psychology
In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more.
On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology (or any branch of specialized knowledge, for that matter).
Read moreI don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots - perfect for long flights because uninterrupted concentration is needed to tackle them.
Read moreGuitar learning diary: As I learn to play the guitar, I realised that I might be able to make musical associations without mental awareness. It’s probably because I am not familiar enough with the language of music to surface musical feelings to a conscious level. For example, yesterday, I tried to play some dominant 9 chords in a book. I was learning the fingering so I wasn’t attending to the sounds of the chords.
Read moreMy family has been watching the Penn & Teller: Fool Us TV series. I was reminded of a 2008 paper published in Nature Review Neuroscience about the psychological aspects of magic. Teller was listed as a co-author (among several well-known magicians). There is a very remarkable sentence in the paper: “One of the authors of this Perspective (referring to Apollo Robbins) is a professional thief.”