Does Machiavellianism concept attempt to combine different personalty types? Wikipedia states that:

Machiavellianism has been found to be negatively correlated with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness

Next, agreeableness article has following words:

The lower-level traits, or facets, grouped under agreeableness are: trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness.

And article on Machiavellianism in some way is contradictory:

It was found that in a trust game, those with high MACH-IV scores tended to follow homo economicus' equilibrium strategies while those with low MACH-IV scores tended to deviate from the equilibrium

In simple words that means that high machs are closer to optimal strategy in trust games than low machs. If they are mistrustful, why are they better in trust games?
That's not the only contradiction. Let's look at conscientiousness article:

People who score low on conscientiousness tend to be laid back, less goal-oriented, and less driven by success

And now again Machiavellianism article:

High Machs admitted to focusing on unmitigated achievement and winning at any cost.

But enough Wikipedia, there is more ambiguousity in this research article (that references a bunch of other articles):

There are at least two main paradigms of partner selection and both can be evidenced with previous research to be relevant to the partner selection of Machiavellians. On the one hand, similarity in level of affiliation, intimacy needs and personality traits has particular importance in ideal standards and mate choice. Previous studies provided countless evidence supporting the similarity hypothesis
...
Accordingly, it is also possible that a dominant high-Mach who demands attention can form the most stable – though dysfunctional and asymmetric – relationship with a submissive and permissive low-Mach partner who he or she can manipulate and exploit

Again ambiguousity. The only explanation I can propose is that there is no such thing as Machiavellianism. There are [at least] two types of personality which Machiavellianism tries to describe. Is there any concept that tried to resolve these issues? Obviuosly, Mach-IV can't separate these two types of personalities. So, are there any tests that can do it?
P.S. I expect that those "machiavellianists" who are good in trust games usually tend to choose similar [to themselves] partners for relationships and possibly, they are more goal-oriented (and should they really be a part of dark triad?). Also I won't be surprised if these two types of "machiavellianists" will differ greatly in emotional intelligence and mind theory.

"If they are mistrustful, why are they better in trust games?"

From the abstract of the actual paper:

  We argue that Christie and Geis’s
  Machiavellianism scale (Mach-IV) is an instrument that allows the identification of types who
  vary in cooperativeness. We use that test to predict the behavior of participants in a two-person
  one-shot constituent game in which subjects face a choice between trust and distrust, and
  between reciprocation (trustworthiness) and defection. We find that the Mach-IV scale does
  not predict trusting behavior. It does, however, predict reciprocity. Over one half of those
  who score low to average on the scale reciprocate trust. High scorers overwhelmingly defect
  when it is to their advantage to do so.

In other words, high Mach's know when it's to their advantage to stab you in the back and do it. Big surprise there.

The game played, annotated with the results, is reproduced below.

I'll not give a full explanation (read the paper if you are unfamiliar with game theory, it explains it "for dummies"), but suffice to say that the high Mach (H) overwhelmingly moved down as P2, i.e. maximized their own profit even if that meant screwing over the P1 player who was nice to them, whereas average-to-low (AL) Mach players reciprocated (about half the time) as P2 even though that's not the dominant strategy as P2. In other words, AL felt like reciprocating for a past favor, even though that buys them nothing in this game. High Machs (mostly) did not repay a favor in such circumstances.


Have there been any studies which report a positive correlation between eating certain foods and reported sleep disturbances? This Skeptics question touched on the subject, but I'm more focused on studies that have been conducted under highly controlled circumstances, like a university sleep lab.

We've all heard these old wives' tales about eating before you go to bed, but is there any evidenced-based, physiological basis for certain components of foods that can cross the blood brain barrier and induce nightmares or other parasomnias?

According to the article "Relationship between Food Intake and Sleep Pattern in Healthy Individuals" (Crispin et al. 2011), there appeared to be a gender based differences in how certain food intake affects sleep patterns.  Additionally, the time the food was eaten also affects sleep patterns.

A couple of key points from the linked article's conclusions:

  intake of high fat and carbohydrate foods preceding the sleeping period are associated with higher sleep latency. Other studies19,20 have demonstrated that individuals who ingested a high-glycemic index, carbohydrate-rich meal 4 hours prior to sleep presented a decrease in sleep latency. In addition to the amount of carbohydrates, the glycemic index may have an important influence on sleep patterns, especially in inducing sleepiness. Different types of fat have also been shown to influence sleep.

and

  ..Data from this study suggest that individuals who consume meals with increased fat content in the nocturnal period seem predisposed to have decreased REM sleep.

and

  ..high caloric food intake preceding the sleeping period was correlated with greater sleep latency in women (nocturnal caloric intake correlated positively with sleep latency).

(The full article is available at the above link).

Further, this About.com article, describes specific examples, such as cherries, which contain melatonin, that helps regulate sleep.

Even though the second link is not all that authorative, there are a number of peer-reviewed papers presented as its bibliography, namely:

Afaghi A, O'Connor H, Chow CM."High-glycemic-index carbohydrate meals shorten sleep onset." Am J Clin Nutr. 2007 Feb;85(2):426-30. (full HTML article)

Burkhardt S, Tan DX, Manchester LC, Hardeland R, Reiter RJ."Detection and quantification of the antioxidant melatonin in Montmorency and Balaton tart cherries (Prunus cerasus)." J Agric Food Chem. 2001 Oct;49(10):4898-902. (full PDF article)

Gruber R, Xi T, Frenette S, Robert M, Vannasinh P, Carrier J. "Sleep disturbances in prepubertal children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a home polysomnography study." Sleep. 2009 Mar 1;32(3):343-50. (Full HTML article)

Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Kasza K, Schoeller DA, Penev PD."Sleep curtailment is accompanied by increased intake of calories from snacks." Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Jan;89(1):126-33. Epub 2008 Dec 3. (Full HTML article)

Ozsungur S, Brenner D, El-Sohemy A."Fourteen well-described caffeine withdrawal symptoms factor into three clusters." Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2009 Jan;201(4):541-8. Epub 2008 Sep 16.c(Full PDF article)

Shi Z, McEvoy M, Luu J, Attia J. "Dietary fat and sleep duration in Chinese men and women." Int J Obes (Lond). 2008 Dec;32(12):1835-40. Epub 2008 Nov 4. (Full HTML article)

I hope this helps.


Cognitive dissonance and interpreting unplesant situations as having a good effect I took a sociology class that I didn't agree very much with. One thing we discussed was why people who go through hazing (e.g.  Jean-François Caudron joining a hokey team) often report feeling closer with their colleagues and a increased sense of happiness after such an unpleasant experience. Apparently this is to avoid cognitive dissonance: if the person didn't think it's worth it, then he would be a fool for going through such a bad experience.

Do I understand that right? Are theories like this scientific or are they more of just a suggestion? For example if someone likes their job, but gets paid poorly, according to this theory could it be that they are tricking/convincing them self into liking the job so they don't feel like a fool for getting paid poorly?

Hazing can be approached from different perspectives (including sociology) because it's a complex phenomenon that is not well understood nor always clearly defined.  But from a psychological perspective, you are right, one of the theories used to explain the phenomenon is that of "cognitive dissonance", first put forth by Festinger in the 50s.

And yes it's a scientific theory and one of the most respected ones in the whole field of psychological sciences.  This does not mean it explains everything or has no shortcomings but it means that many studies have supported its explanatory power, just as the evolutionary theory in biology is not perfect but has a lot of explanatory power in that field.  Granted psychological theories are not as good as theories in other fields (long story) but as I said, this is one of the best we've got in this field.

So what is cognitive dissonance?

I'll start with an example:

Consider someone who buys an expensive car but discovers that it is not comfortable on long drives. Dissonance exists between their beliefs that they have bought a good car and that a good car should be comfortable. Dissonance could be eliminated by deciding that it does not matter since the car is mainly used for short trips (reducing the importance of the dissonant
belief) or focusing on the cars strengths such as safety, appearance, handling (thereby adding more consonant beliefs). The dissonance could also be eliminated by getting rid of the car, but this behavior is a lot harder to achieve than changing beliefs.

And here are the principles in brief (though the theory is more complex than this):

Definition--The unpleasant psychological state aroused when holding two conflicting cognitions.  Discrepancy can exist between 1. attitude vs attitude and 2. attitude versus behavior.

Basic Hypothesis--The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce dissonance.

Five different ways to reduce the dissonance: A. Change your attitude. B. Change your behavior. C. Add consonant cognitions. D. Minimize the importance of the conflict. E. Reduce perceived choice.

One of the original papers on hazing and cognitive dissonance was by Aronson and Mills in 1959, entitled "The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group."  A paper in 1994 by Elliot & Devine suggested that the thing that people experience when there is cognitive dissonance is not just physiological arousal but also a psychological effect, a "distinct, aversive feeling."  If you've ever stood in a long lineup to get an average product or see a so-so movie or get a seat at a restaurant that offered only average food at best (which happened to me last week) you know what that feels like.:)

Lastly, in terms of your job example, yes, that could be true, but keep in mind three things, one that, as I mentioned above, there are several ways to reduce dissonance.  Two, that he could actually like the job that much that the pay is not significant to him.  And three, it's important that an action is freely chosen (or perceived to be so).  If the person in question had to take the only job that he was accepted for, he doesn't have much cognitive dissonance, unlike a person who is highly qualified and accepted to work at ten different companies and after careful evaluation ends up choosing a company that turns out to have serious shortcomings.  This, by the way, is tied in with the concept of regret.

