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Who Wants To Be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire?
ThePolynomial writes "Last night Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist and Homeland Security Fellow, became the first person to face the million-dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in three years. He now has a first-person narrative on seedmagazine.com where he describes using techniques from cognitive science to think of answers on the show." From the article: "I used priming on my $16,000 question: 'This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?' I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena's remark popped into my mind: 'What else would you expect from Denmark?'"
D. William
Dammit, Dammit, Dammit!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
That show is still on the air, dam i though that show was cancled some 3 years ago
Isn't that show about tabloid rumors and hollywood trivia now, without any relation to the old show that actually asked questions that were about something other than pop culture?
It seems strage to see that show name in relation to anything even near science, considering that science was chucked from the roster of questions asked on it years ago.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I missed the 'in 3 years' part of the summary. ignore parent.
On shows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" they give you all the time in the world. Some contestants can literally take 15+ minutes to answer a question, which is why this guy's techniques are usable. He had no time constraints.
But, being TV, they can edit it down to make it entertaining. TFA mentions this, but not everyone is going to RTFA.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Y'know, those guys that can remember incredible sequences of numbers/playing cards etc, but have regular sized IQs... they create a story (The jack of hearts held on tightly to the queen of spades, stuff like that) and remember that in order to remember the sequence.
Wonder how that could be applied to computer memory...
I am a leaf on the wind
My wife loves this show. He actually passed on the $1M and kept the $500,000 -- It was something thought to watch him. He thought he knew the answer to the $1M (the question was which ship was not [boarded/sunk?] during the Boston Tea Party). He thought he knew the answer, even gave it out loud, but said he wasn't sure enough. I think he yelled DAMN three times when Merideth told him the correct (his) answer.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
It's a shame. What could have been a fascinating treatment of neuroscience for laypeople, and how it applies to a quizshow, has been written like "the time I went on telly by Ogi Ogas aged 7 and 3/4".
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Is he happy having one half a million or stabbing himself in the face for walking away from a million, when he DID know the answer?
either way, it is awsome to see a scientific aproach to problemsolving
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Hmm, maybe that's why the summary says he was the first to face the million dollar question in three years?
--Atlantix
and other techniques from brain-based learning have really helped me think about my teaching methods. (I am a high school math teacher). The NSA sponsors workshops here in the state of Maryland that focus on how the brain retains knowledge and practical ways to use that in the classroom. IMHO, every teacher should be aware of developments in this field and really think critically about what they want students to retain long-term. Ultimately, a job description for a teacher is someone who creates meaningful memories.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I got to visit New York several years ago for a chance to beat Regis, back when the show was still prime time.
One thing the producers hammered into our head was "Regis does not know the answer. He might think he does." The point: ignore the Regis Fake. He probably wants you to win but you might know more than he does.
They also told us that one contestant took about 45 minutes to answer a single question, got it right, and took another 45 minutes on the next one. As another poster said, they're fine with that. It all comes out in the editing.
Slashdot lately feels like a delayed copy of reddit. Can this be good?
Not else everyone did so well...
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The article forgets to mention that Gena is mildly retarded and has acquired little knowledge of the outside world
Help fight continental drift.
Suppose he remembered NCAA wrong and thought it was National College Atheletic Advancement and then reasoned it out after 15 minutes, and was ultimately wrong, we would just never hear any of it because it'd just be some guy who thought he was right, but was wrong. I've no doubt that such techniques are useful but the justification here seems to be just because he won. I've seen plenty of times on Millionaire when the guys would go through all these anecdotes and thought he remembered correctly, but turned out to be wrong. Does this disprove such methods?
Frankly, the people who do those memory competitions are far more impressive than this guy, but at least they don't write 4 page essays on how clever they think they were.
But isn't this just the way the human brain works? Admittedly, I don't know much about cognitive neuroscience, but it doesn't seem to me that free-associating to recall the answers to simple trivia questions. I appreciate academia as much as the next guy, but to champion the use of mnemonic devices and mental cues on a game-show as some kind of scientific vindication seems somewhat rhetorically overblown. Maybe I'm projecting, but isn't this how everybody's memory functions? I can't count how many times daily that I think back to physiological cues (gesticulations, expressions, etc) and other unrelated events to recall information and conversations. I've been under the distinct impression for most of my life that this sort of non-linear association is a common part of human thought and not some sort of 'technique' or 'skill.' Am I totally wrong about this, or is this just a simple case of inflated journalistic hyperbole?
