Can a brain be modeled as a simplified interaction of different states and their triggers? I've long been interested in the concept of "states of mind", which influence the perception of the outside world and outlook on past, present and future. They can be thought of as "colored lenses" through which the world is perceived. Each state has a certain trigger. Some example states are:

Anxiety - world is a terrible place full of danger
Sexual arousal  - brain notices sexual stimuli more and reduces inhibitions
Creative inspiration - ideas fly and there's a drive to create

Today I've read about an experiment to replicate a part of a rat brain in supercomputer. The following quote jumped at me as rather significant:

  The researchers wrote, that the slow synchronous waves of neuronal
  activity, which have been found in the brain during sleep, were
  ‘triggered’ during the simulations, suggesting that neural circuits
  may have the unique ability to able to switch into different ‘modes’
  that could explain critical behaviours.

  “An analogy would be a computer processer that can reconfigure to
  focus on certain tasks. The experiments suggest the existence of a
  spectrum of states, so this raises new types of questions, such as
  ‘what if you’re stuck in the wrong state?” said Markram.

I read that the project is criticized due to it's complexity, seems like they are working from the bottom up, which makes me ask:

Are there projects out there that attempt to model the brain from the higher levels of abstraction (discrete states and their triggers) down to more detail?

To use a computer analogy - instead of writing very low level binary code, I can take a high level programming library and work with that. Is there research in this direction?

This image is an example of a state machine - a system is modelled in terms of discrete states and their interactions. The author does not concern themselves with interaction of individual neurons, instead with higher level states:

My answer is probably a weird hodgepodge of sometimes poorly explained stuff, but hopefully it's coherent enough :P

For many decades in psychology, we've had a mechanistic stimulus-organism-response understanding of the brain.  That is, a stimulus triggers an internal psychological process, which produces some behavioral response.  One of the major limitations of this kind of thinking is that it assumes that the mind is at rest until it's stimulated by something in the environment (even if we add a recursive component to it). However, this is fundamentally untrue.

Instead, the brain is a predictive organ (e.g., Clark, 2013). It's loaded with prior knowledge about past experiences, which is constantly used to predict incoming sensory information. If there is a discrepancy between incoming information and past experience (i.e., prediction error), then our knowledge is updated. This is most clearly seen in the literature on vision, which shows how top-down expectations and prior knowledge robustly bias early visual activity, even in the absence of a visual stimulus (Summerfield & de Lange, 2014). The trigger-state model could not easily account for this.

Moreover, dividing up the brain into mental states may not actually represent how the brain functions.  The brain isn't really faithful to the kinds of distinctions we make between cognition and emotion, for example (e.g., Barrett, 2009; Pessoa, 2008).  And not only that, those higher order states like anxiety and sexual arousal can be represented in the brain in many different ways. Indeed, there is no dedicated mechanism in the brain or body for producing states like anxiety or creative inspiration (e.g., Wager et al., 2015).  They're merely concepts for organizing and communicating our experience.  And even then, our brain may not really "have" concepts (see Laurence Barsalou's work; but see also Blouw, Solodkin, Thagard, & Eliasmith, 2015), although it may have a conceptual system that allows us to conceptualize (e.g., Barsalou, 2005).

So I guess what I'm getting at is that brain function is nonlinear, spatiotemporally dynamic, and doesn't adhere to folk psychological categories. Thus, it would probably be difficult to understand the brain by attempting to reduce linear trigger-state relationships to the level of networks, regions, and cells. However, maybe (probably) someone has a better informed, more balanced answer than me! :)


How does the brains "focused" and "diffused" modes facilitate learning? I am insatiably curious about the topic of "accelerated learning".

Think about that scene in the matrix where trinity downloads the skill of how to fly a helicopter into her brain in a few seconds. :)

By "accelerated learning", I mean committing new information to long term memory in a highly recallable fashion with maximum efficiency - i.e. minimum time.

I believe that developing the optimal accelerated learning algorithm requires a deep understanding of how the brain actually learns (at the level of neurons and synapses).

It is from this perspective, that I am considering these 2 "modes" of the brain called "focused mode" and "diffused mode".

I would like to state my intuition about how these 2 modes are used by the brain to learn and then have someone more knowledgeable than I tell me where I am wrong. Or perhaps improve the explanation.

My intuition is that "diffused mode" is about making associations.
i.e. Noticing how things are similar.

When we learn something new, we try to associate it to something we already know.
Like maybe when you see a pomelo for the first time, you might associate it to a grapefruit.

My intuition is that "focused mode" is about making discernments.
i.e. Noticing how things are different.

For example, a pomelo is different than a grapefruit in several ways:
It's bigger.
It's inner skin is thicker.

I think the process of learning the concept of "pomelo" then involves refining a "sparse distributed representation" of the object in the brain.

A "sparse distributed representation" is just a bunch of neurons that fire together to signify the thought of a unique concept.

So learning involves starting with a sparse distributed representation for an existing concept that we are familiar with, and then making changes to that representation via discernment until we have a new unique "sparse distributed representation" for our new concept.

Is this correct?

A big assumption here is that diffuse mode is something you can activate at any time. Where as most teachers on the subject view it as a process that activates through inattention (think daydreaming). Inattention can be difficult with work, commute, home, and family as sources of stress or focus.

Another is that focused mode is only for unique identification. Every researcher I've come across acknowledges that making connections is readily available in the focused mode, but it's going to be more limited to the concept you're working with. In her class on Learning how to Learn Barbara Oakley states,

  With the focus mode... You're able to figure out the problem you're trying to solve or the concept you're trying to understand while it's related to something you're rather familiar with.

Segway into the zero-sum-game of these modes. While one is turning on the other is turning off. Not in a binary sense, but along a spectrum. Which is why you might let a problem sit in the back of your mind while you work on similar subjects and all of a sudden you reach an 'aha' moment and make the final necessary connection. Or at least move onto next steps. Instead of inattention to a problem leading you straight into sandy beaches. Again from Barbara Oakley,

  As far neuroscientists know right now, you're either in the focus mode or the diffuse mode of thinking. Being in one mode seems to limit your access to the other mode.

Salvador Dali would take advantage of the diffuse mode and spoke about such with his "sleeping key" method. The idea is to relax to the point you're about to enter the first stage of sleep while keeping a primary thought in mind. As you drift off you'll lose focus letting your mind make connections, until the key drops and you wake up ready to jot down ideas or work.

Further Reading:

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, "Rest is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain's
Default Mode for Human Development and Education"


where can i find preprocessed fmri data set for alzheimer's disease I want to work on identification of Alzheimer's patients based on given fMRI data.Basically, I want to implement the following paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25907414. Where can I get preprocessed dataset or how can I preprocess dataset?

See https://www.reddit.com/r/neuro/comments/5y4pta/does_anyone_know_where_i_can_find_a_repository_of/ for a similar question.

Websites that were posted there include http://www.humanconnectome.org/data/, http://neurovault.org, http://www.ppmi-info.org, https://openfmri.org/, http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/abide/ and http://radiopaedia.org.  Some of those are repositories of data for other diseases, but their control scans could be useful.


Relation between L-glutamine supplementation and risk of schizophrenia There is the glutamate hypothesis of schizophrenia. Which tells you that excessive levels may increase the risk of obtaining schizophrenia.

L-glutamine turns into glutamate directly. Does this mean that L-glutamine supplementation, which is common among bodybuilders, increases the risk?

Glutamate availability in the brain is strictly dependent on de novo synthesis of glutamine in astrocytes. This process  requires the enzymes pyruvate carboxylase and glutamine synthetase to form glutamine, which is then converted into glutamate by deamidation via phosphate-activated glutaminase in a reaction that also yields ammonia (Schousboe et al., 2014).

In other words, whatever you ingest in terms of glutamate or glutamine via your food doesn't reach the brain and won't play a role in psychosis.

This is good news, as glutamate is an abundant, naturally occurring amino acid and is found in tomatoes, grapes, cheese, mushrooms and other foods. It is also widely used as a flavor enhancer with an umami taste that intensifies the meaty, savory flavor of food. It's commonly used in stock, soups, ramen, savoury snacks etc. (source: wikipedia).

Reference
- Schousboe et al., Adv Neurobiol (2014); 11:13-30


Game-theory strategies to overcome holdout problem? The hold-out problem often occurs in debt-restructuring or in urban development.

The hold-out problem is defined where an agent, for example a land developer, must negotiate with many lot owners and each lot owner must provide their consent in order for a project to proceed. However, since the agents know that their consent is required they can extract a portion of the producer surplus in excess of their opportunity costs. The net effect is that such large-scale projects are underproduced.

There are legal remedies to address this underproduction. Eminent domain is a legal tool to overcome hold-out problems, however, it does not consider pareto-efficiency. It's not at all clear whether developers that exercise eminent domain are increasing social welfare or simply have better influence over a political process to transfer resources from one group to another.

