Marc Egeth
Hi there! I'm an experimental psychologist currently working in industry to help make medical devices usable.
Main things about me. Let's see. I have a great family, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, LA, and elsewhere - but I'll leave them out of this. Here are my more academic and future-tech interests; and just let me know if a link is broken or missing or if you would like a copy of something.
Press: Mosquitoes
Press: Headless fruitflies
Press: Tongue illusions
Selected paper - if you read just one
Human factors
Perception
Human tongue illusions: you might experience these if your tongue is flexible enough.
How can you tell if a perceptual illusion that you think you have discovered is real? Here is a method for verifying the existence of a newly discovered perceptual illusion (say, a new tongue illusion).
It turns out that children diagnosed with autism have unusual neural responses to rapidly presented tones. Can this be used to identify autism in pre-linguistic children? My contribution to this paper is the data on simultaneous MEG/EEG, a technical challenge to use two forms of neuroimaging at the same time.
Consciousness
Is thinking about another person's memory like thinking about a photograph or a photograph of a photograph? This is the paper that came out of my dissertation research. (And here is my dissertation on the same topic.)
Here are ways to go about using neuroimaging to tell where an uncommunicative patient, such as a young child, is in pain.
Here is how to communicate with, and detect consciousness in, children or adults who cannot move.
Here is one way to use magnetoencephalography to tell if a person who cannot move is conscious. This is the paper that accompanies a poster I presented at the 2008 Biomagnetisim conference in Sapporo, Japan.
Update! The Coma Science Group cited and used the methods described in the previous papers to try detecting consciousness in a man diagnosed as vegetative. They got him to answer yes/no questions by asking him to change his mental state in ways that are detectable using neuroimaging, with one of these mental states meaning "yes," and the diagnosis was revised.
Evolution
Do females prefer males because they were healthy juveniles? Read all about parasites, sexual selection, and the Hamilton-Zuk model in bowerbirds.
Here is a way to get parasites to evolve into into less-harmful forms.
And here is my review of Susan Oyama's book The Ontogeny of Information, apologies it is behind a paywall.
Etc.
An experiment in mood regulation: What happens when people think sad thoughts ... and then try to think themselves out of that mood?
I think Hebrew might be an invented language.
And I've been brainstorming a new cryptocurrency.
VanDeventer asked, Can a placebo still create a beneficial placebo effect even if the patient knows it is a placebo? Subsequent research suggests the answer is "yes." In this paper, I speculate that, to feel better, you might not even need the placebo. Perhaps, to feel better it is enough just to know that indeed you can feel better without actual medicine. So, read the paper and see if you feel better.
Email me at marc.egeth@gmail.com.