AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

Locke's Common-place book

Between 1500-1700 the amount of available knowledge increased dramatically and the lack of an ordered system for cataloging this information frightened scholars [1]. Initially ideas were grouped together in notebooks by subject, but this system was supplanted by Locke's new method, that indexed memorable ideas via alphabetic order, rather than by relevant heading. This method increased one's capacity to store ideas whilst simultaneously reducing search

In the recent Extended Mind debate, it can be easy to forget how long discussions of 'artificial' memory have been in existence. I don't normally quote great swathes of text, but this single sentence from 1200AD, expresses such a richness of content that I couldn't resist:

Three Capetian French scholars consulting an astrolabe, ca. AD 1200 Read original >>

The Dream, Henri Rosseau, (1910) MoMA

Source Monitoring was first described as a framework for understanding how people attribute the source of mental experiences in 1993 (Johnson, Hastroudi & Lindsay, see also Johnson & Raye). The Source Monitoring Framework (SMF) has been used by many labs in the last 15 years to investigate how the subjective experience affects memory judgments. Features that make up complex e

Sleep

A recent Harvard experiment (Payne et. al., 2009) shows that an afternoon nap selectively increases false recall of semantically similar critical words to presented words [see DRM paradigm]. This is because sleep plays an active rather than a merely passive role in memory consolidation. Upon waking, experimenters found that subjects remember the gist of the presented items more easily than specific words,

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

One of the keynote speakers at ASCS 2009 this year was Thomas Metzinger. He presented a hypothesis from his book T

Figure 1: Imagining a healing white light might actually precipitate the body's own capacity to deliver pain relief (e.g. opioids), but won't reduce the size of a cancerous tumour.
Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, allevi

Helen Keller is famous for being a tremendously successful deaf, blind and mute writer and activist. She is also central to one of the most famous cases of cryptomnesia, a circumstance when a person utilizes implicit information whilst experiencing no phenomenal familiarity with the content. In this case, Helen wrote the story The Frost King and was accused of plagiarizing The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby.

In the history of analytic philosophy, there is much debate abo

To be presented at Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (ASCS09)

TITLE: The Danger of the Extended Mind

ABSTRACT: This paper accepts three claims of the Extended Mind Hypothesis (EMH): 1) External elements form part of the machinery of cognition, insofar as they causally interact with mental states. 2) The meaning of our thoughts is partly explained by reference to the external world (content e

On Saturday night I hosted a dinner for UQ women in Philosophy. We had a whole covern turn up (13)*! It was awesome. There was enough food for forty people! Everyone seemed to have a great time and we're all looking forward to another one in the spring.

Preparing for everyone to show up. I wanted lots of candle-light for ambiance.

I discovered that tea lights look amazing in my grandmother's tea cups. The light shines right through the

...it’s very important to use your brain, to keep challenging your mind, but all mental activities may not be equal. We’re seeing some evidence that a social component may be crucial... The evidence suggests that people who spend long stretches of their days, three hours and more, engrossed in some mental activities like cards may be at reduced risk of developing dementia. Researchers are trying to tease apart cause from effect: Are they active because they are sharp, or sharp be

The Waters of Lethe, Thomas Benjamin Kennington

...the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things. Plato

The Lethe River was one of the rivers of Hades* also known as the river of oblivion. The river functioned as a mind-wipe an