Which possible methods can be used to determine if a certain part of the brain is active? The question goes back to this tweet:

Julia @JuliaHass
I just learned that elephants think humans are cute the way humans think puppies are cute (the same part of the brain lights up when they see us) so pack it in, nothing else this pure and good is happening today.

The skeptics stack exchange post about the tweet refers to elephants, but I'm interested in a general answer.

PET (positron emission tomography) will measure glucose consumption, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2147116
fMRI will measure changes in blood flow, or more precisely measuring the blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) response. https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/what_does_fmri_measure

Note that I'm being a bit simplistic here, as with PET you can measure a lot of different things (like activation of circuits depending on specific neurotransmitters) depending on the tracer used. Here's a table from the book PET and SPECT in Neurology:

The downside is that PET has lower spatial resolution than fMRI and substantially lower temporal resolution, meaning chnages over time are hard to pick up with PET. If you care about quick changes, then MEG or EEG are the fastest, but you have solve a difficult inverse problem to figure out where the changes came from, which requires making quite a few assumptions to get a (unique) solution.

And let me add (for infotainment purposes) "[f]MRI Killed The Radiotracer".


Can one personality kill another personality? For a person with multiple personalities, can one personality murder or kill another personality such that the killed personality never surface again?

Did it ever happen or studied?

Far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing (Mischel & Shoda, 1995) that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006).
  Can Personality Be Changed? by Dweck

After searching for related case studies, this is the closest I could find: "Deathman, age 27, intervened when John, Gail and Diana argued." -- Four Cases of Supposed Multiple Personality Disorder: Evidence of Unjustified Diagnoses This women's multiple personalities fought each other (even though the authors doubt she had MPD).

Perhaps "kill" is not the best word.


Is speech perceived as set of phonemes by human? I am currently trying to understand how speech is being perceived and understood. I am currently aware of the workings of inner ears and the basilar membrane and its frequency filtering, but going from an acoustic signal to something meaningful such as perceiving speech is still very unclear. I am working with implementing speech recognition software, and what we do is recognising basic speech units namely phonemes, but it this is how the auditory system perceives speech?.. is speech perceived as basic units, or just something man made? or is the perception of speech (very) different, and how different?

Phonemes are the smallest units of speech sound, usually about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each language (1). They are what letter are to words, actually  alphabetic writing systems are derived from phonemes (2). A group of phonemes together form a chunk, that represent a word. These chunks are arbitrary and are created by culture, and are learned by humans from very early age. Furthermore these chunks point to specific concepts that are stored in our semantic memory.

  Concepts arise as abstractions or generalisations from experience;
  from the result of a transformation of existing ideas; or from innate
  properties. A concept is instantiated by all of its
  actual or potential instances, whether these are things in the real
  world or other ideas.

  Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that we have
  accumulated throughout our lives. This general knowledge (facts,
  ideas, meaning and concepts) is intertwined in experience and
  dependent on culture.


How to frame survey questions to get honest response? I'm doing a (statistical) survey on whether or not international students at my college receive satisfactory grants. Here's the deal, I don't expect them to say yes it is satisfactory. I need a way to formulate questions to tricking them into giving me an accurate questions. I've already got my formalities written but how can I approach them with these questions? Bonus would be to tell how much more they would need (if at all).

In my opinion, test-retest method would be suitable to your request.

This procedure is quite simple: individuals are asked to take the test and then take the same test again at a later date. The scores are then compared. The closer the scores are, the more reliable the test.

This methodology is appropriate for instruments such as IQ tests and surveys because there is little chance of people experiencing a sudden jump in IQ or suddenly changing their opinions.

I wish i have been helpful.

REFERENCES

PICONE L., Pezzuti L., Ribaudo F.,  (2013), "Teorie e tecniche dei test", Roma: Carocci.


Correlation between anxiety/calmness and innovation development? Is there any research or clues about whether anxious/calm people are more/less likely to be inventive / creative / develop innovations?

I am interested about this both on an individual and cultural (peoples) level.

"Mr. Scott? We need more POWER!" is the common call made to engineering from the bridge of the fictional Starship Enterprise. It seems common in science fiction for engineers to flourish under high amounts of pressure and overcome all odds. However this does not reflect reality.

For this answer I think it best to turn to Individual Psychology as the creative process is more about a person's preference and comfort than a series of predefined conditions or mental states. Creativity flourishes in certain environments. High gain/high anxiety reward based systems do not encourage creativity. Creative people can be taught to cope with the existence of a reward and overcome the pressure. Extrinsic motivation fosters competition and dependence on rewards which leads to performance anxiety. Intrinsic motivation leads to performance for one's own betterment at ones own pace and while it produces less results.

Depression, Bipolar and Schizophrenia are thought to be caused by stress and anxiety acting on a biological vulnerability. So creativity may be a response and outlet to the anxiety the illness or life causes for these individuals.

By themselves, artistic and creative people tend to experience higher anxiety and depression. However there are no conclusive causal relationships between depression and creativity. There have been stronger relationships between more serious mental illness like schizo typical and bipolar.

  A study looking at 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions for those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

-Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300,000 people with severe mental disorder


Does the Dunning-Kruger effect still work the same if the incompetent person is aware of this effect? Is it possible for an incompetent person to reevaluate his abilities (to become more realistic about his abilities) when finding about the Dunning-Kruger effect?

One critique of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it is just regression to the mean. I.e., there is an imperfect correlation between perceived an actual ability. A consequence of this is that people low in ability will overestimate and people high in ability will underestimate. Of course, in some domains, we also see a leniency bias whereby people in general have an inflated sense of their ability. For a discussion of these interpretations see this post by Tal Yarkoni.

But in general, there are ways of increasing the correlation between perceived an actual ability. The basic principle is to provide people with feedback on their performance that is accurate. And presumably, it would help to persuade people that it is trustworthy.


What type of imagination is responsible for hallucinations? What about the type of imagination which medicine calls hallucinations? Is it a great gift or a curse for those who sense extremely? Is imagination a mild form of hallucinating?