Ideally, we would like a voluntary bargaining solution that all (or most) parties agree to that produces a socially efficient amount. A bargaining solution should always be arrived at when the social utility of the production exceeds the opportunity costs of each individual and the producer cost.

What bargaining "game" could be designed (and enforced or enabled by a legal process) so that such a procedure could be applied to hold-out problems?

The hold-out problem is much studied and has even been associated with IP disputes (especially relevant in an age where a complex device like a mobile phone can involve license agreements between hundreds of companies).

Some of the consequences being identified as a result of the hold-out problem include urban sprawl (easier to develop green-fields sites), urban decay (hold-outs prevent urban renewal), and even disruption of the innovation and investment cycle (hold-outs over-value their IP contribution and innovators then refuse to invest).

In Imminently Eminent: A Game Theoretic Analysis of Takings Since Kelo v. City of New London, Alex Hornaday proposes the following game:

Game participants include a Developer and an Owner;
Developer values Owner's property at $x$;
Owner values property in a range $p_1$ to $p_2$ such that $p_1 < x < p_2$;
Basic play:

Developer offers price $x_1$;
Owner either accepts or rejects $x_1$;
if Owner rejects $x_1$, Developer may quit bargaining or offer price $x_2$;
if Developer offers price $x_2$, Owner either accepts or rejects $p_2$;
if Owner rejects $x_2$ and the Developer has the power of eminent domain, Developer may then choose either to do nothing or to condemn;

Hornaday also includes a penalty which the Owner would incur during round 2.  He acknowledges that much of this is Pareto-inefficient as either (or both) parties are forced into a loss following an unsatisfactory conclusion.

The oversimplification here is that hold-outs tend to occur when multiple parties need to negotiate.  In that case the last part to negotiate a deal is able to exert a monopoly pricing power over the other parties.

Eminent domain certainly offers the eventuality of a result (from the Developer's perspective) but can be distortionary (since either party may have insufficient negotiating power to secure an ideal result).

My answer, at this point, becomes speculative and I offer this untested as a potential model for achieving a "better" response amongst multiple parties.  It is based on the concept of optimal reservation prices in auctions.

Supplementing Hornaday's game as follows:

Developer makes a sealed reserve offer, $r_1$, for all properties from all Owners;
All Owners make a sealed pooled reserve request, $r_2$, for all properties;
Negotiator establishes whether $r_1$ and $r_2$ are aligned;
If not, then an assessment (legal and social) must take place (at Developer's expense) if the Developer wishes to continue to assess whether eminent domain is even possible (not a decision, however, so pertaining to a negotiation only);
If negotiation is possible, or if eminent domain is a viable solution to negotiation, then price negotiation can continue with all parties knowing where they stand.

We can now continue with the original game.  I believe that there need to be sufficient inducements and penalties for the Owners (inducements for early settlement, penalties for holding out) to balance the Developer's costs in the process.

Obviously, if the reserve prices make a settlement unlikely and eminent domain would not be possible, then the Developer must walk away and pocket the costs of the process to that point.


Psilocybin for treatment of anxiety disorder Has psilocybin been used for treatment of anxiety disorder? I've mostly found it used in the treatment of depression in patients diagnosed with cancer (Nichols et al. 2017) and patients not diagnosed with anything at all (Griffiths et al. 2006). Alternatively, how legitimate is it to generalize the results of the cancer patients to a chronic anxiety disorder patient?

Nichols, D. E., Johnson, M. W., & Nichols, C. D. (2017). Psychedelics as medicines: an emerging new paradigm. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 101(2), 209-219.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187(3), 268-283.

There has been some preliminary research in the 1960's. From "The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders" by Vollenweider and Kometer:

Psycholytic therapy was introduced by Ronald Sandison and applied in
Europe at 18 treatment centres. In psycholytic therapy, low to
moderate doses of LSD (50–100 μg), psilocybin (10–15 mg) or,
sporadically, ketamine were used repeatedly as an adjunct in
psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy to accelerate the
therapeutic process by facilitating regression and the recollection
and release of emotionally loaded repressed memories, and by
increasing the transference reaction. A review of 42
studies reported impressive improvement rates in (mostly
treatment-resistant) patients with anxiety disorders (improvement in
70% of patients), depression (in 62% of patients), personality
disorders (in 53–61% of patients), sexual dysfunction (in 50% of
patients) and obsessive–compulsive disorders (in 42% of patients).
Unfortunately, the majority of these studies had serious
methodological flaws by contemporary standards. In particular, with
the absence of adequate control groups and follow-up measurements and
with vague criteria for therapeutic outcome, the studies did not
clearly establish whether it was the drug or the therapeutic
engagement that produced the reported beneficial effect. It was also
difficult to draw firm conclusions regarding potential long-term
efficacy. Nevertheless, the studies provide a conceptual framework for
the application of psychedelics, with the data suggesting that the
most promising indication for psychedelic use might be found in the
treatment of depression and anxiety disorders.


Are IQ tests "biased" against individuals with Asperger's Syndrome? One person makes the claim over at his response to the Quora question Do people with Asperger's have above-average IQs simply because the ones with below-average IQs simply get diagnosed with autism instead?.

  No.

  Intelligence testing as most neurologically typical people understand
  it, is heavily biased toward individuals with expressive and receptive
  language ability which is often impaired in persons with autism to a
  greater degree than in persons with Asperger's.

  As an example: imagine an intelligence test that was written in
  English being administered to a person who grew up speaking French.
  That person might be quite bright but would likely score very low.
  There have been numerous documented studies of the effect of language
  bias in intelligence testing that makes the idea of standardized
  intelligence testing a questionable endeavor.

  From personal experience, my own son has rather severe language
  impairments and, if tested with a written or verbal test, would almost
  certainly have an MR diagnosis in addition to his autism. However,
  when tested with strictly non-language based testing methods, has
  proven himself to be quite bright (in the empirical sense, that is.
  Watching him spend 30 seconds on a strange computer before finding his
  favorite YouTube videos shows that he knows quite well what he's
  doing).

Is he right when he says that "Intelligence testing as most neurologically typical people understand it, is heavily biased toward individuals with expressive and receptive language ability which is often impaired in persons with autism to a greater degree than in persons with Asperger's."?

And could IQ tests be biased against Aspies in other ways? Could they also be biased in favor of Aspies in certain ways as well?

Depends which IQ test you use - individuals with ASDs show a typical "pattern" on the WAIS, which can cause it to appear like they have lower IQs. When tested with tests which aren't biased in this way, they appear to have the same IQ range as neurotypicals.

The assumption that those with an ASD are cognitively impaired pervades both popular and scientific literature - those who are minimally verbal or non-verbal (i.e. those who do not show fluency in their speech) are often labelled as ‘low-functioning’. The characteristic cognitive profile shown by the WAIS is commonly interpreted as a unified deficit known as ‘weak central coherence’, the tendency to focus on low-level details as opposed to the higher-level ‘whole’ (Happé, 1999). Much of the recent research regarding the neuroanatomical signature of autism relies on the untested assumption that cognitive strengths of autistic individuals as shown by the WAIS are nothing more than low-level by-products of high-level deficits. Dawson et al. (2007) have shown using Raven’s Progressive Matrices (Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998), a complex yet general test of intelligence, that the WAIS severely underestimates autistic intelligence (by an average of 30 percentile points). It is therefore recommended that though the WAIS has a number of useful psychometric properties which can be applied in the diagnosis of autism, it is not used as a measure of intelligence in such populations.

References

Dawson, M., Soulieres, I. Gernsbacher, M., Mottron, L. (2007). The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence. Psychological Science. PDF
Happe, F. (1999). Autism: Cognitive deﬁcit or cognitive style? Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 216–222.
Raven, J., Raven, J.C., & Court, J.H. (1998). Raven manual: Section 3.
Standard progressive matrices. Oxford, England: Oxford Psychologists Press.


Does the Minnesota 12 steps model really produce an effective change in the treatment of drugs addictions? The Minnesota 12 steps model claims to cure drug addiction, but doesn't deeply deal with the personality structure underlying addiction. We know today how addiction is a problem with an enormous range of factors causing it, being personality or/and psychopathology and coping strategies some of the most important.

The method uses 12 steps to free individuals from drugs, but it doesn't use any deep approach to their personalities and its duration is also too short to do it ("The primary care program was intended to last up to 60 days in a residential setting", " "insurance companies then set 28 days as a reimbursement guideline in order to ensure sufficient coverage"(1).
There is even little evidence that this model is effective, and it received criticisms.

Hence my questions:

Is it really producing changes, or only temporary changes which can collapse every time that personality is challenged?
Can it be realistically expected that the individuals treated by this method have their personalities really transformed and would never feel the necessity of consuming drugs, or have other type of addictive behaviours?

