basal cognition

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition and translation system, built on deep neural networks, that turns his spoken English into Chinese speech in 2012.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

A HOPE XI talk on programming by voice with open source speech recognition. The speaker writes Linux systems code by voice and describes building custom voice grammars as an alternative to the keyboard for programmers with repetitive strain injuries.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition. It surveys the history and key challenges of computer vision, from the Cambrian explosion and Hubel and Wiesel to ImageNet.

A short CGP Grey explainer about how countries are defined, why recognition by others matters, and the oddities of places like Taiwan and Vatican City. It shows that statehood is partly a matter of diplomacy rather than fact.

Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.

Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.

VICE News reporter Elle Reeve investigates China's rollout of facial recognition and mass surveillance technology and what it means for citizens. The report originally aired on VICE on HBO.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

A dramatized fictional video of micro drones with facial recognition and swarm AI used as autonomous killer weapons. It is a Slaughterbots-style warning about lethal autonomous weapons.

A one-minute clip from the film Minority Report showing digital signage that recognizes a passerby and personalizes ads to him by name. It depicts a vision of targeted advertising driven by biometric identification.

Jonna Mendez, former CIA Chief of Disguise, explains how disguises are used in intelligence work and what makes deception effective, including changing one's gait.

A clip from the movie Minority Report showing personalized advertising that recognizes a person as they walk through a mall.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

A long video essay arguing that Koko the gorilla probably could not actually use sign language. It examines the cherry-picked data and the lack of transparency behind the claims, drawing on published critiques.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

Kathy Sierra's Fluent 2015 keynote on the one metaskill for developers: the ability to come up to speed quickly and stay there. She covers how people learn, cognitive resources versus willpower, and building skill.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.

Maker's Muse designs a 3D-printed and laser-cut puzzle box to test whether wild sulphur-crested cockatoos can solve it. He documents how the birds work it out.

Vsauce explores how human reasoning works, drawing on the social theory of reason and the extended mind thesis, made in partnership with Bill Gates around climate change.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

A student interviews Kirsten Carlson, who does not have an internal monologue, and she answers questions about how she thinks. The video grew out of a viral article about people lacking inner speech.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.