"Two by Two" or "Why One is Not Enough"

A lot of Cog Sci research is focused on figuring out the basic mechanisms of sensation and perception, mostly because we need to understand the basics before we can make real claims about more abstract, interesting, human-type cognitive activities. This is all just to preface the next bit.

As far as I can tell, our bodies know that 'two are better than one', especially when it comes to perceiving and navigating through space. Think about it. At an obvious and general level, we have two feet to walk and two hands to manipulate things. On a more cognitive neuroscience-y level, we have two eyes that see slightly different views of the world (allowing us to perceive depth more easily), and we have two ears that hear two different sound profiles of the world (allowing us to locate the sources of sounds). This all makes sense.


Here's where things get strange. We have a nose. We have two nostrils. Recently, researchers at Berkeley found that this is a big deal (in terms of spatial perception). Despite the fact that humans don't depend on olfaction (smell) in the same way that other mammals do (see dogs, cats, rats, etc), these researchers found that humans are perfectly capable of following a scent trail (see image #1, one the left is a dog following a pheasants scent trail; on the right is one of the subjects in the study).



Not only that, but they used a 'nose prism' (row f in image #2, don't ask) that allowed the researchers to control whether the participants were breathing air from one or two airstreams. Turns out that participants breathing two different airstreams (which means that each nostril got slightly different air/scent inputs) were both faster and more accurate in their scent-tracking than those who only smelt air from a single stream! I think that it is crazy that we (our brains) are capable of detecting differences between our nostrils (that's like 5mm, nothing!).

In a Nutshell

This is just a little somethin I whipped up for the Cog Sci student conference. It's watered-down acrylic and pen on the back of a Trader Joe's bag.

Boys and Breakfast

Recently I've been going to the BBC for my news. Today one of the headlines for their "Health" section was "High-calorie diet linked to boys".

According to the article, women who have higher-calorie, nutrient-rich diets around the time of conception and early pregnancy tend (56% of 740 first-time pregnancies studied) to have male children. This trend has been well-documented in other species (horses, cows, etc). There has been a slow, steady decline in the number of boy babies born in developing countries in the few decades.

The idea is that well-nourished mothers are more likely to live in favorable environments, environments that could support a whole bunch of babies. It makes sense, under these conditions, to have boy babies because boys could sire more babies than girls could mother...

The point of all this (for me) is that it is tremendously ironic that the cultural values and habits of the affluent (thin, well-managed women, preferably too busy to eat breakfast) would create conditions of scarcity within the individual (lean times, more girl-children).

Sorry to stray from cog sci, but intriguing things are intriguing things, and both nutrition and gender have interesting and significant effects on cognition, so this might relate to something more relevant later.

Also, for full article, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7358384.stm .

Visualizing the Inside Out

A design group from Hong Kong has come up with a clean and clever way to help the general public visualize the impact of the(nearly) invisible. These guys printed a poster (with a drawing of our respiratory system) with clear sticky ink. Over time, the image (of our lungs) became visible as airborne pollutants collected on the poster. This is definitely a great example of meaningful yet parsimonious design.