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| Psychology | type: Thematic count: 184 |
Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) delivers a trenchant look into the burgeoning business of positive thinking. A bout with breast cancer puts the author face to face with this new breed of frenetic positive thinking promoted by everyone from scientists to gurus and activists. Chided for her anger and distress by doctors and fellow cancer patients and survivors, Ehrenreich explores the insistence upon optimism as a cultural and national trait, discovering its symbiotic relationship with American capitalism and how poverty, obesity, unemployment and relationship problems are being marketed as obstacles that can be overcome with the right (read: positive) mindset. Building on Max Weber's insights into the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, Ehrenreich sees the dark roots of positive thinking emerging from 19th-century religious movements. Mary Baker Eddy, William James and Norman Vincent Peale paved the path for today's secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology institutes. The author concludes by suggesting that the bungled invasion of Iraq and current economic mess may be intricately tied to this reckless national penchant for self-delusion and a lack of anxious vigilance, necessary to societal survival.
Tags: Psychology, Positive Thinking
Posted: 08.21.10 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
A controversial exploration of the origin of religion in the neurology of the human brain. In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions?
Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about
them, and thus creeds are born.
Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about
them, and thus creeds are born.
Posted: 08.03.10 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
Posted: 05.28.10 | 3 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature.
Posted: 05.17.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Audiences always think they know how a story will go. The Hurt Locker plays with this to great – and unforgettable - effect
Tags: Psychology, Art
Posted: 05.17.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 05.03.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The central premise of this book by Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) and Merryman, a Washington Post journalist, is that many of modern society's most popular strategies for raising children are in fact backfiring because key points in the science of child development and behavior have been overlooked. Two errant assumptions are responsible for current distorted child-rearing habits, dysfunctional school programs and wrongheaded social policies: first, things work in children the same way they work in adults and, second, positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative behavior. These myths, and others, are addressed in 10 provocative chapters
Posted: 04.28.10 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
Posted: 04.20.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Although a Croatian teen had only just started studying German at school, the 13-year-old has been able to communicate fluently in German since waking up from a 24-hour coma.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 04.16.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This spring the Hammer Museum presents The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, an exhibition of preeminent psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s (1875-1961) famous Red Book, thought to be the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology by many contemporary scholars.
Tags: Psychology, Carl Jung
Posted: 04.15.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.
Tags: Psychology, Intelligence
Posted: 04.13.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
How much can you jam into a human brain? How far can you push yourself past feelings of exhaustion? In this hour of Radiolab, we examine human limits.
Posted: 04.09.10 | 0 | AUDIO | GO TO LINK
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the "real world", both physically and emotionally -- something he continues to struggle with today.
Tags: Psychology, Art
Posted: 03.15.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the psychologists fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it.
Tags: Death, Psychology
Posted: 03.03.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
And now, just in time for Oscar junkies, comes a new statistical mincing of the movies that may someday yield an award category of its own: best fit between a movies tempo and the natural rhythms of the brain.
Posted: 03.02.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Even though all participants in Brown’s experiment expected to receive a series of “vague and ambiguous statements” that could apply widely, they all still fell foul of the personal validation fallacy.
Posted: 02.03.10 | 2 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots: One of its “videographs,” mapped over a trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, clearly shows viewers’ brains lighting up whenever a monkey appears onscreen.
Posted: 01.31.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource. Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 01.27.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
Posted: 01.25.10 | 1 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
In this wide-ranging assortment of 150 brief essays, well-known figures from every conceivable field demonstrate why it's a prerogative of all thoughtful people to change their mind once in a while. Technologist Ray Kurzweil says he now shares Enrico Fermi's question: if other intelligent civilizations exist, then where are they? Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) reveals that he has lost faith in probability as a guiding light for making decisions. Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) confesses that he has lost his childlike faith in the value of manned space flight to distant worlds. J. Craig Venter, celebrated for his work on the human genome, has ceased to believe that nature can absorb any abuses that we subject it to, and that world governments must move quickly to prevent global disaster. Alan Alda says, So far, I've changed my mind twice about God, going from believer to atheist to agnostic. Brockman, editor of Edge.org and numerous anthologies, has pulled together a thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions.
Posted: 01.17.10 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Jane Poynter, author of The Human Experiment, describes her two years and twenty minutes inside Biosphere 2
Tags: Psychology, Biosphere2
Posted: 01.11.10 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues.
Posted: 01.04.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Tabla is just one of the many restaurants around the country that are feverishly revising their menus. Pounded by the recession, they are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.