In general, it's useful to think of freely chosen effort put into something as how much you value it, and that any later thoughts or feelings or fact contrary to this are going to cause you dissonance.

Hope that this answer has been useful to you.

Aronson, E. & J. Mills (1959).  The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59 (2), 177-181.
Elliot, A.J. & Devine P.G. (1994). On the motivational nature of cognitive dissonance: dissonance as psychological discomfort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, 382–394.


What's the difference between repetition suppression and habituation? Neural repetition suppression seems to be describing behavioral habituation on a neuronal level. What's the difference between these two terms?

The two concepts are analogous and mutually illustrative, but empirically refer to different levels of analysis: behavioral and neural.
Habituation
Habituation is a form of non-associative learning, specifically, learning that a stimulus is behaviorally unimportant. If I loudly and repeatedly bang on a metal pot immediately behind your head, you will probably be shocked, then uncomfortable, then annoyed, until you eventually learn to mostly ignore the unimportant sound. It is an effect detected in behavioral measures, rather than neural measures, and which, as any Google search will confirm, is well-established across many species. An example of the term's general usage from Wikipedia (which I hope is sufficient for illustration), noting the emphasis on the behavioral rather than neural scale:

The habituation process is a form of adaptive behavior (or neuroplasticity) that is classified as nonassociative learning. Nonassociative learning is a change in a response to a stimulus that does not involve associating the presented stimulus with another stimulus or event such as reward or punishment.

Repetition Suppression
Repetition suppression is a neural mechanism which attenuates (i.e., gradually decreases the intensity of) signals in the brain when a stimulus is detected repeatedly. Presenting the same visual stimulus repeatedly will therefore cause decreased response in some of the involved groups of visual neurons, which is also a useful effect in a number of behavioral research fields like memory and attention research. Two illustrative examples of the term's usage follow:

Memory
Furthermore, single-cell recordings show experience-based changes in perirhinal neuronal firing patterns broadly consistent with item recognition, wherein firing rates decrease in response to previously encountered relative to novel stimuli (Xiang and Brown, 1998). Such firing rate decreases, termed “repetition suppression” ...
Gonsalves, B. D., Kahn, I., Curran, T., Norman, K. A., & Wagner, A. D. (2005). Memory strength and repetition suppression: multimodal imaging of medial temporal cortical contributions to recognition. Neuron, 47(5), 751-761.
Face recognition
Repetition suppression, as manifested by the difference in response amplitude between the first and third repetitions of a target, was stronger for fearful than neutral faces.
Ishai, A., Pessoa, L., Bikle, P. C., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2004). Repetition suppression of faces is modulated by emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(26), 9827-9832.

Clearly, habituation and repetition suppression share a lot of conceptual similarities, but it's important to remember that they are ultimately models of entirely different, if closely related physical phenomena which occur at completely different scales. Behavioral habituation relies to some extent on neural repetition suppression, but it does so through memory, attention and other cognitive systems. Repetition suppression alone is therefore not sufficient to explain behavioral habituation, or vice versa.


Are there any tests for one's belief or philosophy? I know of the varying types of personality tests and I find them interesting (specifically HEXACO due to it having multiple facets to expand its 6 main factors and I believe it is open-source or free to use to some extent). I was wondering if there exists any psychological tests that determine one's beliefs or philosophy?

I know of the Dark Triad, but that's still more personality than belief. The difference I am trying to define is that personality tests seem to me to state what a person does or how they act, but not necessarily attempt to define their reasoning or motives. I believe a psychological belief test could be interesting, and/or (if different) a test of how one's personal philosophy is correlated to academic philosophies, meaning the well-established and studied philosophies.

Any resources and thoughts are welcomed here.

Psychological profiling may accomplish to some extent what I am looking for, but I am uncertain. These may help reveal one's motivations to some degree, which is still something useful.

The confidence in one's own ability to achieve intended results is assessed by tests on self-efficacy

Self-efficacy or personal efficacy is a dimension developed by Bandura (1997) in his social cognitive theory.

He also developed some tests which assess the sefl-efficacy in many situations:

Academic self-efficacy
Self-efficacy to regulate eating habits
Driving self-efficacy
Problem solving self- efficacy
Teacher self-efficacy

And a great deal more scales. In fact  "the efficacy belief system is not a global trait but a differentiated set of self-beliefs linked to distinct realms of functioning" (Bandura, 1997) . Multidomain measures reveal the patterning and degree of generality of people’s sense of personal efficacy.

(I wish to have helped you)

REFERENCES

Bandura (1997), Self-efficacy. The excercise of control, New York: Freeman
The article: Guide for constructing self-efficacy scales : link: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/bandura/pajares/014-BanduraGuide2006.pdf


If it takes multiple action-potentials to cause one action-potential in another neuron, why don't brain signals dissipate almost immediately I just got into neuroscience like a couple of months ago, but I can't, for the life of me, figure this out. Wouldn't it take a humongous amount of action-potentials in, for example, the thalamus for a small number of neurons to fire at the opposite end of the brain in the frontal cortex? Also, usually, signals travel from the cortex back to the thalamus, so is it possible for signals to get boosted in some way? It just seems there wouldn't be enough action-potentials for there to be any circuitry in the brain.

Edit: My thought process is very mathematical, and I didn't think about temporal summation when thinking about this, but let's say, for example, that it takes 4 APs to fire a single neuron. That would mean that y = x/4, with y being the amount of output APs and x being the amount of input APs. Let's say that 100 million neurons need to fire to reach the end of the frontal cortex. That would mean you'd need 400 million input APs in total to reach the end of the frontal cortex. That seems like a lot, but while typing this, I feel like my grasp of some of the more basic aspects of neuroscience isn't really that great. I'm self-teaching so maybe that has something to do with it.

This answer is a bit below my normal referencing standards, but hopefully helps you with some things you're missing and motivates further reading...

Thalamus (at least parts of it) projects directly to frontal cortex (and everywhere in neocortex). Just one synapse from thalamic cell to cortical cell. Neurons send long projections (axons) from region to region. So, with your assumption of 4 presynaptic neurons per cell (which is probably on the low side, but see 2 and 3 below) that would mean just 4 cells in thalamus, rather than 400 million.
In the CNS, especially in the brain and even more especially in neocortex, connections are one-to-many (divergence) and also many-to-one (convergence). When one cell fires, it influences many other downstream cells (for order of magnitude you can assume "thousands"). The strengths vary: some cells get larger inputs than others from the same cell.
Most connectivity is local, and the entire brain is constantly active. For typical neocortical cells, you might see a minimum firing frequency of around 1 Hz in normal in vivo conditions. There are billions of cells each connected to thousands of others, so any one cell is receiving many many inputs at any one time. Other inputs arrive on this background of activity.

I'd recommend starting with a basic neuroscience textbook; Purves' Neuroscience is a good one as is Kandel's Principles of Neural Science. If you're coming from a more computational background, Dayan and Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience is also a good book, but I'd suggest pairing it with something more rooted in biology as well.


Do people low on agreeableness swear more? Reading through a scientific report on Big 5 characteristics in everyday life, I found a -.28 correlation for Agreaableness and swearing.
http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~mehl/eReprints/EARlensmodelJPSP.pdf

Do other studies usually support this?
Is swearing (in combination with other cues) a useful indication of low agreeableness?

There are a number of findings showing that people who are low in agreeableness swear more often. Apologies for the long full quote, but the relevant literature has just recently been nicely reviewed in a chapter about "Natural language use as a marker of personality" by Ireland and Mehl (2014). They cite the study you based your question on (Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006), which is very nice because it uses a relatively unobtrusive recording device (the Electronically Activated Recorder, EAR) to collect data about naturally occurring conversation. However, they also cite additional evidence that is in line with this finding:

  Another face valid linguistic correlate of agreeableness is swearing. Unsurprisingly, people swear less to the degree that they report being more agreeable (Holtgraves, 2010; Mehl et al., 2006; Yarkoni, 2010; see Jay, 2009).

Is swearing a reliable indicator of low agreeableness?

  Indeed, the five words that best discriminate between individuals ranking high and low in agreeableness in Facebook status updates are all swear words (Schwartz et al., 2013). The negative correlation between agreeableness and swearing fits with lay theories of personality as well and is correctly interpreted by outside observers of students’ EAR recordings (Mehl et al., 2006). Given the low overall incidence of swearing – making up about 1/3 of a percent of spoken conversation and 1/10 of a percent of emotional writing – these results essentially mean that highly agreeable people are unlikely to swear even once in a given sample, whereas a highly disagreeable person might swear only a few times. Nevertheless, swearing, like negative emotion words, another low-frequency category, is a potent and reliable indicator of agreeableness and other key psychological variables (e.g., Robbins, Focella, Kasle, Weihs, Lopez, & Mehl, 2011).

References

Ireland, M. E., & Mehl, M. R. (2014). Natural language use as a marker of personality. In T. M. Holtgraves & T. M. (Ed) Holtgraves (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology., Oxford library of psychology (pp. 201–218). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.


Is there a field of research based around music and emotion in the brain? I'm looking for research surrounding the scientific study of music and emotion and its effects on the brain. In particular, are there known parts of the brain which activate when playing or listening to music?

