Masters in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience
Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 29 Aug 2005 00:01:00 GMT
I set myself up as a guest blogger on Nicole’s blog so I could tell you a bit about what she’s up to. She doesn’t think anyone would care to read about what she’s been doing, but I think it’s really interesting. And I know our close friends (and maybe our not-so-close associates) would find this interesting.
Nicole started in the Applied Cognition and Neuroscience program at the University of Texas at Dallas last summer. She started off with Computer Vision, which is a very interesting course. She probably would’ve enjoyed it more if she had a passionate teacher (her prof was a bit disinterested) and it wasn’t a compressed summer semester. Her final project had her recognizing shapes in a bitmap. The application had to tell if the shape was a circle, rectangle or triangle. It also had to detect if the shape was rotated. It was a pretty difficult project and Nicole worked really hard on it. In the end, she was sure that she screwed up and was going to get a horrible grade in the class… She got an A.
This semester, which started about a week and half ago, Nicole is taking Cognitive Science and Speech Perception. Both of these classes have nothing to do with computer algorithms, like the Computer Vision class, so they are going to be more in line with the program.
Speech Perception, so far, has blown right over a lot of material which must be very familiar to a serious student of music. Unfortunately, Nicole is not a serious student of music. But she may not be behind the rest of the class, since they all seem to be in the same boat she is with regard to music theory. The most interesting part of this class that Nicole has shared with me is that there is a Taoist in the class. He is taking the class because of his interest in how our speech distorts our reality. He cites, as an example, the case of the witness who must pick a criminal out of a lineup. If the witness has given a verbal description of the criminal before the lineup, the witness will (according to the Taoist) often pick incorrectly. I want to know how the police make a lineup of suspects if they haven’t gotten a description, but that may make too much sense for a Taoist to understand it… See, Taoists embrace contradiction, so they aren’t much fun to argue with.
I haven’t heard much about Cognitive Science yet. I know that the professor has touched on consciousness and they are talking a bit about brain structure. The most noteworthy event that has happened in this class so far is that one of the required books for the course is already in Nicole’s library. She bought the book (Mapping The Mind, by Rita Carter) for her own pleasure reading a few months ago. So, that served as a pretty good bit of positive feedback that this is a course that she is going to enjoy.
