Has there been any research done that contrasts point-based and achievement-based gamification methods? Stack Exchange is a good example of these two methods of gamification:

Reputation
Badges

I am curious as to whether there has ever been any research done that defines and contrasts these methods?  I am specifically interested in discovering what sort of goals and behaviors collecting achievements encourage as opposed to collecting points.  How do end-users respond differently to these methods?  Or do they?

Taking Stack Exchange as an example, we could ask what sort of behaviors are we attempting to encourage with reputation as opposed to badges that require them to be separate entities?

Reputation is a recognition system for participation, while the badges represent the type of participation.

Reputation amasses over time simply by recognizing that the individual is participating in a meaningful way, and that their experience can be judged by the amount of reputation. Badges, on the other hand, show where their aptitude and participation lies (Such as being a prolific editor, having insightful answers, etc.)

Both of these will appeal to people in different ways, and both will contribute to a thriving site, as it encourages several levels of participation. The reputation will be more of a benefit system, as you get increasingly advanced privileges on the site for higher reputation, and the badges are the "pat on the head" motivation.

While I don't have access to the full text, the precis for this article suggests that they presented specifically on the Stack Exchange model, and the badge/reputation system as applied to an online community. Other than that, most of the gamification models that I found searching scholarly articles were more geared toward education and social media rather than Q&A type sites.


What causes dreamers to accept dreams as reality? I have long had interest in dreaming, and one of the defining features of ordinary dreams is that the dreamer either accepts the dream as "real life", or does not question the surroundings.

Compare these ordinary dreams with "lucid dreams", or conscious dreaming, where the person is aware of the fact that he/she is dreaming. Within an ordinary dream, a person "goes with the flow", while within a lucid dream, the person can think clearly and act voluntarily without waking up.

Have these been any studies that used fMRI or other techniques to try to determine what is it within the human brain that causes the distinction between conscious and ordinary dreaming?

If you are searching specific part of the brain, I think that frontal regions of cortex will be an answer(In particular, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which was associated with self-focused metacognitive evaluation). But, as it common in real life, becoming aware of dreaming state required coordinated work of different parts of brain.
You can read this very good article and wiki of course.

  Lucid dreaming is characterized by a regaining of higher cognitive capabilities, eventually leading to the awareness of the dreaming state. Recent quantitative EEG data have shown that this wake-like intellectual clarity is paralleled by neural activations in frontal and frontolateral regions. Likewise, PET data show cognitive control in dreams to be associated with activation of frontal cortex components. via


Does not seeing sunlight for several days impair moral judgment and lower mood? Background: In winter, daytime is very short where I live. A few months ago, due to a bad sleeping habit, I had not seen sunlight for almost a month. Then I noticed some strange things had been happening to me for a few days. I wasn't feeling any emotion (especially fear). In addition, ability to distinguish between right and wrong was slowly fading away.

Does not seeing any sunlight for some number of days affect sense of morality and emotions?

Update: As I recall, this happened to me 3 times over 4 years of time. But I wasn't aware of it.

Although not the question you asked, there has been at least one study looking at the influence of 'cave-like environments' on cognition - people are more prone to magical thinking/illogical beliefs (not their term) when placed in a dark, windowless environment.
Rigoli et al (2013): Cave-like Environments Facilitate Magical Thinking

Abstract
The cognitive mechanisms that underlie beliefs in the supernatural are not well understood. In an attempt to understand this phenomenon, we hypothesized that the cave environment “affords” such usage. In our experiment, 52 participants completed a survey about their metaphysical beliefs inside a room providing a great deal of natural light, while another 52 participants completed the same survey in a dark and windowless room. The survey asked participants to rate their beliefs in a variety of supernatural phenomena and also included multiple-choice questions which described bizarre scenarios that could be explained either scientifically or supernaturally. The supernatural responses to both the rating-scale questions and to the multiple-choice questions were significantly higher in the cave-like condition. These results are consistent with anthropological claims that the dark zones of caves may have played a role in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness that contributed to humans’ tendency toward magical thinking.


Does a general impairment test exist, that specifically would be useful for the context of driving? We know that  alcohol negatively influences a driver's ability to drive. Governments typically combat this by making drunk driving illegal, and use the concentration of alcohol in breath or blood as the definitive measure as to whether a crime has been committed or not.

In this sense - alcohol in the blood/breath is merely a proxy for impairment, but one that is quite reliable - when one is drunk they're going to show alcohol in the blood stream, this is able to be accurately measured.

There are other ways a driver can be impaired as well - quite commonly through sleepiness/fatigue, but also other drugs, or distraction (driving while texting), or emotional distress.

The prospect of 'drugged driving' comes up quite commonly in discussions about legalising cannabis. Where there is a reliable test of alcohol impairment - it's not quite the same for cannabis and other drugs - the problem being that saliva tests can show the presence of the drug long after the person has sobered up. A blood test might be viable - but that's perhaps not practical, in terms of getting a cop to administer to a driver.

With fatigue, it's even more problematic - there's no drug to detect at all.

In light of this - has any general impairment test - that perhaps tests reaction times or some other metric, that can be administered at a roadside, been developed?

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, CTC & Associates provides technical communications services for the transportation sector, and together with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), they put together a report on how to monitor driver fatigue:

  to serve as a synthesis of pertinent completed research to be used for further study and evaluation by MnDOT. This [Transport Research Synthesis (TRS)] does not represent the conclusions of either CTC & Associates or MnDOT. (MnDOT, 2015)

The following (apart from ESS - see below) are some of the studies presented in the MnDOT report.

In-vehicle Technologies

Balkin, et al. (2011) talks about technologies which can detect or predict driver fatigue.

  Technologies that objectively detect or predict operator fatigue may be used to effectively complement or even supplant organizational or regulatory approaches. Over the past decade and a half, there have been considerable advances in relevant technologies, including onboard devices that monitor drivers’ state or level of performance as well as devices that predict fatigue in advance of a work cycle or trip.

Barr, Popkin and Howarth (2009) also reviews and discusses unobtrusive, in-vehicle, real-time drowsy driver detection and fatigue monitoring/alerting systems.

  The study focuses on recent developments in two areas:

  Mathematical models that predict operator alertness and performance at different times. Factors
  involved in the assessment include the amount of sleep obtained or missed, circadian factors (the 24-
  hour cycle of physical, mental and behavioral changes) and workload.
  Vehicle-based monitoring technologies that assess behavioral characteristics of the driver such as eye
  gaze, eye closure, head position and movement, and heart rate.

Roadside and other Out-of-vehicle technologies

Fitness for Duty

There is the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale [KSS] (Åkerstedt & Gillberg, 1990; Kaida, et al., 2006) and there is the Epworth Sleepiness Scale [ESS] (Johns, 1991).  Both are self-report scales, frequently used in studies measuring subjective sleepiness, that measure the individual’s drowsiness.  The KSS is a 9-point verbally anchored scale going from ‘extremely alert’ to ‘extremely sleepy–fighting sleep’, whereas the ESS uses a 4-point scale from never doze to high chance of dozing.

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) (named after The Epworth Sleep centre in Melbourne, Australia) is used by doctors here in the UK to point toward the possibility of sleep disorders such as Sleep Apnoea. You can see an example PDF of the questionnaire at the Warrington and Halton NHS Hospitals website. It is a self-evaluation questionnaire devised to determine general sleepiness observed by the individual based on usual chances of dozing off or falling asleep while engaged in eight different activities.

Not wishing to add any validity to the system, I thought I would mention that Optalert talks about a testing system they developed themselves and are promoting, called the Johns Drowsiness Scale (JDS).  It was developed by Optalert’s Founding Director, and developer of ESS, Dr Murray Johns, and comparing it to ESS, and Blood Alcohol Concentration Readings, they say that

  With 30 Per Cent Of Road Fatalities Attributed To Drowsy Driving, At Optalert We Believe The Johns Drowsiness Scale (JDS™) Will, In The Near Future, Become As Important As Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) Readings. (Source: JDS vs BAC - Optalert)

Whilst assessing the use of a simple balance task for assessing fitness for duty, Sargent et al. (2012) states:

  results indicate that postural balance may be a viable tool for assessing fatigue associated with time of day, but may not be useful for assessing fatigue associated with extended hours of wake.

Roadside Testing

A pilot study was conducted (Forsman, et al., 2014) and it states that the method put together for the pilot...

  further developed, may provide a drowsiness test for roadside surveillance.