Is there a specific field of study based around music and cognitive science?

Well it depends what you mean by "field of study", but yes there is significant Cognitive Science research on Music and emotional arousal and/or brain activity. In particular Cognitive Neuroscience is most relevant to actually mapping brain activations involved with various forms of music appreciation and creation.

A good study specifically on music and emotion is Investigating Emotion With Music:
An fMRI Study by Stefan Koelsch et all. They investigate listening to music and have nice heatmaps of brain activity during listening. There's many other papers exploring the activity pattern when listening or creating music, but the conclusion of this article sums up some of the major areas:

  In the present study, activations during the perception of
  unpleasant music were observed within an extensive neuronal network of limbic and paralimbic structures comprising the amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus,
  and temporal poles. Although clear increases of BOLD signals were observed in those structures in response to unpleasant music, strong signal decreases were also measured
  in response to pleasant music. This indicates that these
  structures respond to both pleasant and unpleasant auditory
  information with emotional valence, and that listening to
  music has the capacity to up- as well as down-regulate
  neuronal activity in these structures.

  ...

  During the presentation of the pleasant music, activations
  were observed in the ventral striatum, the anterior superior
  insula, and in the Rolandic operculum.

So interestingly, music with different emotional context results in different patterns and locations of brain activation. The full article has more specific information, and you can feel free to ask about more specific patterns of activation in regards to more specific stimuli.


What was creativity called before the 1950s, i.e. before Guilford coined the term? It is known that Guilford coined the term, but the concept is much older. What did people in Freud's time call it? Genius? innovation? Something else?

Let me open this by saying that it's not clear to me that Guilford coined the term, as the Google n-gram viewer shows use well before 1950:

Freud wrote an essay on creative writers (and day-dreaming) in 1908 but he does not talk of creativity as a noun/concept in itself at least in the English translation. Likewise Jung wrote a fair bit about the "creative impulse", but like in the case of Freud he doesn't seem much concerned how comes people are creative but just why they start to manifest it outwards as art. Another similar term Jung used was the "creative fire". At my level of understanding, the reason for this lack of concern in the psychoanalytic tradition is that they explained (away) the source of the creative process as the unconscious. And once they get to the unconscious as the ultimate explanation, all effort for further understanding what goes under that seems to stop, and the their efforts are directed at understanding the manifestations of the unconscious. It's a bit like saying that you can't understand God, but you can study his works. I'm probably exaggerating that, but part of the issue surely is methodological; Jung and Freud did not apply (or even outright rejected) a systematic scientific method.

The stated motivation of Guilford's work on creativity was that he thought the IQ tests were only good at discriminating elementary school performance, but not good for discriminating what he called "creative potential". In "Creativity: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow" Guilford credits Catharine Patrick with the first experimental studies of creativity; she wrote several papers from 1935 to 1941 with "Creative thought" in their title. Guilford says Patrick attempted to systematically test the anecdotal evidence of Graham Wallas (1926) related in his book titled "The art of thought". There doesn't seem to be an on-line record of Patrick's earliest (1935) paper on the topic. Her 1937 "Creative thought in Artists" and 1941 paper "Whole and Part Relationship in Creative Thought" are available on-line. Neither paper uses "creativity" as a term in their text, so in this narrow sense Guilford was the first to use the term in the nascent field.


How do I measure ratio of EEG frequency band for a few electrodes in decibels? I wanted to calculate the ratio of Theta/Beta ($\Theta$/$\beta$) in decibels for a couple of electrodes in AF3 AF4 and Cz

I was able to get these in microvolts, but would like to convert them to decibels but am unsure what is the appropriate way to do so.

For instance, should I convert it like:

$$ratio_1 = 10.log\left( \frac{\Theta_{AF3} + \Theta_{AF4} + \Theta_{Cz}}{\beta_{AF3} + \beta_{AF4} + \beta_{Cz}}\right)$$

or

$$ratio_2 = 10.log\left(\frac{\Theta_{AF3}}{\beta_{AF3}}\right) + 10.log\left(\frac{\Theta_{AF4}}{\beta_{AF4}}\right) + 10.log\left(\frac{\Theta_{Cz}}{\beta_{Cz}}\right)$$

Decidels are ratios in log scale. Usually the ratio of powers (in the physical sense). Powers sum up, but not dB. For example, a sound source at 70dB SPL means its power is approximately 3200 times higher than the reference sound source of dB SPL. If you have 2 sound sources both at 70dB, their power add up but their total sound pressure is going to be only 76dB SPL.

The appropriate way to answer your question depends on the assumptions you make. Your first equation compares the overall power within the Theta frequency band to the overall power within the Beta band, across recording locations. Your second equation compares power ratios at each location independently (although I would take the mean, not add them). Whether the first or the second equation is more appropriate is a scientific question.

Also note that dBs are usually defined in log10 scale ($\frac{ln(x)}{ln(10)}$), but it doesn't really matter.


How do you raise the stakes in an experiment without actually paying people money? I am trying to run a psychology experiment for one of my courses and it involves people trying to guard some "treasure" of theirs and trying not to lose it.

My problem is that I can't ethically (or legally) force them to offer up their own money and then actually penalize them for not doing well.  At the same time, many of the participants that I've run so far have figured out that it's all a ruse and it's fake and they're not going to actually lose any money so the data may not accurately show how people react in those situations when there is something on the line.    Or I could give them a hypothetical scenario in which their job is tied to how well they do but again, it's not real so people often just don't try.

Ideally, I would have some sort of funding for this where I can offer them $10 if they do well and slowly start taking away money as they fail to give them some incentive.  However, I don't have any of that (it's a course project) and I'm trying to figure out how to incentivize them.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!

Make them create something with their own hands, something hard to make and use that as currency.

I first became aware of this type of experiments from a ted talk by Dan Ariely which I recommend you watch, specially the last part:

What Pushes Us To Work Hard — Even When We Don't Have To?

The gist from these behavioral economics experiments, is that we value things we make substantially higher than an impartial evaluator,even more if making them was difficult,challenging or rewarding; so if you don't have money but have willing  experimenters, you could possibly make them create something, let them assign a value and then use it as currency.

You experiment would be as follow:

Create something - Origami,painting, sculpture of themselves
Assign Value - Ask them how much would they sell it for
Substitute for currency - Take their thing away from them, now you have something you can reward them with or even fraction.


Full list of the capabilities of human brain I am studying the concept of multi-tasking. The premise upon which I am asking this question is my belief that multi-tasking is a myth(as discussed in a few books on the same topic) and that the brain processes its tasks/brain requests sequentially, one by one. The moment we try doing two tasks, that interfere with each other in terms of the areas of brain that are activated while doing those tasks, we hit an efficiency bottleneck; our efficiency of brain resource usage goes down.

The same belief now led me to think that an efficient way of performing any task is to schedule the task in the brain in such a way that its adjacent tasks have no chance to interfere with the current task in terms of their usage of brain's resources. So, what are those different brain resources that together accomplish an activity? Can anybody give me a full list of the abilities of the brain as per the latest scientific results available?

In the process I tried to list down the various activities that we enjoy doing while we are able to give our full attention/concentration to them and then tried to see what are the varieties of things that a brain can actually do, so that we can quickly identify the activity and classify it in terms of its effect on brain's usage.

A few significant things brains beautifully do are:

calculations(math) = counting

Literature = imagination + verbal

music skills = counting + aesthetic

learning new language = memory + verbal usage + pattern detection

falling in love = reproductive + courting

imagery and sexual fantasy = reproductive + visual imagination + aesthetics

poetry = verbal + counting(metre) etc

traveling = recall + curiosity

adventure = same as above

sports = strategy + motor skills etc
etc etc

The above list includes the types of creative activities that brain does, but does not list the basic, elementary set of abilities that together accomplish these activities. So my question here is, what are those various distinct faculties that a brain uses to accomplish a task? You may provide a list of all the faculties(RHS of the above "so called" equations :)), or map the different parts of brain with unique abilities, or provide a totally different way of looking at the brain altogether...

For more clarity:

As an analogy with a computer system which has processing units and related resources like ALUs, Memory, etc what are the different processing unit and resources in the brain which together accomplish a task. I am looking for that list basically

The length of your question and it's tags make it quite confusing, however what you mentioned about the brain processing tasks sequentially and then hitting an efficiency bottle-neck when using conflicting resources reminds me of the research of Neils Taatgen.

He uses a cognitive model called ACT-R to do computer simulations to predict what efficiency bottle-necks a person might experience. His research might help clarify some theories you have.


Does the strength of the simultaneous contrast illusion vary with the length of time it is viewed? I have done several searches without finding any papers addressing this question..

I'd like to know if there is any evidence to suggest that the strength of the simultaneous contrast illusion (or any similar effect) is affected by the length of time that a person looks at the display.

For example, are people more likely to report a contrast effect / perceive the effect more strongly (as in perceive a bigger difference between targets) if they stare at the display for a few seconds as opposed to seeing a much more brief presentation of the display? Or vice versa?

If you're aware of any literature or a good starting point for this, I'd be grateful if you can point me in the right direction.

Equally, is there any literature addressing a similar question for different types of illusory effects?

I'm still not 100% with this answer but this is what I've got:
Research into time effect on illusion is sparce, but from what i have found I think it depends on the type of illusion. I found a paper by McCauley and Henrich which discusses the way in which illusions are processed - diachronic being over time and synchronic being instantly. They have used Müller-Lyer illusion as an example.

