Encefalus

Stephen Wolfram
Lately I’ve been reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. As you can guess from the title, Wolfram makes a few great remarks about the future and the methods of science.
Traditional science uses mathematics. What mathematics do, is to quantify problems, find regularities and then use equations to describe these regularities. What this [...]

In the latest post we talked about the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos: The death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos (drugs, guns, cops and tasers part II). Since then, Greece continues to be shocked by riots, protests and various forms of resistance against authority.
Some people even managed to occupy the national tv network, at the same time, that [...]

Those of you who read Encefalus, probably remember this article: Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society
The reason I am mentioning this, is this article I found on the web: Ten Of The Most Controversial Books!
The latter article refers (pretty obviously) to books that [...]

Lately I’ve been digging into the subject of agent based models of social sciences. Agent based models are defined by wikipedia as following

An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network, with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. [...]

Lately I have been reading this book: The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind. The book deals, quite obviously, with philosophy of mind and all the matters that touch this subject, including free will. The author is Ben Goertzel who happens to be a very interesting person. He holds a PhD in mathematics, but [...]

I was reading this book the other day: Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. It’s a very interesting book that deals with the cutting edge of current social and cognitive science: the application of computational modelling in social sciences. I will not talk about the details of this book here [...]

A very simple title. What logic has to do with Encefalus, a blog that mainly deals with psychological issues?
Logic is something that I was always interested in, not for any special reason, but because I am a math-logic geek. But beyond that, I always believed that you can never really do science, unless you have [...]

Lately I have to deal with a lot of things in my life. So, I have been thinking about the relationship between information and the human cognitive system. How much information can we absord at a time? How can we filter the noise out of it and keep the useful stuff? How can we manage [...]

The recent economic crisis made me think a lot about the subject of economics. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I’m very interested in economics, and I believe them to be an integral part of cognitive science, or any science that aims to comprehend the human behavior and civilization (Some thoughts on a new micro-economic [...]

There is a blog in Psychology Today called Freedom to Learn. Its author is Peter Gray. His resume is: "a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory psychology textbook, Psychology, now in its 5th edition."
This blog has some very interesting articles. It’s [...]

The other day I was writing an article for Encefalus concerning economics and studying their relation to psychology. However, as I was writing it, I stumbled upon some problems, like what is the definition of economics. Obviously, modern economists might have different opinions among them, and I, as a psychologist, have a different view on [...]

GeorgeLoewenstein
Remember the article Lotteries, poverty and social implications? I found this article in Scientific American : Lottery Tickets and Credit Cards: The Dangers of an Irrational Brain. It’s an interview with the researcher who’s work we commented in Lotteries, poverty and social implications. He is called George Loewenstein.
What I particularly liked about this interview is [...]