(1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64351/

Grønbæk and Nielsen (2007) conducted a randomized, controlled study of the Minnesota model for treating alcohol dependence in Denmark. 148 alcohol dependent individuals participated. The study reported a significant difference in alcohol abstinence between control and treatment groups when data was aggregated over the one-year period. However, by the end of the one-year followup period, this difference had disappeared. They concluded:

  Twelve months after onset of treatment, the Minnesota day clinic treatment does not differ in effect from the much cheaper ‘standard’ public treatment. However, patients in Minnesota treatment were total abstainers throughout a longer period.

References

Grønbæk, M., & Nielsen, B. (2007). A randomized controlled trial of Minnesota day clinic treatment of alcoholics. Addiction, 102(3), 381-388.


What is the name of the cognitive bias where an expert overestimates the knowledge of others? I'm looking for a name of a cognitive bias that describes the following phenomenon:

A person has been exposed to some area of expertise from a very early age (think 7-10), and for an extended period of time. This can be sports, computers, musical instruments, etc. As the child matures, the child does not realize that such exposure has created a level of competency where even advanced tasks are easy for them.

After growing up such child may be surprised to find out that ordinary people do not have his/her level of expertise. As adults, such people can continue to write books or give advice, being [completely] oblivious that others do not come even close to their level of expertise.

What is the name of this cognitive bias, where individuals do not realize that other people do not share the same level of expertise?

This sounds similar to the "curse of knowledge" phenomenon (also called the "curse of expertise" by at least one publication that I found).

From Wikipedia:

"The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias according to which better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people."

Some references:

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. The Journal of Political Economy, 1232-1254.
Birch, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2007). The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs. Psychological Science, 18(5), 382-386.
Hinds, P. J. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on prediction of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5(2), 205.


Why do "cool" colors, which are actually warmer, look cool, and vice versa? Why do cool colors look cool that are in fact warmer, and why do warm colors look warm when they are actually cooler?

Blue wavelength has higher energy than red, i.e, blue flame is hotter than red flame, but still blue seems cool. Is it due to it being the color of water or the sky?

Why is red light seen as "warm", although it is still lower in energy than blue?

  Red and blue light differ in energy density, they are located on opposite sides of the rainbow. Blue light oscillates almost twice as fast as red and has a correspondingly shorter wavelength. And because it swings faster, the particles of blue light are also higher in energy. Nevertheless, red light appears warmer.

  This is the difference between physics and psychology. How a color affects us depends not just on whether or not the corresponding rays are energetic, but it depends on how the brain processes signals. And especially when it comes to colors, very archaic associations play a role.

  Red, yellow and orange - these are the colors of fire, of embers. The sun appears red in the evening sky. And red is also the color of blood. Blood means heat: If we are hot and our fingers are warm, they are red. This already happened to our early ancestors, and that's why this association of red = hot is probably anchored deep in our perceptual apparatus. Conversely, if we consider what is blue: blue is, for example, water - and water is cool.

  Now you can take this even further and say: Red light is not only psychologically warm, but also physically warm - if we think for example of infrared lamps, they really warm us. Which is why they are used in medicine, while, conversely, of course, no doctor would think to treat a person with UV lamps. Because UV light is aggressive, it can damage the skin and cause cancer.

  This is because UV light is even higher in energy than blue light - the high energy density makes the light so aggressive. Conversely, infrared light, while physically even lower in energy than red light, is seen as heat radiation.

  This has the following background: Basically, every body has a natural radiation, and this characteristic radiation depends only on the temperature. Therefore, one can, even if it is pitch dark, distinguish hot and cold items with an infrared camera, because warm objects glow stronger in the infrared spectrum. There is a clear relation between the temperature of a body and the kind of radiation that it emits.

  If something has room temperature, then we do not see this radiation, it lies in the infrared and our eyes can not see infrared radiation. But when things get warmer, the radiation changes and shifts into the range of visible light - in other words, it shifts from infrared to red. That is why red-hot objects are red.

  At still higher temperatures, the heat color would in fact shift to blue, but when a body glows blue, it would be even hotter than the sun, and in everyday life, we almost never have to do with such extremely hot objects. That is why red is the color of a warm, glowing body.

Translated from http://www.swr.de/blog/1000antworten/antwort/16474/warum-gilt-rotes-licht-als-warm-obwohl-es-doch-energiearmer-ist-als-blaues/


Can the act of studying more be a defense mechanism? Let's say he/she wants to get good grades because unconsciously he/she is afraid that otherwise a bad future awaits.

My question, is the act of studying more a defense mechanism? If it is, under which category we can classify it?

I thing closest is displacement, but as I understood if you are angry you redirect your anger with displacement. We can substitute other emotion for anger. If it is frustration, frustration needs to be redirected. But the person pushes herself more here so she is not redirecting her frustration(you can always clarify if I understood a concept wrong or send me a resource to clarify, I study by myself I just like learning).

Waiting for you answers! Thank you.

Whilst I am a defender of Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychology, please be aware that this covers areas of psychology considered by some here to be pseudoscientific.  With that in mind, you are right to question the hyposthesis that any defence mechanism involved would be displacement.

Ego defence mechanisms theorized by Sigmund Freud, could have a role in the situation you are talking about, but they also may not.  Displacement involves displacing emotions towards an issue onto another issue.

Using a similar scenario to yours for an example, someone who is frustrated with their grades in science education may displace their emotions towards those grades on to their tutor.  In this situation, instead of internalizing the issue with themselves not understanding the subject, they blame the tutor for not teaching them properly.

The defence mechanism you are talking about, is loosely connected to sublimation (satisfying an impulse - e.g. aggression - with a substitute object).  In your scenario, the person is channelling their frustration constructively by trying to improve the situation through more studying.


What is the reason behind terrorist attacks? From psychology point of view, what is the reason behind terrorist attacks?

What is the motivation for the leaders of terrorists?
What is the motivation for the person who performs terrorist attacks?

As others have mentioned, different individuals and groups can have broad (and conflicting) motivations for specific actions. I found this post on the Politics SE while looking up a similar question, though I don't know if this is exactly what you are asking. The post asks why ISIS performs terrorist attacks when it brings them more attention and threat. Ultimately, they just have different goals. Looking at it from one perspective, it seems "wrong". Looking at it from another, it completely makes sense.

This answer (to the above question) does a great job of explaining how ISIS stated goals relate. These goals are not focused on conquest or "winning" in the traditional sense, but much more on bringing division into the world. If this is the goal, terrorist attacks that bring fear, racism, and religious judgement from the West are right (again, towards this purpose).

Long story short: they have a different goal than many people. These attacks are actually quite rational, when working towards that goal. It is the goal itself that we find irrational.

As to why people believe in one goal vs. another: I don't think that this has a universal answer. Lots of complex things can go into this belief, and they can greatly vary by individual.


Research on avoiding thinking about things that trigger depression or anxiety Has there been study done in regards to the phenomenon of avoiding thinking about things that would emotionally trigger depression or anxiety?

What I mean is, a person will think about something randomly, and if they don't push the thoughts away immediately, they will start to obsess over those thoughts and become depressed. Is this a known phenomenon?

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one way to break this cycle is to examine the intensity of the anxiety, or the propensity to think anxiety-inducing thoughts, in different locations, home, shopping, gym, library, movie. Breaking the cycle by limiting time spent in the anxiety-inducing location is beneficial because triggering depression might trigger more anxiety-inducing thoughts, which will add to the depression...etc.


Is there any theory supporting the idea that writing with your non-dominant hand is beneficial? E.g. Could writing with your left hand increase creativity? Especially if the left hand is the non-dominant one. Could placebo effect also play a significant role?

Yes. It is beneficial. There is physical evidence. And it also can play a role in terms of plasticity.


Is there a canonical reference for behavioral, attentional, and memory tests? In researching another question, I read a few review articles that were testing behavioral and attentional variables in response to different sleep parameters.  I was curious about some of these tests, including, but not limited to, the following:

Attentional network test
Visual analog scale
Digit symbol substitution task
Psychomotor vigilance test
Four-choice reaction time test
Two-choice visual reaction time
Letter cancellation

Rather than asking for a laundry list of their characteristics, which would rail against my question asking sensibilities, I'd like to know if there is a canonical reference in which I could look up the bases for these tests.

Ideally, it would describe the tests, their objectives, the proper procedures (and any variants), statistical power as a function of participants, and any particular information about different brain areas or deficits that the tests can definitively provide.  It may well be that I'll have to go back to their origins in the literature, but it would seem that there would be some sort of handbook available.

I'm not aware of a comprehensive resource that details all of this information for all of these tests. A simple solution would be to find a specific reference for each of the tests you're interested in.

A good place to start looking for these references might be The Cognitive Atlas, which has a Tasks section. For example, the page about Digit/Symbol coding test gives some information about the task, what it measures, and relevant bibliography.

For the Attentional Network Test the canonical reference is probably the paper that introduced it:

Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D., Sommer, T., Raz, M., & Posner, M. I. (2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional networks.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 340–347. PDF

Visual analog scale, as far as I know, is not a specific test, but rather a methodology of presenting a visual scale to which the participants compare something (usually something 'subjective' like pain).