Further Reading

  MnDOT. (2015) Monitoring Motor Vehicle Driver FatigueRetrievable form http://dotapp7.dot.state.mn.us/projectPages/pages/projectDetails.jsf?id=35917&type=DOCUMENT

Plus Chapters 9 & 10 of:

  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. (2016). Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue, Long-Term Health, and Highway Safety. Washington (DC): National Academies PressDOI: 10.17226/21921 NBK: 384966 [Free PDF]

References

Åkerstedt, T., & Gillberg, M. (1990). Subjective and objective sleepiness in the active individual. International Journal of Neuroscience, 52(1-2), 29-37.DOI: 10.3109/00207459008994241 PMID: 2265922

Balkin, T. J., Horrey, W. J., Graeber, R. C., Czeisler, C. A., & Dinges, D. F. (2011). The challenges and opportunities of technological approaches to fatigue management. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 43(2), 565-572.DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2009.12.006

Barr, L., Popkin, S., & Howarth, H. (2009). An evaluation of emerging driver fatigue detection measures and technologies (No. FMCSA-RRR-09-005). United States: Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.Retreivable at https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/34394

Johns, M. W. (1991). A New Method for Measuring Daytime Sleepiness: The Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Sleep, 14(6), 540-545.DOI: 10.1093/sleep/14.6.540

Forsman, P., Pyykkö, I., Toppila, E., & Hæggström, E. (2014). Feasibility of force platform based roadside drowsiness screening–A pilot study. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 62, 186-190. DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2013.09.015

Kaida, K., Takahashi, M., Åkerstedt, T., Nakata, A., Otsuka, Y., Haratani, T., & Fukasawa, K. (2006). Validation of the Karolinska sleepiness scale against performance and EEG variables. Clinical Neurophysiology, 117(7), 1574-1581.DOI: 10.1016/j.clinph.2006.03.011

MnDOT. (2015) Monitoring Motor Vehicle Driver FatigueRetrievable form http://dotapp7.dot.state.mn.us/projectPages/pages/projectDetails.jsf?id=35917&type=DOCUMENTTRSs are also searchable at http://dotapp7.dot.state.mn.us/projectPages/pages/homepage.jsf

Sargent, C., Darwent, D., Ferguson, S. A., & Roach, G. D. (2012). Can a simple balance task be used to assess fitness for duty?. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 45, 74-79.DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2011.09.030


Euphoria from oxygen deprivation Plane & Pilot have an article saying:

  Altitude-chamber tests have shown that as oxygen deprivation increases, some victims experience a sense of increasing well-being, even euphoria, while they’re losing the ability to function in a thoughtful, coordinated manner.

But it's not too clear from that article how many people experience euphoria from oxygen deprivation. I'm pretty sure the loss of cognitive function is 100%, eventually, even though the dose/concentration might vary with the subject. But does everyone experience euphoria before that happens or does it happen just to some individuals with a certain vulnerability? This video suggests not everyone experiences euphoria, and if that's so what's the prevalence?

Optionally (i.e. if it's easy to answer based on the same source(s) for my main question), are there any proposed/studied pathways by which this euphoric consequence of oxygen deprivation might come about? And is it relevant to anything else, say to the "choking game" that some children (unfortunately) practice, or to asphyxiophilia/hypoxyphilia?

Short answer
Given the fact that literature on hypoxia consistently report euphoria as a symptom, my conclusion is that the two are correlated strongly and is not confined to a small subset of susceptible people.
Background
Personally I know only of the effects of oxygen on the central nervous system under conditions of increased oxygen pressure, as for example encountered by scuba divers at depths greater than standard recreational diving. In that case it is called oxygen intoxication or oxygen toxicity (e.g., Chawla & Lavania, 2001), characterized by e.g.:

visual changes
tinnitus
irritability, anxiety, confusion
vertigo.

Hypoxia (Asmaro, Mayall & Ferguson, 2013) can indeed lead to

Euphoria and feelings of well-being
Acute anxiety, irritability & confusion
confusion, loss of consciousness.

The authors however only qualitatively analyzed their group of test subjects on these subjective mind states and describe quantitative statistics only on psychophysical tests. The latter were indeed significant, showing that hypoxia leads to changes in performance on a variety of tasks in most, and probably all subjects.
To proceed to your question - hard numbers on the prevalence of feelings of euphoria are difficult to find, yet credible reports that mention it as a symptom are abundant. For example, the self-asphyxial risk-taking behavior (SARTB) you mention is known to lead to euphoria and is thought to be one of the motivations behind the 'game' (Griffiths, 2015; Busse et al., 2015).
The fact that hypoxia is a general term for a range of blood oxygenation levels, and the complexity of the cerebral cortex, variability in susceptibility is to be expected. For example, hyperoxic effects depend strongly on the altitude (i.e., partial oxygen pressure) Chawla & Lavania, 2001).
References
- Asmaro, Mayall & Ferguson, 2013
- Busse et al., Arch Dis Child (2015); 100(12): 1106–14
- Chawla & Lavania, Med J Armed Forces India (2001); 57(2): 131–3
- Griffiths, Education and Health (2015); 33(3): 54-6


Are the raw scores of the NEO-PI-R normally distributed? Scoring the NEO-PI-R test results, as done for example in this document, involves converting an absolute score to a t-score. However, the conversion from absolute score to t-score (as can be seen in the document above and many others) seems to be always linear, i.e. $t=\alpha*raw+\beta$ for some values of $\alpha,\beta$.

Since the t-scores are normally distributed, such a linear conversion only makes sense if the raw scores are also normally distributed (and not e.g. skew in either direction). In a limited sample that I took, I noticed that some of the facets are not normally distributed, in the sense that they have a significant amount of skewness.

Is this not a flaw in the scoring system? Or is there a (psychological) reason why we should not worry about this?

Generally,  psychological scales that are the sum of forced-choice items exhibit skew as the mean approaches the floor or ceiling of the scale.

The test manual for the NEO-PI shows the exact relationship between raw scores for domains and facets and corresponding percentiles. So if you want to be more precise and not assume normality, you can use that data.

Here's one table showing skewness values in an officer sample from Detrick & Chibnall (2013). As is typical with this kind of data, there's a little bit of skew, but it's not huge. So the normal approximation wont be too bad.

Detrick, P., & Chibnall, J. T. (2013). Revised NEO Personality Inventory normative data for police officer selection. Psychological Services, 10(4), 372.


Does the "learned" in "learned helplessness" refer specifically to behaviorism's conditioning? I was said that because the experiment of Seligman that gave birth the theory of learned helplessness was an expansion of Pavlov's experiment, hence the word "learned" in the term should be understood as conditioning, not learning in general. So perhaps it's better termed as "conditioned helplessness"?
According to Learning - Wikipedia:

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.

It's clear that people with learned/conditioned helplessness acquiring new behaviors, but do they acquire new understanding, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences?
Related:
• What is the difference between conditioning and learning?
• How does one escape learned helplessness?
• Are association, conditioning, and symbolic learning the same thing?

Wikipedia explains that there's not one theory of learned helplessness but several, some more encompassing than others with respect to what is learned:

Research has found that a human's reaction to feeling a lack of control differs both between individuals and between situations, i.e. learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation but at other times generalizes across situations.[7][9][10] Such variations are not explained by the original theory of learned helplessness, and an influential view is that such variations depend on an individual's attributional or explanatory style.[11] According to this view, how someone interprets or explains adverse events affects their likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression.[12] For example, people with pessimistic explanatory style tend to see negative events as permanent ("it will never change"), personal ("it's my fault"), and pervasive ("I can't do anything correctly"), and are likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.[13]

(Aside: contra to the somewhat one-sided way in which Wikipedia discusses this, the expanded theories were not that easy to demonstrate reliably, at least not with a sizeable effect.)


How to better remember your dreams? Often times, I wake up with an amazing, yet fleeting glimpse of a dream I had. I would like to recollect those events I had in my dream, and try to adopt ways to better remember those dreams.

There are a few (random) ways that I have tried, but I would like to know if there are studied ways of accomplishing this.

How can I easier remember my dreams and record them for the future?

There is a lot of information on 'dream recall' related to research on lucid dreaming. For some quick information, I would take a look at Wikibook's page on Lucid Dreaming/Dream Recall.

I have tried some of these techniques, and I found that what has worked for me in the past was

trying to write down everything I can as soon as I wake up
lying in bed, not moving, and just letting my mind wander over what I could remember (this usually helps other memories about the dream pop up)
doing this consistently every day.

The last one is the most important, you really notice that if you are consistent you start remembering more and more when you wake up. I highly recommend the book "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Howard Rheingold and Stephen LaBerge. It was the required reading for a Psychology of Dreams class I took and is based on a lot of cool research.


Does human to human interface carry the same information from the brain I'd like to know if the human to human interface carry the same information from the brain or it is just a signal that switch on or off electrical impulses that causes the limb to contract?

Is it even possible to take someone else signal coming from the brain and redirect to somebody else where the other person can use it for the same result or is it always going to be digital type On or OFF and not analog?

The answer for the particular interface that you linked to is that a single scalar variable is being passed.  The EMG activity in one person controls an electrical signal that is connected to a nerve in the second person, which when activated causes the muscle to contract.  The EMG activity is thresholded and then the binary information of whether or not it passes that threshold is passed to a "TENS unit" whose output can be controlled in an analog way.

While the actual information being passed in this demonstration is binary, there is no reason why it must be so.  It is simply a result of the design decisions the creators made.


Episodic Memory Decoding I'm planning a study on memorability of episodic events.
Therefore, participants record a couple of hours of their daily life using an egocentric camera (encoding).
After a certain time, they are shown snippets from the recording and judge whether they remember it or not (decoding).

I don't have a psychological background, hence I have some questions:

How long should the snippets be? Currently, we have 5sec videos, separated by 10sec margin.
I know chunking, however, it happens in encoding phase, I'm looking for an equivalent in decoding.
Maybe showing a few frames from the video is better than playing video?
How long should the time between encoding and decoding be? Currently, it's 6 to 8 days. I'm aware of Time Scale Similarity.
I've found a work that suggests that asking people whether they remember or not is sensible. However, any further evidence would be great.
I think Experiences of Remembering, Knowing, and Guessing is also highly related.

As this is a scientific work, references are highly appreciated.

The answers to your questions in your post would depend on the scope of your study.  For example, with

  How long should the time between encoding and decoding be?

it would depend on what criteria is set within the scope of the study.  If the people who are asking you to perform the study are asking for specific timescales then you need to stick to them and outline that in your report.