Tags: Psychology, The New York Times
Posted: 12.29.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
All lovers of existentialism will enjoy Becker's treatment of life and death. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for this work when it was first published in 1974. He certainly writes as one who understands the darkness of human life. Becker's thesis is that human personality and behavior has its deepest roots in our denying our death (thus the title). By this he means not only our death itself, but all of the horrors associated with our mortality as human beings. Becker makes frequent reference to Otto Rank, and reiterates Rank's point that all human cultural creation is inevitably religious in nature. There is also a wonderful treatment of Freud which will be especially refreshing to all those nauseated by modern attempts to dress up Freud's theories and make them appear more optimistic than they are, as well as a discussion of Freud's breaks with Jung and others.
Tags: Death, Psychology
Posted: 12.24.09 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Hailed by many viewers as a "life-transformational film," Flight from Death uncovers death anxiety as a possible root cause of many of our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level.
Posted: 12.13.09 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
The paper describes a dozen different con scenarios -- entertaining in itself -- and then lists and explains six general psychological principles that con artists use:
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 12.09.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions. Armed with Zagats or internet data or some rumor off Snopes, we act as though now we're supremely rational choicemakers.
Posted: 11.27.09 | 0 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 11.25.09 | 0 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Google doesn't reveal its search algorithms, but the company's engineers confirm that what we're looking at in [Google Suggest] is, essentially, a list of the most popular queries that start with a given prefix. A suggestion-enabled search is like an instant popularity contest. Just type in a couple of letters, and you've got access to oodles of data on what your fellow Web surfers are hunting for.
Tags: Technology, Psychology
Posted: 11.13.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.
Posted: 10.15.09 | 1 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.
Posted: 10.14.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A new study suggests that both babies and dogs are distracted by social cues -- they focus on adults' faces and gestures rather than paying attention to where an object is hidden.
Tags: Psychology, Babies
Posted: 10.02.09 | 7 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
People can perceive subliminal messages, particularly if the message is negative, according to a UK study.
Tags: Psychology, Subliminal
Posted: 09.29.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
Tags: Psychology, Placebo
Posted: 09.07.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in primitive tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.
Tags: Psychology, Social Behaviors
Posted: 08.31.09 | 0 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
To me, and I suspect many readers, the quest for information can be an intensely rewarding experience. Discovering a previously elusive fact or soaking up a finely crafted argument can be as pleasurable as eating a fine meal when hungry or dousing a thirst with drink. This isn't just a fanciful analogy - a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.
Tags: Psychology, Information
Posted: 08.30.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It might seem bizarre that science is using art to learn about the mind—looking for hard facts in the most ethereal of places. But great artists turn out to be the world's first neuroscientists.
Posted: 08.25.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
Posted: 07.28.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Put another way, credit-card companies are becoming much more interested in understanding their customers lives and psyches, because, the theory goes, knowing what makes cardholders tick will help firms determine who is a good bet and who should be shown the door as quickly as possible.
Tags: Psychology, Behavioral Finance
Posted: 06.21.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
50 scientifically proven ways constitute 50 chapters of the book, longest of which take 7 pages. The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion. So, what are the 50 ways?
Tags: Psychology, Persuasion
Posted: 06.10.09 | 3 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
Posted: 05.26.09 | 6 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The classic response to this mental wrangling -- whether relatively trivial or deadly serious -- is to try and forget about it, push it to the back of our minds or some other variation on the theme. Unfortunately counter to our intuition about what should work, psychological research has discovered in the last twenty years that this approach is not just wrong, but has the potential to make the situation worse.
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology
Posted: 05.26.09 | 8 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?
Posted: 05.11.09 | 9 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates--empirically--that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
Posted: 05.06.09 | 26 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
This year marks Bookworm’s 20th anniversary. To celebrate, I thought I’d talk to Silverblatt about books, literature, education and how we can become better readers. As the Bookworm jingle says, “You are a human animal. You are a very special breed. For you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.”
Tags: Psychology, Michael Silverblatt
Posted: 05.06.09 | 12 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."
Posted: 04.29.09 | 15 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Blackmore is a parapsychologist who rejects the paranormal, a skeptical investigator of near-death experiences, and a practitioner of Zen. Her explanation of the science of the meme (memetics) is rigorously Darwinian. Because she is a careful thinker (though by no means dull or conventional), the reader ends up with a good idea of what memetics explains well and what it doesn't, and with many ideas about how it can be tested--the very hallmark of an excellent science book. Blackmore's discussion of the "memeplexes" of religion and of the self are sure to be controversial, but she is (as Dawkins says) enormously honest and brave to make a connection between scientific ideas and how one should live one's life.
Tags: Psychology, Memes
Posted: 04.27.09 | 23 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The human brain is amazing, but it evolved for specific purposes, such as avoiding predators and finding food. Those purposes do not include choosing good credit card plans, reducing harmful pollution, avoiding fatty foods, and planning for a decade or so from now. Fortunately, a few nudges can help a lot. A few small hints: Sign up for automatic payment plans so you dont pay late fees. Stop using your credit cards until you can pay them off on time every month. Make sure you're enrolled in a 401(k) plan. A final hint: Read Nudge.