There are certainly some anecdotal stories that hallucinations (as part of psychosis) occured in highly creative people e.g. van Gogh or in the families of some creative people, such as the story of James Joyce's daugher. But that's anecdotal evidence. I tried to find whether some (psychometric) measure of imagination correlates with hallucinations, but not much luck with that insofar. [And that's not because such measures of imagination don't exist at all; some have been proposed. I'll update this part if I find something relating them to hallucinatons.]

What I could find out is that hallucinations are correlated with a confusion between imagination and (actual) perception, both visually and auditory.

On a slightly more positive note, the propensity for hallucinations was also associated with a better pattern matching ability in some visual tests with highly confusing images, but this was only when exposed to the full image before, i.e. a form of bias toward prior knowledge.

Perhaps the above aren't so surprising given that a lot of normal people (about half it seems) hallucinate in sensory deprivation experiments. A somewhat similar situation was observed in people who experienced hallucinations as a side-effect of higher doses of tricyclic antidepressants, namely that their hallucinations occured when background noise was low. Charles Bonnet syndrome is anohter case of reduced stimuli; Oliver Sacks has a talk at TED about it. So if anything, hallucinations are associated with not enough perception.

Note however that there's a rich tradition in philosophy of discussing imagination and hallucinations together. E.g. there's a MIT Press book titled
Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology with quite a few hits inside for "imagination" So it's quite possible I've missed some relevant issue. Do note as a caveat that one of the papers (by K. Farkas) in that book mentioned early on that

  The notion of hallucination most commonly discussed in philosophy is somewhat
  different from the notion used in psychology or psychiatry.

Likewise there's a Humanities paper that discusses them together. (Despite the dubious venue in which it was published, it is cited by papers in more reputable journals, so perhaps worth a read--but it's 50 pages, so don't expect me to do it.)


Difficulty of expressing thoughts verbally Some people find it difficult to express their thoughts verbally. They may often feel that their words don't give their thoughts enough justice, and that their thoughts could've been verbalized better.

What can the causes for this be?
Can it be "cured" or alleviated, maybe by reading, and participating in conversations?

This is not a direct answer to the question, but a related construct that may be useful is alexithymia.

Alexithymia is a personality construct describing relatively decreased ability to identify and express emotions. Psychometrically, the alexithymia construct has seen extensive use and undergone testing that by and large supported its validity (Bagby, Parker and Taylor, 1994a; Bagby, Parker and Taylor, 1994b). In clinical populations, the causes have been theorized to include anterior cingulate cortex and right hemispheric dysfunction, but the cognitive neuroscientific evidence is currently mixed (Zaidel, 2005).

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any direct parallel for the inability to adequately express thoughts, nor of any direct treatments, and I was not able to find anything in the literature. Hopefully, the alexithymia construct may still be of some use in finding an answer.

References

Bagby, R. M., Parker, J. D., & Taylor, G. J. (1994). The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale—I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure. Journal of psychosomatic research, 38(1), 23-32.
Bagby, R. M., Taylor, G. J., & Parker, J. D. (1994). The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale—II. Convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity. Journal of psychosomatic research, 38(1), 33-40.
Zaidel, G. T. E. (2005). Alexithymia, interhemispheric transfer, and right hemispheric specialization: a critical review. Psychother Psychosom, 74, 81-92.


Best way to capture effect of making people upset? I am an undergrad, I am planning to do some research to see how much I enjoy it before I apply for grad programs.

I am researching the effects of a certain characteristic of a presenter making people upset, uncomfortable, aggravated or displeased during a short clip like a TV commercial. My plan is to have subjects watch a short clip with a presenter and see if they are they aggravated, upset, uncomfortable with the presenter based on that one characteristic changing and compare this across demographics. I do not have much experience with setting up and performing experiments so any help would be much appreciated.

How do I quantify how upset, uncomfortable, aggravated or displeased the subject felt?

How do I make sure that every subjects experience is the same expect for that one factor?

Do I have to do anything special because I will not be able to run the same test on the same exact subject?

I really want to know how to best perform this experiment.

Without knowing exactly what the factor you are interested in is, it is hard to predict how feasible it would be to manipulate it. For example, is it possible to make two videos of the speaker, one with the factor, and one without, with nothing else changing? My guess is that you probably can't do this, so I'm going to focus on how you might be able to run the experiment without that kind of very specific control.

One option would be to make several videos, half of them with the critical factor, and half without. There will be lots of other things that vary between these videos, but as long as the only thing that varies systematically is the factor you are interested in, then you can run an informative experiment.

You asked: How do I make sure that every subjects experience is the same expect for that one factor? The answer is that you can't really do this. You can try to get close, but subjects will always have slightly different experiences. This is why we need to run many subjects to determine if an effect is reliable. Any given subject may just be tired/hungry/cranky when they come to the experiment and this will affect your results. But, if you run lots of subjects then it is likely that tired/hungry/cranky subjects will be in both conditions, and therefore on average won't impact your conclusions.

Depending on how long the videos are, you could potentially show multiple videos to a single subject, and measure their emotional responses to each one. This is a within-subject design, and the advantage of this is that it controls for some of the random variation (tired/hungry/crankiness) between different subjects in your experiment. If subject A tends to be crankier than subject B, it will introduce noise into your results if each subject only sees one kind of video. But if subjects see both kinds of videos, you can test whether videos with the factor tended to make subjects more aggravated, controlling for their 'baseline' level of aggravation. If the videos are longer, then you could just show one kind of video to each subject (a between-subjects design) but this will probably require collecting data from more subjects to wash out the noise of some subjects being more prone to aggravation than others.


Can I still get involved in psychology/neuroscience with a computer science degree from several years ago? In the three years since getting my B.S. in Computer Science I have become more interested in biology again (my original major) and also in psychology and neuroscience. My current job -- which is more Information Technology than actual Computer Science -- is not fulfilling. My level of interest when learning about the brain and/or mind is so much higher than, say, learning about the architecture of some web application.

Is moving into psychology and/or neuroscience as drastic of a switch as I think it is? Does anyone have any advice for how best to start down that path?
If I decide to do this, I am assuming some graduate school will be required. Given that I finished undergrad with just average grades, is it a fool's errand to even consider going down this road?

I don't think it's foolish.

