Multitasking significantly impact short-term memory of elderly, study finds

In a follow-up to my recent post on multitasking comes this report from the New York Times:

[A] study being published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences… shows that multitasking takes a significantly greater toll on the working memory of older people.Researchers said the key finding of the new study is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.

Wray Herbert on catching liars

Science writer Wray Herbert reports in the Huffington Post:

Detecting lies and liars is essential to effective policing and prosecution of criminals, but it’s maddeningly difficult. Most of us can spot barely more than half of all lies and truths through listening and observation — meaning, of course, that we’re wrong almost as often as we’re right. A half-century of research has done little to polish this unimpressive track record.But scientists are still working to improve on that, and among them is cognitive psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth, in the U.K. Vrij has been using a key insight from his field to improve interrogation methods: The human mind, despite its impressive abilities, has limited capacity for how much thinking it can handle at any one time. So demanding additional, simultaneous thought — adding to cognitive “load” — compromises normal information processing. What’s more, lying is more cognitively demanding than telling the truth, so these compromised abilities should show up in detectable behavioral clues.

Allen Institute completes map of human brain

Wired.com reports that the Paul Allen Institute for Brain Science has completed a multi-year project to map the human brain – and make that map (actually a kind of virtual atlas) publicly available.

When asked why the Allen Institute undertook such an endeavor, CEO Allan Jones told Wired:

The Allen Institute operates on a different model than most research institutes, with a focus on creating catalytic resources for those other researchers around the world.  Our mouse brain atlas, which was completed in 2006, has really proved to be an extraordinary resource for scientists and is used by approximately 10,000 unique users from around the globe every month. It represents for researchers a reference for new discovery, hypothesis generation and confirmation of their own data, and often saves them from having to do an experiment themselves in the lab, which it turn saves time and money.

Raymond Kurzweil and technological singularity

TIME Magazine reports:

[Raymond] Kurzweil believes that we’re approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away…

…If computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.