Tags: Psychology, Behavioral Finance
Posted: 04.27.09 | 28 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.
Posted: 04.10.09 | 20 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com), each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.
Posted: 04.01.09 | 19 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
As Europes most controversial Ming-bearded mind-botherer and former cha-cha chamption, I offer here an insight into the techniques and thinking which have made me offensively rich and the best thing to happen to television since sliced bread. Improve your memory. Learn how to hypnotize. Read minds. Improve your memory. Its literally all here.
Posted: 02.23.09 | 16 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This is a book about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and about the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.
Tags: Psychology, Emotion
Posted: 02.20.09 | 23 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Existential psychotherapy is partly based on the existential belief that human beings are alone in the world. This feeling of aloneness leads to feelings of meaninglessness which can be overcome only by creating one's own values and meanings. Existential psychotherapy suggests that in making our own choices we assume full responsibility for the results and blame no one but ourselves if the result is less than what was desired. The psychotherapist helps his or her patients/clients along this path: to discover why the patient/client is overburdened by the anxieties of aloneness and meaninglessness, to find new and better ways to manage these anxieties, to make new and healthy choices, and to emerge from therapy as a free and sound human being.
Posted: 02.14.09 | 29 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Hailed by many viewers as a "life-transformational film," Flight from Death uncovers death anxiety as a possible root cause of many of our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level
Posted: 02.14.09 | 24 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
The theory builds from the assumption that the capability of self-reflection and the consciousness of one’s own mortality can be regarded as a continuous source for existential anguish. This "irresolvable paradox" is created from the desire to preserve life and the realization of that impossibility (because life is finite).
Posted: 02.14.09 | 20 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.
Tags: Psychology, TED
Posted: 02.06.09 | 25 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
A new examination of the surprising origins of human goodness. In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short"we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies?
Tags: Psychology, Emotion
Posted: 01.04.09 | 56 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but its something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt. The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable.
Tags: Psychology, Statistics
Posted: 11.24.08 | 57 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.
Tags: Psychology, Intuition
Posted: 11.10.08 | 81 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Most scientists dismiss the vast majority of ghost sightings as hoaxes. But researchers in Canada, England and elsewhere are exploring what happens in the brain to create the illusion that something is "haunted." So far, they have found evidence that some apparitions may be brain benders caused by spiking EMFs (electromagnetic fields), and possibly even extremely low-–frequency sound waves (known as infrasound) so subtle that the ear does not register them as noise.
Posted: 10.30.08 | 53 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It should be obvious: Scientists are human beings and their scientific theories reflect normal human mechanisms of thought, called frames and metaphors by some cognitive scientists and models and analogies by others. James Clerk Maxwell was no exception. His laws of electromagnetism were structured by those forms of human cognition. In Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian demonstrates this beyond question. The book is a tour de force by a great cognitive scientist of science.
Posted: 10.28.08 | 60 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
This week's Nature has a fascinating essay by anthropologist Pascal Boyer discussing the quirks of spiritual belief and how they may result from the evolution of our mind and brain.
Posted: 10.23.08 | 37 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Psychology Today journalist Matthew Hutson covers some fascinating experiments just published in this week's Science that found that reducing participants' control increase the tendency for magical thinking and the perception of illusory meaning in random or patternless visual scenes.
Posted: 10.17.08 | 36 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
An unlikely alliance was formed between Farmer Smith and economists Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, and Imran Rasul. The economists would design and administer pay schemes, and in exchange for that (and for confidentiality), Farmer Smith would let them treat his business as a gigantic laboratory for researching the nexus between pay, workplace friendships (which they mapped out), and workers' productivity.
Posted: 09.18.08 | 67 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Farhad Manjoo's True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is a breezy-but-engrossing look at the increased polarization of news in the 21st Century. Manjoo convincingly argues that our own capacity for selective perception (show two groups of partisans footage of a political debate and both will swear it was biased for the other side; show the same footage to someone who doesn't care and they won't see bias for either side) combined with the Internet's capacity to network affinity groups and spread fragmented, selective media are a perfect storm, with the truth right in its path.
Posted: 09.11.08 | 42 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics.
Posted: 08.27.08 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.
Tags: Psychology, Facial Expressions
Posted: 08.18.08 | 46 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Author, psychologist and pioneering Buddhist teacher Kornfield writes his best book yet (and his previous ones were pretty good). His newest uses the same sweet narrative voice, provides convincing and illustrative anecdotes and stories, and reaches into world traditions and literature as well as contemporary scientific research. This book offers a systematic and well-organized view of Buddhist psychology, complete with occasional diagrams.
Posted: 08.16.08 | 61 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers' brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders. These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science -- and if it's not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.