If you want to make the switch, I'd look into BS-requiring lab tech jobs in labs doing things you are interested in, and trying to apply for graduate school in a year or two if that works out well.

These are jobs that recently-graduated students often do for a year or two while strengthening an application for graduate school, and in my experience a CS background can be quite useful to many labs. The lab I work in often takes on undergraduate assistants in CS, and some of those students choose to keep working after graduating (or come from elsewhere after graduating).

Titles for these jobs vary a lot by institution, but I've seen "research intern", "junior scientist", "research technician", etc. You can both look at job postings and try to contact professors directly; know that both methods may have a high rejection rate. You'll have the best chance if you both a) learn enough about what particular labs are doing to be able to describe why working there would interest you, and b) don't paint yourself into such a narrow focus that many opportunities are ruled out. Don't be afraid to contact past professors even if you've been out of school for a bit and ask their advice.

Expect to take a pay cut compared to your industry job, and to not have much (any) negotiating power. The things you would want to stress when you apply are that you are interested in making a career move to academia and pursuing a graduate degree, but want to get research experience. Look for jobs where you'll have an opportunity to work on projects and publish rather than becoming de facto IT support.

Poor undergraduate grades will hurt you - grad school applications can be very competitive, especially at better known schools (but don't discount other research institutions; good mentors are more important than Ivy-tier names). Your goal would be to accrue research experience and solid letters of recommendation: these can compensate a lot for average grades. At the same time, you should make it a personal goal to learn more about the specific fields of research and research questions you might be interested in, even if they're outside the work you start doing initially.

I'm speaking from a US perspective, so if you are elsewhere things may be a bit different. Good luck.


Why is recognition easier than recall? The main ways of memory retrieval are recognition and recall.

Why has it been found that recognition is "easier" to perform, meaning it is usually faster or is more likely to yield an accurate retrieval?

It is not. At least not always: In this famous experiment Tulving and Thomson show that under certain circumstances recall can be better than recognition.

It seems that the reason why recognition is usually more accurate than recall, is the context. Usually, the context in the recognition test is very similar to the conditions in the learning phase - the subject sees a list of words. In the free recall test, the context is different - the subject is not given any external stimulus.

Tulving and Thomson changed that in their experiment: the context of learning was more similar to the recall test, which resulted in higher performance in the recall.

This indicates that the encoding in memory has some context specificity. Items that were encoded using a visual stimulus will be easier to recognize or recall if the same or similar stimulus is presented during the test.

Note: I interpreted the word 'easier' in the question as 'more accurate' because typically accuracy is measured, and not the 'ease' of the recall/recognition, which could be defined in many different ways.

  Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological review, 80(5), 352-373. PDF


Is there any significant empirical evidence showing drawbacks of ACT therapy? According to The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has a vast database of empirical evidence showing it's benefits. Based on this evidence, it seems that this type of therapy should be the primary option for people who struggle with any problems.

This is seemingly illogical to me. After all, if this therapy has no drawbacks, as it seems, I don't see why it wouldn't it be used for everything. Are there any empirically based claims showing the drawbacks of ACT therapy?

After significantly more research, with help from the comments I have found the following:

According to The University of York,

  "Acceptance and commitment therapy was more effective than control conditions across several disorders, but there was no evidence that it was more effective than established treatments."

More specifically, they state:

  "[A]cceptance and commitment therapy was of statistically significant benefit for depression (two RCTs), physical health (five RCTs), and other mental health conditions (seven RCTs), but not for distress conditions (four RCTs)." and "When all trials were combined (regardless of comparison or duration of follow-up), acceptance and commitment therapy was significantly more effective than control conditions"

This evidence points to ACT being equally as effective as established therapies, but ineffective on distress conditions. As Fizz pointed out in the comments, the biggest issue with ACT and other third-wave CBTs is that they are over hyped as miracle solutions despite little empirical evidence showing they are more effective than already established methodology.


How does body temperature affect perception of time? Does raising or lowering one's body temperature lead to different perceptions of time? And does this then control the virtual length of positive or negative emotions?

For example, individuals might drink cold beverages while watching a horror movie or sip hot tea while coding or making a plane model.

Do people drink different temperature beverages while doing certain things just because of their preference or unconsciously because it helps to get more of that certain feeling they're after?

It seems that there is a research literature on the topic of the relationship between body temperature and time perception.

Weardon and Penon-Voak (1995) present a literature review of the topic which would be worth reading if this interests you. The following quotes their abstract:

  Experiments investigating timing behaviour in humans under conditions
  where body temperature was raised or (much more rarely) lowered,
  dating from 1927 to 1993, were reviewed. These tested the hypothesis
  that humans possess a temperature-sensitive chemical or bio!g,gical
  internal clock. Most studies used conditions in which subjects
  produced or estimated durations less than 100 sec long, probably using
  chronometric counting, but other experimental paradigms were sometimes
  employed. Data from each study were expressed in a uniform fashion, as
  plots of changes in the rate of subjective time (estimated from
  changes in timing behaviour) against changes in body temperature. In
  almost all cases, rate of subjective time increased when body
  temperature increased above normal, and decreased when body
  temperature was lowered below normal, although observations of the
  latter type were rare. The data also suggested a parametric effect of
  body temperature, with higher temperatures generally producing faster
  subjective time. Some possible mechanisms for the effects obtained
  were discussed, with the most promising explanation probably being
  that the temperature manipulation produces changes in arousal.

Aschoff  (1998) also summarises some of this literature and highlights the important distinction between time frames of time perception:

  From the point of view of a chronobiologist, human time perception can
  be divided into 2 distinct classes that differ in their interaction
  with the circadian system: short time intervals in the range of
  seconds (up to about 2 min) ... [and]... long time intervals, such as 1 h...
  The production of short intervals shows a negative correlation with
  body temperature and a positive correlation with the intensity of
  illumination, while the 1-h intervals are independent of both these
  variables. For the short time intervals, the negative correlation
  with body temperature has often been documented (Aschoff and Daan,
  1997; Francois, 1927; Hancock, 1993; Hoagland, 1933; Pfaff, 1968;
  Wearden and Penton-Voak, 1995), and 2 publications give strong
  evidence for a positive correlation with light intensity (Aschoff and
  Daan, 1997; Pöppel and Giedke, 1970). With regard to the 1-h
  intervals, an independence of light intensity is well supported
  (Aschoff and Daan, 1997).

