Further Reference

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray.

Books
The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love – Richard Restak M.D.

Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average – Joseph T. Hallinan

The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God – David J. Linden

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind – V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions – Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde and Sandra Blakeslee

Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See – Donald D. Hoffman

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us – Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell

How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker

Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World – Christopher D. Frith

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking – Thomas E. Kida

Papers
Kevin C Bickart, Christopher I Wright, Rebecca J Dautoff, Bradford C Dickerson & Lisa Feldman Barrett. (2010) “Amygdala volume and social network size in humans”, Nature Neuroscience. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2724.html

Articles
Brain blamed for teen stroppiness. (2004, May 18). BBC News. Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3724615.stm

Day Five: Free Will & Magic Tricks

Can Clever Hans read minds?

Free Will

• Clever Hans effect
• Facilitated communication
• Split Brain
• Seeing Overweight People Leads to Eating More
• Stroop Effect
• Unconscious Advertising priming
• Menstruation Effects
• Testosterone and Behavior

Magic Tricks

• Disappearing Ball Study
• Disappearing coin
• Occlusion Filling In
• Misdirection
• NLP - Derren Brown:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr-QtNE9k84
• Fake Money
• Give Me Your Wallet

Marketing

• Merchants of Cool
• Do we control our decisions?
• Disney memories and backward framing
  
• Framing language

Day Four: Racism and Other Biases

Shooters Choice and Racial Bias

• http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0778/investigations/shooters_choice.shtml
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130712737
• http://www.unc.edu/~bkpayne/publications/Payne_2001_Prejudice-And-Perception.pdf

Presidential Height Bias

• http://www.heightsite.com/2-BEING-TALL/height-matters/height-bias_presidents.html

Height and Salary

• http://news.ufl.edu/2003/10/16/heightsalary/

Testing Biases

• http://www.freakonomics.com/2007/05/23/more-evidence-of-cultural-bias-in-testing/

Day Four: Empathy in the Brain; Autism

Empathy

• TED talk on Empathy
• Effective Interrogation Techniques

Autism

• Triangle test
• Sally-Anne test
• Burning matches
• Processing errors
• Detail vs overall
• Reduced change blindness in autistic adolescents
• Empathy experiences:
• http://www.scn.org/autistics/empathy.html
• http://www.grasp.org/media/empathy.pdf
• Connectivity theory of autism
• Benefits of Autism 1
• Benefits Autism 2

Day Three: Working Memory

Elizabeth Loftus

Discussed in Class

• Training working memory improves fluid intelligence
• Insight problems and working memory
• Memory in the brain (1)
• Memory in the brain (2)
• Satriani vs Coldplay
• How we make memories
• Memory, Confidence and Confabulation
• Elizabeth Loftus
• Repetition equals truth
• Warnings become truth

Day Three: Cognitive Unconscious

Studying Cellphone Distraction

Discussed in Class

Articles

• Iowa Card task study
• Light Pattern Learning
• Overthinking
• What clown?
• Decision Potential: Detecting Handedness of Button Push
• Other views of Decision Potential (1)
  
• Other view of Decision Potential (2)
• Libet Free Will (Article Download)

Video

•  Cognitive Dissonance

Day Three: Visual Attentiveness

Is that the same guy?

Discussed in Class
Videos

• Basketball Passes 1
• Basketball Passes 2
• Change Blindness: Whodunnit?
• Change Blindness: Boarding
• Darren Brown Person Swap

Some Change Blindness Demos

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7lh8KogjhE#t=5m45s
• http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/djs_lab/demos.html
• http://www.gocognitive.net/sites/default/files/change_blindness.v.0.93.swf
• http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Slowchanges/index.html

Articles

• Police officer misses beating
• First Inattentional Blindness Study

Day Two Follow-Up

Additional Optical Illusions

• http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU8WEVn_LMg
• Which rectangle is darker?
• http://www.blelb.com/english/blelbspots/spot07/blelbspot07_en.htm
• http://games.yahoo.com/braingames/brain-teasers-games/chess-pieces-508
• How many colors are there?
• Watch the colors change.
• Color Blending
• http://games.yahoo.com/braingames/brain-teasers
• http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/
• Hollow Mask
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laty3vXKRek

Day Two: Visual Cognition

Impossible Triangle

Discussed in Class
Articles

• Facial Saccades - Where the eyes are looking on the face.
• Necker Cube - Perceiving hexagons vs. cubes
• Virgin Mary Toast Fetches $28,000

Demonstrations

• Visual Rules from bleb:
• Reading borders
• Red Squares 
• Changing Colors - Expanding
• Changing Colors - Yellow Blue Red
• Rotating cubes
• Thomas Kinkade: "Painter of Light"
• Visual Motion Construction Examples
• Ball and Shadow
• Biomotion Walker: interpreting motion points

Videos

• Change Blindness Demos (Dr. Ben Tatler)
• Impossible Triangle
• Inception Penrose Steps
• Triangle Sculpture Walkaround
• Xiao Xiao (Flash Tweening)
• iPad Animations
• Dual Vision Pathways (Stop at 23 Minutes)

Day One: Intro to the Brain

Discussed in Class
Articles

• Poverty & Intelligence
• Teen Brains
• Mess With Your Perception
• Homunculus (Penfield) Map 
• Perception of Potato Chip Freshness Influenced By Sound

Videos

• Anatomy of the Brain 
• Neuron Activity and Suppression
• CBS Reporter Abruptly Speaks Gibberish
• Waterboy clip: medulla oblongata
• Seung TED Talk
• How Much of the Visual Field We See
  

Seminar Description

The Puppet Master in Your Mind - Mr. Erath
This exploration into the discoveries of neuroscience may cause you to question the very world around you. We will explore such issues as: how our brains create a conscious, subjective reality based on uncontrolled processes in the subconscious, how various illusions fool you, the illogical processes involved in so-called logical decision making, “diseases” of the mind, the error prone and hackable processes of memory formation and recall, and how much of your will is free. You will see video of neuroscientists explaining their fascinating discoveries, test yourself to learn more about how your own brain works, and learn about and discuss recent research and its implications. You will also have the chance to hear a UC Irvine neuroscientist talk about their current research.