People who take an ungodly amount of time to answer simple questions are among the most annoying people on the planet.
If you don't know the answer, you don't fucking know! Just guess or stop there.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I remember watching Regis in the show's early days, when it had class. The third question was "what kind of trees shed their leaves in winter?" The contestant sweated for a while and then asked for a lifeline. At that point a five-year-old kid in the room said "Such a big man, and he doesn't know is deciduous?"
The modern version is so dumbed down, that it resembles the equally silly descendant of another show where the hostess would skewer the unfortunate soul who failed to answer correctly. Those were the days!
Watching that show is really frustrating. Half of the people make no effort whatsoever to think through their answers before they go with them. If people would just take an extra 60 seconds to think about it, they could make so much more money. If I was that guy, I probably would have gone with William and taken the million. Does he lose ALL the money if he gets it wrong, or does he just go back to the last tier?
I read the article, and it was more of a discussion of how your brain works, remembering long-forgotten and "unimportant" facts. It's more of a "what happens" discussion rather than a how-to guide. However, by having a better understanding of his thought processes, he was able to guide it a little better. I found the article interesting, because some of the techniques he used are the same ones I've employed playing trivia games or taking tests, and I just didn't know they had names.
For instance, I was unaware that "Theory of Mind" was a cognitive process with a name. Apparently, this is the process of understanding someone else's beliefs or thought processes and using this understanding to come to conclusions about their motives. The author used this process to eliminate some of the options given to him by asking himself "what would the question's authors have put here to confuse me" rather than just figuring out the correct answer to the question.
It reminds me of when I was in high school, and we were engaged in a county-wide "math field day" event. Students from several schools were brought together, and we took exams and competed for awards. One of the exams was almost impossible to complete, because it had 60+ questions, and you only had 30 minutes. The questions were not particularly hard, just time-consuming. After only being able to get through 5 questions in 10 minutes, I knew I wouldn't finish, so I started ignoring the questions, and just looked at the multiple-choice answers, and I realized what the authors were doing. They were trying to make answers that seemed plausible, or that you might arrive at if you made a mistake, by breaking up parts of the real answer. For instance, the choices you were given might be a) 2, b) 2/3, c) 2/5, d) 4/3, e) 4/7. It can't be a) 2, because the rest of the choices are fractions. Since three of the choices have a 2 in them, though, it's likely one of the answers with a 2. Since no other number but 3 and 4 appear more than once, it's likely an answer that has a 2 in it, and also a 3 or 4. The only answer that fits is b) 2/3. So I'd mark that down. I just did that for all the questions, and won the competition, without actually doing any math.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Now, there's got to be some other ways to turn this cognitive neuroscience degree into a million...
He describes nothing more than what has been taught in Psych 100 courses for decades. As such, the link to being a neuroscientist is tenuous. Rather he used simple tricks and likely a bright guy.
Slightly off topic, but do you remember this cool guy?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Is that like "psychologist" or "psychiatrist" => imbecile what thinks they know anything, and that they deserve the same respect as an actual doctor / scientist.. LOL
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2821185.stm
:( Denmark isn't all that bad!
When I saw the Sears question my intuition says "Refrigerators". I don't even know if that's one of the choices, and it is clearly wrong. If I was there I'd have lost the $250,000 question if I go with my hunch and no one would be interested on my insight to human intuition except perhaps on how NOT to play Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.
I'm sure the techniques have some basis to why they work, but it is easy to fit the model to the data when you turned out to be right. Why don't we ask every person who didn't get very far in Millionaire and see what their thought process is? I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who thought they remembered something, and plenty of people who went on a hunch and was wrong.
Surely someone employed in Homeland Security should be au fait with current affairs ? The Danish cartoons were big news for well over a week not that long ago, and are obviously related to questions of terrorism and, well, Homeland Security. Obviously the qualifications for winning a quiz show are more stringent than landing a job with Homeland Security.
Take it from a dane (and even in the words of a marginally Danish influenced band, whose name I fear to mention as their Danish member might sue the crap out of me)... It's "Sad But True"...
I know it's wildly off-topic, so feel free to mod me so, but there's still a lot of this going on here - it didn't stop with the cartoons last year. Within the past few months a radical right-wing party realeased a drawing of Mohammad as a drooling pedophile in their members' magazine and the same party's youth fraction had a "draw Mohammad in the most humiliating way possible" contest on the agenda for their annual meeting.
I'm surprised the muslims are taking it all so well...