  Diachronic penetration contrasts with the synchronic penetration of
  those input systems. Because subjects either (a) acquire some explicit
  theory (that has implications for their demonstratively illusory
  experience with some stimulus),6 or (b) gain wider perceptual
  experience including, possibly, wider experience with the
  illusion-inducing stimulus and, presumably, thereby obtain a new
  implicit conception of it,7 or (c) both, they would, in the case of
  synchronic penetration, instantly or at least very quickly cease to
  experience the illusion or, at any rate, experience a mitigated
  version of the illusion—e.g., the perceived disparity between the
  lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion (below) would measurably decrease.

the Müller-Lyer illusion is a persistent illusion, Fodor (1983) also cites the Ames room and the phi phenomenom (perceiving a series of still images, when viewed in rapid succession, as continuous motion) as persistent illusions. It appears that the simultaneous contrast illusion is a persistent illusions.

The simultaneous contrast illusion is induced by the distribution of the peripheral gray values which indeed show a continuous shift of gray levels, although in a reverse direction. The phenomenon of simultaneous contrast helps us to make the contrast clearer; helping us to identify figure-ground relations more easily, more quickly and more securely (Carbon, 2014). Visual processing is very fast, it generally starts at about 75-80 ms (Vanrullen & Thorpe, 2001).

There are some illusions that once they are 'figured out' wont work again (such as change blindness).

Some illuisons require sematic knowledge to fill in the gaps for example the illusion below.

  What we will perceive at first glance is mainly guided through the
  specific activation of our semantic network. If we have been exposed
  to a picture of a man before, or if we think of a man or have heard
  the word “man”, the chance is strongly increased that our perceptual
  system interprets the ambiguous pattern towards a depiction of a
  man—if the prior experiences were more associated with a rat, a mouse
  or another animal of such a kind, we will, in contrast, tend to
  interpret the ambiguous pattern more as a rat (Carbon, 2014).

At first glance you perceive the illusion as one thing but you may go onto to perceive both things. This would require more time -  and this would be the illusion changing over time.

What I've concluded about the simultaneous contrast illusion and others like it is that perception of them is two things - fast and persistant. What I've drawn from this is that they don't change over time, and that not many researchers are interested in whether or not they change over time, possibly due to coming to the same conclusion?

References:

McCauley, R. N., & Henrich, J. (2006). Susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion, theory-neutral observation, and the diachronic penetrability of the visual input system. Philosophical Psychology, 19(1), 79-101.

Carbon, C. C. (2014). Understanding human perception by human-made illusions. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 566.

Vanrullen, R., & Thorpe, S. J. (2001). The time course of visual processing: from early perception to decision-making. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 13(4), 454-461.


What is the connection between cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias? Intuitively, I'd think that cognitive dissonance (CD) is one explanation of confirmation bias (CB), since if it's the case that most people believe "I am right about most things", then admitting one is wrong about something is dissonant with that. Searching "cognitive dissonance confirmation bias" I found a ton of (almost all non-academic) places asserting something similar, but no concrete evidence linking the two. Moreover, I don't see anything about CD here or in any of the various other places I've read about CB.

Is there any research that identifies a connection between the two and tests it?

Related studies you might find interesting.

Confirmation bias in sequential information search after preliminary decisions: An expansion of dissonance theoretical research on selective exposure to information.

  The authors provide evidence that the increase in confirmation bias under sequential presentation is caused by heightened commitment due to the participants' increased focusing on their decision

Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises.

  Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.

Google Scholar has many more too, but you'll probably have to filter a bit.


How long does the trace of a memory last in the brain? With long-term plasticity one refers to the phenomen by which synapses are modified by neural activity and these modifications last for long times, a day perhaps of the order of days. This phenomenon is often described in contrast to short-term plasticity, where the response of a synapse has a non-linear component that depend on the history of the presynaptic activity in a short time in the past of the order of hundreds of ms.

Plasticity is in fact a much more complicated subject and involves processes at different levels, at the synapse, neuron, network and whole brain (e.g., homeostasis) level. Given our current knowledge of memory systems in the brain, how long are we able to trace even small bits of the memory of a stimulus we were exposed in the past?

Obviously one can answer the question at the cognitive level, i.e., we can rephrase the question and ask instead: What's the oldest memory I can recall? It is well known that our behavior as adults is a reflection of even the oldest memories of our lives. However, I would argue that this is an inderect effect, namely those events that happened in our childhood had an influence on how and what we experience say in the adolescence, and then what we experience as adults is a reflection of what we experienced in adolescence. One known phenomenon that seems to "elongate" memories in the future is the one of replay, i.e., the fact that our brain spontaneously recalls memories of the past like in dreaming.

In computational neuroscience, we can trace bits of patterns stored in a neural network with plastic synapses by probing the network, e.g., by presenting a noisy version of a training pattern and testing if the network is able to recall that pattern, something like an associative memory paradigm. A statistical tool used to test the scaling properties of synapse models is the signal-to-noise ratio analysis. Using this analysis, one is able to address the question of a memory lifetime by assessing whether the synapses maintained some information of a pattern in the past (the signal) with statistical arguments (i.e., with respect to the "noise" of all the other memories interfering with the old one).

Is anybody aware of any experiment where people tried to trace single bits of memories at a single synapse level? In models, the weight of single synapses is maintained for ever unless other memories interfere with that. In reality, it would be interesting to see whether single biological synapses can maintain information on long time-scales (days? months? years?), even considering protein turn-over, or if its the network dynamics that plays a crucial role in maintaining those memories or refreshing them.

Note that answers that go beyond the synapse level are also welcome, that's why the main title doesn't specify to much details.

This is a very difficult question that we don't know the answer to yet.  Here are some references.

Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus
Alessio Attardo, James E. Fitzgerald & Mark J. Schnitzer
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v523/n7562/full/nature14467.html

  Strikingly, CA1 spine turnover dynamics differed sharply from those seen previously in the neocortex7, 8, 9. Mathematical modelling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of spines with a mean lifetime of approximately 1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern.

Long-Term In Vivo Imaging of Dendritic Spines in the Hippocampus Reveals Structural Plasticity
Ligang Gu, Stefanie Kleiber, Lena Schmid, Felix Nebeling, Miriam Chamoun, Julia Steffen, Jens Wagner, and Martin Fuhrmann
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/42/13948.short

Transient and Persistent Dendritic Spines in the Neocortex In Vivo
Anthony J.G.D. Holtmaat, Joshua T. Trachtenberg3, Linda Wilbrecht, Gordon M. Shepherd, Xiaoqun Zhang, Graham W. Knott, Karel Svoboda
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(05)00004-8

  Dendritic spines were imaged over days to months in the apical tufts of neocortical pyramidal neurons (layers 5 and 2/3) in vivo. A fraction of thin spines appeared and disappeared over a few days, while most thick spines persisted for months. In the somatosensory cortex, from postnatal day (PND) 16 to PND 25 spine retractions exceeded additions, resulting in a net loss of spines. The fraction of persistent spines (lifetime ≥ 8 days) grew gradually during development and into adulthood (PND 16–25, 35%; PND 35–80, 54%; PND 80–120, 66%; PND 175–225, 73%), providing evidence that synaptic circuits continue to stabilize even in the adult brain, long after the closure of known critical periods. In 6-month-old mice, spines turn over more slowly in visual compared to somatosensory cortex, possibly reflecting differences in the capacity for experience-dependent plasticity in these brain regions.

Stably maintained dendritic spines are associated with lifelong memories
Guang Yang1, Feng Pan1 & Wen-Biao Gan1
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7275/full/nature08577.html

  Importantly, a small fraction of new spines induced by novel experience, together with most spines formed early during development and surviving experience-dependent elimination, are preserved and provide a structural basis for memory retention throughout the entire life of an animal.


Does the brain have a 'debugging mode'? In computer programming we have a debugger that we can use to execute a program step by step. In that mode, the program can be suspended and we can analyze the state of the hardware, modify the state and control the flow of the program to experiment.

Now, the question: Does the brain have something similar? Like a "debugger mode" in which it can reflect about or analyze its internal structures?
I think this is the mode that therapists use to analyze behavior, isn't it?

Short answer: Not a debugger, but possibly a control flow override.

Long answer:

This is a common fallacy known as the introspection illusion:

  The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly
  think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental
  states. ... In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make
  confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called "causal
  theories"1) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.

It was long thought that self-focus, meditation, concentration, hypnosis, self-reflection, psychoactive chemicals, and similar techniques can help improve one's insight into their brain's functioning, mental state, decision-making process, cause of emotions, buried memories, and other such private information.  However, research has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not the case - it is at best an illusion, where people fill in gaps with confabulated self-knowledge that they do not actually have access to.

There are too many examples of this to list here, but check out choice blindness (people give explanations for decisions that they did not make), misattribution of arousal (people misattribute the causes of their emotions), and memory confabulation (people confidently recollect incorrect memories) for some well-known cases.

More in-depth literature on the subject can be found in a review by Silva & Gendolla (2001) of over 30 years of research into an informal theory called the "perceptual accuracy hypothesis" that claims (but no evidence supports this) that self-focus increases accuracy of self-knowledge in a wide variety of aspects of the self.  Another review by Wilson & Dunn (2003), notes the lack of evidence for any potential for improvement of self-knowledge using introspection.  A more modern review by Bollich, Johannet, and Vazire1 (2011) comes to essentially the same conclusion:

  ... we conclude that the road to self-knowledge likely cannot be
  traveled alone but must be traveled with close others who can help
  shed light on our blind spots.