Academic Background for Switchtracking Phenomenon In one recent episode of Hidden Brain podcast, they talk about a pattern in conversation called "Switchtracking". It references to the the "Thanks for the Feedback" book by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.

In general it happens when you get a feedback unrelated to the topic you are concerned in a conversation. Here is how it is defined at respective NPR post:

  Switchtracking, as defined by author Sheila Heen, is when "someone
  gives you feedback, and your reaction to that feedback changes the
  subject."

I'm wondering if there is any academic background supporting this phenomenon (There is neither references section in the book nor podcast page). Is it called something else in academia? I could not find any references to some academic publications in the fields of CogSci, management, or behavioral economics.

Switch-tracking seems very similar to the "Dialogue Alignment" in Psycholinguistics and some other fields of Cognitive Science. For a successful conversation interlocutors need to develop similar representations. Switch-tracking, however seems an abstract conceptual domain problem, but dialogue alignment mostly investigates issues in a more concrete linguistic domain.

Here are some related publications:

  Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2006). Alignment as the basis for
  successful communication. Research on Language and Computation,
  4(2-3), 203-228.
  Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). Alignment in dialogue. The
  Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, 443-451.
  Brennan, S. E., Galati, A., & Kuhlen, A. K. (2010). Two minds, one
  dialog: Coordinating speaking and understanding. Psychology of
  Learning and Motivation, 53, 301-344.

And this one investigates bilingual alignments:

  Purmohammad, M. (2015). Linguistic alignment in L1–L2 dialogue.
  Language and Dialogue, 5(2), 312-333.


What is the optimal mean correct on a multiple choice test in order to maximise the measurement of individual differences? What is the optimal mean correct on a multiple choice test item in order to maximise the measurement of individual differences?

My understanding is that in general a percentage correct of 50% is optimal where there is no scope for guessing.
However, on multiple choice tests there is a certain number of response options. Thus, the probability of getting the correct answer if you know nothing, is one over the number of response options.

In this case I believe that the optimum is:

$$1/k + \frac{1 - 1/k}{2}$$

where k is the number of response options.

So the optimum for different values of k would be:

k = 2: optimum proportion correct = 0.75
k = 3: optimum proportion correct = 0.67
k = 4: optimum proportion correct = 0.625
k is infinite: optimum proportion correct = 0.50

That said, I'd still like to find the classic references where I obtained these ideas from. And I imagine item-response theory might have a little more to say about this, particularly regarding the common recommendation to vary the proportion correct over a range.

Furthermore, none of the above recommendations address the issue that setting the difficulty at the above level for most items can be intimidating for some test takers.


Predicting how long a task will take As a software engineer I have always struggled with predicting how long a project would take by underestimating and I have noticed that all of my colleagues have the same problem.
In this video at 3:32 Luke Jones labels this problem The familiar road phenomena where people underestimate how long a task will take when they are familiar with the task.

What studies have been conducted on the familiar road phenomena?
Why do humans do this and what is the evolutionary advantage?

If someone is familiar with repeating a task, it becomes a habit. Routines within a habit take less brain power. With less conscious effort needed to do it, someone would most likely underestimate or gloss over what the task consists of.

This is just one possible interpretation; there might be other reasons as well.

The evolutionary advantage would be that we need less mental resources to deal with things we are familiar with. We would say, struggle to learn to peel a potato at first, but after a few dozen/hundred times, we do it effortlessly. The brain will try to optimize these things into a habit loop to conserve resources needed to do things. Without habits, we would spend too much time on 'simple' things like recognizing a person's facial features.

Source: Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House, 2012.


How can visual thinking be avoided? I have seen a lot of resources online about how to teach people visual thinking, but I've seen a lot less on the opposite: how to avoid visual thinking. The problem with visual thinking is that it is inherently concrete, while words are inherently abstract. Given that some subjects are more abstract than others, it is preferable in those subjects to not use visual reasoning.

How can visual thinking be avoided?

Short answer
In normally sighted people visual thinking is the dominant mode of thinking and may be intimately associated even with verbal thinking and hence difficult to root out completely.

Background
Human thought can be generally divided into visual and verbal thinking. Visual thinking is mediated by visual imagery, where imagery visual representations are created of things that have been, are, or will be (e.g., life events such as memories of a recent vacation). In contrast, verbal thinking involves thinking in words, for example when you are thinking about what and how you will tell something to friends or colleagues, i.e., inner speech (source: Harvard Gazette, May 2017).

A study by Amit et al (2017) investigated subjects' brain activity when recalling images or sentences. Verbal thoughts resulted in more robust activation of language centers in the brain than during visualizations. However, subjects generated visual images regardless of whether their intent was to visualize or to think verbally. One possible interpretation the authors provide is that visual thinking is a primary mode of thought, which is supported by the notion that verbal abilities appeared later in human evolution and also appears later in childhood.

An interesting notion here is of congenitally blind people that lack visual memory altogether. In these instances, visual imagery is totally absent and in these people verbal thinking may be the only mode of thought available (Zimler & Keenan, 1983). In congenitally deaf-blind individuals the mode of thinking may be further warped into tactile thoughts. These considerations may lead to believe that with sufficient practice, pure-verbal thinking may at least theoretically be possible in the sighted.

References
- Amit et al., Neuroimage (2017); 15(152): 619-27
- Zimler & Keenan, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn (1983); 9(2): 269-82


Is the Wonderlic invalid if you have previously done other intelligence tests? Years ago I did a fake wonderlic test on a website getting a bad score mainly because the test server delayed time in between questions but also the questions were harderd and not correctly ordered by difficulty. I did another 2 or 3 tests after then a couple of years later did a real wonderlic test (with different questions) and scored 95th%, im wondering is this score invalid because I did a few practice tests some years before.

Also the real test included instructions not to spend too much time on one question which made a difference i think.

It is assumed that most people taking intelligence tests have been exposed to a wide range of assessments in the past. It is a standard feature of education systems that students will do a wide range of assessments, and some of these are more or less like intelligence tests.

Many tests even have practice questions for the purpose of increasing validity. The rationale is that some people may perform unnecessarily poorly because they're not familiar with the interface or the general test taking strategy.

So, no, doing another intelligence test doesn't invalidate your current intelligence test score.

That said, there is an active literature on practice effects. For example, see this question about practice effects on Raven's.

As a general principle practice effects are generally considered to be small on intelligence tests. The theory of skill transfer says that they will vary on a continuum based on the similarity between what has been practiced and what you are doing now. There also needs to be some capacity for domain-specific learning.

In your case, most free online tests that claim to be modelled on the Wonderlic or another commercial test are likely to be a very rough proxy.
More generally, the Wonderlic has a wide range of question types. Thus, I doubt that even taking an alternate form of the Wonderlic would make much difference to subsequent test taking efforts.
Also, when you do a test, you typically don't receive feedback on what is the correct answer. So, the capacity for incidental learning is limited.


Does anyone know how to explain Quinian bootstrapping process by Carey to a layperson (like me)? I've been trying my best to understand what Quinian bootstrapping is, by reading scientific articles on this topic, but I come across more and more philosophical concepts like "sortals" or similar.

I would like to just grasp the idea behind Quinian bootstrapping - what does a child do when understanding some abstract concepts, like "weight". Does anyone know how to explain how it works in a less complicated, but maybe more simplistic way?

I can add that I know what is bootstrapping.

References

Carey, S. The Origin of Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Carey, S. “Precis of The Origin of Concepts”, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
34 (2011), 113-167

The basic idea of Quinian Boostrapping is that you start off not understanding a concept, but use a symbolic placeholder for it, and then fill in the details over time. For example, right now you don't understand Quinian Bootstrapping but you do have the placeholder term "Quinian Bootstrapping" that you can hold in your mind and relate to other things you know and learn. Over time, your placeholder is replaced with the actual concept.

Note that this is how nearly all of our concepts work. What is "water" or "planet" or "electricity"? You start off with "I learned some arbitrary word that picks out some category of thing in the universe" and then approach the real concept over time. But note that an "expert" on the concept may surprise you: "ice is a form of water even though you think it is not" and "Pluto is not a planet even though you think it is" and "the bright flashes during a storm and the stuff that makes the TV work are the same."

You asked specifically about weight. Imagine a child newly learning "weight" as opposed to "mass" (and as opposed to "density" and "volume" and other nearby terms). The child will start off just knowing that there are various terms that are picking out nearby concepts, but not understanding what makes them different. But as the child is led through examples (e.g., "the same object will weigh more on Earth than on Mars") the placeholders become elaborated into concepts.

This bootstrapping ability relies on being able to relate information from a variety of sources to an arbitrary placeholder symbol, which means it is likely unique to humans.


