Psychology
razib | October 19, 2009Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more:
Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the graph). But the New Agers were also more likely to think that people are not what they seem, that they are being persecuted, that electrical devices like computers can control their thoughts, and that their thoughts are 'echoed back'.
On a mass scale people with orthodox beliefs who are affiliated…
omnibrain | October 12, 2009Seriously, a cat named George is a registered hypnotherapist with three professional organizations in Britain. The article not only presents these organizations as full of shit, it highlights the absolute stupidity of almost all applications of hypnosis.
Here's the details:
Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies.
Each one accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George's credentials.
It follows a similar investigation by an American clinical…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2009ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.
Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A…
razib | October 11, 2009Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes:
The concern of the researchers is that a woman who gets involved with a guy while on the pill might find that she's no longer compatible with him once she stops later on in the relationship. Imagine waking up next to your boyfriend, or even your husband, one morning only to discover that you're just not that into him. While female comedians make such scenarios commonplace in their stand-up routines,…
razib | October 8, 2009For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit:
Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.
"Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to…
omnibrain | October 6, 2009I've seen a lot of illusions... but this one is really f'n cool:
CHOP CUP from :weareom: on Vimeo.
-via neatorama-
omnibrain | October 5, 2009
So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision"
But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers.
In Correcting Misconceptions…
ejohnson | October 1, 2009There's no denying that sex is important for most creatures biologically. For humans, the biological imperative of sex has seeped into our psyches over thousands of years worth of evolution, making it more essential than we realize. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer reports on a new column in Mind Matters positing that love and lust have cognitive benefits, significantly affecting test subjects' abilities to solve logic and insight puzzles. Over on Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong reports on an exceptionally atypical case of invertebrates that have "abandoned sex altogether" for some 80…
razib | September 28, 2009Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity:
We hypothesized that religiosity, a set of traits variably expressed in the population, is modulated by neuroanatomical variability. We tested this idea by determining whether aspects of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical volume. We performed structural magnetic resonance imaging of the brain in 40 healthy adult participants who reported different degrees and patterns of religiosity on a survey. We identified four Principal Components of religiosity by Factor Analysis of the survey items and associated them with regional…
omnibrain | September 24, 2009Here's an interesting video from boingboing:
Boing Boing presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler about people whose senses blend, or mix. For instance: a synesthete might see colors when listening to music, or taste flavors when hearing a spoken word.
In this documentary, Dr. David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.
emjohnson | September 24, 2009Seed magazine has just posted my review of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank Nikki, Evan, Bora and everyone else that helped in developing this piece. For posts on related topics please see Misunderstanding Dawkins, The Sacrifice of Admetus, Bonobos "Red in Tooth and Claw", The Evolution of Morality and Laboratory Evidence for the Breakdown of the Selfish Gene.
In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was…
edyong | September 23, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Many patients would like their doctors to be more sensitive to their needs. That may be a reasonable request but at a neurological level, we should be glad of a certain amount of detachment.
Humans are programmed, quite literally, to feel each others' pain. The neural circuit in our brains that registers pain also fires when we see someone else getting hurt; it's why we automatically wince.
This empathy makes…
edyong | September 22, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
As a species, we value fair play. We're like it so much that we're willing to eschew material gains in order to punish cheaters who behave unjustly. Psychological games have set these maxims in stone, but new research shows us that this sense of justice is, to a large extent, influenced by our genes.
When it comes to demonstating our innate preference for fair play, psychologists turn to the 'Ultimatum Game',…
omnibrain | September 21, 2009
I was reading an article this morning that I found on fark (yeah yeah...) and for once I actually read the comments underneath the main article. I was pretty surprised on the consistency of the attribution errors that the religious folks were making and thought it would be something interesting to share here and get your thoughts.
For the setup here's the (really pretty amazing!) story:
On the hike, Cole started fooling around by walking in the water. It was not incredibly steep, but the water had lots of slippery algae and rocks.
To Johnson, it looked dangerous. She pleaded with her…
neurophilosophy | September 19, 2009LANGUAGE contains many sayings which link our feelings and behaviour towards others to temperature. We might, for example, hold "warm feelings" for somebody, and extend them a "warm welcome", while giving somebody else "the cold shoulder" or "an icy stare". Why is that we have so many metaphors which relate temperature to social distance? According to George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, we judge others on the basis of warmth because abstract concepts, such as affection, are firmly grounded in bodily sensations.
There is…
ejohnson | September 14, 2009
Humans have voracious appetites--for food and drink, stability and comfort, emotional fulfillment. How we satisfy those appetites is the subject of several posts on ScienceBlogs this week. On Neurotopia, Scicurious discusses an fMRI study that looks at how certain brain regions are activated when we think about our favorite foods when we are hungry versus when we have just eaten. DrugMonkey considers a paper that investigates the reliability of DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for MDMA abuse and dependence. And Razib of Gene Expression shares a figure from a Gallup poll comparing the relationship…
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
edyong | September 4, 2009Domestic dogs are very different from their wolf ancestors in their bodies and their behaviour. They're more docile for a start. But man's best friend has also evolved a curious sensitivity to our communication signals - a mental ability that sets them apart from wolves and that parallels the behaviour of human infants. Dogs and infants are even prone to making the same mistakes of perception.
Like infants less than a year old, dogs fail at a seemingly easy exercise called the "object permanence task". It goes like this: if you hide an object somewhere(say a ball under a cup) and let the…
edyong | September 3, 2009When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences.
David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…
ejohnson | September 3, 2009
As David Dobbs reports on Neuron Culture, the use of antidepressants in the US has nearly doubled in the last decade. David agrees with fellow neuroblogger Neuroskeptic in attributing the increase to a broadened definition of depression. But if Americans are becoming more depressed, there is hope on the other side of the coin as scientists turn up new insights into what makes us happy. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer tell us money can buy us happiness—but only if spent properly. Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily discusses a study in Psychological Science that demonstrates how our perception…