Hancock (1993) summarised the literature and discussed the proposed mechanism:

  The general notion of a temperature influence on time perception may
  be traced to Pieron (1923,1945)[1] who suggested that "if the speed of
  organic processes are modified, by variation and temperature for
  instance, mental time will increase or decrease proportionally." It
  was Pieron's student Francois (1927 a, b), however, who conducted the
  original empirical evaluations of the proposition. Yet, it is Hoagland
  who is associated most frequently with this general effect, mainly
  because of his postulate of a chemical clock to control estimates of
  duration. Using both his own data and those previously collected by
  Francois, Hoagland (1933) proposed that estimates of duration were
  directly dependent on internal body temperature. He described this
  relationship through the Van't Hoff-Arrhenius equation, which
  describes the speed of a chemical reaction in relationship to its
  temperature in degrees Kelvin. In observing that the collective data
  provided a unitary slope value within this equation, Hoagland (1933)
  concluded that our judgments of time depend upon "an underlying
  chemical master reaction, implying an irreversible chemical mechanism
  controlling the consciousness of duration."

References

Aschoff J (1985) On the perception of time during prolonged
temporal isolation. Human Neurobiol 4:41-52.
Aschoff J and Daan S (1997) Human time perception in
temporal isolation: Effects of illumination intensity.
Chronobiol Internat 14:585-596.
Aschoff, J. (1998). Human perception of short and long time intervals: its correlation with body temperature and the duration of wake time. Journal of biological rhythms, 13, 437-442.
Francois, M. (1927a). Contribution a l'etude du sens du temps. La temperature inteme comme facteur de variation de l'appreciation subjective des durees. Annee Psychologie, 28,186-204.
Francois, M. (1927b). Influence de la temperature inteme sur notre appreciation du temps. C. R. Soc Biology, 108, 201-203.
Hancock, P.A. (1993). Body temperature influence on time perception. The Journal of general psychology, 120, 197-216. PDF
Hoagland, H. (1933). The physiological control of judgments of duration: Evidence of a chemical clock. Journal of General Psychology, 9, 267-287.
Pieron, H. (1923). Les problemes psychophysiologiques de la perception du temps. Annee Psychologie, 24, 1-25.
Pieron, H. (1945). The sensations: Their functions, processes and mechanisms. London: Muller.
Pfaff D (1968) Effects of temperature and time of day on time
judgments. J Experimental Psychol 76:419-422.
Pöppel E and Giedke H (1970) Diurnal variation of time
perception. Psychol Forschg 34:182-198.
Wearden JH and Penton-Voak IS (1995) Feeling the heat:
Body temperature and the rate of subjective time, revis-
ited. Quart J Exper Psychol 488:129-141


Do .sav files expire after the trial version expires? I saved a certain file on an SPSS software that expires after 2 weeks of its installation. I wanted to ask if my file would still exist even after the expiration date. The data is for psychology research.

The only difference between trial software and the 'real' thing is that trial software looses some or all functions after the trial period. Any files generated with it will be kept and be functional; only the exe file is affected. The company of course hopes that you wish to use those files after the trial period and buy the full license.


situations might cause a PTSD I recently came to realize something which happened almost 10 years back, which I didn't realized then, but upon recollecting the past events I went in to PTSD. But the persons who where involved in that incident didn't consider it to be a big issue.

So my questions are, How long after the incident will PTSD happen?

And what incidents can be categorized as an traumatic incident ?

What situations might cause a PTSD for a person ?

In the clinical definition, PTSD is a psychological disorder that develops in some people after a trauma. Interestingly, not every traumatized person develops chronic (ongoing) or acute (short-term) PTSD, nor has every person who develops PTSD gone through a dangerous event. The 'trauma' in the name can refer to events as diverse as hearing about a traumatic event from another person or seeing it on TV, or the death of a loved one (even if you weren't there).

The most important parts of diagnosing any mental illness are (a) is it causing suffering (either to the patient or other people), (b) it is statistically significant (is it unusual for the culture of the patient).

In the case of PTSD, it is enough that they are suffering for the clinician to look further.

PTSD usually occurs within 3 months of the incident, but some people develop symptoms after more than a year. Most people recover within 6 months, but others have long-term chronic symptoms.

To be diagnosed, a patient must have a constellation of varied symptoms. The ICD-10 and the DSM-5 describe the most common diagnostic criteria used today.

The best plan for a clinician is generally to develop a holistic outlook that takes into account the dynamics of the patient's case rather than to try to pigeonhole the patient into diagnostic criteria. Someone who experienced a traumatic event and has residual anxiety and depression may or may not be diagnostic with PTSD. PTSD, under the DSM-5 criteria, must include one re-experiencing symptom, one avoidance symptom, two arousal and reactivity symptoms, and two cognition and mood symptoms.

Since the treatment most commonly indicated for PTSD is anti-depressants/sleep aids and psychotherapy, which are also the treatments for many other mental illnesses, the particular diagnosis is less important than the welfare of the patient. PTSD patients can also benefit from exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring.

The US National Institute of Mental Health has a good introductory article on the subject.


What is "intelligence" in "artificial intelligence"? As far as Artificial Intelligence is concerned, what is "intelligence"? The definition I see on various sites like Wikipedia:

  Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one's capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, and problem solving

Merriam Webster:

  The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations :  reason; also :  the skilled use of reason.
  The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).

etc seem to be a bit broad and nebulous, and not necessarily what I would be thinking of if I wanted to build an AI, or evaluate the intelligence of non human life-forms.

The definition I currently go with is:

  General problem solving ability.

However, I'm not sure if this is broad enough to encompass all we think of when we say "intelligence" in the context of AI, or what we would be looking for in "intelligent" life-forms. What's a useful definition of intelligence. Broad enough to encompass all the we consider when we think intelligence, yet narrow enough to exclude particular idiosyncrasies of specific intelligent agents? A universal definition of intelligence applicable to all intelligent agents.

