Psychology
omnibrain | May 22, 2007Answer...They're all involved in car accidents.
Our first story is brought to you by California State Senator Carole Migden who recently voted for a bill banning cell phone use while driving. I'm sure you can guess what happened... yeah exactly... she was chatting on her cell phone and ran into a cute little Honda, sending the driver to the hospital with minor injuries. Ooops.
Our final story shows that annoying friend you have might just cause you an accident if they are blabbing away in your front seat while you're driving. This is of course in addition to making you crash when they call…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2007[More blog entries about sex, monogamy, polygamy, evolutionarypsychology; sex, polygami, monogami, evolutionär psykologi.]
The nature vs. nurture debate will always be with us poor cultured apes. Only very rarely can we lay the blame for our behaviour on genetic programming. A typical issue is that of monogamy.
I happened upon two bloggers (here and here) who argue that humans are polygamous ("everybody's built to screw around"), or at least polygynous ("men are built to screw around"), by nature. They base this assertion on the results of research showing that a) somewhere between a percent…
clock | May 17, 2007A must-read by Sara Robinson. You can use it to understand the persistence of Creationism. Or the lack of Internal Locus of Moral Authority in people belonging to Moral Majority.
omnibrain | May 17, 2007Here is an updated reposting (originally published on 04-26) with further information at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
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I really like soda, especially the kinds with lots of caffeine and sugar. However, I have minor panic attacks whenever I drink them and think about all the corn syrup and other scary junk that goes into the soda flowing through my body. On the other hand I can't stand diet sodas - whose chemicals won't make me fat and diabetic (and probably take a lot longer to insidiously wreck the body) but taste…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2007[More blog entries about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, anxiety, depression, parenting; psykologi, psykiatri, psykoterapi, ångest, depression, föräldraskap.]
I recently had a book on popular psychology recommended to me and found it absolutely dire. And today's paper reports that most of Sweden's university programs for psychotherapists have been found to be substandard and will be closed down unless they improve dramatically. This has inspired me to write something about late 20th century psychotherapy, a.k.a. humanistic psychology, a movement that has been a background presence for…
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2007[More blog entries about memory, psychology, loss; minnet, psykologi, förluster.]
Here's a thought that's been floating around my head for a while. Let's look at the world as a stage play. Turns out there's a difference between a) our memories of dramatic events, b) our ideas about scenery and dramatis personae.
I spent a finite number of days in my childhood home at Vikingavägen 28. Large, but finite. I do remember events that took place there. But I also carry around a model of the place in my head. Closing my eyes, I can wander around the house and yard as it looked in, say, 1980. The…
omnibrain | May 4, 2007
Paxilback - Gray Kid parody of Justin Timberlake's Sexyback - enjoy!
(HT: boingboing)
omnibrain | May 3, 2007There's an interesting post over at Mind Hacks about this woman:
Dear Editor
We report the case of an elderly lady with no experience of using a personal computer or internet technology, whose delusional experiences included the direct personal receipt of email.
Ms T, an 84-year old female with a 40-year history of schizoaffective disorder, presented with a delusional belief that something precious and of value 'for all people' had been inserted into her body by a doctor in Germany in the 1950s. She had sought medical help because she believed that an abdominal operative procedure would be…
omnibrain | May 1, 2007
A male chimpanzee may beg for food from another chimpanzee by gesturing with an extended arm and open hand.
But the same gesture may also be used to ask a female chimpanzee for sex, or between two males as a sign of reconciliation after a fight, said primatologist Frans de Waal, a member of the research team.
"Typically they may use it for food ... but they may use the same gesture for something totally different, so for instance a male may invite a female for sex by holding out an open hand to her," Dr de Waal said.