If however you have freedom to do so, as you seem to be asking on a psychological standpoint, it may be beneficial to test different timescales and maybe tabulate the results of memorability against time. You could even test different timescales against different ranges of emotional levels attached to the event.

For example,

does a person remember a highly emotional episodic memory longer than a non-emotional one?

What about medium levels of emotions?

You could also add to this with your question on how long snippets should be.

Does a 5sec video snippet help someone to remember better than a single frame image?

If you have the time and freedom to explore, you can conduct a large amount of research on memory.  It would only be down to how wide you can make the scope of the study whilst keeping it within the remit of what you are trying to find out.


What psychological disorders have frequent and rapid anger outbursts? I'm interested in the mechanism behind a personality that can outburst anger rapidly and consistently for a long period. I've done some research and stumbled upon this issue described by multiple different people, typically about a female rejecting her partner, which makes me think it has some biological basis.

Within a certain time after a relationship starts, 6 months to 4 years an otherwise very desirable woman starts to have explosive anger outbursts over trivial issues and big issues alike. The words spoken and faults given during these temper outbursts does not matter, yet they follow a remarkably similar pattern:

very rapid onset (15 seconds or less from baseline to angry) and long duration (up to 3 hours to flare up again)
near total suppression of logical ability (will not see logic or reason)
total shut down of empathy (makes very hurtful comments, emotionally abusive)
significant drop in self awareness (can't see that acting like this is not appropriate and feels self justified)
perception changes (you ALWAYS do that, you NEVER do this)
does not want to be touched and actively rejects attempts at physical comforting
pushes the man out or continues the episode till the man can't take it any more and leaves
poor recollection of what happened during the episode later
likely to occur after 1 month of cohabitation, and can occur within days of having sex

I've additionally gathered that men in these relationship assume more "feminine" role, while women are more "masculine". I've seen reports of a man bending over backwards to please such woman for years, yet this does not help.

Otherwise the couple say they still love each other and can function normally.

The almost universally given advice is: run, flee, end it. So it appears that behavior is aimed at and quite successful at forcing separation.

Question: Is this some kind of personality disorder? Is there a more scientific term I can use to look up this behavior?

UPDATE: since the question is closed, I will add answer here, as it took me a long time to find relevant info.

The mechanism described here is a clearly observable, biological, cyclical in nature, but it is only a tip of the iceberg of a cluster B personality disordered woman.  This pattern of violent outbursts and push/pull dynamics is consistent with borderline personality disorder About 75% cases of BPD are female. I'm amazed at how many books are written on the subject by people who survived relationships with these women. (the male opposite is narcissistic personality disordered men, who deal just as much damage to women)

BPD/NPD has also been described as extremely low agreeableness and emotional stability on big 5 personality traits. During the courtship period, the undesirable traits are obfuscated from the potential partner (so woman who's more disagreeable than 95% of people may look like only 75% disagreeable). That's a major difference which is the cause of much unhappiness in such relationships.

BPD women are quite numerous are prone to emotionally violent anger outbursts, "Projecting" undesirable qualities onto the partner as a mechanism of self defense and avoiding any attempts to point out the pattern. Anecdotal evidence from countless sources suggests it is impossible to argue with a borderline disordered woman, or convince her to get help, as it results in the following:

Projection or blame shifting onto the partner
Threats of separation
Emotional abuse
"Circular arguments" that solve nothing

Sometimes these women experience moments of clarity, which only confuse the partner. These moments do not last long. Anecdotal evidence suggests BPD women are very resistant to therapy, and I've read accounts of up to 15 years of seeing psychiatrists/psychologists pass without any change.

It is common for the partner to somehow start accepting blame/fault for these violent outbursts, resulting in a lot of frustrated, depressed and beat up partners and husbands.

Most of your list fits for symptoms of lack of will to cooperate. Lack of will to cooperate is likely triggered by lack of sympathy, which again may be triggered by lack of trust. I say 'may' because there are several possible reasons that such situations may occur.
Lack of will to cooperate may also be due to personality traits, especially due to low score in the Big 5 personaliy trait Agreeableness.
Agreeableness scores the tendency for which a person prefers to cooperate and be altruistic, rather than antisocial and egosentric.

You also mention several signs of being very emotional. This will highly depend on the personality of the woman, more than the sitution itself. Some people naturally respond more emotionally and prefer to use their feelings when making judgments, as opposed to using logic.
Emotional instability is especially typical for those with a high score in the Big 5 Neuroticism personality trait.
Neuroticism scores the tendency for a person to be 'moody', change mood frequently, respond negatively, get anxious, suspicious and 'overreact'.

Your 'kind of rejection" is not a 'biological defence mechanism by which a woman pushes an unsuitable mate out'. It is the response pattern of a personality type when discontent with another person, regardless of relation status or gender.


In what order do you preprocess EEG data? I am fairly new to EEG research and I am unsure what the best ordering is for preprocessing data. Do you correct for baseline and filter the data before you go on with artifact rejection/correction, or the other way around?

I can imagine the former to be correct, because baseline correction and filtering makes it easier to interpret the data visually, making it easier to identify artifacts. However, if you filter the data first, some artifacts may become less severe, making it difficult to have artifact rejection be done automatically.

What are your thoughts?

You kind of have to do some kind of baseline correction first (or a highpass filter on the unepoched data) because of slow drifting. Lowpass filtering before artifact rejection is fine as long as you don't ever go back to the unfiltered signal in your analyses.

After that, you can either throw out trials that exceed a set threshold, or you can do a two-step artifact rejection procedure. For the two-step rejection throw out anything beyond a large threshold. Then throw out any trials with points that exceed a set number of standard deviations from the mean of all trials at each time point.

The reason I say that filtering before artifact rejection is okay is because the artifacts that you are filtering out should not be related to the brain activity you are interested in. This is reasonable for frequencies above, say, 50Hz, because that should just be external and muscle noise. Anything lower than that could affect task-related brain activity, say eye movements for example. You might not want to include trials where the subject was looking away from the screen or closed their eyes.


How does people's sense of right and wrong affect their behavior? In general, people tend to simply max out their profit.

In the process to max out their profit, humans have this peculiar cognitive function, called sense of morality.

We have no idea how it evolve but it seems to have some function and affect their behaviors. Somehow.

I want to know how this strange cognitive function affect humans behavior?

For example, most of us don't just grab fried chicken and run away. We sense that it's politically incorrect and not profitable. However, some may think it's just wrong and don't do it anyway without thinking if it's profitable or not. Or do they?

It seems that people are more willing to negotiate if they think those who pressure them have earned their profit "rightfully". People are more likely to condemn if they think what others do is wrong.

But that seems to be a very amateur observation.

When we see someone put gun on someone's head, we are more likely to think, we should punish this robber rather than thinking what does he want. On the other hand, people are more willing to pay tax that goes to welfare recipients. That's probably because we think that robbing is wrong, while voting for welfare is right.

In general, how does our sense of right and wrong affect our behavior and how does that lead to our individual profit or our selfish genes?

The 2 things I have in mind is

People tend to do what's right
In conflict, people tend to side with those they think is right. For example, if a thief is beaten up to death, conservatives would side with those who protect their properties while liberals would side with the thieves.

This is an interesting question which seems that even the experts are still investigating it to a degree.

Take a look at the links I provide in this answer and look at the conformity studies like the Milgram Experiment and the works of Dr Phil Zimbardo with his Stanford Prison Experiment and his book on The Lucifer Effect (a study of the Psychology of Evil and heroism) etc.

Stanley Milgram tested earlier conformity studies by Solomon Asch to see what extent the experiment can reach.

It seems that even though there are a few who are an exception, there are those with high moral standards who can be swayed into doing something bad.  Especially when their actions are "justified" by someone in authority or seem to have more knowledge of the situation.

There seems to be a fine line which can be very blurry to a degree.  For a rather pessimistic view on society have a look at this article.


"Give me a child..." Quote from Skinner? B.F. Skinner has been quoted all over the place on the internet (e.g. PsychologyDegreeGuide) to say

  Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything

I am starting to think he didn't as I am yet to find a reference to where he said it.

The nearest I have found is

  Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (Watson, 1925, p. 82)

Robert Charles Lee, BSc (Hons) Psych & Stats, 1981, Univ. of London states that it

  seems to have come from a TV interview in the 1960s and reused in an Open University (UK) programme in the 1970s and '80s.

I have yet to find this.

Did Skinner really say this?  If so, where?

References

Watson, J. B. (1925). Behaviorism. New York: Norton.

I also think it's false that Skinner really said it (exactly like that), and even if he said it offhand verbally, it's almost certain he didn't put it in writing in that form.

My argument is that the 4-gram "shape him into anything" doesn't show in n-gram viewer, which means there are very few books containing it... according to the help. If you try "give me a child" you'll get an n-gram as there are plenty of books containing that 4-gram.

A book search (instead of n-gram) for the phrase "shape him into anything" returns only 10 books or so. 3 or 4 of these attribute it to Skinner, one reservedly, which is a psychology textbook. The other books are on the margins of psychology (philosophy etc.) so they likely propagate hearsay. None of the books containing that phrase is a biography of Skinner, and there are some book-length biographies of him. Also none of the books say or cite where he might have said or written it.

The exact same result (no n-gram, few books) also applies to the 4-gram "child and I'll shape".

As a related trivia, some of the books that hit "give me a child", have it for "give me a child until he is seven, and he is mine for life," attributed to unnamed Jesuits, but other books cast doubt on veracity of the attribution. I'm mentioning this because one book drew a connection between what Skinner supposedly said and what Jesuits supposedly said.