This is a very broad and not well defined issue, but two theories that may help you to get a better understanding are the following :

Triarchic theory of intelligence by Robert J. Sternberg

  Sternberg's definition of human intelligence is "(a) mental activity
  directed toward purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of,
  real-world environments relevant to one's life" (Sternberg, 1985, p.
  45).

Sternberg divides intelligence into three major subtheories:

  Componential – analytical subtheory

  Analytical giftedness is influential in being able to take apart
  problems and being able to see solutions not often seen.
  Unfortunately, individuals with only this type are not as adept at
  creating unique ideas of their own.

  Experiential – creative subtheory

  Sternberg splits the role of experience into two parts: novelty and
  automation. A novel situation is one that you have never experienced
  before. People that are adept at managing a novel situation can take
  the task and find new ways of solving it that the majority of people
  would not notice (Sternberg, 1997). A process that has been automated
  has been performed multiple times and can now be done with little or
  no extra thought. Once a process is automatized, it can be run in
  parallel with the same or other processes.

  Practical – contextual subtheory

  Sternberg's third subtheory of intelligence, called practical or
  contextual, "deals with the mental activity involved in attaining fit
  to context" (Sternberg, 1985, p. 45). Through the three processes of
  adaptation, shaping, and selection, individuals create an ideal fit
  between themselves and their environment. This type of intelligence is
  often referred to as "street smarts." Adaptation occurs when one makes
  a change within oneself in order to better adjust to one's
  surroundings (Sternberg, 1985). For example, when the weather changes
  and temperatures drop, people adapt by wearing extra layers of
  clothing to remain warm.

Theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner

  The theory of multiple intelligences differentiates intelligence into
  specific 'modalities', rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by
  a single general ability. Howard Gardner proposed this model in his
  1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
  According to Gardner, an intelligence must fulfill eight criteria:
  musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic,
  logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal,
  intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential
  and moral intelligence may also be worthy of inclusion.


Can a hyperpolarized neuron fire action potentials? Is there any chance that a neuron could fire when hyperpolarized? In that case, would the spike be different than usual?

Perhaps this is not what you asked, but there's a phenomenon called rebound spiking or postinhibitory spiking where a hyperpolarization causes spiking. This is due to the oscillatory property of membrane dynamics (certain subsets of type-II neurons). Spikes can be evoked after inhibitory current stops. Figure 7.29 from Izhikevich's book:

Here's a partial figure from Hasselmo 2014 (recordings from entorhinal cortex stellate cells).

References:

Hasselmo, M. E. (2014). Neuronal rebound spiking, resonance frequency and theta cycle skipping may contribute to grid cell firing in medial entorhinal cortex. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 369(1635):20120523+.
Izhikevich, E. M. (2007). Dynamical systems in neuroscience : the geometry of excitability and bursting. Computational neuroscience. MIT Press.


Can color blindness be treated with image filtering technology? Using image color-filtering techniques we can simulate the way colorblind people see:

The aim of this question is to know whether the opposite process could be possible, namely can a colorblind person experience normal trichromatic vision using a  vision enhancement device? Could the deficit in the cones be corrected via this system?

Taking this one step further, if this process is possible, is it possible that humans could experience multi-cone vision as the 16-cone vision of the mantis shrimp?

Short answer
Lost spectral sensitivity in bichromats or monochromats cannot be made up for by technology. The only thing technology can do is to process the visual image and shift its spectral content such that it falls outside the deficient region in the color-deficient spectrum. Likewise, trichromats can never match the spectral sensitivity of a dodecachromatic shrimp simply because we cannot generate visual acuity de novo. Mantis shrimp can detect UV light and additional cones enhance the spectral reslution in the visible spectrum too. This cannot be emulated with a trichromatic system.

Background
Removing colors from RGB images such that it alludes to the way color-vision impaired people perceive the world is trivial, as the image shows in the question and see Figs. 1 & 2.

Trichromats have three cones: red, green and blue cones, inferring normal RGB vision. Cone opsins are responsible for capturing light and they have overlapping sensitivity spectra (Fig. 3). Dichromats have only two types of cones and lack one cone type. People suffering from protanopia are unable to perceive any ‘red’ light, those with deuteranopia are unable to perceive ‘green’ light and those with tritanopia are unable to perceive ‘blue’ light (source: Colour Blind Awareness). However, while they are said to be color blind, they do not lack the ability to see that one color; in fact they cannot perceive a specific section of the normal visible spectrum.

The most accepted way in which we perceive color is the Hering theory of spectral sensitivity. Basically it states that we perceive color through two opponent systems: a red-green and a yellow-blue opponent system. Without going into detail on this (it's another story...), it's important to realize its consequences. Because of the spectral overlap of the red and green cones and the red-green opponent system in Hering's model, the outcome of either missing the red cones or the green cones is pretty similar. Hence the collective term red/green color blindness, because people with red and green deficiencies see the world in a very similar way. Protanopes and deuteranopes both live in a world of murky greens, where blues and yellows stand out. Browns, oranges, shades of red and green are easily confused. Both types will confuse some blues with some purples and both types will struggle to identify pale shades of most colors. For example, a person with deuteranopia sees red as a shade of green and people with deuteranomaly often misclassify brown as red (source: Colour Blind Awareness).

Now - we cannot regenerate that missing cone with image filtering; removing data from an image is simple (Fig. 1). However, adding it back in is impossible. How can a person without red cones perceive red? It's simply impossible.

To draw an analogy here - when a person at old age is missing the sensory cells in the basal end of the cochlea due to the steady degenerative processes of the hair cells and cannot perceive high frequency tones of, e.g., 8 kHz and up (presbyacusis), it's over. We can amplify with everything we got, but the person simply can't hear it. What we can do, however, is a process called frequency compression. Basically what you do is squeeze the higher frequencies at the front end into the lower frequencies and amplify that through a hearing aid. In this case the person still can't perceive the frequencies, but the information is yet contained in the signal.