Near-dream states producing closed-eye visual rendering of the environment Sometimes when I'm about to fall asleep, or have slept but not fully awakened, I experience a weird phenomenon. I'll describe it with a recent example:

I had come home from school, and it was still light out. I was lying in bed, quite tiredly, and fell asleep with my clothes on. I think this is relevant, because it makes for an unnatural sleep, which I've heard it can produce things like sleep paralysis. My laptop was lying in front of my face, and when I started waking up, I had a moment of consciousness. I was still half-asleep, eyes closed, and in front of me, I could see the laptop. But not clearly; I was seeing its silhouette, like x-ray through my eyelids.

This has happened to me in other settings, where I've seen my bedroom through my eyelids. Sometimes, when I've fallen asleep at the school desk, I've "seen through" my eyelids and my desk, down at my feet.

What could possibly cause this? The visual renderings are usually quite accurate. My question is, why would the brain conjure these images up? Why would it try to show me representation of my environment in these half-sleep states?

It would seem like what you are experiencing is eidetic memory (Eidetikos) and/or Hypnogogia. Reasons as to how and why this may occur are still being studied. Consider the following here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885948/
"Visual Cues for the Retrieval of Landmark Memories by Navigating Wood Ants" by
Robert A. Harris, Paul Graham, and Thomas S. Collett

Even on short routes, ants can be guided by multiple visual memories. We investigate here the cues controlling memory retrieval as wood ants approach a one- or two-edged landmark to collect sucrose at a point along its base. In such tasks, ants store the desired retinal position of landmark edges at several points along their route. They guide subsequent trips by retrieving the appropriate memory and moving to bring the edges in the scene toward the stored positions.<

And..

Some ants, having located a reliable source of food, shuttle back and forth along idiosyncratic, visually guided routes (e.g., [1–5]); the final stage of their route to a goal is guided by a stored local view or snapshot of the surroundings as seen from a vantage point close to the destination (review [6]). A view of a familiar object stored as a snapshot seems to be encoded in terms of a small set of distinct features, such as oriented edges, color, and retinal size [7–9]. In some experimental situations, ants and bees attend to high-contrast boundaries of objects and guide their path to their destination by moving so as to shift edges in the current retinal image toward their stored retinal positions in the snapshot [7, 9]. If the visual scene is manipulated so that some edges are missing and cannot be matched to the snapshot, the insects will steer as best they can with the remaining edges [7, 9].<

What this seems to be like for us is what has been known as the "Method of Loci".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

The method of loci is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises.<

So, in one sense the brain may perform this operation for some purpose(s) of survival and navigation but these may not be the only reasons. Given that they emerge in these states as you describe makes it even more difficult to ascertain as you are presumably safe and are not in the process of moving about the room.
Also something to consider which I have shared before is the following paper on Electromagnetic Field Theories of Mind: https://philarchive.org/rec/JONETO?all_versions=1
Hope this helps!


Mental Health Optimisation and the Macro Environment I'm studying the below questions. I appreciate they're rather broad - the purpose of this post is to get guidance on where I might start. I'm hoping someone can provide more focused examples of related studies which will help me move forward.

To what extent does a high level sense of direction weigh on day to day mental health optimisation?

In other words...

How is the economy relevant to mental health optimisation and does progression at such a macro level support individual psychological health progression?

By 'high level sense of direction' I mean the level of optimism in our environment - whether that be from growing financial markets, an evolving political landscape, levels of world conflict etc. (I'm talking vision/risk appetite/optimism. Perhaps there is an academic term within the cognitive sciences for this? Behavioral Ecology?)

I'm looking to analyse how our global connectivity and processing of world news/events which highlight sometimes far-removed changes in our environment, directly impact our mental state.

Ideas:

Have there been any studies into the relationship between economic
performance and anxiety? Maybe the psychological outlook of Millenials who experienced a very difficult economic environment during 2007 to 2013 (credit
crisis) whilst trying to enter the workforce? Many didn't and lived
with parents longer, haven't bought houses etc..
Perhaps the relationship between proliferation of social media news services and psychological health?

Please provide reading suggestions and advise if I'm not using terms recognised in the realm of cognitive science/psychology. Please add relevant tags to my question as not sure where this fits in; looking to bridge two worlds here.

For a high-level overview, I usually start with Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a peer-reviewed, community-contributed, comprehensive source of high-level information.  The user community has already done the work for us of aggregating large volumes of primary and secondary source material, digesting it for the reader, keeping it up to date, and ensuring a balanced approach. so it should meet your needs as a starting point of "where the most up to date/popular/most respected views" might be.  Wikipedia also provides links to related articles, and reference source materials that you can follow up on to dig deeper.  Any similar online encyclopaedia-style wiki would be fine too (eg, Scholarpedia) if you prefer.

The article on "Causes of mental disorders" has a section on environmental factors.  Some highlights:

  ... environmental causes are stressors that individuals deal with in
  everyday life. These stressors range from financial issues to having
  low self-esteem.
  ...
  The lower the socioeconomic status of an individual the higher the
  risk of mental illness. Impoverished people are actually two to three
  times more likely to develop mental illness than those of a higher
  economic class.
  ... there is a strong association between poverty and substance abuse.
  ... Problems in communities or cultures, including poverty,
  unemployment or underemployment, lack of social cohesion, and
  migration, have been associated with the development of mental
  disorders.

You may also be interested in the reverse effect - of mental health on the economy.  You can also use Wikipedia to research specific disorders, such as the effect of the economy on major depressive disorder (depression).  It's important to pay attention to cause and effect when doing this.  For example:

  Depression is often associated with unemployment and poverty. ...
  prevalence is in groups with stronger socioeconomic factors i.e.
  homelessness.

Read this carefully, as it doesn't mean that a bad economy causes depression, only that poverty and depression co-occur - it's equally likely that depression causes poverty than the other way around.  Having said that, there is strong evidence that economic health does affect rates of depression:

  Although reverse causation—poor mental health leading to lower
  earnings—is present, it is no longer considered the primary mechanism
  behind the association between income and health. Several longitudinal
  studies have specifically examined the relationship between depression
  and socioeconomic status and concluded that the causal direction runs
  from socioeconomic status to depression.

I hope that this is what you were looking for to get started.


Is there an effect of visual expertise on eye movements when examining an image? In the following linked image, you can see the eye movement traces of a subject examining a bust of Nefertiti (I came across this image while reading the following blog).

When I was in grade school, I often heard art teachers claim that they were "not teaching us to draw or paint or sculpt... but teaching us to SEE". From personal experience with human figure drawing, it appears to me that the most observable change that comes with practice in drawing the human form from observation is learning to pay attention to the most essential details.

My question:
Is there any reason to believe that if we were to take a group of people who could be considered to have "visual expertise" (let's say they have years of experience with observational drawing), that we would find notable differences in the patterns of their eye movement traces when scanning an object such as the Nefertiti bust shown above... when compared with people who do not have such expertise?

If you believe that we would observe such a difference... what evidence and/or theory leads you to believe this?
Otherwise, what evidence and/or theory leads you to believe that it would be unlikely to observe such a difference?

There is a substantial literature on eye tracking.

Skill acquisition example

One study that I am familiar with and is of some relevance is Study 2 in Lee and Anderson (2000, PDF).
Specifically the study used eye tracking tools to examine how visual attention was allocated over time on an air traffic control simulator.
The broad finding, consistent with skill acquisition theory was that:

  Overall, as people become more skilled, they appear to be reducing the
  time they ﬁxate on all the task-irrelevant regions while maintaining
  the amount of time spent on the task-relevant regions in the move
  unit-task. (p.305)

Thus, this study shows that at least on a task, as you would expect visual attention changes as a function of the development of expertise.

A specific study of eye movements comparing experts and novices

It seems obvious that when visually examining art, people differ in how they view it. It also seems plausible that experts viewing art may focus on different things to novices.  After a little searching I found a study by Vogt and Magnussen (2007) that appears to directly address your interest:

  In two sessions with free scanning and memory instructions,
  eye-movement patterns from nine artists were compared with those of
  nine artistically untrained participants viewing 16 pictures
  representing a selection of categories from ordinary scenes to
  abstraction: 12 pictures were made to accommodate an object-oriented
  viewing mode (selection of recognisable objects), and a pictorial
  viewing mode (selection of more structural features), and 4 were
  abstract. The artistically untrained participants showed preference
  for viewing human features and objects, while the artists spent more
  scanning time on structural/abstract features. A group by session
  interaction showed a change of viewing strategy in the artists, who
  viewed more objects and human features in the memory task session. A
  verbal test of recall memory showed no overall difference in the
  number of pictures remembered, but the number of correctly remembered
  pictorial features was significantly higher for artists than for the
  artistically untrained viewers, irrespective of picture type. No
  differences in fixation frequencies/durations were found between
  groups across sessions, but a significant task-dependent-group by
  session interaction of fixation frequency/duration showed that the
  artistically untrained participants demonstrated repetition effects in
  fewer, longer fixations with repeated viewing, while the opposite
  pattern obtained for the artists.

