Thursday, December 24, 2009

Brain Farts

The title alone made this worth reading: Anatomy of A Brain Fart.

Money quote: The latest research seems to indicate that brain farts are a unique type of cognitive mistake. Unlike errors caused by lack of information or experience, or by distractions, brain farts are innate. They have a predictable neural pattern that emerges up to 30 seconds before they happen. When you are absorbed in inward-focused thinking such as daydreaming, a collection of brain regions jointly called the default mode network (DMN) starts furiously popping away. Neuroscientists don’t agree on exactly which parts of the brain compose this network, but they now believe it is one of the busiest neurological systems.

2 comments:

Nick Ziegler said...

Just letting you know that your hyperlink has a space at the end of the URL, so it leads to an error page. Deleting the space would make the link work. :)

Chris said...

Nikolus, thanks for the heads up. Fixed.

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...