Posted: 08.16.08 | 48 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?
Posted: 08.06.08 | 59 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Warning: Habits May Be Good For You highlights the anthropologist Val Curtis’ work to synthesize anthropology, public health, and consumer behavior. She has a simple problem, how to teach children in sub-Saharan Africa to habitually wash their hands, thus lowering significantly the risk of many diseases. As Charles Duhigg writes, Curtis turned to consumer-goods companies for insight into her work.
Posted: 08.03.08 | 46 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Spiral Dynamics is a theory of human development introduced in the 1996 book Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Chris Cowan. The book was based on the theory of psychology professor Clare W. Graves, and originally targeted at a business management audience. The American author Ken Wilber has popularized these ideas in a series of books. "Spiral Dynamics" is a registered trademark of the National Values Center, Inc.
Posted: 08.02.08 | 43 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
While musing over yesterday's post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician's misdirection, I remembered Dennett's 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn't exist as some scientists think it does. Dennett argues that the 'hard problem' is a red herring - the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.
Posted: 08.02.08 | 52 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now some psychologists are considering how they can use magic to advance our understanding of the brain -- and perhaps help inoculate us against advertising.
Tags: Psychology, Magic
Posted: 08.02.08 | 46 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
You’ll meet 42-year-old Carter Goodwin of Beacon, N.Y., whose honesty about his disease will move you. “I miss the mania,'’ said Mr. Goodwin, an artist. “I love the mania. It feels so good to feel like I can do anything and like there is something really special about me. But it’s all chemical. It’s not true.'’
Tags: Psychology, Bipolar Disorder
Posted: 07.29.08 | 42 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
"Theory of mind" is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 07.29.08 | 29 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Stefano makes an interesting point that these acts rely, in part, on misinforming people about psychology. Derren Brown is a classic example where he often gives explanations after the trick so the viewer feels they are being let in on the secret, but which are obviously misleading and so are part of the more general misdirection that the feats are achieved through the 'power of the mind'.
Tags: Psychology, Derren Brown
Posted: 07.29.08 | 38 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.
Tags: Psychology, TED
Posted: 07.28.08 | 50 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Joel and Ian Gold, brothers and psychiatrists from Montreal, believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.21.08 | 34 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Recently we have seen plenty of irrational behavior, whether in politics or the world of finance. What makes people act irrationally? In a timely but thin collection of anecdotes and empirical research, the Brafman brothersAri (The Starfish and the Spire), a business expert, and Rom, a psychologistlook at sway, the submerged mental drives that undermine rational action, from the desire to avoid loss to a failure to consider all the evidence or to perceive a person or situation beyond the initial impression and the reluctance to alter a plan that isn't working.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.13.08 | 70 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, Albert Camus wrote, and that is suicide. How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art.
Posted: 07.07.08 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience.
Tags: Psychology, The New Yorker
Posted: 06.24.08 | 46 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The Asch conformity experiments, which were published in the 1950s, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the "Asch Paradigm".
Posted: 06.23.08 | 41 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
It may be fun, but this is no comedy, it’s more like a documentary. Cults thrive on our vulnerabilities, and a good demonstration of just how vulnerable we all are was given in a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.
Posted: 06.23.08 | 42 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A complete stranger to science, Cass immersed himself in the world of neuroscience, subjecting himself to brain scans, psychological tests, and scientific conferences, as he attempted to gain a better understanding of ADHD, anxiety, stress, motivation and reward, and consciousness. Then things got a little weird. What began as a more clinical effort to understand himself soon became a personal and emotional journey into the fragile, mysterious workings of the mind and the self.
Tags: Drugs, Psychology
Posted: 06.13.08 | 79 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."
Posted: 06.11.08 | 38 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 06.01.08 | 29 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Of the diverse problems that impede accurate intelligence analysis, those inherent in human mental processes are surely among the most important and most difficult to deal with. Intelligence analysis is fundamentally a mental process, but understanding this process is hindered by the lack of conscious awareness of the workings of our own minds.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.08.08 | 49 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
When is it proper to refuse to obey authority figures, even if they have been democratically chosen for their positions? In 1961, I participated in a famous experimental study about obedience and authority although I and other participants were led to believe it was a study of memory and learning. The experiment was designed by a Yale University professor of social psychology, Stanley Milgram, and resulted in a book, Obedience to Authority, which is still widely used in sociology courses.
Posted: 05.08.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The CIA have released the full text of a book on the psychology of analysing surveillance data. While aimed at the CIA's analysts, it's also a great general guide on how to understand complex situations and avoid our natural cognitive biases in reasoning.
Posted: 05.08.08 | 48 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The Infinite Mind is a weekly, public radio program focusing on the art and science of the human mind and spirit, behavior, and mental health. The series is hosted by Dr. Fred Goodwin, formerly the nation's "top psychiatrist" as director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and the world's leading expert on manic depression.