They also summarise existing research (see the article for more information):

  Picture perception in artists and laymen has been compared in several
  studies on the assumption that artists view the world differently from
  others. ... In one 12-s recording session, Nodine et al (1993)
  found that artistically untrained viewers tended to spend more time
  viewing individual objects than relationships among elements in
  paintings... Other authors have reported different eye-fixation patterns in artists and
  non-artists viewing pictures. Antes and Kristjanson (1991) found that
  eye-movement parameters alone could differentiate artists from
  non-artists by fixation densities on less important aspects of
  paintings, with 'important' being defined a priori by one professional
  artist (rather than by the experimenters according to hypotheses).
  Zangemeister et al (1995) found that artists and sophisticated viewers
  used a more global scanning strategy than artistically untrained
  participants when viewing abstract pictures.

References

Antes J R, Kristjanson A F, 1991. Discriminating artists from nonartists by their eye movement patterns. Perceptual and Motor Skills 73 893 ^ 894
Lee, F.J. & Anderson, J.R. (2001). Does learning a complex task have to be complex?: A study in learning decomposition. Cognitive psychology, 42, 267-316. PDF
Nodine F, Locher P J, Krupinski E A, 1993. The role of formal art training on perception and aesthetic judgement of art compositions. Leonardo 26 219 ^ 227
Vogt, S. & Magnussen, S. (2007). Expertise in pictorial perception: eye-movement patterns and visual memory in artists and laymen. PERCEPTION-LONDON-, 36, 91. PDF
Zangemeister W H, Sherman K, Stark L, 1995 Evidence for a global scanpath strategy in viewing abstract compared to realistic images. Neuropsychologia 33 1009 ^ 1025


How cognitive science explain the stylistic convention in text writing? Some researchers and writers published books about this topic: how the psychology influence the taste of the readers.

It's very intuitive that the word choice matters when we want to be persuasive, capture the listener's attention or simply avoid to hurt him. The importance of the presentation is clear to the human kind since thousand of years, but only with the psychological studies we have clearer some influences of a speech which are counterintuitive.

To better clarify the topic: trying to help someone may hurt his self-esteem if he interpret our attempt like a statement of superiority.

Now I was looking at this revision, which I put also here for easyness: https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/29363/revisions

The last part which was deleted contained an opinion which was slightly critical. Another user deleted it. We may some reasons to agree with his behavior but this is the point. Why do we agree on his revision? Why human being living in different countries developed the same beliefs about focusing the discussion on xxx and rejecting yyy.

Pscychology somehow teached us that beliefs are not absolute as everyone would think of his one. So, if every convention was caused by something. The convention related to the definition of rethoric and dialectic should be deep into the human brain structure.

NLP is not a science, however are there serious books to study about communication seen in a scientific way?

Why are that kind of sentences (the one expressing polemical opinions) rejected by most of people?

I don't think there is a stylistic convention in text writing that prevent the expression of an opinion. There are countless texts expressing a subjective view or controversial points. The example you picked up is somehow very specific to academia.stackexchange.com.

The website explicitly tries to prevent the expression of an opinion - see https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask about the possible reasons for a question to be flagged (and removed) as primarily opinion-based - e.g. a rant in disguise. This rule echoes the way science is made of - facts and interpretation -, especially in its formal way of communication. Researchers sometimes express an opinion in an article but it is usually advertised as such - see the specific section called "opinions" in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science for example.

In the case of the removed sentence, I guess that the reviewer relied on "I would prefer" and "my opinion" to build his/her opinion.


Is it possible to become totally envy free? Can we develop a particular mind set for being totally envy free; to stop envying others?

Smith and Kim's (2007) review article in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin titled "Comprehending Envy" might be a good starting point. They define envy as

  an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of
  inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a
  desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons.

They are also clear to distinguish proper envy from several other emotions including benign envy, longing, jealousy, and resentment.

Individual differences in experiencing envy: As a starting point, from a trait personality perspective, people differ in their tendency to experience various emotions. In particular neuroticism is associated with a tendency to experience negative emotions. Smith and Kim (2007) mention several self-report scales:

"Dispositional envy scale (DES; R. H. Smith, Parrott,Diener, Hoyle, & Kim, 1999) consists of eight items, four of which ask respondents to indicate the degree and frequency of their
experiences of envy"; copy of items
"measure of enviousness developed by Gold (1996) uses a number of items containing familiar idioms that were argued to encourage truthful responses."

Table 2  from Smith et al (1999) report the means and SDs for the items of the DES. The means and sds are generally less than 2.5 on a 1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree scale (e.g., I feel envy everyday M=2.3).
This  suggests that a bit over half the participants are either disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the test items.
The scale showed moderately strong positive correlations with neuroticism and negative correlations with self-esteem. Thus, you might conclude that some people rarely consciously experience envy. That said, some researchers consider that this might be due to social desirability in responding or even at a deeper level, people may not even realise that they are experiencing envy.

Thus, while social desirability might explain some of the individual differences, I think that some people just rarely experience envy. That said, this still leaves open the question of how people who do experience negative effects from envy, might reduce such effects.

Coping with envy:
Smith and Kim (2007) review research on coping with envy:

  Types of strategies for coping with envy. Salovey and Rodin (1988)
  followed up their survey by examining what strategies people use to
  cope with envy and jealousy and to assess which seemed most effective
  in doing so. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing their
  emotional reactions to envy-provoking situations in a number of
  domains and the frequency with which they used three distinctive
  coping strategies (self-reliance, selfbolstering, and selective
  ignoring). A number of important, suggestive findings emerged.
  Self-reliance, which included items tapping emotional control (e.g.,
  “refrain from feeling angry”), perseverance (“don’t give up”), and
  goal commitment (e.g., “become committed to the goal”), and to a
  lesser extent, selective ignoring (“decide it isn’t so important”)
  were associated with reduced envy. Self-bolstering (e.g., “think about
  my good qualities”) was unrelated to reduced envy; however, for those
  participants already experiencing envy, it was associated with less
  depression and, along with self-reliance, with less anger, both
  affects associated with the experience of envy. Salovey and Rodin
  (1988) interpreted these findings to mean that the more effective
  strategies for reducing initial envy appear to be stimulus focused rather than
  self-focused.

References

Smith, R. H., Parrott, W. G., Diener, E. F., Hoyle, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (1999). Dispositional envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1007-1020.
Salovey, P., & Rodin, J. (1988). Coping with envy and jealousy. Journal
of Social and Clinical Psychology, 7, 15–33.
Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological bulletin, 133(1), 46. PDF


Difference between parallel processing done by human brain and by computers I am asking a question regarding parallel processing as done by billions of Neurons inside our brain and parallel processing done by our computers in a cluster for example or even on a Graphics processor having 500 processing cores.

Recently we have seen great success in applying computers to solve complex problems applying parallel processing, such as in the field of scientific simulations, modeling, video/image processing etc.  Also due to limitations on semiconductor devices, chip makers are now forced to develop multi-core CPUs. This encourages and motivates software developers to apply parallel programming to gain the required performance, exploiting all the processing cores inside the CPU.

While people are encouraging to solve problems using parallel programming on the computers, at the same time generally discouraging to do parallel processing inside the brain. Expert say that we must concentrate in one dimension to get best results. Why can't human brains be used to do massive parallel processing in the same way computers are doing today?
The brain is having billions of computational units called Neurons, and thus it provides an opportunity to do processing at both coarser level and at finer level.
Why can't we use our brain to do certain jobs in parallel in the same way as computers, for example, while I am writing this question using my right hand, why cant I solve a problem in geometry at the same time, using my left hand? Using much less powerful computers having just two processing cores (vs billions in brain) I can do these two jobs of writing and solving geometry problem, in parallel by launching two separate threads. Why it is so?

There is a passage in On intelligence about the differences between parallel processing in human versus computers :

  From the dawn of the industrial revolution, people have viewed the
  brain as some sort of machine. They knew there weren't gears and cogs
  in the head, but it was the best metaphor they had. Somehow
  information entered the brain and the brain-machine determined how the
  body should react. During the computer age, the brain has been viewed
  as a particular type of machine, the programmable computer. And as we
  saw in chapter 1, AI researchers have stuck with this view, arguing
  that their lack of progress is only due to how small and slow
  computers remain compared to the human brain. Today's computers may be
  equivalent only to a cockroach brain, they say, but when we make
  bigger and faster computers they will be as intelligent as humans.

  There is a largely ignored problem with this brain-as-computer
  analogy. Neurons are quite slow compared to the transistors in a
  computer. A neuron collects inputs from its synapses, and combines
  these inputs together to decide when to output a spike to other
  neurons. A typical neuron can do this and reset itself in about five
  milliseconds (5 ms), or around two hundred times per second. This may
  seem fast, but a modern silicon-based computer can do one billion
  operations in a second. This means a basic computer operation is five
  million times faster than the basic operation in your brain! That is a
  very, very big difference. So how is it possible that a brain could be
  faster and more powerful than our fastest digital computers? "No
  problem," say the brain-as-computer people. "The brain is a parallel
  computer. It has billions of cells all computing at the same time.
  This parallelism vastly multiplies the processing power of the
  biological brain."