Back on-topic though... This sounds interesting, but I'm pretty sure people actually do this stuff automagically, it's just not common that it's so apparent to the "subject". Interesting read, though...
"Live free or don't."
What else would you expect from Denmark, indeed!
Game... blouses.
I'd really like to wip out a world-map and ask Gena to point her finger at Denmark, ask her how many Eiffel-towers Denmark has and whether or not Denmark is part of the axis of evil.
Oh, and btw...
>:-O ------ Mohammed the prophet
Just pre-guess random answers.
a,b,a,a,d,c,b,a,c,b,d,b,d,c,b - did I win? It's only a 1 in 4^15 chance (is my maths working?). Hmm. That's a billion. Might take a while to do it. But brute-forcing it will work.
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You still don't know the answer, chump! It so happens Denmark wasn't the first to publish such cartoons, and they didn't publish cartoons in the plural, but only one cartoon - ergo, not a very well-informed cognitive scientist - do not look to this clown for future scientific advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience. What America - and a number of other countries need - is massive media reform.....
IMHO it's somewhat excuable that people are missing the "in 3 years" bit because
that is a horribly phrased sentence. The editors should have corrected it to read:
Last night Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist and Homeland Security Fellow, became
the first person in three years to face the million-dollar question on 'Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire?'
fsck, this is like using digg. Make with the 24 bit ints and threaded comments!
Were that I say, pancakes?
Last night Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist and Homeland Security Fellow, became the first person to face the million-dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in three years by using a special technique known in cognitive science as REMEMBERING.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
> ergo, not a very well-informed cognitive scientistm mad_cartoons_controversy
True.
A scientist, especially at the homeland security, really should know about how this. Slashdot posters are excused for not knowing the simplest facts and not doing the most trivial research like e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muha
There are some videos on google vid, regarding the ancient Egyptians and talismans.
You want to know how they built the pyramids? Consider this: They had the best education system (as in method of learning) the world has ever known.
Crudely it can be analogised thusly. If you have a ring on your finger, or a necklace, broach, locket, special pen someone gave you etc... Then to anyone else, if they look at that ring, it will be a meaningless piece of metal to them. Zero value sentimentally. However, to you, that ring will always remind you of, for example, the day your mother gave you that ring and the advice she said, and then it will be linked to what your mother looks like and how much you miss her etc...
In short, it evokes powerful memories when you look at it, because YOU have linked those memories to it.
The Egyptians used symbols, they linked a lot of ideas to these symbols, and so whenever they looked at them it would remind them of everything they had been taught regarding these symbols. Also, I won't get to into it, but speech processing is one of the slower, less efficient parts of the brain. By using visual methods, as opposed to aural/written*, they access the sub-concious directly, hence better learning. It's amazing we are just beginning to discover now the education systems they had 7000+ (+++ depending on who you believe) years ago are much better than our own.
*Written is only bad if you use your inner-monologue (that voice you hear when you read that sounds like your voice). This way it still engages speech processing. If you saw words as images, and didn't speak them as you read them it would increase your reading ability up to nearly ten-fold, and it would also increase your memory retention and recall. As most people use their inner-monologue, as they've never been taught to read beyond grade/primary school, I regard it as bad.
1: I'm danish
2: I don't know why anybody would expect this more or less from Denmark
3: The cartoons were published in November 2005, but didn't gain any momentum internationally until a group of extremist imams (muslim priests) went to Egypt with a portfolio of the drawings, as well as a lot of other nasty stuff that may or may not have been presented to these guys, but never, never, never was printed in any significant publication.
It was obvious what they meant, and since he got it right, he probably doesn't hold a grudge - but they got the facts plain out wrong. You would think that a show like that would do some pretty good fact checking, especially given that there are only ~15 questions per show.
So Ogi-dude does not know the answer, and he is trying to Zen this one while his wife, the medical doctor who must have known the answer, is squirming like crazy.
Geez, isn't it "knowledge in the world" that the opiates drugs all have pretty much the same theraputic effects ranging from making you constipated (learned that in high-school drug resistance class - the phy-ed teacher told us "dope will plug you up but good -- same effect as paragoric) to cough suppression (codeine is the real deal if your doctor will write you a prescription for it), and that codeine used to be used by dope fiends to tide them over.
Anyway, he guesses "D, cough suppressent, final answer" and he gets the .5 million.
After that episode, his wife is about to bust that he was about to answer "D, William", the correct answer but one that he was not certain. Ogi is going to beat himself up over that one, but Ogi-wife looked like she was perfectly happy with the half million.