Back to your question - what Robin Kramer alluded to is the Chroma device: like the hearing aid example above, this device uses signal processing tricks. Basically it can do three things for you; 1) identify colors, 2) enhance contrast 3) detect edges. Identifying colors can help by replacing reds and greens in red/green color blinds with yellows and blues. Enhancing contrast can be done in red/green color blinds by shifting the red/green spectrum towards the blues and the yellows, much like our acoustic-frequency compression scenario in the hearing aid above. Edge detection can help to improve object detection etcetera in murky images in color blinds. But all it can do is optimally use the limited color information available to the color deficient person. It can not restore normal trichromatic vision in any way.

Then to the mantis shrimp. Six of the additional cones are dedicated to UV vision, which is outside the visible spectrum of ours. The other ones add spectral detail. Extra cones within the visible spectrum add spectral detail. They do not add additional colors as such. UV vision cannot be inferred by technology. What you can do, however, is compressing UV wavelengths into the visible wavelengths. But still we would not be able to 'see' it as such. Further, spectral detail cannot be added by technology either.

Fig. 1. color blindness simulated pictures. source: Vision Salud

Fig. 2. Color blindness. source: Tanuwidjaja et al., 2014

Fig.3. Spectra sensitivity of the cones and the rods. source: wikipedia

Reference
- Tanuwidjaja et al., Ubicomp 2014, September 13–17, Seattle, WA, USA


People's subjective tendency: Is there a mathematical model? In our everyday life, people always intentionally or unintentionally value some objects. However, some tend to overvalue the value of objects, while others tend to undervalue them. For some the deviation is big, while for others it is small.

So I wonder, are there existing research findings related to this? Or is there a mathematical model to model different people's subjective tendencies on how they value objects in daily life?

I think there is a mathematical model for this.
Have a look at Bayes' Theorem. It is also very interesting from a philosophical and psychological point of view.

Here is a link from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/


Why can a user seamlessly switch from one language input to another on the same keyboard? The question regards the phenomenon where a user can switch context on the same tool seamlessly, and as it seems without thinking. The only practical use of the phenomenon that I know of is the switching of input languages on the same keyboard, but there are probably other real world examples.

Often these users don't type the way I do (looking at the keyboard), still they are very skilled in both Swedish, English and Icelandic keyboard setups. Is this a kind of automated process, such as the use of a piano from a professional concert pianist who does not need to think, only play with what is learned from hours and hours of exercise? I believe it is related. but not the same.

I'm asking of what this mechanism of switching context is and why it works seamlessly for users.

An image of the Icelandic keyboard setup:

Image from http://farm8.staticflickr.com

Focusing on the word "seamlessly", in the more general case (not just typing)--once you look at cognitive/linguistic activity with a fine enough resolution it becomes clear that language-switching is not usually seamless.  There is typically a cost (lowered performance, either in speed or accuracy) to switching languages in any modality, which is typically greater from second language to first language than from first language to second language (Language Switching & Competition, Second Language Research April 2012 vol. 28 no. 2 131-149, among many others).


What is the difference between Megalomania and Narcissism? As far as I can tell, both megalomania and narcissism are found in [delusions of] grandiosity. Perhaps megalomania has more focus on power, rather than just being well liked?

What is the primary difference between the two?

Are all megalomaniacs narcissists? Or all narcissists megalomaniacs? Or are they completely separate?

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) doesn't distinguish between megalomania and narcissism. The most recent edition of the DSM (DSM-5) classifies both as a form of narcissistic personality disorder.


Colorado Boulder study about brain morphometric measures of Cannabis users methodologically weak? I'm relating to this study: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.short

The researchers found no differences in subcortical brain structures for daily Cannabis users vs. controls. However the controls were only abstinent for 60 (adults) or 90 (adolescents) days. IF Cannabis use was associated with changes in brain structures which take more than 60-90 days to normalize, these (presumably) insufficient abstinence periods could be the reason why no differences between user and controls could be found. Why did they not use a control group which had not used Cannabis at all?

The researchers used a questionnaire to identify daily users, that is, the experimental group contained persons who had used marijuana every day during the past 60 days.

The control group, on the other hand, consisted of persons who had not used marijuana at all during the past 60 days.

The researchers probably felt that 60 days (that is, three months or a quarter year) is a long enough period to establish habitual use and habitual non-use.

Of course it is possible that the 60-day-non-users did use marijuana once or twice every year, just as it is possible that the 60-day-daily-users did not use marijuana once or twice each year. But this should have no massive long term effects either way.

Of course it is possible that the non-users just stopped using 60 days ago, or that the users just started 60 days ago. But it is unlikely that this would be true for a significant proportion of participants, and for most participants it is very probable that the usage pattern over 3 months reflects long time usage.

But basically you are of course right. The worst case could be that the last-60-day-users had all just started 60 days ago, and that the last-60-day-non-users had all just stopped. The researchers might have asked this, but they do not report such a question, which, in my eyes, is a problem. But probability is in their favor.


Do workers retain information from audio lectures when working in a physically demanding job? If I were to start listening to lectures instead of music will I retain the information?

I've attempted to do this myself once with Assembly Language but I worked in a loud environment (sand blasting and concrete mixing) so couldn't really hear the  audio most of the time and programming makes for a bad audio book. At my current job it's also loud but the management doesn't care if we use ear plug headphones just don't want to pay the money for them if I wont retain much information.

Anyone have any experience with this or links to studies done?

If it matters I plan to listen to lectures on computer science, quantum physics, psychology, neurology, and medical basics (anatomy, physiology, etc) and maybe various other sciences.

First off, if you want to retain information, you have to actively listen to it. Simply putting it on like you would background music is not going to help that much. However, if you do want to learn by listening to a lecture, there are several strategies you can use. Here are some listening strategies you can try to employ. They are mostly targeted at being in lecture, but listening is listening either way.

Another useful fact is that the speed that the average brain thinks at is 400 words per minute. Find the speed of speaking at which your brain doesn't tune out at, but still has time to process everything coming its way. If you have a friend, have them speak at different speeds and observe the effect on your attention span. Then when you turn on your audio lecture, see what speed the lecturer speaks at and adjust the speed in an audio editing program to match your brain's attention span. Also, if you can't change the speed of the audio but it's slower than you want, then ask yourself small questions in between sentences so that you don't lose attention.

