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Christian Kliesch

@enactedmind.bsky.social

1.2K followers 544 following 427 posts

Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam. Interested in cognition and what it means to be human. So far. I identified potential culprits: Bodies in development, minds enacting, babies being clever but mostly useless at doing things.

Posts Replies Media

Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

I saw this the other day and now I have serious doubts about Schopenhauer's pessimism. The flute, out of all instruments!

"Elsewhere Nietzsche cast doubt on the sincerity of Schopenhauer's pessimism on the curious grounds that in his spare time he was a keen flutist: "Schopenhauer, pessimism not-withstanding, actually-played the flute... every day, after dinner. You can read it in his biography ... is this really—a pessimist?""

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Who's in Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, maybe north of England) between February 6-18? I have a talk on Feb. 12 in Edinburgh, and am trying to extend my stay in Scotland/UK and might need couch(es) to crash...

View onto Edinburgh Castle from Arthur's Seat, Scotland.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Hi Lancaster, see you at @lcicd.bsky.social !

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Yes - more developmental, more comparative, more evolutionary. Essentially we need a big, interdisciplinary Everything Bagel of cognitive science to understand why we are social.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Similarly, human children with congenital cataracts that are not treated within their first 4-6 months after birth may show life long differences in their configural face processing, e.g. in processing the Thatcher illusion.

Example stimuli used to elicit the Thatcher Illusion. In the Thatcher illusion, eyes and moths are rotated 180 degree in relation to the rest of the face. In the example image, 4 versions of the same face are shown, two faces the right way up, two faces up side down. The faces either received the manipulation of turning the mouth and the eyes up-side-down, or were not manipulated. People with typically developed configural face processing take into account the face's overall configuration when it is presented the right way up and immediately notice the Thatcher manipulation in faces presented the right way up. However, they are less likely to notice the manipulation if the face is presented up-side-down.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

The egg and its shell provide more than shelter. It is also an important way of prioritising information during development. Gottlieb found that exposing the duckling to light before hatching lead to a faster development of the visual system and slowed down auditory development.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Gottlieb investigated these interactions in ducks. Duck hatchlings can identify their mother's calls immediately after hatching. But is this ability innate? Not quite. It is embedded into a complex ontogenetic process that is built on interactions between the chick, the egg and its environment.

Wood Duck family with mother and hatchlings

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Authors, such as Susan Oyama and the late Gilbert Gottlieb, have argued that we need to take into account the interactions between a developing organism and its world, if we want to understand development both from an evolutionary and an ontogenetic perspective.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I always imagine BRMS as a little squirrel, sampling different piles of nuts. That gives me a bit more confidence in its results. 2

Image of a European red squirrel behind a pile of hazel nuts, sampling one of them. According to the source, the image is AI generated.

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Christian Kliesch @enactedmind.bsky.social · 07/11/2024

Meanwhile, enjoy these weightless babies from Kornafel et al. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

A picture from a scientific paper, showing 5 young toddlers. The first one illustrates free play wearing typical toddler clothes, the second one is wearing an additional harness. The next three kids are dangling in harnesses that are compensating for their body weight to varying degrees - 0%, 20% and 40%. All babies have a black bar over their eyes to preserve their anonymity.

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