copy-paste from Null-Hypothesis , which dubs itself as The Journal of Unlikely Science. It came to me through the facebook group We’re scientists AND we’re sexy! Ok, I admit, I am a member of it. Yeah, right. Me. Sexy. Ouch! It Hurts.
I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat
By Jamie Lawson
Scientists in California have been busy flashing images at people again. This is a favourite game of psychophysicists the world over, being a nice way of measuring reaction times to… well, Visual Things. This time they’ve been looking to see if people pay more attention to evolutionarily salient objects like lions and impala rather than novelties like cars, tables and lamps.
The result will come as no surprise to the evolutionary psychologists in the crowd. When presented with pairs of images, each flashed rapidly and identical except for a tiny change, participants were much faster and more accurate at identifying changes involving animals (including humans) than those involving your aforementioned inanimate things, even if the animal was hardly visible at all. This also held true when a failure to notice the inanimate object in the scenes would normally be associated with sudden and messy death, such as is the case with cars.
The explanation? Well, back in the day, humans would have benefited from attention to things that they could hunt and eat (like impala) as well as to things that could eat them (like lions) and things that may have filled both categories (like… each other). Humans who ignored these objects moving about would presumably have died from either a) starvation or b) being killed and/or eaten, so a tendency to attend to animate objects became hardwired in to the human visual system. Things like cars, although life threatening, are just far too modern to have been incorporated.
So, the good news is that you are very likely to spot a big cat as it sneaks up on you with every intention of making you its lunch. Sadly, in moving to avoid it, you may just end up being crushed beneath the wheels of a bus you have entirely failed to notice. Ah well, swings and roundabouts, eh?
Here’s an example of what Internet 2.0 can do in terms of rapid dissemination of content: I join a group on facebook, where I see a youtube link which I promptly reference in my own blog: Cool uh? Not nearly as cool as the plant in the movie itself, though, a species of mimosa which folds her leaves when touched…
It apparently belongs to the Triffid family, of Sci-fi fame.
I, for one, welcome our shy motile plant overlords!!!
This morning, I open facebook instead of starting to work straight away. Bad guy… I notice that a friend, who seems to have the typical feminine passion for tests, has just taken the IQ tests. I’ve always been skeptic about the definition of Intelligence tested by such tests, yet after lunch I have not much to do, and I start it. I see that it only gives you 15 minutes. Panic. but the questions are mostly boring math in textual form, so start picking them randomly… Out of four answers I will at least answer 25% of them correctly, no? So,l if they’re difficult (and should be if they want to test your intelligence), you stand a good chance of getting a decent score anyway… I only stop (ten seconds each) to answer the one with pictures, unless they’re too complicated… otherwise, random for those too…
Hit the submit button that there’s still 9 minutes plus left. The machine asks me if i want to share the results with my facebook friends. Uhm, I don’t think i want to share a 78 with anyone… so no, thank you. Skip it.
Here’s the result: 119!!! Definitely above the average!!!
Now, either I really am a genius, or I have a big reserve of good luck (stored in my fat abdomen), or may be the results are not really objective. I start thinking that being facebook populated by americans, they would never return a number lower than 100 for fear of being sued by all the lawyers or lawyer-capable rich dumbasses who may get it. me included. Well, no, i would not sue them. I am not going to waste my hard earned cash this way…
Anyway, it was fun… Albeit quite silly.
When will we come to a decent definition of ‘intelligence’? Such as “the ability of a men to whoosh a girl into her bed by the use of any possible mean, either verbal, vocal or corporeal”.