Posted: 05.07.08 | 57 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
Magical thinking springs up everywhere. Some irrational beliefs (Santa Claus?) are passed on to us. But others we find on our own. Survival requires recognizing patternsnight follows day, berries that color will make you ill. And because missing the obvious often hurts more than seeing the imaginary, our skills at inferring connections are overtuned. No one told Wade Boggs that eating chicken before every single game would help his batting average; he decided that on his own, and no one can argue with his success. We look for patterns because we hate surprises and because we love being in control.
Tags: Psychology, Magical Thinking
Posted: 04.14.08 | 64 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Rather than spotlighting the rococo workings of the human brain, the author highlights its bald frailty: the ease with which a tap on the head, as Mason puts it, can blow apart a life.
Posted: 04.13.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly. Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia.
Tags: Psychology, Wired
Posted: 04.13.08 | 60 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Researchers found that instant perceptions not only had a role in people’s selection of partners, but that their interpretation of faces was more often right than wrong when determining the attitude towards one-night stands
Tags: Psychology, Facial Expressions
Posted: 04.11.08 | 82 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
But while many people are familiar with Googlegngers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection be it kinship or competition with utter strangers just because they share a name? Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.
Tags: Psychology, The New York Times
Posted: 04.10.08 | 71 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
When we make decisions we think we're in control, making rational choices. But are we? Entertaining and surprising, Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us.
Posted: 03.31.08 | 66 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
Psychologist Robert Ornstein's wide-ranging and multidisciplinary work has won him awards from more than a dozen organizations, including the American Psychological Association and UNESCO. His pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain has done much to advance our understanding of how we think.
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology
Posted: 03.03.08 | 59 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt number sense capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
Posted: 02.29.08 | 75 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The American Psychological Association's refusal to condemn psychologists who participate in illegal government torture of suspected terrorists has driven a deep rift into the organization, with many prominent members quitting in protest. Metafilter has a good roundup of links to various positions from within the APA.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 02.20.08 | 41 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Metapsychology features in-depth reviews of a wide range of books written by our reviewers from many backgrounds and perspectives. We update our front page frequently and add more than forty new reviews each month.
Posted: 02.20.08 | 42 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
Freud introduced the West to the unconscious, but the last half-century of psychology has reinvented it, argues University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson. In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, Wilson attempts to explain why there's so much about ourselves that we fail to understand, which can lead to misdirected anger. He points to a revised, post-Freudian understanding of how the mind works: the reason that their own judgments, feelings, [and] motives remain mysterious to people is not repression, as Freud argued, but efficiency so that the mind can process and analyze multiple things at once.
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology
Posted: 01.18.08 | 185 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone, according to a study by scientists at the University of Portsmouth. The research, which also suggested that some people have "smilier" voices than others, adds to the growing body of evidence that smiling and other expressions pack a strong informational punch and may even impact us on a subliminal level.
Tags: Psychology, Facial Expressions
Posted: 01.16.08 | 61 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies.
Posted: 01.16.08 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In other words, the reason we've developed thinking brains is to allow us to act, and so the possibilities, limitations and feedback from actions must shape our psychology - both in the long term as a species (via evolution) and in the short term as individuals (via learning and plasticity).
Posted: 01.16.08 | 48 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Classic psychology studies show just how little access we have to the workings of our own minds. Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don't bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we're good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up.
Tags: Psychology, PsyBlog
Posted: 01.15.08 | 60 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
I've just finished Derren Brown's absolutely charming and fascinating book "Tricks of the Mind," which is one of those impossible- to- pigeonhole, eclectic nonfiction books that pulls together its subject matter in a genuinely novel way and ends up influencing how you see the world around you.
Posted: 01.14.08 | 97 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is an entertaining tour with Warren as an enthusiastic and witty guide, who earnestly tries to figure it all out. Sometimes I laughed out loud, other times I tried to roll my eyes to the back of my head (an indicator of hypnotic capacity), and I wanted to check out many of the books and authors Warren consults along the way.
Posted: 01.13.08 | 43 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
What do you think you look like? And what do others think of you? A film about first impressions from artists Lenka Clayton and James Price.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 01.08.08 | 35 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
This is a good time to remind everyone, though, to pay attention to what’s happening in ads in other than “front and center” positions. Just because you are watching the speaker in the foreground doesn’t mean your brain isn’t processing background imagery or activity.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 01.02.08 | 32 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
One of the reasons I was wrong is that I didn't see that the same tactic we used on juggling balls (of gradually adapting the content and design of a virtual world to the instantaneous state of the user/inhabitant) could be applied in a less somatic way. For instance, in some clinical protocols, a traumatic event is represented in VR with gradually changing levels of realism as part of the course of treatment.