As for a passage that ideatically comes close to that and we know Skinner wrote... here's one in SEP

  Skinner protests that “it is in the nature of an experimental analysis of human behavior that it should strip away the functions previously assigned to autonomous man and transfer them one by one to the controlling environment” (1971, p. 198).

I read a few more pages from Skinner's Science and Human Behavior (195X). The passage I quoted is actually quite representative of Skinner's pretty convoluted writing style. The hypothesis that he would have written anything in a more direct fashion seems pretty unlikely. I don't know how he spoke...


Is sub-vocalization when reading and writing merely a symptom of lack of fluency? In reading & writing, I for one, find myself subvocalizing the statement to myself. This behaviour is language-independent. However, the effort and subvocalization involved is greater in any language that I do not use regularly.

Is sub-vocalization when reading and writing merely a symptom of lack of fluency in a language?

My understanding was that at least some sub-vocalisation is a normal part of reading and writing. The wikipedia article on subvocalisation cites several sources supporting that claim. The article also claims that there is no evidence to suggest that speed reading training that involves suppression of sub-vocalisation is effective. There is also evidence that suppressing subvocalisation can in some instances result in decrements in performance (see Baddeley et al, 1981).

There is some evidence to suggest that degree of subvocalisation is related to complexity of the reading passage. Baddeley et al 1981 summarise the use of

  the  electromyographic monitoring of  the muscles involved in
  vocalisation  in order to study the role  of  articulation in  reading
  (e.g. Sokolov,  1966).  Using  this technique,  Hardyk  and
  Petrinovitch  (1970) concluded  that subjects were  able  to read  and
  comprehend  simple prose  without  the  occurrence  of
  electromyographic activity,  but that such  activity  did  occur in
  the case of  more complex passages.

One explanation would be that degree, prominence or frequency of subvocalisation increases as the reading task gets more difficult, where experienced difficulty would vary both based on the individual's ability with the language and with the objective difficulty of the reading passage.

References

Baddeley, A.,  Marge Eldridge & Vivien Lewis (1981): The role of
subvocalisation in reading, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 33:4, 439-454
HARDYK, C.  D.  and PETRINOVITCH,  L.  R.  (1970).  Subvocal speech  and  comprehension  level as a function of the difficulty level of reading material.  Journal of  Verbal Learning  and Verbal Behavior, 9, 647-52.
SOKOLOV,  A. (1966).  La parole intbrieure dans la pensbe concrete. In Recherches Psychologiques en U.R.S.S.,  les Editions du Progrks, U.R.S.S.


Is there a difference between hearing and decoding the sound? I presume that deafness is the inability of hearing any sounds. And I presume that it may also be possible to be less able to decode sounds. In other words, an inability to translate or understand the spoken word into a meaningful message. The inability to understand speech happens a lot to me when people tell me one message and I decode it wrongly, understanding a completely different message.

Is there a discrepancy between hearing and understanding sound?

Short answer

Yes, there is a difference between hearing and understanding sound.

Background

Acoustic information is processed in different neural centers along the auditory pathway. The auditory system runs from the peripheral end organ in the inner ear (the cochlea) to the cortex. Along the way various processing steps are carried out. For example, basic reflex behaviors in response to acoustic stimuli (e.g., startle responses) are processed in subcortical structures (Bocca, 1985), while complex sound perception, such as listening to music, is mediated in the cortex (Philips & Farmer, 1982).

Source: New York University

It is not until the cortex that complex sounds such as speech are processed into meaningful information. The difference between hearing and understanding sound is strikingly evident in people with lesions in the auditory cortex.

Damage to the auditory cortex can result in an inability to recognize complex sounds and in a loss of speech understanding. These symptoms are referred to as agnosia or cortical deafness (Rosati, 1982). The loss of speech understanding (word deafness) is the most debilitating and therefore most investigated aspect of agnosia (Philips & Farmer, 1982).

However, tone audiograms (i.e., tonal hearing sensitivity) of people with cortical deafness are largely unaffected (i.e., their auditory thresholds are fine) and they may have normal sound-intensity and sound-frequency discriminating abilities as well (Rosati, 1982). Hence, the auditory cortex is thought to fulfill a synthetic function, in that it integrates complex sounds such as speech in time (Bocca, 1985). Word deafness may therefore be comparable to hearing a strange language, or hearing reversed words being spoken; one can hear it, but not comprehend it (Rosati, 1982).

It has been shown that the auditory cortex is crucial in storing information as well as processing of sound stimuli with rapidly changing content (in the order of milliseconds to tens of milliseconds). A loss of storage capacity and the loss of the ability to analyze rapidly changing acoustic signals are thought to at least partly explain the detrimental effects of auditory cortex lesions on speech understanding and other auditory abilities (Philips & Farmer, 1982).

References
- Bocca, The Laryngoscope 1985;68:301-9
- Philips & Farmer, Behav Brain Res 1990;40:85-94
- Rosati et al., J Neurol 1982;227:21-7


How to analyze reaction times and accuracy together? Is there a good way to analyze reaction times and accuracy together, other than MANOVA?

I have data from an experiment in which participants had to respond to stimuli in two different conditions in a within-subject design. And my impression is that some subjects differ in accuracy between those two conditions, while some others differ in reaction time.
How can I test such a hypothesis?

MANOVA is definitely a bad idea given that one dv is continuous and the other is binomial. After exploring a number of different approaches to combining RT and accuracy data, I've come to conclude that the best current approach is to use linear ballistic accumulator model (e.g., see Donkin et al 2011).

The LBA is a simple (structurally and computationally) framework that lets you speak to the different processes (info processing efficiency vs response criterion) that jointly contribute to RT and error data.

References

Donkin, C., Brown, S. & Heathcote, A. (2011). Drawing conclusions from choice response time models: A tutorial using the linear ballistic accumulator. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55, 140-151. PDF


Is pattern recognition a measure of spatial IQ? Does pattern recognition come under spatial IQ, or is spatial IQ only to do with mental rotations and visualising?

Not a complete answer, but you might want to look at the most widely accepted framework for organising cognitive abilities: The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93Carroll_theory

In this model speeded rotation is situated under visual processing.
But you'd have to check what is meant by perceptual speed.

In my thesis, I measured Cube Comparison (which is a kind of mental rotation task) along with several common measures of perceptual speed (speed of comparing, sorting numbers, and finding numbers in a set) and I found that cube comparison tended to load on both perceptual speed and general ability factors.
http://cogprints.org/8035/7/anglim-2011-skill-acquisition-phd-thesis.pdf


What do chimpanzees do with fire in the wild, and can they be trained to manipulate burning objects? It seems that most animals run away or avoid fire at all costs. This is especially apparent during wild fires. Humans, obviously, have figured out how to use fire as a tool.

Are we the only known species that is capable of manipulating fire? Do chimpanzees, or other primates, learn to approach fire? Are there any known examples of successfully training primates to use fire as a tool?

Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames was observing savanna chimpanzees in Senegal and found that chimps there have mastered the first step in controlling fire.

However there is this article from worldnewsdailyreport.com, which talks about a group of chimps in the Congo mastering the use of fire through experimentation and observation.

The BBC also had a documentary called Monkey Planet which showed a bonobo chimpanzee in a zoo in Illinois building a fire, lighting it using matches, and toasting marshmallows on it.


Is there such a thing as word synonyms? I'm an English teacher and participate in the English Language forum.  The question of word synonyms is very frequent.  People ask if words can be substituted in sentences and still retain meaning, etc.

I feel that there is no such thing as "synonyms" because the pictures created in the mind of listeners and speakers  are different for different words, and to complicate matters putting the words in sentences will produce different mental pictures / movies.

For example, if I ask 100 native English speakers what they imagine when they hear these two sentences, I feel that very different mental pictures / movies will be produced:

a) Please wash your hands.
b) Please clean your hands.

Some would argue that "wash" and "clean" are synonyms, and that the meaning of both sentences are the same; remove dirt from you hands in whatever way you choose.  I feel that they are not the same.  I'm sure there are better examples to help my point.  The words garbage, waste, pollution, trash, and rubbish, were discussed in another post.

I read Benjamin Bergen's book.  I am an ESL teacher, and a big problem I have found is that students don't have the same mental pictures as native speakers for words.  If I ask them what a word means they can say, but if I ask them what they imagine, the results don't always match or coincide with what native speakers would likely imagine, and I know that they will end up using the word incorrectly.

My questions are:

1) Does it really make sense to talk about "synonyms" in light of what we now know about how people process language?

2) Are there books besides Bergen's that explore the topic of language processing in the way his book did, i.e. language as a mental movie produced in the listener and speaker's mind?

Technically no two words are identical, especially between speakers, but the term is still useful. Here's my answer borrowing from a few disciplines:

Semantics:

It may be useful to think of words in terms of their sense and reference. You can think of reference as the thing that the word/phrase 'points to' in the world, and sense as additional meaning conveyed by a word/phrase. If for example, you were to refer to your friend's dog as "Lassie", the reference of Lassie in this context is simply your friend's dog. If you referred to your friend's dog as a "mutt", then the reference of "mutt" is still your friend's dog. Both "Lassie" and "mutt" share elements of the same meaning--in that they have the same reference, but they differ in their sense. You could make the same argument for "wash" and "clean", though they may have the same reference they have different senses, therefore, they are not the exact same.