  I always felt this argument was a fallacy, and a simple thought
  experiment shows why. It is called the "one hundred–step rule." A
  human can perform significant tasks in much less time than a second.
  For example, I could show you a photograph and ask you to determine if
  there is cat in the image. Your job would be to push a button if there
  is a cat, but not if you see a bear or a warthog or a turnip. This
  task is difficult or impossible for a computer to perform today, yet a
  human can do it reliably in half a second or less. But neurons are
  slow, so in that half a second, the information entering your brain
  can only traverse a chain one hundred neurons long. That is, the brain
  "computes" solutions to problems like this in one hundred steps or
  fewer, regardless of how many total neurons might be  involved. From
  the time light enters your eye to the time you press the button, a
  chain no longer than one hundred neurons could be involved. A digital
  computer attempting to solve the same problem would take billions of
  steps. One hundred computer instructions are barely enough to move a
  single character on the computer's display, let alone do something
  interesting.

  But if I have many millions of neurons working together, isn't that
  like a parallel computer? Not really. Brains operate in parallel and
  parallel computers operate in parallel, but that's the only thing they
  have in common. Parallel computers combine many fast computers to work
  on large problems such as computing tomorrow's weather. To predict the
  weather you have to compute the physical conditions at many points on
  the planet. Each computer can work on a different location at the same
  time. But even though there may be hundreds or even thousands of
  computers working in parallel, the individual computers still need to
  perform billions or trillions of steps to accomplish their task. The
  largest conceivable parallel computer can't do anything useful in one
  hundred steps, no matter how large or how fast.

  Here is an analogy. Suppose I ask you to carry one hundred stone
  blocks across a desert. You can carry one stone at a time and it takes
  a million steps to cross the desert. You figure this will take a long
  time to complete by yourself, so you recruit a hundred workers to do
  it in parallel. The task now goes a hundred times faster, but it still
  requires a minimum of a million steps to cross the desert. Hiring more
  workers— even a thousand workers— wouldn't provide any additional
  gain. No matter how many workers you hire, the problem cannot be
  solved in less time than it takes to walk a million steps. The same is
  true for parallel computers. After a point, adding more processors
  doesn't make a difference. A computer, no matter how many processors
  it might have and no matter how fast it runs, cannot "compute" the
  answer to difficult problems in one hundred steps.

  So how can a brain perform difficult tasks in one hundred steps that
  the largest parallel computer imaginable can't solve in a million or a
  billion steps? The answer is the brain doesn't "compute" the answers
  to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. In essence, the
  answers were stored in memory a long time ago. It only takes a few
  steps to retrieve something from memory. Slow neurons are not only
  fast enough to do this, but they constitute the memory themselves. The
  entire cortex is a memory system. It isn't a computer at all.

The point made here is that the computing paradigm (that is, the way the whole thing works) of the brain and the computer are completely different. The computer is a Turing machine, and the brain is something else, possibly a memory system if you think that Jeff Hawking is right. Whatever it is, the brain is not a Turing machine.

To go back to your question:

  Why can't human brains be used to do massive parallel processing in
  the same way computers are doing today?

It has to do with the way the human brain works. If you assume that the brain will do any task in a parallel fashion, and the more neurons involved, the better the performance; then in order to maximize your performance you should use your whole brain. 1 task: 100% performance, 2 tasks: 50% performance, 3 tasks: 33% performance, and so on.

But if you add an "attention switching cost" to go from one task to another, then you are better off just focusing on one task where the switching cost is zero.

So you can multitask, but it won't be efficient.


Method/Unit for measuring activity in specific frequency band for EEG This may be more of a signal processing question but I'm looking to measure and compare activity in different frequency bands for each sensor. Unfortunately, all papers I've looked at simply refer to "alpha activity" without specifying how this was calculated.

Is there any standard method or "best practice" to measure the level of activity? Is it simply the average energy in the band (sum of the square of the absolute of the signal?)

Any help with this would be appreciated.

How you analyse your data depends a bit on how you did your time-frequency decomposition.

If you're using a fast Fourier transform, you will likely cut out the temporal window of interest prior to analysis, and your power estimate will be a single value (per subject and/or condition) within this time window. For example, alpha wave desynchronisation is likely to kick in something like 100 ms after the onset of a tone, and you might be interested in its power between then and 300 ms. This is based on theory and literature, there is no single answer. But if you do cut out a time window in advance like this, make sure that the time window of interest is an exact multiple of the size of the cycle you are looking at! (e.g. a multiple of 1/10th of a second for 10 Hz.) Otherwise you might get some nasty artifacts.

What you will then end up with is one data point per subject and condition, per EEG sensor. Some people pre-select a group of sensors based on the literature, and look at average power across these sensors. In that case you can use any of the standard parametric statistics to test your hypotheses.

Alternatively, you might adopt a sliding time window or similar approach (see here), where you get an estimation of how power develops over time (per sensor and frequency band). In that case your data space is larger, and the usual way to constrain it is to use cluster-based permutation tests which are nonparametric. This will give you back clusters of significant differences across time and/or sensors (this means groups of successive time points or sensors near each other that show an experimental effect). Again, whether you want to average across sensors is a theoretical question. You can also decide to average across time using this approach, and to end up with a single data point per subject/condition as above. This approach is not particularly temporally precise - the data will be a bit smeared across time - but it gives you a better overview of what is going on in the brain and in which frequency bands the interesting effects might lie.

As for the unit, I prefer to convert raw power to decibel, because the scale is symmetric around zero and comparable across experiments. So, 10*log10 of the power in your signal. If you're using a baseline, make it an absolute baseline (it's equivalent to a relative baseline for raw power, which is the standard).


What is the scientific term for information overload? I'm a computer science major. Currently I'm working on a project for which I want to expose users to different levels of information depending on their distance from displays.

Anyone who ever saw a control room of a power plant or the management software of brokers knows that the persons are bombarded with information (directly like numbers, and aggregated like graphs). I think that it might be a good idea to reduce the shown information depending on the distance and the direction one is looking.

I'm pretty sure that psychologists have already done research in that regard, but I'm totally unable to find any paper on that subject.
Is there a specific scientific term for this kind of information flood?

If what you are seeking is how to present material so that cognitive overload does not occur, you are in the realm of learning theory.[1]

Cognitive load theory and schema (learning) theory go hand in hand in. Schemas are frameworks of information (like a steel-framed skyscraper in your mind); they start as very basic ("This is a cell") and become more complex and facile ("NADH-Q oxidoreductase, Q-cytochrome c oxidoreductase, and cytochrome c oxidase are mitochondrial transmembranous enzyme complexes responsible for oxidative phosphorylation, etc.") They allow (and form) Long Term Memory (LTM). We need a framework ("cell") into which we can stick a fact before we can remember it for more than a very few minutes. The more we know about something (the better our schemas are), the more easily we learn. Working Memory (WM) allows us to process what we are exposed to and place it into a schema so that we can remember it. Like a computer, we have limited WM (processing ability) available to us at any given time. Efficient processing results in placing material into a schema which then facilitates Long Term Memory (LTM).

Inefficient Processing results in an inability to understand what one was just exposed to. Failed schema identification means leads to inability to use information.

Where does cognitive load come in? Cognitive Load takes up processing speed (reducing WM). If cognitive load is great enough, all WM is used up, and we will be unable to identify/form a schema. There are several types of Cognitive load: intrinsic (how complex the information is), extrinsic/ineffective (a bunch of things including distractions, emotionally demanding states [e.g. stress], and especially the way in which material is presented, e.g. inducing splitting of attention, etc.) and germane (what's left over to actually form schemas). They are (kind of) additive. Good schemas reduce cognitive load (increasing WM).

The linked site presents different models of presenting information that promotes schema formation, identification and processing in different situations, and links to further work.

1 Schema Theory and Cognitive Load Theory


Where to find information regarding the effect of ion concentration in the brain on behaviour? Hopefully this is the right area. but for some background, for a school project I'm currently trying to design a medically accurate zombie. I have half a semesters knowledge of basic physiology, and part of the class is that I do more research into areas that are relevant to my project, and I'm wondering where I can find any info, or if you have any insight.

You see, we're in groups, and so far we've designed it so that the infection is spread by fungi, other members of the group are working on how it crosses the blood brain barrier, how it spreads, etc. I'm looking at behaviour.

One thing we've considered is that the fungi destroys parts of the brain like the frontal cortex, so the victim loses their personality, and some similar ways that it makes the victim more zombie-like. One idea I've been trying to work with is that the fungi alters the concentration of ions in the brain. The problem is, I can't find much research that is accessible to someone with my knowledge. I've found some articles like this one: https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc3628083?client=bot#free-full-text , that describe the effect of one ion concentration on one aspect of neuronal behaviour.