Posted: 01.02.08 | 66 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people dont always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope the belief that your current hardship is temporary.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 12.09.07 | 32 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation. Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler.
Posted: 11.12.07 | 57 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
...a group of researchers, noting that music therapy has already been shown to reduce pain, improve sleep quality, and improve mood in cancer patients undergoing therapy and multiple sclerosis patients, wondered if music might alleviate depression as well. It does. They took 56 depressed subjects, had them listen to Beethoven's 3d and 5th piano sonatas for 15 minutes twice a week in a clean, otherwise quiet room -- and saw their depression scores on the standard Beck Depression Scale go up significantly. [I'm sure he means down - otherwise their depression is worsening!]
Posted: 11.10.07 | 93 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
We all know that humans are natural born conformers - we copy each other's dress sense, ways of talking and attitudes, often without a second thought. But exactly how far does this conformity go? Do you think it is possible you would deny unambiguous information from your own senses just to conform with other people?
Posted: 11.10.07 | 84 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
In reality people show a number of predictable biases when estimating other people's behaviour and its causes. And these biases help to show exactly why we need psychology experiments and why we can't rely on our intuitions about the behaviour of others.
Posted: 11.10.07 | 83 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
This chapter examines several ways in which philosophical attention to intuition can contribute to empirical scientific psychology. The authors then discuss one prevalent misuse of intuition. An unspoken assumption of much argumentation in the philosophy of mind has been that to articulate our folk psychological intuitions, our ordinary concepts of belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, is itself sufficient to give a theoretical account of what belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, actually are.
Posted: 11.09.07 | 52 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
via mymindonbooks. Describing Inner Experience? explores in unprecedented detail the inner experience of one person (Melanie) as she goes about her ordinary day, using a random beeper to 'sample' moments of her experience. Psychologist Russ Hurlburt has decades of experience in sampling and interviewing people about the details of their experience. In this book, he teams up with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, a prominent skeptic about the accuracy of people's reports about their experience. Together, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel examine the believability of Melanie's reports.
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology
Posted: 11.09.07 | 37 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
We make choices every day. We choose the clothes we wear, the way we travel, the movies we watch, and the places we shop. From time to time we make bigger choices as well: the neighbourhoods we live in, the jobs or universities or schools we go to, and even the cultures we identify with. These choices give us a measure of control over our lives, and it seems natural to believe that individual choice is, almost by definition, a good thing.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 11.06.07 | 24 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Hrobjartsson and Götzsche found that in studies with a binary outcome, meaning patients were classified as improved or not improved, the placebo group had no statistically significant improvement over the no-treatment group. Similarly, there was no significant placebo effect in studies in which objective outcomes (such as blood pressure) were measured by an independent observer. The placebo effect could only be documented in studies in which the outcomes (improvement or failure to improve) were reported by the subjects themselves. The authors concluded that the placebo effect does not have "powerful clinical effects," (objective effects) and that patient-reported improvements (subjective effects) in pain were small and could not be clearly distinguished from bias.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 11.06.07 | 33 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
A new blog from the BBC about the mind, neuroscience, consciousness and so forth.
Posted: 10.26.07 | 72 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
Perhaps more than any other religion, Buddhism is associated with happiness. According to Buddhist thinking, happiness and sorrow are our own responsibility and completely within our control. "Buddhists say everything comes from the mind," says Venerable David Lungtok, a Buddhist monk currently living in Sydney. "If we train our mind properly, happiness will be the result."
Tags: Meditation, Psychology
Posted: 10.26.07 | 53 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
One of my favorite Derren Brown videos where he plays with people's minds on the tube in London.
Posted: 10.25.07 | 99 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Cialdini believes that influence is a science. This idea attracted me. As a rhetorician, I have always thought of persuasion as more of an art. Cialdini, however, makes a first-rate case for the science point of view.
Tags: Psychology, Persuasion
Posted: 10.24.07 | 89 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Today's "60-Second Science" podcast at Scientific American lists the "six basic rules of persuasion".
Posted: 10.24.07 | 69 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
He conducted pioneering work in psychology and innovated his own school of Radical Behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing consequences.
Posted: 10.22.07 | 88 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
I started reading this because I'm having a child soon and had no idea what it was about. I'm only two chapters in and already my head is spinning. The basic premise is, "the way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions". A very thought provoking approach to the psychology of child development.
Tags: Psychology, Behaviorism
Posted: 10.21.07 | 99 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
Posted: 10.18.07 | 67 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The movie trailer based on the book of the same title about a man who lived through his imagination after a horrible stroke. Directed by Julian Schnabel.
