Psychology

Someday ,when the building block thoughts of the mind, the picture thoughts Temple Grandin wrote about and the ones high functioning autistic people build upon are generally known about , common sense will be common for every one. In fact it will be able to be "learned". Man's mind (if we are right) is one big photo album that talks. The picture toughts that make us function do everything from mr/dd type of thoughts to indeed the Einsten things. There are several sections of the mind (the picutre thoughts that play below the surface of the mind all the time) that are dedicated to social…

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The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors, such as its saliency, novelty, degree of threat, or behavioral relevance to a task. Generally, attention is thought to be key, in that people can only remember part of a visual scene when paying attention to it at any given moment. University of Washington researchers, however, say that memory for visual scenes may not depend on attention level or what a scene contains, but when the scene is presented. Their study, they say, shows how visual scenes are encoded into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time…

Autism and your normal mind -the connection. Have you ever been going along having a chat and suddenly your stopped cold?  You then see a "minds eye" thought of uncle joe (or something else). You are then forced to say I can picture him or it but, I can't place the name? As you stand there and look at the minds eye picture you discover its uncle joe ,or perhaps the word your looking for and you move on with the conversation or bluff it off and still move on with the conversation. If I am right and autism that we learned is right you just seen one of the 100's upon thousands of…

Environmentally friendly products are everywhere, but consumers aren't purchasing them because they care about the environment, according to a new University of Minnesota study. "Green purchases are often motivated by status," says Vladas Griskevicius, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "People want to be seen as being altruistic. Nothing communicates that better than by buying green products that often cost more and are of lower quality but benefit the environment for everyone." In the recently published paper, the reseachers find…

It (catching a ball) was easy, I was 35 or so and for the first time  in my life caught a ball! To be able to do this I had to learn how to think  with both OPTIC and Brain Generated vision. Psychology has no clue we have two forms of vision that happen during the autism lack of eye contact and one is deep internal thoughts that cancel out optic vision. The other is normal optic vision that all humans share and most people use all the time with out much exception.  While I was in special education  (we) were learning inadverently a different kind of…

Some studies suggest that video gaming can improve vision and enhance information processing abilities. But that may be total nonsense, according to a study that examined the short-term effects of video-game ownership on academic development in young boys. Families with boys between the ages of 6 to 9 were recruited for the study in Psychological Science. The families did not own video-game systems, but the parents had been considering buying one for their kids. The children completed intelligence tests as well as reading and writing assessments. In addition, the boys' parents and teachers…

In the past week or two, there have been several news stories and blogs (including here on SB) written in regards to a paper that came out this month titled, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". It would be easy for the untrained eye to read such a headline and think, "Gee.... this was published in a peer reviewed journal, so this must really be something..." However, if you read through the paper in detail, and look at the longitudinal data methods used for the analysis, one begins to question the validity of such broad assumptions. I have run across other studies in the past…

A new study that was just released on Sunday and published online in Nature Neuroscience has found that Ritalin, a popular medication to treat ADD/HD, helps improve learning not only by improving focus, but also by increasing plasticity of neural connections. The player involved in this new discovery is none other than that magical little neurotransmitter, one of my good friends, dopamine. As well as giving insight into to the nature of attention deficit disorders, providing new avenues to pursue for treatment, this study brings to light a few important facts about dopamine. First, note…

I sincerely apologize for my complete absence from the blogging world though a recent bout with what can only be called "The Plague" has had me incapacitated for more than a week. Minus a trip to the doctor that only reinforced my belief that going was a waste of time... but, I digress. One of the small benefits of being sick is that you can gain some perspective on various tasks and areas of your life - you realize what you enjoy doing and will fight to get to do even when you are beyond exhausted and then you realize what you were doing because it was "the right thing to do" or you really…