For some decades now, computer scientists have been attempting to reproduce the function of the brain using artificial neural networks, with some success.  An interesting aspect of neural networks is that they, like the brain, also do not have a debugger - at least not a useful one.  Ask a programmer to explain why their neural network misclassified a training input, and they will respond with a statistical analysis and abstract mathematical model that describes the overall system, not a coherent reason like “it thought this R was an A, so assumed the word was gain instead of grin…”  The only way to get such an explanation is to look at the result, and then guess.

The kind of "talk therapy" psychotherapy (such as CBT) that you ask about has been demonstrated to be more effective than placebo, so we know that something about it works, but what about it works is not well understood.  Perhaps even the illusion of insight has some therapeutic effect, or perhaps there is a cognitive override mechanism at work.

Dual process theory is a well established idea that suggests that we have such a mechanism of control override that allows us (like some debuggers) to change the progression of mental processes mid-way.  This is typically the role believed to be played by our "conscious" mind.


What are proper EEG frequency bands and electrode placements for imagined speech? I am doing an EEG experiment about imagined speech recognition. Which frequencies will have the most relevant information? I chose the frequency band [4-40] Hz as a start, mainly because of signal processing considerations. Filtering out the remaining frequencies basically removes the DC voltage and most of the EOC artifacts.  Which frequencies should I select?
Also which channels will contain the signal (i.e., the most relevant data)?

A study by D’Zmura et al. (2009) in which two syllables were spoken in imagination showed that imagined speech information was present in EEG alpha, beta and theta bands. The beta band (13-18 Hz) proved most informative. The most informative electrodes were located mainly near the top of the head (vertex) where electromyographic artifacts had least influence.

They used various signal processing steps (standard low-pass filtering to remove 60 Hz line artifact, DC filtering, signal enveloping etc.) to clean up their signal. Please refer to the reference list for specific signal processing details.

References
 - D’Zmura et al. Lecture notes in computer science 2009;40-8. HCI International
 - Brigham & Kumar, iCBBE 2010


Is it possible to develop curiosity? I know that curiosity is developed kinda on it's own. You don't know when you'll become curious. But is it possible to train one's mind to become curious about certain subject? I've seen titles and tips on "how" to become curious, but I don't think those "X steps" will make someone's mind budge.

Is it possible to sort of prime oneself to become curious? Mind priming seams powerful for certain things, and it's only thing that I thought could work. Again, priming mind that knows it's gonna be primed sounds rather tricky.

Note: I know the question is messy,so please,do correct me and tag appropriately if needed . :)

On a related note, I attempted an answer on the question: What causes a person to be curious, inquisitive and explorative?

Context

The younger generations (like mine) have developed in an over-stimulated environment. We are no longer satisfied nor amazed by simple things. As budgets for show-business and entertainment companies grew, so did our standards for amazement and wonder. [1]

  In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline — e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine — has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less. [2]

Like this quote denotes, I sometimes feel that everything is already explored or have been done before. This vision often cause a reflex to search for existing answers before even tackling a problem on my own.

He continues by saying that we are not going to school because of an initial desire to learn and understand the world, but because the existing world wants us to learn what it considers important:

  In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. [2]

Factors of influence

Motivation (in any flavor) can be influenced by personality characteristics, environmental factors and social situations. For example, there is a negative correlation between being in a depressed state and demonstrating curiosity in general.

  It has been suggested that a decline in curiosity is one characteristic manifested by depressed individuals. [...] Results indicated that subjects made temporarily depressed reported significantly less state curiosity, perceived value of information, and desire for additional knowledge than elated or neutral subjects. [3]

Now if we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it seems obvious that people with less satisfied needs are not naturally led to be curious. This implies that any society, family or individual that never approves the work of others, that can't provide security or food to its members doesn't provide an environment suitable for curiosity to develop.

There might also be physiological and developmental predispositions to grow up curious about the world. You can read more about these here and here.

Training?

The next section is highly subjective as it contains personal opinions

While there are things you can do to increase the likelihood of becoming curious about a particular subjects, I don't believe curiosity is something you can unlock with a magical treatment. Don't force it. It develops with time and new experiences.

Thing I would suggest:

Making practical uses of a subject, making links to other subjects you are already interested in. For instance, I became highly motivated in math and physics classes after finding an application for it in 3D game development. On another note, some people tackle life's problems with metaphors of things they know well.
Breaking the desire for stability, security and familiarity. Here is some media on the subject: Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love, Fuck your comfort zone.
Learning to learn (as stereotypical as it may sound) and doing things that you love.
Surround yourself with curious, motivated and interesting people. It will lead to very interesting discussions and you will learn lots of stuff from each other.


Are there any open access journals in the cognitive sciences with impact factor >1 Impact factors are scores assigned to journals which indicate how often, on average, articles are cited. Impact factors are published in Journal Citation reports of Thomson Reuters.

These reports however, do not indicate whether journals are open access or not.

I would like to know if there is any open access journal in the cognitive sciences with impact factor >1.

Frontiers is an example of a collection of different open access journals where you find some high-impact publications within the cognitive science field. They have A LOT of journals within the neuroscience and the psychology field.
This is what Frontiers themselves says about impact factors of their journals:

Thomson ISI requires at least three complete years of publishing, plus a few of other criteria, before issuing an impact factor for a specific journal. In the case of Frontiers, this condition has so far been met by only three of our Neuroscience journals. Impact factors are issued for the preceding year involving complex criteria that evaluate the previous three years' citations.
The impact factor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience was 1.58 in 2009
and 1.94 in 2010, indicating substantial growth year over year. We
expect to see this growth in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
(2.58 in 2010) and Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (3.58 in 2010),
as well as a number of impact factors issued to other Frontiers
journals in 2012. We expect these impact factors to continue to rise
in 2012 as well as to have Thomson ISI issue several more impact
factors to Frontiers journals in June 2012.

So, in this case "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience", "Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience" and "Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience" would probably be three good answers to your question.


What is the basis on deciding that a certain behavior/tendency is abnormal or a disorder I don't really want to give examples as I am looking for a general rule that I can apply to any behavior or tendency to determine whether it is normal or a disorder.

You can think of "abnormal" in two basic ways:

Statistical abnormality - The extent to which an individual is high or low on some trait compared to the average of the population. This use of the term is value-neutral, meaning that there is nothing inherently good or bad about being close to the average (i.e., "normal") or far from the average (i.e., "abnormal"). For example, an individual with an extremely high IQ is "abnormal" in the same way that someone with an extremely low IQ is "abnormal". In short, statistical normality is just a way to mathematically describe how extreme a value is compared to some reference. The key to this type of "normal" is that the reference point (e.g., mean) is empirically derived. It is simply a numerical description.
Social or clinical abnormality - The extent to which an individual expresses a value on some trait compared to some reference defined by people. This reference point (or set of points) might be defined by society (i.e., social norms) or by experts like clinical psychologists (i.e., diagnostic criteria). The key to these types of "normal" is that the reference point is not value-neutral. In fact, the reference points with social and clinical normativity are usually what is considered "good" by those setting the criteria.

People (professionals included) often fail to distinguish between statistical normality and social/clinical norms, but its important to keep these straight when thinking about mental or behavioral disorders. Saying that an individual is "abnormal" in a statistical sense means something very different than saying that an individual is "abnormal" in a clinical or social sense.

To answer your question:

Your question is about clinical normativity. There is one especially useful criterion that clinical psychologists use to determine whether a patient is presenting as abnormal (or "disordered"): The extent to which a patient's symptoms interfere with everyday functioning and basic well-being. An individual might meet several specific criteria for a disorder (e.g., ADHD, phobias), but if he or she has found a way to maintain stable relationships, keep a job, and is otherwise happy with their life, a clinician might decide against giving a formal diagnosis. In short, the clinician basically asks the patient to identify the things making them miserable and tries to determine if any of the symptoms might be responsible. Things that will tend to push a clinician toward making a diagnosis of a disorder are things like not paying bills, poor social relationships, not leaving the house, drinking too much alcohol, inability to stay employed, feeling anxious or depressed, etc.

Caveats

Of course, the "everyday-functioning/well-being" heuristic isn't perfect, but it is very useful for helping to organize one's thinking about what makes a behavior or disposition "disordered". The main drawback to this heuristic is that there are many things that interfere with everyday functioning that aren't considered disordered, like grief. Grieving over the death of a loved one can be incredibly disruptive to a person's life, but it isn't actually clear that a magic pill that could prevent the grieving process would be a good thing. Is it good for someone to lose their spouse and carry on like nothing happened the next day? Reasonable people can disagree on the answer to this question, but (for now) most clinical psychologists don't consider grieving to be "disordered" unless the person has been grieving for a very long time (e.g., years). So, the "everyday-functioning/well-being" heuristic is generally useful when trying to figure out if something is disordered, but keep in mind that there are many situations in which its application is of limited value.


At what point in our life do we know what is real? Is "real" or reality defined during childhood, or as adults? Is this caused by age, or an event?

