Comments on: Your brain: Search engine, or calculator?

When faced with a difficult decision, the right thing to do, apparently, is wait for more data.

[Sam Papelbon]

i don't get it...

doesn't this just sort of go with that annoying thing people always have in their signatures about some study in 'cmbidgare' or something?

if people read words as a whole, instead of by letter, ziggurat would obviously not be candy since it only shares one letter. candle is almost the same word. it requires extra verification like 'a hah, it has an 'le' at the end'

this same study could be done by sitting a 5' person next to a 6'10" person and saying 'which is taller?' and then sitting a 5'8" person next to a 5'9" person and asking the same question.

it's not a painfully obvious answer, and from experience, whenever i have to think about something at a computer, circling the mouse around is the same as looking up and going 'ummm...'

if that's all this study is supposed to prove, that when faced with a more difficult decision, people tend to think more, then i must congratulate these scientists for being able to con someone out of research money...

[aabcdefghij987654321]

You didn't read the story

Or you'd not have written all that about how many letters are different between the various words. If you'd have read the story you'd have noticed that the words being compared were SPOKEN to the test subjects which therefore means the word is received in parts and not read as a whole.

[Razzl]

We are analog, not digital

Without going into too much analysis, I'll take your conclusions as a simple confirmation that, once again, experimental method was unable to make human behavior fit neatly into a "digital" model, all answers being 1's or 0's, "yes" or "no", etc. The physical world is chemical in nature and therefore analog; and we are a product of that environment.