Obviously if you are trying to "multitask" you have to make the audio slow enough to where you can hear every word and work on your job, if that's what you wanted, but multitasking has been proven to be impossible.

There was a study done on audio-tutorials versus in-person lab-lecture and the people who used audio had better scores/retention.

A few questions you might want to ask about yourself are:

What sound intensity of music helps block out ambient noise but still allows me to hear myself think?
Where are the best places for me to listen to audio?
Which subject am I going to be listening to? (You answered this in your question but some of those subjects can't be simply listened to once through for retention. I would say Computer Science and Quantum Physics need a very quiet environment if you are going to be listening to them. Hopefully you have a pause button. Meanwhile, the others you mentioned might be possible if you are able to memorize quickly.)

Finally, if you have a car, I would highly recommend listening to your lecture in the car, and then when you are sitting down elsewhere, re-listen to that same lecture. Repetition really helps with retention! (You can find lots of articles on that online.)

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need clarification, etc...


Are there working computational frameworks for human behavior and personality? I've been scanning through the web, looking for some ideas and theories about computational modules of human behavior and personality, but so far all I could find regards to procedural programs and cognitive modules (which are tending towards learning and decision making, and not personality modeling).

What I mean by computational frameworks for human behavior is not some Java implementation of categorization of a given person, which are limited to the model constraints and specific domains, but high-level object oriented abstraction of the whole human personality. As Chris Crawford describes the difference:

  "A character is to a real human being as a story is to life, ...  story
  is a simplification and a clarification of life. It has a beginning, a
  middle, and an end, where life just bounces along endlessly."

For example, a system called "The AntiBigData" takes some set of personality traits (which must adhere to predefined interfaces), and access the class package of "Humor", which associates to some repository of let say 100 MB of anecdotes, and sorts the repository by likeliness of the given personality traits.

Of course, this system would have infinite potential of complexity and domain, and maybe developed in an Agile fashion, but I am surprised I couldn't find information about academic formalization of relevant topics.

Cognitive Architectures

The description most closely matches the concept of a cognitive architecture. Whereas I would say most empirical cognitive science focuses on isolating cognitive functions or behavioral substrates, cognitive architectures are relatively unique because they attempt to run bottom-up simulations of interdependent sets of cognitive functions.

Example: ACT-R framework

An influential example of a cognitive architecture is Carnegie Mellon's Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational (ACT-R), which is a hybrid cognitive architecture--meaning it comprises both symbolic pattern recognition and underlying processes such as utility functions. The ACT-R framework distinguishes between modules (perceptual-motor and memory), buffers for accessing memory, and pattern recognition between buffer states and perceptual-motor production.

ACT-R model

ACT-R usage

ACT-R allows researchers to obtain standard quantities like response times and accuracy on a very large amount of tasks. (Apparently it now also affords obtaining fMRI data, but I am not at all familiar with this.) It has been used to model virtually every kind of behavior and cognitive function, and there is little point in giving specific examples. The ACT-R website's publications section features a staggering amount of well-categorized articles, if you want to know more, but since you wanted to know about personality in particular, it merits pointing out that it does include individual differences.

Conclusion

Cognitive architectures are an exciting development that promise to solve the dirty little secret of most cognitive science: while we are developing increasingly powerful explanations for isolated cognitive functions and behaviors, there was no way to bridge most of these models, or to combine them into a model of a coherent "mind" (i.e., a cause of behavior). While they are not the only player in that game (e.g., embodied cognition and dynamical systems), the concept of cognitive architecture, unlike competing concepts, has the advantage of being immediately compatible with the cognitive literature, and very amenable to digital simulation.


Do victims of parental abuse and neglect become abusive or neglectful parents? The psychology literature suggests that 'good parenting' in early childhood is a crucial helping factor in brain development of child. (e.g., see "Social Intelligence" by Goleman.)

Where people grow up without 'good parenting' do they tend to, potentially unconsciously, offer similar 'bad parenting' to their children?

By bad parenting, I mean any abusive and neglectful parenting behavior. Examples:

Getting drunk and beating wife in front of children (abusive).
Never appreciating any success of kid (neglectful).

Does bad parenting breed bad parenting?

Bad parenting is considered a risk factor for all kinds of disfunctional behavior. For example, childhood victimization has been found to cause a higher risk of

juvenile delinquency
prostitution
adult re-victimization
lower IQ and reading ability
drug use and drug-related crime
child molestation
etc.

These are just random samples from the first page of a Google Scholar search for the term "bad parenting". This is a well researched topic, and it appears to have been shown that victims of abusive or neglective parents run an increased risk of showing abusive and criminal behavior themselves.

As for your specific question, yes, again it seems that adults that have been mistreated as children are at a higher risk to mistreat their own children. This is a consistent finding across many studies: one example, another example. Again, there are many more examples. The other risk factors, such as partner violence (i.e. adult re-victimization), teen pregnancy and substance abuse, are in turn facilitated by child victimization (see the list above).

The problem is that many studies are badly conceptualized and often do not carefully consider other influences such as personality traits and the responsibility of the child: not all children are born as the same blank slates, and a "difficult" (irascible, headstrong, energetic etc.) child will increase the likelihood that the parents use desperate attempts such as physical force to restrain it, and will as adult - and independent of being abused or not abused as a child - have a stronger tendency for anger, impatience and transgressing the borders of other people including his own children. One article analyzing methodological problems finds that of all studies on intergenerational child physical abuse published between 1965 and 2000 only ten included a control group, and of these ten only two met several other methodological standards, and of these two one study provided evidence for the intergenerational continuity of child physical abuse, while the other did not.

So it appears that this question has not been answered to full satisfaction by current research.

Edit:

A great overview of the research on the effects of different parenting styles is given on pages 182-188 in Arnett, J. J. (2010). Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Definition: Bad Parenting

Laurence Steinberg defines "bad parenting":

  So when I say bad parenting, I mean parenting that is excessively harsh, parenting that is inconsistent, or parenting that is excessively permissive. And lots of times kids get all three of those things together. So their parents will swing from being really, really harsh and punitive to not even caring, and being what most of us would consider to be negligent. And so those three things, the harshness, the permissiveness and the inconsistency, all have been shown to contribute to antisocial behavior during adolescence.


