cognitive function

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

A Google Tech Talk by sleep researcher Dr. William Dement on healthy sleep and performance. He argues sleep debt must be repaid and describes the three characteristics of healthy sleep.

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

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

A short TV segment on Jill Price, a woman with highly superior autobiographical memory who recalls nearly every day of her life. She describes the good and bad sides of never forgetting.

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

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

A short Supernova 2007 provocation in which Clay Shirky uses a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine, rebuilt periodically, as a metaphor for how networks change business and collective creativity.

A short clip from the film Office Space in which Peter explains his typical workday to the Bobs, the consultants.