I guess what I'm really asking is whether there is one source that puts a lot of these facts together so someone without a medical degree could understand it, possibly with some additional research? I just want to know a list of ions in the brain that can modify neuronal behaviour, what that would look like, and how that works.

Is there a source like this that exists? Am I able to access it? Do I have any misconceptions about this subject?

Please let me know, any help or input is greatly appreciated.

The 'ion concentration in the brain' is a really general concept. A biochemist (I did Biochemistry in a, seemingly, previous lifetime) might approach this question by taking a brain, freeze drying it, then homogenize it and determine ion concentrations.

However, the effect of ion concentrations in the brain plays out its role in a much more confined space, namely across the cell's membranes. The differences in ion gradients across the neuron's membrane is what determines its responses. Further, different brain areas govern different responses. Gross changes in ion concentrations in the prefrontal cortex for instance will exert wildly different effects than the same procedure in the brain stem.

If you want to go this way, you should perhaps confine yourself to a specific area of the brain, and to a specific way of disregulating ion homeostasis. Or veer away from the idea entirely.

What you'd rather could use as a source of inspiration are zombie ants. These ants are 'zombified' by the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which infects Camponotus leonardi ants that live in tropical rainforest trees. Once infected, the spore-possessed ant will climb down from its normal habitat and bite down on a leaf and then die.

The fungus can only flourish at a certain temperature, humidity, location and distance from the ground. By hijacking ants they re-locate themselves to ideal spots. in fact, 95% of the ants found their way to the north side of a plant, about 25 centimeters above the ground, in an environment with 94 to 95 percent humidity and with temperatures between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (Harmon, 2009).

Note, however, that the underlying pathophysiological underpinnings are entirely different from your original ion homeostasis idea.

Zombie ant. source: Wikipedia

Source
- Harmon, Sci Am, Fungus Makes Zombie Ants Do All the Work, July 2009


Is there a better way to describe brain activity than EEG "brain waves" I've been reading about EEG brain waves, which are specific waveforms that are observed on the EEG output, and are usually scored by humans. This concept has been around for quite some time.

Is there anything "newer" or "better" than EEG brainwaves discovered in the recent years?

Given the rise in commercially available EEG sensors, has any company succeeded at putting forth a way to analyze or quantify the output of these sensors to give some useful information to researchers? I'm thinking of brainwave-processing algorithms. For example in Actigraphy, the study of human motion, there are algorithms like "if 19 out of 20 minutes of activity are scored as sleep, then the sleep onset is known to happen at the start of the 20 minute window". Is there something similar for brainwave or derived metrics?

There is no better way to describe brain activity than brain waves! :)

There are newer ways to analyze and think about brain waves, though. Usually you will find these under literature on neuronal oscillations.

Good aspects of thinking about brain activity using brain waves:

Brain waves are directly related to neural activity. They are an electric or magnetic measure of current passing through neurons. It doesn't get closer than this (unless you use an invasive technique). In comparison, fMRI measures changes in blood flow over one or two seconds after neurons have fired.
Brain waves are measured essentially at the speed of light, i.e. with no perceptible delay between the onset of neural activity and the moment that the electrode or MEG sensor picks them up. This allows for measuring brain activity as it unfolds, as the brain processes information on the order of milliseconds.

Bad aspects include:

Seriously compromised spatial resolution. With EEG, the electrical signal gets smeared by passing through the skull. With MEG the measure is more direct, but still, all sensors pick up activity in any part of the brain (at least in EEG; I'm not so sure about MEG), so it is very difficult to say with certainty where precisely something is localized. Methods do exist, but (in my experience) it doesn't come close to MRI precision. It also gets very complicated very quickly.
Activity is picked up only from the neocortex. You can't say much about deep brain activity.
Brain waves are utterly unintuitive. It is very hard to see how a wavy line on a screen can tell us something about the most interesting thing in the world: ourselves. It is supposed to be related to our consciousness, to our thoughts and feelings, to our personality, state of mind, actions, intentions, everything - yet it's just a wavy line. This is where some hard training in neuroscience comes in.

In the past, brain waves were identified by eyeballing. Nowadays we can do much better. We can imagine that each of these lines is actually composed of many different types of neural activity, happening at different speeds. Neurons firing together quickly will lead to small, brief amplitude changes, whereas neurons firing together at a slower pace will lead to slow waves. The more neurons are firing together, the higher the amplitude of the wave. The faster they are firing together, the lower the wavelength.

The fast and slow wavelengths will be summed up into the single wavy line on the screen, but we can decompose it, e.g. by using a Fourier transform or a wavelet transform. By decomposing, we gain insight into the fact that neurons fire together at different rates when they do different things. For example, if you ignore a visual stimulus, then your visual brain begins to fire at about 10 times per second. This is called the alpha rhythm. If you are actively observing a stimulus, the activity will change to 40-70 times per second. This is the gamma rhythm. Thus, you can say something about what the brain is doing when you see the pattern of neural activity based on a wavy line.

Also, you might notice that two distant parts of the brain have neurons firing together... but that they are in phase with each other. This might mean that they are both processing different aspects of the same information, so it tells us something about functional neuronal connectivity even though we don't see the underlying white matter firing.

In any case, brain waves should not really be seen as better or worse than other measures of neural activity. They simply add their bit of information, that is part the larger puzzle of how the brain works. See here for a really nice comparison of M/EEG with fMRI, and a discussion of all the big issues behind noninvasive electrophysiological measures.


Why is training better when following an easy-to-difficult schedule? As suggested in the answer to this question, experimental results show that training is most effective when it follows an easy-to-difficult schedule.

What theories and specifically computational models account for that?

In the simple computational models commonly used to demonstrate learning classifications for example, there is no such effect, as far as I know:

Binary Perceptron - Typical examples (closest to the cluster means, or far apart along the optimal separating vector) are the most informative, leading to a prediction that easy trials would result in faster learning.

Some learning algorithms only update the network when an error is made, leading to a prediction that more difficult trials would result in faster learning.

Support Vector Machinces (SVM) - only the few most difficult examples affect the final result, again leading to a prediction that more difficult trials would result in faster learning.
Naive Bayes classifier - Typical examples help estimating the parameters with less errors, leading to a prediction that easy trials would result in faster learning.

SVM training is typically done in a batch processing, and thus the order of data presentation doesn't matter. You should consider online learning algorithms, for example, the perceptron learning rule. These algorithms are in general stochastic gradient descent optimization procedures, and easy examples early on with larger learning step would be much more efficient (faster convergence towards the correct answer) than learning with difficult examples first.


Self-fulfilling stereotypes: Have researchers tried inventing new group stereotypes? Studies on the stereotype threat have typically used stereotypes that that are common in contemporary culture, i.e. the canonical example being the study that showed African American SAT scores lowered when faced with the stereotype that African Americans are less intelligent than other groups.

Have there been any studies where researchers invented a stereotype (i.e. something random, like "Hispanics perform more poorly at jump rope than other groups") and tested to see if it had any effect on well controlled test subjects?

Have there been any social studies where scientists have tried inventing a new stereotype and implanting it into the mainstream population?  (I doubt this because of ethics issues, but it would certainly be interesting!)

The "blue eyes brown eyes exercise" involves a completely arbitrary and invented stereotype.

During part of the exercise, Jane Elliott treated the blue-eyed children as the superior group.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, treating the brown-eyed children as the superior group.
She treated people with the superior-eye-color-of-the-day as highly intelligent and able to learn,
and people with the "inferior" eye color as inherently lazy and stupid.

I hear that, during the exercise, the new stereotype does have a significant effect on the subjects.

Perhaps this exercise by a schoolteacher doesn't really qualify as a "well controlled experiment" performed by a "scientist", but it sounds pretty close to what you were looking for.


What is the medical term for semi-mindless activities to help reduce anxiety? ... such as gardening, mowing, cleaning... perhaps driving What is the medical term for semi-mindless activities to help reduce anxiety? ... such as gardening, mowing, cleaning... perhaps driving.

I recall that, maybe, the word asynchronous was part of the term * which based on present answers now seems less likely * .

I have not been able to find any term, medical or non-medical, which includes the word asynchronous, but to add to the answer by @user20460 there is the non-medical term hobbies.
Taking part in hobbies and other interests is recommended to anyone who suffers from anxiety and/or depression because not only can it provide a distraction, but it can also alleviate boredom which in itself can create or exacerbate anxiety - see also, Csikszentmihalyi (2000).
As NoPanic.org points out, you should...

do something that makes you happy. Every day should include a bit of ‘ME’ time. It may be losing yourself in a book, playing or listening to music or a self-pamper session. However busy life seems, you deserve that special time.

References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Beyond boredom and anxiety (Vol. 721). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.