Cognitive Science:

How do we define words and phrases? It cannot be just a dictionary definition, because we know much more about what constitutes a word than what a dictionary attempts to do. One could extend the idea of a dictionary definition and compose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that encapsulate a word's meaning (for example a dog could be something that is furry, four-legged...etc.) But this is problematic--for one it does not account for gradation across categories. Secondly, it is almost impossible to fully define categories such as "dog" and "chair" using necessary and sufficient conditions. (You could fill a book with conditions that could satisfy "chair" but can never work out a contingent system), finally, it leads to infinite regress. (For example, if we define a "dog" as something that is "furry", what then is are the necessary and sufficient conditions of "furry"?)--thus necessary and sufficient conditions don't have much use in natural language. An alternative is prototype theory (see: Eleanor Rosch), which asserts that a concept's meaning is graded around an idealized core. For example, you may have an idealized concept of "dog" (say, a golden retriever), and all other examples of dogs you see in the world lay on a spectrum in relation to your idealized representation of a dog. The farther away, or more different, the object is from the idealized core, the less "dog-like" it is. The interesting thing about prototype theory is that the idealized core is arbitrary--it varies from person to person. So one person's idea of a "dog" is not the same as another person. That means that the word does not mean the exact same from speaker to speaker, despite having very similar senses and references. From this we could conclude that no two speaker's englishes are the same. So even when comparing the same word, their meanings are not truly the same. The processes that involve how prototypes form in the first place are as much dependent on individual variation, as they are culture and language.

Phonology:

The Bouba-Kiki effect shows that speech sounds themselves may come to have meaning (see: sound symbolism). So the fact that your synonyms "wash" /waʃ/ and "clean" /klin/ have different phonological realizations means that they also have differing semantic implications.

Bringing it together:

As an ESL teacher you may be working with children who may have learned english explicitly--this is in stark contrast to native english speakers who learned english passively. ESL speakers may be comparing their native language (and prototypes) to english, thereby producing different conceptualizations of the semantic space english expressions explore.

So cognitively no two words are identical. From this you could claim that there are no "true" synonyms--but that doesn't mean that the term "synonym" is useless. Even though all words have multiple complex layers of meaning, some words have more semantic similarities than others, and that still bears pointing out as an interesting feature in language.


Why does a person temporarily go blind without any apparent cause? A person experiences the alternating, intermittent, and temporary, loss of different sensory and motor functioning, such as finding himself unable to see or walk. None of these symptoms are caused by an accident, illness or psychological distress immediately preceding them, but seem to appear at random and with no discernible unifying situational characteristic.

What's going on?

Loss of sensory or motor functioning are possible symptoms of a conversion disorder.

Conversion disorders usually appear during adolescence and are mostly caused by situations of extreme stress (such as the frontline experience of soldiers). Often the disorders enable the patient to avoid specific tasks or responsibilities or recieve the attention of specific persons.

It is important to make sure that the symptoms are not caused by neurological disorders, such as an illness of the central nervous system. Most paralyses and sensory impairments have neurological causes and many are mis-diagnosed as conversion disorders.


Biological plausibility of RBMs How biologically plausible are Restricted Bolztmann Machines (RBMs) and their stacked equivalent Deep Belief Networks (DBNs)? I know that Deep Learning (DL) in general isn't considered biologically plausible, since it requires information to be propagated backwards through uni-directional synapses. However, from what I understand, DBNs don't use back-prop and instead uses some sort of unsupervised learning algorithm. Does that make them more biologically plausible?

First, I want to clarify a few things. Deep Learning simply refers to any learning on a deep (more than one hidden layer) neural network, where the learning happens (i.e. parameters are adjusted) at all layers in the network. Therefore, deep learning algorithms can span the gamut between quite biologically plausible to very biologically implausible, and can include supervised and unsupervised (and maybe even reinforcement-driven) algorithms. That said, the algorithms that are currently very successful in deep learning (e.g. backprop on a convnet), are not very bio-plausible.

As pointed out in the comments, bio-plausibility is difficult to quantify. What is helpful is pointing out what aspects of an algorithm are or are not bio-plausible, so that's what I'll try to do here.

One mark in favour of RBMs is that the error signals are local. The objective function for an RBM is completely defined by the two layers of the RBM, and this holds even when the RBM is embedded in a larger network.

However, I am reluctant to say that the weight update of an RBM is completely local, at least in their typical formulation. RBMs are typically trained using Contrastive Divergence (CD) [1]. After the forward pass (computing the hidden node activations from the inputs), CD requires recomputing the input node activations from the hiddens, and then recomputing the hidden node activations from these new input node activations. (This can happen many more times depending on the particular variant of CD, but has to happen at least once.) This is called Gibbs sampling, and it is unclear to me how this could happen in biology.

Another mark against RBMs is that they have tied weights: the feedback weights are the transpose of the feedforward weights. Some autoencoders avoid this problem by having untied weights, though this can also make them more difficult to train (the increased flexibility leads to more local minima).

A Deep Belief Network (DBN) is initialized by stacking a bunch of RBMs together. One can think of the first RBM as encoding the inputs (i.e. finding a probability distribution over the inputs), the second RBM as encoding the encoding created by the first, the third RBM encoding this second encoding, and so on. Creating the DBN sometimes involves "untying" the weights, so that there are now separate feedforward and feedback weights.

Once constructed, DBNs can be fine-tuned using a number of algorithms, some more bio-plausible than others. Here, fine tuning simply refers to adjusting all the parameters of the DBN together to minimize some global objective function, rather than using the local objective functions for each RBM (as was done when creating the network). One fine-tuning algorithm is the wake-sleep algorithm [1], an unsupervised learning algorithm that has two distinct phases [2]: A "wake" phase, where the network is run forward, and the feedback weights are adjusted based on these feedforward activations; A sleep phase, where the network is run in reverse (generatively), and the feedforward weights are adjusted based on these feedback activations. This algorithm is reasonably bio-plausible, since the weight updates can be determined locally, and feedforward and feedback weights are separate and are adjusted separately. Some of the papers on the wake-sleep algorithm suggest that it might map onto and explain the wake-sleep cycles of animals, however I do not know of any studies that provide evidence of this.

DBNs can also be fine-tuned using supervised learning algorithms, namely backprop. This of course brings all the bio-plausibility concerns associated with backprop.

So to summarize, and address your overall question, which I interpret as "Are RBMs and DBNs more bio-plausible than deep networks trained with backprop?": It's going to depend on how exactly they're trained. RBMs run synapses backwards just like backprop does, but propagating things backwards through unidirectional synapses is only one of the bio-plausibility concerns associated with backprop. Others include that backprop requires the derivatives of the hidden units at their activation points, and that backprop uses continuous values, not spikes (for a fuller list, see [3]). RBMs avoid these two concerns, however they add additional concerns, like how Gibbs sampling might happen in biology. Which one is "more" or "less" biologically plausible depends on which of these problems might be more easily solved in the brain. With regards to DBNs, I would say that the wake-sleep algorithm is more biologically plausible than backprop, in that the mechanisms in the brain seem more tailored to implement the wake-sleep algorithm than backprop.

That said, could a DBN trained with wake-sleep and a shallow classifier on top achieve the same results as a convnet trained with backprop, on a task like ILSVRC-2012 (ImageNet)? Certainly not with our current computational power and the current machine learning knowledge and tricks. And even though I don't expect a good bio-plausible learning algorithm to scale to large datasets right out of the box, it is important to keep in mind that whatever algorithms we want to attribute to the brain, they're going to have to scale.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16764513
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-sleep_algorithm
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04156v3


seeing every interaction as a conflict What could cause someone to see every interaction/conversation as a battle that they have to win. whether it be with strangers or close family members, including their children, and they have to 'win' regardless of the physical, emotional or financial cost to themselves or the person they are interacting with, even if it is entirely out of proportion.

Is there a name for this type of behaviour ?

This is Unilateral Control Model of Behaviour.  The opposite is "Give Up Control Model" and in the middle, you have "Mutual Learning".  You can see another copy of Unilateral Control's definition here.

  Having goals is essential to being effective as an individual, team, and organization. But when you use a unilateral control mindset, you see challenging situations as a contest in which there are winners and losers.


Does psychology have a name for emotions that a person can feel but cannot name? This is sort of an inverse of this other question.

To explain what I am looking for, I had this experience when I was a teenager that a much older friend (who wanted me to feel as part of a group of people my age) took me to a party with quite a few other teenagers.

People at the party seemed nice and friendly but after being there just a minute or so I got an uncomfortable feeling and wanted to leave. It could be that this feeling surfaced when that friend told me that he was going to leave me and pick me up later.

He was not very happy about me wanting to leave as well but at that time I was not able to articulate to him how I felt. Also because I had not felt that feeling in earlier situations (likely because I had not had much social interaction in groups like that before) that feeling just seemed weird to me.

Many years later when I was pondering on that memory and realized that the uncomfortable feeling I had was simply a feeling of being intimidated (most likely about the social situation). I did also realize that this probably could have been minimized by some preparation (he had not told me in advance that there was this party going on where he wanted to drop me off).

Anyway, my question is about this aspect of feeling something but not being able to articulate what it was. Is there a formal name for this phenomenon in psychology?

The term used for recognizing emotions is affect labeling (also know as emotions labelling). The act of labelling an emotion requires similar cognitive mechanisms used for labelling a cat or a dog (Concept). Like any other concept learning, affect labeling requires training and experience.

Labelling emotions is very importand beacuse it can help regulate emotions effectively.

  This impoverished emotional labeling is, in turn, associated with
  deficits regulating those emotions (see Vine & Aldao, 2014). In other
  words, the less aware we are of our emotions, the less likely we are
  to figure out how to best regulate them.

