Psychology
Fear blinds us, immobilizes us, and makes fools of us. Scary stories abound on the internet, through emails, and in conversations, and dangers lurk in the dusty corners waiting to pounce on us and tear our loved ones from our grasps. We know this. We feel it viscerally. And sometimes we shake in our boots.
We've got enough real dangers, and we do, without adding in made-up ones. We do a terrible job at assessing risk. Don't believe me? Which is safer? Driving or flying? If you said driving, you're so terribly wrong and have let both the illusion of control and the availability heuristic…
Look at a waterfall for 30 seconds. Now look at something stationary. The stationary object will appear to drift upwards. The same phantom movement is true after stepping off an airport walkway: if you close your eyes and stand still, you should continue to feel yourself moving.
Though neither of these likely comes as a surprise, their cause is cool: when you first look at or experience a stimulus, the neurons that recognize it get excited. They spring into action, processing the new information and forcing it into your consciousness: wow, look at all that falling water! Then the neurons get…
Hank |
Despite being one of psychology's most memorable concepts and a genuinely good idea, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, immortalized in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" and later Motivation and Personality, needs a makeover, say some researchers.
Maslow's hierarchy says humans will fulfill basic needs before moving on to higher level ones. If you're unemployed and losing your house because fuzzy 'jobs saved or created' statistics have no real value to you, for example, global warming will not be your biggest concern.
In Maslow's pyramid, …
Semantic: "of, pertaining to, or arising from the different meanings of words or other symbols: semantic change; semantic confusion."
Pedantic: "overly concerned with minute details or formalisms, esp. in teaching."
As an English instructor, I get that language usage changes over time, that words shift meanings. I may not like it much. Seriously, ask me how I feel about people calling lecterns podiums? It really bugs the crap out of me! What about how the abbreviated until, 'til, has become till? Accepted usage and all, I get, but a lot of the shift in word usage comes about through the…
Does money make you happy? Economists think so - the concept of 'utility' assumes that economic activity represents people consuming in ways that best supports their happiness. And yet, high sales of Backstreet Boys CDs prove that this cannot be true. What's going on here?
Happiness is a difficult thing to study scientifically
I have had many conversations with people, who, after I tell them I study positive psychology, question whether happiness can be measured. It's intangible, they say. Sometimes this is the same type of person who just took a personality…
Belief: Girls tend to hang out in smaller, more intimate groups than boys.
Not really. At least not by the time children reach the eighth grade, says a new Journal of Social and Personal Relationships article.
Jennifer Watling Neal, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University, says her study is one of the first to look at how girls' and boys' peer networks develop across grades. Because children's peer-group structure can promote or mitigate negative behaviors like bullying and positive behaviors like helping others, Neal said it's important for researchers to…
Not long ago, many scientists had the belief that after the age of about three, the brain was pretty much fixed in function. You could imprint new memories and learn new skills, but that was about it. There was an opposing belief too, that said the brain was a 'blank slate' upon which the various human parameters were written almost ad lib as life went on - an idea, of course, that Steven Pinker refuted in his famous book of the same name (Pinker, 2002).
It is generally accepted that the truth is somewhere in-between. The brain appears to develop into a specific set of sub-systems…
Propaganda - An Application Of The Forgetting Curve
Learning curves, forgetting curves, adjacency and the scientific roots of the black art of propaganda.
Modern rules of propaganda have their roots in Über das Gedächtnis - On Memory, published by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. In 'On Memory', Hermann Ebbinghaus described experiments which he performed on himself concerning learning and forgetting. A related study concerned the serial positioning effect. He also described what I will call here 'active learning' and 'passive learning'. The difference is the same as…
The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him.
That's right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.
What's the meaning of that F to which you're inexplicably drawn…
Sexual images trigger chemical reactions in your brain, which in turn compel us to act in specific ways, or be drawn to certain things, or motivated to engage in particular behaviors. It's common nowadays to have consultants whose job it is to find out exactly how your brain interprets images in order to invoke the greatest possible sexual response. Sounds like a fun job, eh? Sex Research Consultant: Totally hot job in 2011.
The mind is a very complex thing, but when it comes to sex, it's really pretty simple. How simple? This is your brain on sex...
Invoking feelings of pleasure, sensuality…