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Looked him up on Google, and to my dismay, when you type in “Leidy Klotz” into Google, what appears is the name of a professional soccer player, not a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, so I’m like, “Ah! That’s not what I’m looking for.”Ġ:01:45.3 SC: And then I realized, further Googling, it is the same guy.
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So the lead author of the… Or the leader of the lab that performed the study was Leidy Klotz. So I thought that would be a fun topic for the Mindscape Podcast, a little bit different, but interdisciplinary and interesting. And so you can think about why that is, the neuroscience of that, the evolution of why we evolved that way and so forth. Subtractive change, taking things away, is a little bit more alien to us. And the human brain, says the study, has this feature that it is much more eager to add extra squares than to remove them.Ġ:00:58.7 SC: This turns out to be a more general feature, the authors claim, that if we have some design problem or some puzzle in front of us, we instantly move to adding stuff. So you could either add more squares to the image to make it look symmetric, or you could remove squares, you could click on squares and have them disappear to make it look symmetric. And the study was basically the following: They would give subjects a little grid on a computer where there were some blank spaces and some colored-in spaces, and they asked the subjects to alter the pattern of squares to make the image they were looking at symmetric in some well-defined way.
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It was sort of a psychology study, but an interdisciplinary group of people carrying it out. I was on the internet and I noticed on Twitter a link to a very interesting paper in Nature. And I wanted to start today’s episode with a story.