In this article you can find some practical advice how to better understand your emotions.


Can you retain a large number in your head for an extended period of time without distortion? If someone where to recite "794 times 869", they might struggle to retain the numbers pitch perfect in their head as I perform the calculations.

Are there any exercises one could perform to improve his/her visual retention of objects and numbers in their heads?

Can you hold the number 7859385 in your head for an extended period without the image of the number becoming distorted at any point?

Note that I have cross-posted on Math SE.

Yes, you can train your memory to be better at certain tasks, such as remembering numbers.

For example Ericcson et. al. (1980) describe a university student who practiced memorizing numbers several times per week for twenty months and could then memorize and recall more than 70 digits reliably.

I would not recommend such however if you are looking for general purpose memory function. The benefits gained from cognitive training are shallow and do not transfer from one skill to another. For example, while the student was a genius at memorizing numbers, when asked to memorize letters he was not better than a normal person

References

Ericcson KA, Chase WG, Faloon S (June 1980). "Acquisition of a memory skill". Science 208 (4448): 1181–2.


What would happen if we cut the corpus callosum? How would a two-halved brain work? If it would, could we still control things like motion, and would hearing, vision, and other senses still function?

Basically the same as a normal two-halved brain. Circumstances in which function is altered are fairly limited. For details, see case reports on Wikipedia's split-brain page, and this episode of Scientific American Frontiers that features Mike Gazzaniga's research, as mentioned here. Gazzaniga's research was reviewed in a Nature news feature (Wolman, 2012), which you may also find helpful.

Also, yes to all questions of control, except maybe hearing...not sure how we control that normally, other than in terms of attention (see "Do we only hear what we want to hear?"), which still operates normally AFAIK. Control breaks down unusually in mostly special circumstances where stimuli are presented to only one side of the brain. Both ears usually hear most sounds, and both eyes' fields of vision overlap quite a lot, so these circumstances need to be created experimentally to demonstrate really clear effects.


What is the brain doing when someone tries to solve a physics or math problem that they can’t make any progress on? Is their brain actually working or is it day dreaming and not functioning if they’re staring at a physics problem and not capable of making any progress on it?

When a student who can’t come up with any ideas to write longer essays is trying to come up with sentences to write about, what is their brain doing if they’re not making any progress for a long time? Is it actually working or does it refuse to fire neurons to come up with ideas?

Is the reason some people can’t do physics because their brains can’t fire electricity at a high enough amplitude?

To survive, the brain has evolved to solve problems it faces at the best it can, from the problems of escaping a stalking tiger, finding food, competing for the fit mate in the ancient time to solving physics/math problems, trying to make ends meet, and planning for a secure future in the present time.

But the ability for a particular brain to solve any problem depends on both the hard-wiring of the involved neural circuits of the cognitive areas and the information, both declarative (the memory that you’re conscious of) and non-declarative (the skills, the experiences you’ve learned), that the brain has. The hard-wiring is mostly genetically-determined, which is different among individuals, but is and can be modified by practicing, aging, and diseases. The information the brain has is determined by what the brain has accrued from previous encounters, which are obviously vastly different among individuals. So, the ability to solve problems among different brain are different.

That’s why some people are genius, some are average, and some are handicapped. But no matter of what type they are, in the normal conditions, their brains always try to do it best to solve problems because it is inherent in the nature of the brain to do so. Of course, in some situations such as when the brain is bored from repeated stimuli, fatigued from prolonged working, in a sleepy stage, or in a pathological stage (i.e., having a cerebral concussion, an encephalopathy, or an encephalitis), it might not try to solve the problems as usual. But those are abnormal conditions.

So, when a student who can’t come up with any ideas to write longer essays is trying to come up with sentences to write about, the brain is still working and does not refuse to fire neurons to come up with ideas. And the ability to solve problems is not about firing electricity in the brain at a high enough amplitude but is about firing signals in the correct ways in the capable and knowledgeable neural circuits, which depend on the hard-wiring and the information as mentioned above.

Accordingly, to be better at solving problems, one has to practice solving problems (this will modify the hard-wiring of the involved neural circuits) and learn more and more (this will help increase the information that may be useful in solving problems).

You may find more information about the brain function on the net. The fairly good  and not-very to understand one is Neuroscience
(Purves D, Augustine GJ, David Fitzpatrick D, Hall WC, Lamantia AS, McNamara JO, Williams SM, editors. Neuroscience. 3rd ed. Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates Inc; 2004. ISBN-13: 9780878937257 ISBN-10: 0878937250.) in Unit IV  The Changing Brain and Unit V Complex Brain Functions.


Do unschooled persons think differently from us (schooled persons)? How? Through past experiences, I am convinced that "unschooled communities" such as tribals, nomads, cattle-herders, etc. (and persons belonging to such communities) have very different ways of thinking through and negotiating everyday issues. We schooled people construct our thoughts in "a different language", and face great difficulties in communicating and negotiating with them (aside from simple tasks such as buying their produce).

Do the schooled have thinking systems that are substantially different from the unschooled?

If so, what are the prominent differences?

Given that 1) schooling intentionally exposes individuals to conventionally prescribed concepts they would otherwise not be exposed to, entailing formation of neurally encoded cognitive representations thereof at different levels of context-specificity (concreteness) and context-generality (abstractedness) and that 2) metacognitive activity (i.e. thinking and thought-processes) is concerned with the accessing and structuring of concepts seemingly relevant to one another, and can entail the emergence both of new levels of awareness and of thinking-related skills, it is logically predictable that wide differences in the nature of schooled and unschooled individuals' thinking would occur.


Effect of variability due during motor skill training When training fine motor skills, are identically setup practice sessions ideal or, like machine learning, does adding noise/variability to the practice session increase skill acquisition?

According to "Motor Skills Are Strengthened through Reconsolidation" (available through SciHub) adding variability to practice sessions increases learning speed. In the paper, patients were directed to move a cursor on a screen to certain targets via pinch force. Patients who's pinch force mapping was modified during each trial ended up learning faster and performing better on the original pinch task.


What type of data can we get from fMRI to calculate correlations? Lets say we want to compare the correlation between the activation one part of the brain and rise in value of other variable. The design would be within subjects.

What is the data that we can receive from the fMRI from one specific brain area(e.g. temporal cortex) to use to calculate the correlation.

The BOLD response is used in fMRI to provide a quantified measure of activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemodynamic_response. It is based on the ratio of oxygenated vs. non-oxygenated blood, implying blood flow, and inferred to mean more processing or activation of those brain areas.


What is the voltage that an intracortical electrode is expected to receive? When a neuron fires, an action potential of about 100 mV is generated. An electrode measuring brain activity will record several hundreds neurons at a time. How much voltage an electrode directly in contact with brain tissue is expected to receive?

The Utah array is a multi-electrode array for intracortical recordings. In one of many publications on this device, the authors show some sample traces that reveal amplitudes generally between 5 and 40 microVolts. However, measured voltage will depend on the vigilance state of the brain, recording area, time on the millisecond scale, time on the macro scale (gliosis) and insertion depth and so forth.

Note that extracellular electrodes will never measure the high potentials that occur at the membrane surface as recorded through intracellular electrodes. Because of the distance of extracellular electrodes to the neuronal cell membranes, the signals are much smaller.

Reference
- Craig et al., Electroencephal clin Neurophysiol (1997); 102: 228-239


Are societies capable of sacrificing time and energy exclusively for the benefit of future generations? I was thinking on how environment conservation efforts might be enhanced or enforced and I was reflecting that people have to develop a colective conscience that would allow them to spend extra time and work for the good of the community and for the future generations, and not necessarily for an immediate benefit.

The question I keep asking myself is whether people are actually capable of this mindset. Are there any documented cases in history where a society has altruistically created or conserved something exclusively for the benefit of next generations?

An good example of such behavior would be the following: the inhabitants of a region discover a deposit of gold and instead of going full force with the extraction, they rationalize thinking that the gold might benefit their children.

I regard building cities as a method for the aim of satisfying day to day needs and art as a mean to not be forgotten.

Can this type of altruistic behavior propagate even in a society that doesn’t meet the best quality of life standards and where most members are not highly educated?

Short answer
Yes

Background
Consider the following organizations solely acting for preservation:

WWF for example attempts to conserve Wildlife and Marine Parks
UNESCO protects cultural properties

One way they do this is by outreach to local communities and educate them on the value of stretches of land. For example see

How the local (poor) community fishermen are approached to save the vaquita (Nicholls, 2017)  (in an admittedly futile attempt, as there are about 14 left)
Sustainable coffee and cacao production by local farmers in the sensitive Amazone Bassin

So yes, I don't know if this is what you're after, but of course communities can be put to work for the greater cause.

Further, as others have pointed out, this is borderline ontopic here imo, but it is an interesting and hot issue nonetheless.

Reference
-  Nicholls, Sci Am, April 2017)


The effects of online chat on written language skills With the advent of texting and online social networking. There has been a dictionary of new words and acronyms, based on abbreviations. I have noticed that I will misuse there, they're and their, hear and here... and the incidence of my grammatical errors has increased with the increase in longevity of my online and text communication.

I understand this is anecdotal, but I am wondering:
Are there studies showing the effects of online social networking and texting on people's  written language skills?

The research on this topic is limited; it seems, however,  that the advent of online and mobile communication may assist in improving literacy skills of children and people learning a second language.

The use of phonetic abbreviations, assists the learner in developing the connection between verbal and written language. The use of acronyms relies on the users knowledge of how words are spelt. Which requires a presumption of literacy.