Ability to distinguish reality from fantasy happens somewhere between 4 and 6. This is marked by the use of facts and evidence based research in deduction. This ability is gained through changes in the brain like increased cerebral volume, lateral ventricle volume, grey matter, white matter. Interesting the Mid-Sagittal Corpus Callosum also grows significantly during this time. The Corpus Callosum integrates signals from both sides of the brain but the Mid-Sagittal Corpus Callosum size has a negative correlation to IQ.

Anyone above age 6 who is unable to distinguish reality from fantasy based on evidence is maldeveloped. Some behaviors associated with fantasy, irrational behavior or spirituality are common throughout life. Spirituality would in this case involve any set of beliefs about God or the spirit or psychic realm which are not provable with evidence based observations by science. Irrational value and moral based systems are also normal. These beliefs are typically built on the foundation of spirituality. Some fantasy like beliefs about Santa and other non-spirit but magical creatures are also normal. Irrational behaviors like needing to double check to make sure the clothes iron is unplugged and doors are locked are also common. Problems arise and need to be treated when these types of behaviors begin to interfere with the life of the person experiencing the behavior or those surrounding.

In young adults psychosis result in mental illnesses marked by an inability to distinguish reality from hallucinations and delusions. Psychosis may be drug induced by hallucinogens like cocaine or occur because of a stress vulnerability to a mental illness. Schizo typical illnesses can range from the minute of hearing voices which are not really there  with odd behavior to the extreme of becoming totally immersed in a delusional states of dream like trances and losing touch with reality. Psychosis caused by mental illness is correctable with anti-psychotics. Major sedatives which help alleviate the insomnia immediately and over the course of months correct the dopamine overdose thought to be caused by psychosis. Some people must remain on maintenance levels of anti-psychotics all their lives.


Why does handwriting change? In New York magazine it is stated:

  [I]t’s strange that your handwriting changes over time; scientifically speaking, there’s no reason it should. At a certain point, you’ve learned all there is to learn about it: You’ve mastered the fine motor skills, you know the right way to grip a pen, you’ve written enough that you no longer need to think about the physical act of forming letters with your hand.

But they continue:

  But still, odds are decent that your handwriting right now looks a little bit different than it did five years ago, and will look different again in five more.

Now I am wondering if handwriting can also change on a smaller time scale, and specifically with regard to emotional states. If yes, I would be interested in what part of the brain controls it.

The brain is an interconnected whole, when we have high activity in one area of the brain other connected parts are affected.

The writting is mostly controlled by the part of the brain that controls movement (lateral and medial precentral, motor cingulate and primary motor cortices, and postcentral gyrus). Research revealed that there is a direct path between amygdala and the parts of the brain that controls movement. Subsequntly writting will be affected when the amygdala is highly active.

  Using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and probabilistic
  tractography on a cohort of 40 participants, we provide evidence of a
  structural connection between the amygdala and motor-related areas
  (lateral and medial precentral, motor cingulate and primary motor
  cortices, and postcentral gyrus) in humans. ... a direct
  amygdala-motor pathway might provide a mechanism by which the amygdala
  can influence more complex motor behaviors.

Reference

Grèzes J., Valabrègue R., Gholipour B., Chevallier C., A direct amygdala-motor pathway for emotional displays to influence action: A diffusion tensor imaging study.


Are food rewards a good long term learning strategy? This could be a question for parenting SE, but I am looking to understand the mechanism, so I am looking for a core answer from a psychological perspective; without all of the cultural noise that comes with parenting techniques etc.
Example situation:
A 5 year old child is struggling learning to read and write, for whatever normal reason for that age. So they are losing interest in going to school and or doing school/home work. One option is to provide one on one supervision/encouragement and giving a small food reward‡ for say each letter or word written correctly.
My (simple) understanding is that Dopamine facilitates the 'get up and do something productive' drive, and we have dopamine released when we eat food. Or in cave man terms, Ug want's Dopamine hit. Ug get out of cave, hunt down some berries, Ug gets dopamine reward. Ug not die of boredom/hunger today.
Unfortunately in modern society with fridges and infinite scroll on Facebook this mechanism had been short circuited.
So will rewarding academic work with food help build the mechanisms for reward and help study concentration skills as a person gets older; or will this strategy short circuit and create an unhealthy dependency on food when studying/ loosing interest in study once they have had something to eat?
Or
What needs to be done to make this strategy effective, with positive long term outcomes?

‡ Lets assume the food is moderately healthy e.g., raisins, peanut butter on celery, pieces of fruit. Lets also assume the food is partly randomly given, so that the student doesn't always expect a reward, and loses interest as the first time they don't get a reward (Tip I heard for dog training).

Food rewards are effective and safe to use in principle.  But in practice...?
The non-caveman term for the process of using consequences to modify behavior is operant conditioning, and the specific use of rewards is called positive reinforcement:

Example: A father gives candy to his daughter when she tidies up her
toys. If the frequency of picking up the toys increases, the candy is
a positive reinforcer (to reinforce the behavior of cleaning up).

Notice the very specific phrasing of this example as an if, rather than an is - that is, food rewards are a reinforcer only if they work.  This means that in order to know if they work, you will have to try them out, it is not something that can easily be predicted in advance.
Positive reinforcement using a variety of different kinds of rewards (tangible rewards such as food, prizes, privileges, and intangible rewards, in particular social rewards such as praise, attention, and affection) are a mainstay of behavioral therapy (BT, including CBT).  If a parent consults a behavioral therapist for help with a child struggling with homework, then the therapist will likely start with an assessment that includes determining what reinforcers the child may respond well to, as well as possible obstacles to progress.
Behavioral therapy is commonly used with children, particularly children with learning difficulties such as autism.  Since autistic children may initially respond less favorably to certain kinds of social reward, other rewards such as food may be used in early sessions, though patients are ideally weaned off tangible rewards in favor of intangible ones before completing treatment.
Behavioral therapy using positive reinforcement is one of the most evidence-based and effective approaches in the field.  However, parents attempting to replicate this process outside the lab or clinic are recommended training, as they may run into a number of pitfalls.  As a starter on reinforcement training, I recommend the great, accessible, and very short book Don't Shoot the Dog!


Why do people believe what they believe? What is the basis or sequence of events that leads to someone believing something is true. Is there a framework that can be used to understand how people develop belief? How do they go about doing it?
Id imagine very few people who take human induced global warming to be fact would understand the underlying science to verify it for them selves. For most people global warming or Qanon is just someone telling them something. So how do they determine which is true.

This is a good question, but keep in mind that when you ask a broad question, you typically get a broad answer - ie, I won't go into much detail.
First Impressions
In general, belief and attitude formation is thought to be implicit, rather than explicit.  That is, when you ask someone for their belief or attitude, it may appear as though they simply look (introspect) into the part of their brain that encodes that belief or attitude, and then report on it.  However, in experimental setups, beliefs and attitudes often appear to form in the process of reporting about them.  A well known example of this is choice blindness, in which the initial act of explaining choices not actually made, forms subjects' subsequent attitudes.
Once formed, attitudes seem to persist through counterevidence.  For example, suppose a person is provided with evidence that a fact is true, followed by evidence that it is false.  If the evidence sources carry the same weight, then in total, the person ought to be ambivalent about the fact's truth.  However, in experimental conditions, the first piece of information carries more weight than the second - that is, more evidence is required to change an attitude than it does to form it.
Well known examples of this effect include belief perseverance, in which the effect of initial evidence provided persists after being discredited; anchoring (and similar conservatism bias), in which the first piece of information provided disproportionately affects subsequent judgements; and the illusory truth effect (and similar continued influence effect), in which even a single exposure to false claims is not undone by subsequent discrediting information.
Second Impressions
In real-life situations, beliefs and attitudes are often not formed in isolation as they are in a lab.  Thus, while a person being exposed to a new fact might form a new belief, they may instead relate it to a pre-existing belief.  For example, when choosing between a mainstream or conspiracy theory, a person may prefer the first piece of information they are exposed to, as in a lab, or they may have pre-existing reasons to prefer one view over another.
The most common general framework for understanding the process of balancing new beliefs with pre-existing attitudes is that of cognitive consistency, which is a preference for our beliefs and attitudes to be congruent (not contradictory).  This framework encompasses several well-supported theories, such as cognitive dissonance, self-perception theory, and balance theory, each of which proposes a slightly different underlying mechanism.
In summary, as a rough guideline, attitude formation balances overly-weighted initial evidence with the need for consistency across all beliefs and attitudes.


What is the difference between "double dissociation" and simply having control and experimental groups? According to my textbook Cognitive Psychology by E. Bruce Goldstein,

  a double dissociation occurs if damage to one area of the brain causes a function A to be absent while function B is present, and damage to another area causes function B to be absent while function A is present. To demonstrate a double dissociation, it is necessary to find two people with brain damage that satisfy the above conditions.

I don't understand how this is any different from merely having a control group and experimental group. Suppose I take a group of people who destroyed hippocampuses and observe they cannot store episodic memories. I then take a group of people who have hippocampus and observe they can store episodic memories. This tells me the function of the hippocampus must be in part to store episodic memories.

My Question:

How does a double dissociation yield information any different from this?

In brain damage/lesion studies, a double dissociation gives evidence that function A and B are, to some degree, implemented in different regions of the brain. In general, a double dissociation shows evidence that A and B are independent of each other.

