Nullary Sources

John Tierney, the New York Times:

When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said Thursday, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions.

They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” According to their research, which involved more than 19,000 people ranging in age from 18 to 68, the illusion persists from teenage years into retirement.

Resist your gag reflex — this is not yet more gauche east-meets-west self-help nonsense. As far as I can tell this appears to be a summary of several highly serious neuroscience research efforts. Great read.

Jason Palmer, BBC News:

[T]he team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.

With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.

They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.

Imagine a computer controlled with technology like this.