Although some studies are inconclusive, the trend shows that texting and online chat assists in child literacy. Enforced limitations on text size, and the use of a, rapidly, evolving language, promotes creativity in the use of written language.

  Recognising that many, if not most, textisms are some form of phonetic
  abbreviation, Plester, Wood and Joshi (2009) argue that to produce and
  read such abbreviations requires, in the texter, a level of
  phonological awareness (and orthographic awareness). While spelled
  incorrectly in a conventional sense, many textisms are phonologically
  acceptable forms of written English. Decades of research has
  demonstrated a consistent association between different forms of
  3phonological awareness and reading attainment.  David Crystal,
  honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, believes
  that sending frequent texts can actually help children to read and
  write because of the abbreviations used. “People have always used
  abbreviations ... They do not actually use that many in texts but when
  they do they are using them in new, playful and imaginative ways that
  benefit literacy” (Leake, 2008).

  Crystal (2008) believes that the widespread concern about the impact
  of texting on children’s literacy is unfounded. The brevity of the
  text style, and the 160 character constraint of an SMS, requires the
  author to write economically, inventively and playfully – doing this
  is good practice when learning to read and write. Wood, Plester and
  Bowyer (2008) concur that “when texting, the children have the freedom
  to ‘play’ with the construction of language that they are learning
  about at school, and are creative in their use of it. They also have
  regular engagement with it.” Plester, Wood and Joshi (2009) believe
  that any engagement with the written word (as opposed to the spoken
  word) – including reading and writing textisms in digital form on
  mobile phones – is beneficial for children. Wood, Plester and Bowyer
  (2008) posit that “children’s use of this technology appears to have a
  positive impact on their developing literacy, as it provides children
  with an additional resource for learning about and experimenting with
  letter-sound correspondences and language, and for reading and
  ‘decoding’ text.” They conclude that “If our children are showing
  difficulties with reading and spelling attainment, it would seem that
  this is in spite of the contribution of textism use, not because of
  it.”

....

  Evolution of language Language changes constantly. To illustrate this
  point, at the beginning of each school year Cindi Rigsbee, a sixth-
  and seventh-grade reading-resource teacher in the USA, shows her
  learners texts from Old English, Middle English, contemporary English
  from the time of Jane Eyre, and a MySpace page. Throughout the year,
  Rigsbee often refers back to this lesson to remind her learners of the
  different forms of writing (Bernard, 2008). Other teachers have
  contrasted IM lingo with Shakespeare to demonstrate how English has
  evolved (Lee, 2002)

(The effects of texting on literacy: Modern scourge or opportunity? - Shuttleworth Foundation)

The use of texting and online chat has also promoted Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The emphasis being on the written language, and the inability to utilize body language, and facial gestures, as a bridge to overcoming learning difficulties.

  It was found that text-based online chat promotes noticing more than
  face-to-face conversations, especially in terms of learners’ noticing
  of their own linguistic mistakes.

....

  Philp’s (1999) findings pushed the agenda of research on noticing away
  from general evidentiary studies on the positive effect of noticing on
  SLA  towards exploratory studies on contextual factors that affect
  noticing. Realizing the potential effect of learners’ memory capacity
  on noticing as laid out in Doughty’s (2001) cognitive comparison
  framework, Mackey, Philp, Egi, Fujii, and Tatsumi (2002) designed a
  study to explore the relationship between learners’ working memory
  (WM) capacities and their noticing of interactional feedback. They
  found that there was a positive relationship between WM capacities and
  their noticing of interactional feedback, and that learners at lower
  developmental levels exhibited more   noticing than those at higher
  levels.

(NOTICING AND TEXT-BASED CHAT, Chun Lai and Yong Zhao, Michigan State University)

It is unclear what the advent of technological communication has upon the literacy of   adult native language. Any links to current research on this would be welcome.

Note I would like to acknowledge that I have used the links provided in the comments to answer this question.

Will update answer upon acquisition of new material.


Why does appreciation make us happy? Why does one crave facebook likes or a pat on the back. Our actions are always governed by this phenomenon, and I don't understand why.

From a biological viewpoint, these experiences are associated with the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin, which activate the "reward pathway" of the brain that is associated with feelings of happiness and mood alleviation. Since these are pleasurable experiences, we crave more and more of it, which is why a lot of our actions are governed by it.

References:

The Science of Happiness. (2016). More Good Deeds. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from https://www.moregooddeeds.org/blog/2017/1/20/the-science-of-happiness

Fehlhaber, K. (2012). The Reward Pathway Reinforces Behavior - Knowing Neurons. Knowing Neurons. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://knowingneurons.com/2012/10/31/the-reward-pathway-reinforces-behavior/

Icahn School of Medicine | Neuroscience Department | Nestler Lab | Brain Reward Pathways. (2017). Neuroscience.mssm.edu. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://neuroscience.mssm.edu/nestler/brainRewardpathways.html

Know your brain: Reward system. (2015). Neuroscientifically Challenged. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://www.neuroscientificallychallenged.com/blog/know-your-brain-reward-system


MEG from simulated neurons Given MEG is an approximation of neuronal spiking, are there any models that associate the spiking of simulated neurons to an MEG signal? Ideally, this would be a model with some amount of behaviour (mapping to an output, such as a motor action), but purely biological models are fine too.

Techniques that measure brain activity at a distance such as EEG and MEG measure spiking activity very poorly and indirectly. Instead, these techniques primarily measure synaptic currents.

Synaptic currents of course originate in some way from spiking activity, however:

Synaptic currents may not occur in the vicinity of the spiking cells
The amplitude of synaptic currents depends on the current state of the cells impinged upon
Synaptic currents of different types in the same area can cancel each other out
Phase, polarity, and geometry can lead to a complex inverse problem at the sensor that has an infinite number of solutions.

However, by making some rather strong assumptions, one can attempt to solve this inverse problem. Higher frequency EEG/MEG activity is more closely associated with spiking activity, and therefore most appropriate for attempting to localize spiking rather than other types of activity. See for example David and Friston 2003.

I'd also add that although the current agreement seems to be that EEG/MEG primarily come from synaptic currents, because synaptic currents do originate ultimately from some sort of spiking, EEG/MEG signals can correlate well with spiking activity measured with depth electrodes (for example Whittingstall & Logothetis, 2009). It's just likely that the correlation is indirect, mediated through synaptic potentials.

Buzsáki, G., Anastassiou, C. A., & Koch, C. (2012). The origin of extracellular fields and currents—EEG, ECoG, LFP and spikes. Nature reviews neuroscience, 13(6), 407.

David, O., & Friston, K. J. (2003). A neural mass model for MEG/EEG:: coupling and neuronal dynamics. NeuroImage, 20(3), 1743-1755.

Whittingstall, K., & Logothetis, N. K. (2009). Frequency-band coupling in surface EEG reflects spiking activity in monkey visual cortex. Neuron, 64(2), 281-289.


In which situation should structural dissociation theory be applied? In which specific situation you think is most appropriate to apply Van der Hart's SDT?

According to a presentation given by Van Der Hart "Structural Dissociation of the
Personality: The Key to Understanding
Chronic Traumatization and Its
Treatment", this theory relates to the response to trauma, described further in the paper "Trauma-related dissociation: conceptual
clarity lost and found" (Hart et al. 2004).  From the abstract:

  It postulates a common psychobiological pathway for all
  trauma-related disorders. Trauma-related dissociation is maintained by integrative deficits
  and phobic avoidance. This conceptualization advances diagnosis, classification, treatment
  and research of trauma-related disorders.


What is the relationship between perceived difficulty and mistakes/errors? I'm looking for any empirical research about the correlation between the perceived difficulty level of humans and the mistake / errors they make while performing a task.

I would prefer studies with longer/more realistic tasks compared to simple task performed in the lab. I would also prefer studies in the field of software engineering.

So far I could only find one study in this direction:

Varying task difficulty in the Go/Nogo task: The effects of inhibitory control, arousal, and perceived effort on ERP components

Are there others with longer/more realistic tasks?

Here is an article that seems to describe what you are looking for. The researchers sought to test factors that influence the performance of software engineers. To quote from the abstract:

  Goal difficulty has a negative relationship to performance but a positive relationship to effort. Because of this off-setting effect, the degree of goal difficulty has a relatively small overall effect on performance. Goal clarity also has a relatively small effect on performance. Individual ability has the strongest direct effect on perceived performance, more than twice as strong as the effects of work effort, personality dimensions, and perceived characteristics of the task. High achievement needs were directly related to both effort and perceived performance, whereas self-esteem and locus of control have a direct relationship to perceived performance

In summary, it looks like an increase in perceived task difficulty lends itself to an increase in effort, but not overall task performance. Perceived performance is strongly tied to the individual's self-esteem and locus of control.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this in my original post, but you might find it useful to know that there is also research on effort level relative to task difficulty. This study assigned computer tasks that ranged in difficulty, and then gave participants high or low levels of reinforcement for performance on the task. The participants then were given an anagram task to measure performance.

  ...individuals who were highly reinforced for performance on the low-difficulty computer task spent less time persisting on the subsequent anagram task, demonstrating that the low level of effort generalized to another activity. Additionally, individuals who were given low levels of reinforcement for performance on the moderately high-difficulty computer task spent more time persisting on the anagram task. This demonstrated that the effort exerted on the first task, paired with low levels of reinforcement, generalized to the following task. However, participants who were given the highest-difficulty computer tasks did not generalize this effort. According to the researchers, this version of the task was so difficult that the participants could not succeed and thus demonstrated a pattern of behaviors similar to learned helplessness.