Tags: Psychology, Mental Imagery
Posted: 10.16.07 | 43 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Two years ago, Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of Elle France, suffered a rare stroke to the brain stem; only his left eye and brain escaped damage. Rather than accept his "locked in" situation as a kind of death, Bauby ignited a fire of the imagination under himself and lived his last days.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 10.16.07 | 20 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Only a decade ago, the idea of a covert device that uses futuristic technology to send messages and control minds was the hallmark of cults and subcultures: aficionados of the paranoid science fiction of Philip K Dick, or of a samizdat conspiracy literature where mind-control was occasionally proposed as the hidden hand that unifies the disparate narratives of alien abductions and controlling elites.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 10.09.07 | 45 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Infants seem unable to 'think to themselves' and instead 'talk to themselves' when solving problems, usually vocalising the most tricky or novel aspects of the situation. As we grow, we develop the ability to internalise this speech, and can eventually have a purely internal monologue.
Tags: Psychology, Mind Hacks
Posted: 10.09.07 | 47 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Considered a great classic by all who seek for a meeting ground between science and the humanities, Art and Illusion examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of present-day theories of visual perception information and learning.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 10.08.07 | 71 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
From a review of the book, "I can heartily recommend this book for others who retreat into eliminativism in order to make life simpler. I can understand the selection of a title that draws the attention of precisely the readers who make the mistake of pretending the mind does not exist."
Posted: 10.08.07 | 108 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Fleshes out the definition more and goes into the 'folk psychology' aspects of the theory.
Posted: 10.08.07 | 62 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Can Freud's theory of dreams hold up against modern neuroscience?
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, Psychology
Posted: 10.08.07 | 46 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An incredible article about a neuroscientist who suffers from a stroke and analyzes himself throughout the entire event.
Posted: 10.08.07 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith
Posted: 10.08.07 | 75 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A interestingly designed and fairly information social psychology site.
Tags: Psychology, Feed
Posted: 10.02.07 | 87 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
Excellent video showing how people react to social conformity.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 10.02.07 | 51 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
A well written and informative blog combining philosophy and brain science.
Posted: 09.27.07 | 79 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
An article about how Oxytocin has an impact on social behavior. "Both our lab and the Domes lab have found that oxytocin facilitates the processing of social information gathered through at least two different sensory modalities -- that is, through both hearing and vision. This raises questions about just how oxytocin actually facilitates social cognition and theory of mind."
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 09.27.07 | 27 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Essentially the heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important"
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 09.27.07 | 71 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
This book isn't out yet but as a Wired magazine review states, this story of twins separated at birth in a secret psychological experiment casts a decisive vote for nature of nurture. So I presume that they both ended up with similar issues despite radically different upbringings.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 09.26.07 | 30 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
An indie film about what happens after you commit suicide.
Posted: 09.25.07 | 67 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Patients who have delusion experiences which then create post-traumatic stress syndromes. So the traumatic event was a mental event, not an actual event.
Tags: Psychology, Mind Hacks
Posted: 09.25.07 | 42 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Outstanding video slide show about the evolution of the laugh track. "The fact is, hearing laughter still makes people laugh. Laughter, after all, is one of the two most contagious human behaviors. (The other, yawning, is of less interest to the people who make TV shows.)"
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 09.24.07 | 45 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Susan Blackmore's definition of a meme.
Tags: Psychology, Memes
Posted: 09.24.07 | 67 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Article by Oliver Sacks about a man who had amnesia and could not remember more then five minutes of the past, yet was able to still play music. His lack of memory was more haunting then the connection with music.
Posted: 09.24.07 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 09.20.07 | 69 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Lawrence has authored or co-authored approximately 75 articles in the professional literature and thirteen books on a diverse range of topics including psychotherapy, war, cancer treatment, and mysticism.
Posted: 09.19.07 | 66 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
According to the Blakeslees, body maps are created by the brain, using touch, to spell out the brain's experience of the body and the space around it.
Posted: 09.13.07 | 75 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The hypnagogic state, the transition from wakefulness into sleep, the mind can make connections between seemingly unconnected perceptions, thoughts and ideas. A 1923 article from Time Magazine.
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, Psychology
Posted: 09.06.07 | 44 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
Tags: Psychology, Memes
Posted: 09.06.07 | 42 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Highly rated book on the philosophy of self. "Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator."
Posted: 09.05.07 | 88 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Years ago, Americans grabbed toast and coffee for breakfast. Public-relations pioneer Edward Bernays changed that.
Tags: Psychology, Edward Bernays
Posted: 08.31.07 | 34 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Part one of Century of Self about the beginnings of using psychological techniques in marketing.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 08.31.07 | 20 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
A somewhat light but occasionally interesting blog with news about psychology.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 08.31.07 | 16 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
Looking at the brain through marketing and psychology.