This is a different kind of claim than saying that function A is implemented in brain region X. For this kind of claim, performing an experiment that lesioned (removed) a brain region in some subjects but not others (obviously not an ethical experiment, but let's ignore that) would be a reasonable way to test the claim.

However, this kind of experiment wouldn't be able to provide evidence that functions A and B are implemented in independent regions. To illustrate why, let's consider the possible outcomes of the experiment:

Functions A and B both remain in tact or Functions A and B are both disrupted. Clearly this outcome doesn't provide any evidence that A and B are implemented in different regions, since both functions are affected equally by the lesion.
Only function A is disrupted, function B remains in tact. The most that this outcome shows is that region X (the lesioned area) is crucial for function A but not B. However, what is doesn't show is that function A is independent of function B. It could be the case that function A can be disrupted without disrupting function B, but that any disruption of function B will disrupt function A.


Do action video games have an effect on spatial skills? I've just watched a TED talk by Daphne Bavelier, who seems to be a major researcher on plasticity and video games. In it she presents results from a controlled lab study in which participants needed to perform mental rotations (around 14 minutes into the video), before and after having played 10 hours of action video games over a period of 2 weeks. She demonstrates results which show an improvement up to 5 months after having gotten the 'training'.

I'm interested in finding out more about this research and the methodologies it followed. So my first question is whether somebody could link me to the original research.

Did they take into account learning effects?
Did they use a control group?

My skepticism comes from a previous question on video games in which D. Bavelier is mentioned often. It has gotten some concerned responses involving methodological flaws.

The concept of mental rotation was introduced by Shepard & Metzler (1971). The 3D assemblages of cubes were part of their original experiment. Vandenburg and Kuse (1978) later developed a paper-and-pencil test based on this prior experiment, named the Vandenberg and Kuse’s Mental Rotation Test (VMRT).

The study which Bavelier most likely refers to is one done by Feng et al. (2007). [PDF]

  In Experiment 2, we compared spatial attention and cognition in men
  and women before and after 10 hr of action-video-game training. A
  control group trained for 10 hr with a non-action game. [...] In
  addition, we assessed higher-level spatial abilities using a mental
  rotation test (MRT; see Fig. 1b). We expected to ﬁnd enhanced MRT
  performance as a by-product of improvements in spatial attentional
  capacity after training.

The games played were Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault by the experimental group, and Ballance, a 3-D puzzle game by the control group.

  We had not originally
  planned a follow-up testing session; however, we were able to contact
  and retest all 20 subjects after an average interval of about 5 months
  (16–24 weeks).

Results

  Both males and females in the experimental group improved, but there
  was no signiﬁcant change from pretest to posttest in the control group
  [...] furthermore, the improvement in the experimental group was larger
  for females (2.0 to 2.7) than for males (2.9 to 3.2), F(1, 8) 5
  5.193, prep 5 .87, Z 2 5 .39, and the performance of the females on the posttest was indistinguishable from that of the males in the
  control group. Although the gender difference on the MRT was not
  eliminated, its size was much reduced (see Fig. 3, lower left panel).

Although not the exact study which Bavelier demonstrated, a study done by Isabelle D. Cherney (2008) demonstrates similar results using the VMRT test. A huge section of the paper reviews existing relevant research which might be interesting to look into. The focus of this particular study is to ...

  ... examine whether the type (3-D vs. 2-D) and
  delivery (massed vs. distributed practice) affect the degree of
  improvement of males’ and females’ mental rotation performance and how
  individual differences such as anxiety, prior spatial experiences such
  as computer game play, and mathematical performance might affect
  performance. Two existing visuospatial tests, Vandenberg and Kuse’s
  (1978) mental rotation test and the card rotation test (CRT;
  Educational Testing Services Sanders et al. 1982) that have shown
  gender differences and that are of different levels of difficulty,
  were used.

Tested games were The 3-D Antz© racing computer game, the 2-D Tetrus© computer game, or several paper-and-pencil logic games.

  An equal number of men and women were then randomly assigned to [the games] for a half hour. Participants returned to the laboratory for
  another three times for 1 h of practice each. About half of the
  participants in each practice condition were randomly exposed to
  either: (a) distributed practice sessions (they completed the three
  1-h practice sessions over more than 2 weeks) or (b) massed practice
  sessions (they completed the three 1-h practice sessions within 3
  days). During the final session, after a half hour of practice,
  participants completed the two mental rotation tests as a posttest.
  Participants were exposed to a total of four training hours. They were
  asked to abstain to play any computer games between the practice
  sessions.

Practice effect analyses

  Bonferroni adjusted paired sample t-tests on both mental rotation
  pre-and posttest scores showed that, for the VMRT there were
  significant improvements for women, t(30)=−3.6, p=.001, but not for
  men

Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science 171, 701-703.
Steven, G. V., & ALLAN, R. (1978). Mental rotations, a group test of three-dimensional spatial visualization. Perceptual and motor skills, 47(2), 599-604.
Cherney, I. D. (2008). Mom, let me play more computer games: They improve my mental rotation skills. Sex Roles, 59(11), 776-786.
Feng, J., Spence, I., & Pratt, J. (2007). Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition. Psychological Science, 18(10), 850-855. [PDF]


What is the optimal length of a training session? When a practice session is too long, there will presumably be a point where no further significant gains can be made without a break. At what point will this be?

Update: This question was originally about the length of an initial training session, but it has since been rescoped to cover training sessions in general.

Principles of optimal practice duration from the expertise literature

The expertise literature and its discussion of deliberate practice provides substantial guidance on the question of optimal practice duration.
As Ericsson et al (2006) summarised:

  elite performers search continuously for optimal training
  activities, with the most effective duration and intensity, that will
  appropriately strain the targeted physiological system to induce
  further adaptation without causing overuse and injury.

With regards to optimal practice length, Ericsson et al (2006) stated (with key points bolded by me) that:

  Although the detailed nature of deliberate practice will differ across
  domains and as a function of attained skill, there appear to be limits
  on the daily duration of deliberate practice, and this limit seems to
  generalize across domains of expertise. Expert performers from many
  domains engage in practice without rest for only around an hour, and
  they prefer to practice early in the morning when their minds are
  fresh (Ericsson et al., 1993 ). Elite musicians (Ericsson, 2002) and
  athletes (Ericsson, 2001, 2003 c) report that the factor that limits
  their deliberate practice is primarily an inability to sustain the
  level of concentration that is necessary. Even more interestingly,
  elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice,
  on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including
  weekends, and the amount of practice never consistently exceeds five
  hours per day (Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson et al., 1993 ). The limit of
  four to five hours of daily deliberate practice or similarly
  demanding activities holds true for a wide range of elite performers
  in different domains, such as writing by famous authors (Cowley, 195
  9; Plimpton, 1977), as does their increased tendency to take
  recuperative naps. Furthermore, unless the daily levels of practice
  are restricted, such that subsequent rest and nighttime sleep
  allow the individuals to restore their equilibrium, individuals
  often encounter overtraining injuries and, eventually, incapacitating
  “burnout.” In some domains of sports, such as gymnastics, sprinting,
  and weight lifting, the max- imal effort necessary for representative
  performance is so great that the amount of daily deliberate practice
  is even further limited by factors constraining the duration of
  produc- tion of maximal power and strength.

Implications for the specifics of your question

Thus, based on the expertise literature,  four or five one-hour sessions of deliberate practice in a day with plenty of rest between and at night would be optimal if the aim is to maximise learning on the focal task in the shortest period of time.

In general, I wouldn't define optimal duration of practice in terms of amount of the task learnt.

Also, in the real-world, the optimality criterion can vary between people. The expertise literature assumes that the goal is to maximise learning on the focal skill. However, in the real-world, a person may be learning a number of things, and also need to accomplish tangible outcomes at the same time.

References

Cowley, M. (Ed.) (195 9). Writers at work: The
Paris review interviews. New York: Viking.
Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The acquisition of expert performance: An introduction to some of the issues. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The road to excellence: The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 1–5 0). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A. (2001). The path to expert
performance: Insights from the masters on how
to improve performance by deliberate practice.
In P. Thomas (Ed.), Optimizing performance in
golf (pp. 1–5 7). Brisbane, Australia: Australian
Academic Press.
Ericsson, K. A. (2002). Attaining excellence through deliberate practice: Insights from the study of expert performance. In M. Ferrari (Ed.), The pursuit of excellence in education
(pp. 21–5 5 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A. (2003c). The development of elite performance and deliberate practice: An
update from the perspective of the expert-performance approach. In J. Starkes & K. A.
Ericsson (Eds.), Expert performance in sport: Recent advances in research on sport exper-
tise (pp. 49–81). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Romer, C. (1993 ). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 3 63 –406. PDF
Ericsson, K. et al. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate
practice on the development of superior expert performance. The
Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 10(3):683-703. PDF
Plimpton, G. (Ed.) (1977). Writers at work: The Paris review. Interviews, Second Series. New York: Penguin.


How does the personality of a successful leader influence the development of his children? Successful leadership appears to depend on the personality of the leader. Judge et al. (2002) found the following correlations with the "big five" personality factors in a meta-analysis:

Personality trait       Correlation with leadership success

Neuroticism           -.24
Extraversion           .31
Openness               .24
Agreeableness          .08
Conscientiousness      .28

Kock (1965) found the following correlations between the needs for achievement, power, and affiliation, and economic success:

                         Achievment   Power   Affiliation   Ach+Pow-Aff

Gross Production Value   .39          .49*    -.61**        .67**
Number of Employees      .41          .42     -.62**        .66**
Turnover                 .46*         .41     -.53*         .60*
Gross Investment         .63*        -.06      .20          .45*
Profit                   .27          .01     -.30          .34

These two studies found that leaders must not be neurotic, need not be agreeable, and must not have a need for affiliation.