1


Why do suicide has been kept in natural selection? Since I've heard about evolution theory, I tend to think about new things with the help of this theory. While not being always accurate, I find the reasoning that makes this theory possible very interesting.

We can ask a question like Why do humans have 2 eyes? and answer hypothetically that it was more advantageous for creatures to have 2 eyes than having 1 or 3. We can imagine that having 1 eye wouldn't allow to see the depth and make the creature able to live even when losing 1 eye. This answer isn't correct but makes sense.

We can do the same with behavior. Why do we tend to be jealous? We can imagine that forcing your sexual partner to stay with you gives your more chances to spread your genes. I'm not saying that this is the only answer but that's one hypothetical answer that makes sense.

However, what about suicide? From what I have read, people tend to suicide when their amount of pain is higher than what they can support. I don't see any reason why creatures(or anything from bacteria to human) would be advantaged from committing suicide. Why didn't the natural selection keep the individuals that can endure anything since they have more chances to stay alive and spread their genes?

This assumes that tendency to suicide is hereditary. It seems that currently, the consensus is that suicide risk can be increased by environmental factors as well as by family history, so it may only be partially encoded in our genes.

For that part of the 'suicide genes' that does survive the natural selection, some of the possible explanations could be that people who commit suicide may have already had children, so their genes have been passed on to the next generation.

Another explanation could be, linked to what Yuval Noah Harari mentioned in "Sapiens". Hunter-gatherers were constantly on the move and it was not uncommon for them to kill or leave behind the elderly or individuals who would otherwise be a burden or slow down the tribe. It became a social norm, potentially to the point where the sick individuals would be ready to commit suicide themselves. The tribes which practised this were able to hunt and gather more, increasing their chances of survival.

All this is, however, a speculation, it is very hard to prove the evolutionary causes of suicides under scientific rigour, especially when running a controlled study is almost impossible. Even if we were able to run a controlled study, we'd most likely find that there is a large number of factors that allowed suicide genes to prevail.


Do people who experience heautoscopy become unable to see their reflected image in a mirror? I understand that people who experience autoscopy can see their body image outside them without a mirror. I had read many years back in a paper that people who experience the inverse phenomenon called "heautoscopy" become unable to see their body image in a mirror. I am not able to trace that paper. It is correct? Is there any place I can read more about it?

While acknowledging the fact that Google delivers personalized results, I am fairly sure a Google search for "heautoscopy" will deliver you bucket loads of papers to read - I have copied a random handful for your convenience below under 'further reading'.
However, a popular source seems to contradict your definition, as it states heautoscopy as being:

A hallucination in which one sees one's own body from a distance.
Heautoscopy may occur as a symptom in schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Your own referenced Brugger (2002) paper gives a nice definition of both terms in one go:

In an autoscopic hallucination the observer's perspective is clearly body-centred, and the visual image of one's own body appears as a mirror reversal. Heautoscopy (i.e., the encounter with an alter ego or doppelgänger), is defined as a reduplication not only of bodily appearance, but also of aspects of one's psychological self.

Not being able to see ones own reflection in a mirror would be an entirely different phenomenon, more akin to mirrored-self misidentification
Further reading
- Blanke & Mohr, Brain Res Brain Res Rev (2005); 50(1): 184-99
- Brugger, Cogn Neuropsychiatry (2002); 7(3): 179-94
- Brugger et al., J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry (1994); 57(7): 838–39


The unpredictable loading bar -- or, the slot machine effect Say we A-B tested user reactions to completing some task (e.g. transferring files, restarting their device): would people be quicker to get impatient/ annoyed if they got random percentages as indicators of progress, or if they had a steady, accurate progress bar? What if it was steady but NOT accurate?
When would people experience the most intense emotional drops or rises? Would the slot machine effect play a part, i.e. would the chance of getting a "big" leap (21% towards update installation!) keep users waiting patiently during the slower progress intervals?
This question is based off a wandering thought while my laptop was restarting recently, as well as some basic psych understanding. I can certainly see it being possible that people would, on average, be more willing to wait for a 2/3/8 min update with erratic progress than 1/2/5 mins with steady progress.
I'd be interested if anyone knows of such/similar studies and, if so, what conclusions they reached.
Edit: internet legend Tom Scott came through and discussed this topic recently, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZnLZFRylbs!

A couple of studies (Harrison et al, 2007; Amer & Johnson, 2016) tested pauses/stalls in progress, and concluded (respectively): "... participants perceived progress bars with pauses as taking longer to complete ..." and "... participants preferred a progress bar that moves consistently to a stalling progress bar, and judged the process duration to be shorter ..." suggesting that continuous/steady progress bars are preferred by users over intermittent/random indicators.
There is much more research on continuous progress indicators (eg, Villar, Callegaro, & Yang, 2013; Liu & Wronski, 2018) that suggests that users generally prefer fast-to-slow / decelerating progress - that is, inaccurate progress bars that overestimate progress early on.  Slot machines similarly use early success to increase player perseverance, a kind of anchoring bias.  However, most of this research is on progress indicators for active tasks such as filling out surveys.  Some experiments with passive waiting (like file transfers) align with their results (eg, Gronier & Baudet, 2019; Kuroki & Ishihara, 2015), but other studies show a preference for accelerating progress instead (eg, Harrison et al, 2007), so I would wait for a meta-analysis specific to passive tasks before making a firm conclusion.
There are also various exploratory studies testing alternative progress bar displays, such as different colours and shapes, designs and animations, adding audio and video, suggesting that user perceptions can be altered in a variety of novel ways.  As well, progress indicators on passive tasks may be affected by the labour illusion, in which user experience is influenced by the perceived amount of work done.


Name or theory for a particular phenomenon pertaining to ideological possession Is there a name or a theory for when someone alters a truth to strengthen their point(delusion)?

For instance, remember when President Trump carried out his plan to deport "illegal" immigrants and the lefties painted a different picture by their "Day without immigrant" story to portray the administrators as cold mean bullies, as opposed to saying "Day without ILLEGAL immigrants"?

It is a phenomenon where individuals will consciously alter something, not intentionally to lie malevolently, but strengthen their (obviously) weak point(something to do with ideological possession).

Is there an official name or theory for this, like, "So-and-so's theory of  such and such" or is there rather a study with conclusive data/research on the phenomenon?

There is a fallacy in thinking called "confirmation bias" in which one only looks at or perceives "facts" in light of, or to support, their pre-conceived notions.
Here is the definition of confirmation bias:

  The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

See confirmation bias definition.
Of interest see also article in Psychology Today


Asaccadia adaptation Can asaccadia (i.e., lack of saccades, due to neuronal or muscular damage) be overcome? Do other muscles (e.g., neck) compensate? Are the resulting gaze patterns the same as for saccades, and are they involuntary the way saccades are?

Conversely, in normal vision, is the saccade-fixation system specially wired, or is it merely the optimal way to visually examine the world?

Hmm... Saccadic eye movements typically occur several times  per second.  I doubt that one's neck can move with such frequency.

In normal vision, saccades are necessary because of the anatomy of the eye. There is a region of the retina called the fovea, where the density of cones peaks sharply. In fact, there are virtually no cones outside the fovea, and the density of rods also falls off as we move away from the fovea.  This means, that at any given moment we only see a very small region in the center of the field of view in color and at a high resolution.  If you stick out your arm in front of your face, and look at your thumb, your thumbnail would fill your fovea.  Everything else is the periphery, which is blurry and gray.

So why do you have the illusion that you always see a vivid picture of the world in full color?  Because of the saccades.  Your eyes constantly move, and sample the visual field at a high resolution. Multiple fixations produce multiple images which are clear and colorful in the center, and blurry in the periphery.  Your visual system integrates these images into a seemingly coherent and vivid view of the world.

Google "change blindness" to see demonstrations of this illusion.


Getting analysis of changes in MY brain upon cannabis consumption I want to know if/how my brain differs from other brains. I'm also interested in knowing exactly how my brain changes when I smoke marijuana, as it is claimed that it affects individuals differently. Fortunately I live in the Netherlands. Is it likely that researchers would welcome me to come, scan my brain, let me get high and do some more scanning? If the case is that researchers crave material, then this seems like a win-win.

Both the Amsterdam University (UvA) and Radboud University use a public online system for applying for participation in experiments. I forget which system UvA uses, but Radboud uses the sona system (just google it, you can creat an account). There you can see ongoing studies and apply for experiments. Both these cities are big research hubs for neuroimaging. And other universities surely also have similar systems for recruiting participants, but I don't have experience with them so I don't know.

That being said, nobody will tell you about the difference between your brain and other brains. This is simply not a topic of research. It's kind of like asking what's the difference between this grain of sand and all other grains - there are too many to list, the similarities stick out more clearly, and even if there are some differences who knows which ones are important. Neuroscience is a new thing, and we're still cataloging the basics. Unless there's something grossly distorted about your brain, nobody can give it a casual look and tell you something about your personality or behaviour. And if there is something grossly distorted, they'll contact your doctor, and not discuss it with you directly.

On the other hand, if there are marijuana studies you can take part and ask for feedback. At the Donders Institute in Nijmegen you can get a CD with your brain scan for your participation. But the feedback you get will depend on the question the researcher is asking. Typically this question would pertain to shared effects of marijuana on everyone, and not to individual differences. Individual differences studies are still rare, as they require huge numbers of participants while scanning resources are very limited and costly.