or […]
Watching someone else feel pain is a painful experience. The ability to suffer not only your own pain but also that of others has “long been considered the distilled essence of our humanity” by some writers. Concern for the suffering of others has also been said to be central to moral decision making. Fortunately, this […]
The clouds are pillows. Time is a thief. Life is a journey. According to Groucho Marx a hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. And I wish I could write a Psychonomics post as fast as a speeding bullet—but because I can’t, all other commitments today will be delayed by virtue of the […]
Mozart was a child prodigy. He composed from the age of five, and at 17—an age at which many parents would be reluctant to entrust their son with the keys to the family car—Mozart was appointed a court musician in Salzburg. Was his talent genetically determined or did he have the good fortune to be […]