But personality influences not only a person's workplace behavior and success, but also his choice of a romantic partner and how he shapes his relationships to the members of his family. I wonder therefore:

Are there studies on the family situations of leaders, how they relate to their spouses and children, and how they influence their children's development?

Sources:

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitativ and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765-780. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765 Available online at http://workforceuniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Judge_2002.pdf
Kock, S. W. (1965). Management and motivation. Summary of a doctoral thesis presented at the Swedish School of Economics, Helsingfors, Finland.

This is an extremely interesting question. I'm going to take a different approach to the question by focusing on both personality traits and leadership theories (e.g. authentic leadership, transformational leadership, servant leadership etc) to answer whether those two distinct areas can influence leaders' children's development. I will admit that I didn't come across specific studies on the actual family situations of leaders and the developmental impacts of the leader's personality traits towards their children.

Experiential learning and development by children

See Murphy and Johnson (2011) about how early life experiences and parenting styles can shape the development of a children in relation to general development and leadership potential.

  but parents undoubtedly work to inﬂuence their children's thoughts on
  leadership, through role modeling leadership and through the leader
  behaviors and experiences they encourage in their children ... “[Parents…] contribute to their children's religious beliefs,
  intellectual and occupational interests, feelings of self-esteem or
  inadequacy, adherence to traditional or modern notions of masculinity
  and femininity, helpfulness to others, skills, and values (Beer,
  Arnold, & Loehlin, 1998; Kruger, Hicks, & McGue, 2001; McCrae et al.,
  2000)” (Wade & Tavris, 2008, p. 502).

Servant leadership promotes spirituality and servant behaviours in leaders, i.e. serve your employees first before you serve the company. This type of behaviour from a leader would most likely influence the parent's value and style of parenting. For example, leaders who are recognised as servant leaders may be generous and selfless - this may spill over into their parenting style to be compassionate and caring towards their children which in turn, influences their children's development into similar characters.

ADDED: Destructive leaders, narcissism and potential impact on children

Behaviours of destructive leaders tend to be correlated to narcissism (Padilla et al., 2007). Assuming that these behaviours manifest in the home/family environment, there is some evidence that child narcissism can arise from the parent's control over them (Horton, 2010):

  There is also substantial evidence supporting the object relations
  viewpoint that child narcissism comes from a parent’s selﬁsh use of
  the child that is manifest in excessive or inconsistent parental
  control. For example, both Horton and colleagues (2006) and Miller and
  Campbell (2008) found that psychological control correlated positively
  with maladaptive narcissism...

Similarly, destructive leadership involves an element of the urge to control (Padilla et al., 2007):

  ... destructive leadership involves control and coercion rather than
  persuasion and commitment (Howell & Avolio, 1992; Sankowsky, 1995)

I would dare say that if we compared destructive leaders (core trait: narcissism) and servant leaders (core: selflessness) - both would exhibit different parenting styles that both impact a child's development. Children of the former group may grow up to develop childhood narcissism which may stretch out to adulthood. Children of the latter group may grow to develop selfless behaviours in childhood and adulthood. Yet, I wish there would be a study demonstrating this.

References

Murphy, S.E. & Johnson, S.K. (2011). The beneﬁts of a long-lens approach to leader development: Understanding
the seeds of leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 22, 459-470
Horton, R. S. (2010). On environmental sources of child narcissism: Are parents really to blame? (pp. 125-143), In Barry, C, Kerig, P. K, Stellwagen, K. K, & Barry, T. T (Eds.) Narcissism and Machiavellianism in Youth: Implications for the Development of Adaptive and Maladaptive Behavior. Washington, D.C.: APA Press.
Padilla, A., Hogan, R. & Kaiser, R.B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers,
and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18, 176-194


Can emotional IQ be learned? Can emotional IQ be learned? This question concerns both the general population and those with lower than average emotional quotients such as individuals with Asperger's, or Autism spectrum disorder for example.

I don't know anything about those with lower than average.. BUT
Emotional Intelligence can be learned.

Read on:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/7-practical-ways-improve-your-emotional-intelligence.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Develop-Emotional-Intelligence

This will not be a process of a few hour, nor a few days.. It will take you a few weeks or months to grasp and, maybe, a few years to have something robust.
You have only positive "things" to gain if you go this route


What cognitive processes occur during a mental exhaustion or 'burnout'? Mental burnout - or mental exhaustion is not very pleasant, when one feels completely overwhelmed, something 'snaps' and it is hard to concentrate and maintain motivation.  What are the cognitive processes that occur during a burnout?  What processes allow for recovery?

One of the older theories suggested that a person literally runs out of brain-fuel when they hit the wall (Baumeister et al, 1998). They called this state "ego depletion" and it refers to the kind of mental burnout you are talking about. There is currently a lot of research activity on this topic because we (psychologists) assumed for over a decade that some resource was depleted in the brain but have found no evidence for any such resource. Newer theories suggest that people go through a kind of motivational cycle in which people tend to approach longer-term goals with delayed rewards (e.g., doing homework) for some period of time, followed by pursuit of shorter-term goals with immediate rewards (e.g., eating, leisure, etc.; see Kurzban et al, 2013 for a great discussion).

Thus, people with high self-control are people who spend relatively more time engaging in "labor" and impulsive people spend relatively more time pursuing leisure. The cyclical nature of motivation has clear adaptive qualities and the burnout that you feel after working for long periods is thought to be your brain doing exactly what it is designed to do: keep you from neglecting short term goals which are/were just as essential for survival as long-term goals. This is in direct contrast with the brain-fuel idea, which models burnout as self-control failure. See the Inzlicht article for a critique of brain-fuel models.

One interesting area of work that is related to all of this comes from the ADHD literature. The drugs developed to treat ADHD have demonstrated a clear connection between dopamine activity in the frontal lobes and the ability to persist in pursuing labor goals. It might be tempting to think that dopamine is the phantom brain-fuel we've been looking for, but note that the brain has no problem producing dopamine (i.e., it doesn't "run out"). Nobody has really pursued this, but it will be interesting to see how psychologists integrate the role of dopamine and frontal lobe functioning into self-control models. The Barkley reference below is an old one, but it is a good review of ADHD research that is relevant to this topic.

Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological bulletin, 121(1), 65.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(5), 1252.

Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014). Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(3), 127-133.

Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(06), 661-679.


Does long-term alcohol use permanently change one's thought processes? Is long-term alcohol use really capable of permanently changing one's thought processes?

In what ways is this possible, and through what physical changes in the brain does this occur?

I am only addressing the  extreme end of the spectrum of chronic alcohol abuse:
One syndrome that is known to develop from chronic alcohol abuse id Korsakoff's syndrome or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome.
It causes memory loss and a form of dementia. An irreversible brain damage that permanently disables the individual. The individual is unable to function within society and carry out the daily tasks necessary for functional living. It can also include psychosis.

  Korsakoff syndrome is most commonly caused by alcohol misuse,...//...

  Korsakoff syndrome causes problems learning new information, inability
  to remember recent events and long-term memory gaps. Memory problems
  may be strikingly severe while other thinking and social skills are
  relatively unaffected. For example, individuals may seem able to carry
  on a coherent conversation, but moments later be unable to recall that
  the conversation took place or to whom they spoke.

  Those with Korsakoff syndrome may "confabulate," or make up,
  information they can't remember. They are not "lying" but may actually
  believe their invented explanations. Scientists don't yet understand
  why Korsakoff syndrome may cause confabulation. (1)
  ....
  Scientists don't yet know exactly how Korsakoff syndrome damages the
  brain. Research has shown that severe thiamine deficiency disrupts
  several biochemicals that play key roles in carrying signals among
  brain cells and in storing and retrieving memories. These disruptions
  destroy brain cells and cause widespread microscopic bleeding and scar
  tissue. (1)

....

  Lack of vitamin B1 is common in people with alcoholism....//..
  Korsakoff syndrome, or Korsakoff psychosis, tends to develop as
  Wernicke symptoms go away. Wernicke encephalopathy causes brain damage
  in lower parts of the brain called the thalamus and hypothalamus.
  Korsakoff psychosis results from permanent damage to areas of the
  brain involved with memory.   (2)
  ....
   Symptoms of Wernicke encephalopathy include:
  - Confusion and loss of mental activity that can progress to coma and
  death
   - Loss of muscle coordination (ataxia) that can cause leg tremor
  -  Vision changes such as abnormal eye movements (back and forth
  movements called nystagmus), double vision, eyelid drooping
  Alcohol withdrawal Symptoms of Korsakoff syndrome:
  -  Inability to form new memories
  -  Loss of memory, can be severe
  -   Making up
  stories (confabulation)
  - Seeing or hearing things that are not really there (hallucinations) (2)

 (1) Korsakoff Syndrome
Alzheimer's Association
(2) A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia.
Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome
Korsakoff psychosis; Alcoholic encephalopathy; Encephalopathy - alcoholic; Wernicke's disease
Last reviewed: February 27, 2013.