Soo... well... do female chimps sometimes get the wrong idea and give the…
omnibrain | April 30, 2007If you believe that a name can have an impact on how people treat you, your future career and if you also like math you should name your daughter (or change your name) to something further down this list:
Isabella 1.21
Anna 1.04
Elizabeth 1.02
Emma 0.97
Jessica 0.93
Samantha 0.83
Sarah 0.78
Olivia 0.74
Hannah 0.70
Emily 0.68
Lauren 0.66
Ashley 0.63
Grace 0.50
Abigail 0.48
Alex 0.28
If you want your daughter to be a beautician, home maker or a monarch the names on the top of the list are fine. Something bothers me about studies like this but I'm not sure if it's just that I don't want things…
omnibrain | April 25, 2007Overall people with higher IQ's tend to earn a bit more income (1 IQ pt. = $202-$616 more per year) but when you factor in total wealth (I believe that how much bling you have was the measure) and how likely people were to have financial difficulties the correlations fell apart. The smart and the dumb were both equally as inept at managing their own finances. I can think of countless examples of both sides of the coin. For the idiots we have: MC Hammer, Vanilla ICE, Mike Tyson and many other entertainers (ok ok ... I know entertainers aren't necessarily idiots - but they're the easiest to…
omnibrain | April 24, 2007We all know the basic characteristics of a happy dog (well at least pizza guys and mail men know),
Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means "don't mess with me." Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means "I am sooo happy to see you!"
An article in todays NYT highlights a brand new discovery in doggy linguistics,
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
I might even read the…
omnibrain | April 20, 2007A list of the top most satisfying jobs was just released by the General Social Survey (GSS) at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It seems that Psychologists have made it into the top ten - although I don't think they're talking about my field of psychology (not that I'm unsatisfied). Someone really needs to come up with a new name for clinicians or experimental psychology. Any ideas?
Anyway... here's the list:
* Clergy--87 percent percent
* Firefighters--80 percent percent
* Physical therapists--78 percent percent
* Authors--74 percent…
omnibrain | April 19, 2007Usually we feature visual illusions since they seem to be the easiest to make and of course nearly a third to a half of our brain is dedicated to vision so we may just be more interested. In any case here are three auditory illusions from Mighty Optical Illusions.
Shepard's ascending tones (MP3) - This is a recording of Shepard's paradox synthesized by Jean-Claude Risset. Pairs of chords sound as if they are advancing up the scale, but in fact the starting pair of chords is the same as the finishing pair. If you loop this sample seamlessly then it should be impossible to tell where the…
neurontic | April 18, 2007For those of us with even a passing knowledge of psychology, Virginia Shooter Seung Cho's plays read like a fictionalized retelling of DSM IV, the bible of psychiatric disorders. The characters exhibit signs of everything from paranoia, to pedophilia, to anti-social personality disorder, and psychopathy.
Lucinda Roy, one of Cho's English professors was so alarmed by his writings that she referred him to counseling. Cho declined to go. Ms. Roy then contacted campus police. They did nothing. Distressed, Ms. Roy contacted university officials, who gave her two options: She could drop Cho from…
omnibrain | April 17, 2007Dr. Janet Hall of Melbourne Australia has found a number of new ways to use hypnosis to 'cure' her patients phobias. These phobias are completely new to me ;)
She said one Indian woman with a sperm phobia overcame her fear in three sessions and was now pregnant.
Another woman used the therapy to successfully overcome the fear that her husband was going to be "swallowed up" during sex.
I wonder if hypnosis can cure my fear of pseudoscience?
link
omnibrain | April 12, 2007
Researchers in at the University of New Hampshire discovered something very important recently. The show COPS is actually useful for something besides freaking out stoned kids who accidentally flip to FOX when it's on. By watching many many many episodes of COPS Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication, learned that making eye contact with a panicked person is a very important way of controlling their behavior. She describes her findings in a paper entitled, "'Calm Down!': the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police," which was recently published…
omnibrain | April 12, 2007In honor of the Magic of Consciousness Symposium coming up (See below the fold for details) here's a video of Penn and Teller explaining the art of Sleight of Hand tricks.
The Magic of Consciousness Symposium
The ASSC11 Co-Chairs are happy to announce a Special Symposium that promises to showcase the "Magic of Consciousness" to even the hardest-nosed skeptic. Please join us and five of the world's premier stage magicians on Sunday June 24th, 2007, between 5:30pm and 7:30pm, so that these world-class performers may share their deep intuitions and insights on the covert manipulation of…
omnibrain | April 12, 2007This story is almost useless without video - which Is why I'm posting it. Can anyone get a video of an Orangutan playing a video game? In any case... Here's the basic story:
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals -- correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.
The computer games, which volunteers from IBM spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory,…
omnibrain | April 11, 2007Since I seem to be on an art and music kick today I thought I'd highlight a pretty darn cool thing Joshua Bell did. Cognitive Daily and The Washington Post have the real stories, but here's a little snippet:
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?
"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't…