Tags: Psychology, Feed
Posted: 08.31.07 | 82 | BLOG | GO TO LINK
Excellent entry on Edward Bernays who used Freud's ideas to sell product. Links to a documentary and NPR piece as well.
Tags: Psychology, Mind Hacks
Posted: 08.27.07 | 39 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Randi and other magicians discuss there art and how it relates to human fallibility.
Posted: 08.23.07 | 65 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An article in the New Yorker about the physical and psychological torture the CIA is putting 'terrorists' through.
Tags: Psychology, The New Yorker
Posted: 08.12.07 | 72 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Her research in hospital units and in the literature reveals that more than 70% of the individuals who regain consciousness remember events during their unconscious period.
Posted: 08.07.07 | 85 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
Discusses the ways in which the unconscious mind can be primed with subtle outside cues.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 08.01.07 | 37 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Levitin's fascination with the mystery of music and the study of why it affects us so deeply is at the heart of this book.
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology
Posted: 07.26.07 | 45 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
The study, carried out by Kimberlee Weaver and colleagues, found we can tell that three different people expressing the same opinion better represents the group than one person expressing the same opinion three times - but not by much.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.26.07 | 40 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Cheesy but somewhat interesting ideas on changing bad habits.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.26.07 | 33 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Yang put some of his success down to his training in psychology, but do psychologists make better poker players? There's no direct evidence that they do, despite what they might try to tell you at the table, but some research suggests they might have an advantage in a few of the key skills.
Tags: Psychology, Mind Hacks
Posted: 07.26.07 | 53 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Showing something just before or just after a briefly presented picture is known as 'masking' and helps to ensure that after it appears, the picture doesn't stay in iconic memory - a very brief 'after-image' memory that extends our visual experience after something has gone.
Tags: Psychology, Mind Hacks
Posted: 07.26.07 | 48 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Errol Morris talks about the context of language and how it brings meaning to ordinary objects.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.18.07 | 31 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Magical Thinking is when people find non-scientific causes for external events, for instance linking the outside world with their internal consciousness. This has to be controversial since it goes directly against the 'you create your own reality' theories.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 07.03.07 | 32 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
A comprehensive guide to psychology blogs.
Tags: Psychology, Index
Posted: 07.03.07 | 45 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This is a PDF file of a specific study on Magical Thinking and where it originates in the brain.
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology
Posted: 07.03.07 | 40 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A one hour show where Derren Brown comes to America and attempts to be endorsed from five different experts in alternative fields ranging from religious experience to alien abduction. As always with Brown, his (not supernatural) abilities to interact with and influence people are legendary.
Posted: 07.02.07 | 61 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
This may surprise those who have trouble carrying the remainder in division or figuring out a 15 percent tip on a $20 lunch bill, but according to mathematician and psychologist Stanislas Dehaene, mathematics is an inborn skill. In The Number Sense, Dehaene makes a compelling case for the human mind's innate grasp of mathematics. Take, for example, the fact that place value systems (such as the Arabic numeral system we use) arose independently in four separate civilizations--evidence of a universal sense of number. Dehaene's book is filled with examples to support his thesis, from young babies' ability to "count" (i.e., to react when single objects are replaced by two or more) to examples of how brain damage affects various individuals' number sense. Even more fascinating is his discussion of the relationship between language and numbers. Though Dehaene's book is about mathematics, even those readers with the worst math anxiety will find The Number Sense an intriguing exploration of the world of numbers--and the human mind
Tags: Psychology, Mathematics
Posted: 06.30.07 | 57 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
One of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of altered states of consciousness for purposes of healing, growth, and insight.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 06.25.07 | 64 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
A school of psychology that studies the transpersonal, the transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human mind
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 06.25.07 | 65 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
An inconclusive article by Simon Baron Cohen about imagination and autism. Repeats (or is the source) the same discovery.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 06.12.07 | 22 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A magazine devoted to mental imagery.
Tags: Psychology, Mental Imagery
Posted: 05.29.07 | 41 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
The Psychonomic Society promotes the communication of scientific research in psychology and allied sciences.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.29.07 | 24 | WEB SITE | GO TO LINK
He is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.28.07 | 44 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
A best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.28.07 | 30 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
Steven Johnson's article about 'Evolutionary Determinism' and Stephen Pinker.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.28.07 | 29 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The history of mental imagery and philosophy and psychology, with an excellent focus on the 'thoughtless image' debate.
Tags: Psychology
Posted: 05.28.07 | 23 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
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Monday, May 17, 2010 at 10:30pm (PDT)
| Psychology | 184 | |
| Consciousness | 144 | |
| Philosophy | 132 | |
| Religion | 116 | |
| Lucid Dreaming | 105 | |
| Neuroscience | 103 | |
| Science | 88 | |
| Out Of Body Experiences | 74 | |
| The New York Times | 74 | |
| Technology | 66 | |