In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from the laboratory of Carolina Rezaval in Birmingham studied a decision-making process in male Drosophila fruit flies where the reasons for each decision seemed apparent.
Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.
The data clearly show that publications in Cell , Nature or Science ( CNS for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.
Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections.
Until 1986, it was thought that so-called optomotor responses, i.e., the tendency of all animals and humans to follow moving visual stimuli with their eyes or their bodies, were a prerequisite for gaze or trajectory stabilization: whenever the scenery in your gaze moves, you adjust gaze or body orientation to compensate for the shift.