How much more efficient is interleaving skills when learning? In an interview with Robert A. Bjork this article suggests interleaving skills is better than focusing exclusively on one skill at a time. How much of a difference does the research indicate that it makes?

I think it would be unfair to reduce this effect to a single number-- most certainly, it depends on the task at hand, as well as a number of other factors.

To give a rough idea, though, you may want to look at Richland et al. (2005) who found roughly a 25% increase in retention on a knowledge test when using interleaving. Also noted in this article,

  Interleaving has been shown  to be more effective for producing
  learning than blocking or  massing learning (A1A2A3A4A5B1B2B3B4B5) on
  many  diverse sets of stimuli including word pairs (Battig, 1979),
  motor patterns (Shea & Morgan, 1979), and word translations
  (Richland, Bjork & Finley, 2004)

Robert Bjork claims that interleaving is only one intervention among a class of "desirable difficulties", or things that might make your task seem harder but will improve it in the long run. Other such desirable difficulties include generation (e.g., fill in the blank rather than multiple choice; see Karpicke & Roediger (2008)) and the spacing effect (studying at regular spaced intervals is more effective than studying everything all at once). Bjork has shown that interleaving is not just an artifact of the spacing effect--after all, interleaving requires spacing--but that its contribution to retention is in addition to spacing.

If you head on over to Bjork's lab webpage you'll see that he has a decades of research publications available free for download.

Richland, Bjork, Finley, & Linn (2005). Linking Cognitive Science to Education: Generation and Interleaving Effects. FREE PDF

Karpicke, & Roediger (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968. Retreived from https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/101/altmann/karpickeRoediger08.pdf


Is there a Dot-Probe Paradigm / visual-probe task available online? Is there an online resource to take the Dot-probe paradigm test>

When I searched I could only find a guide to set up a server for such a test. However, I don't have the ability to do that.

I'm specifically interested in a test that measures negativity/pessimism bias and tells you the results.

There appears to be an Inquisit implementation of the dot probe task that will run both online and in a lab. Such scripts can presumably be customised to your purposes.

If you want to use this for research purposes, you would need to have access to a licence to Inquisit.

There is also a trial version of the software. You could download the trial of Inquisit and the script and run the script on your computer.


Chunking Patterns and Enjoyment of Applying Patterns I've been reading a book "The Theory of Fun in Game Design" it talks about two concepts of psychology that I wanted to confirm are true. The writer the book isn't a psychologist.

The two concepts are Chunking Patterns and Enjoyment of Applying Patterns.

So, according to the book he says we are pattern matching all the time. That's one of the things our brain does best. Once we recognize a pattern enough we chunk it. So when we drive to work every morning we don't sometimes remember the details because we do it so often we chunk those details.

Art, Movies, Music, Games, etc... that interest us are because they are introducing new patterns that we can either learn or combine with previous patterns.

This has been essential to our survival so our body rewards us for processing these new patterns by releasing endorphin's.

So, basically is this a bunch of hogwash or is there some truth behind the "theory" that pattern recognition is rewarded with a release of endorphins?

Also if this is true, is there somewhere I can read more about this?

This is an interesting question and when you said:

  when we drive to work every morning we don't sometimes remember the details because we do it so often we chunk those details.

you are talking about two different phenomena.  They are chunking and autopilot.  As for the theory that:

  pattern recognition is rewarded with a release of endorphins

I haven't been able to find anything to confirm this, however I may have found a possible source to the theory that pattern recognition can lead to the release of other reward chemicals in the brain, which can only be very loosely linked with the other two phenomena.

Chunking

Within psychology, Chunking is a method used for remembering things rather than "switching into autopilot" to carry out learned tasks automatically without conscious awareness.  Rather than chunking a recognised pattern, we are employing chunking by producing recognised patterns which can be used later on to remember something needed in the future.  We are breaking the item to be remembered into chunks and remembering the chunks with the patterns created.

  The phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism can be observed in the way individuals group numbers and information in the day-to-day life. For example, when recalling a number such as 12101946, if numbers are grouped as 12, 10 and 1946, a mnemonic is created for this number as a day, month and year. Similarly, another illustration of the limited capacity of working memory as suggested by George Miller (1956) can be seen from the following example: While recalling a mobile phone number such as 9849523450, we might break this into 98 495 234 50. Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that is beyond the "seven plus-or-minus two" memory span, we are remembering four groups of numbers.

Autopilot

This has been studied quite extensively and one study on this (Hyman Jr, et al. 2014) talked about how it is possible to drive home and have no conscious awareness during or after the trip. See also, Ira Hyman (2014)

In the introduction it was highlighted that:

  There are two broad categories of possible explanations. One possible explanation is that people were aware of the road and obstacles during the drive, but immediately forgot those features. Alternatively, driving without awareness may represent a form of inattentional blindness, in which objects that pass through the focal point of vision do not enter awareness (Neisser and Becklen, 1975; Becklen and Cervone, 1983; Mack and Rock, 1998; Simons and Chabris, 1999; Simons, 2000). People may use visual information to guide the control of actions, but may not devote attention to objects. Without attention, people may fail to bind features into objects (Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Wolfe, 2007) and thus may fail to become aware of the things they pass when driving or walking. This second possible explanation would be consistent with the theoretical claim that visual information follows two pathways after low level visual processing (Goodale and Milner, 1992; Jeannerod and Jacob, 2005; Westwood and Goodale, 2011). One pathway is the dorsal pathway which uses visual information to guide action, enabling someone to grab an object or navigate around obstacles. The other pathway is the ventral pathway leading to object recognition and conscious awareness.

Pattern recognition and release of endorphins

There is a book called Your Money and Your Brain by Jason Zweig (2008) and Michael Angelucci (2011) provided some insights from the book, including:

  Dopamine is a chemical that sends energy throughout the brain and turns motivation into actions. Dopamine is so powerful that a rat will starve to death rather than turn away from dopamine. Lay an MRI scan of a cocaine addict about to get a fix next to that of a person who thinks he is about to win money and they are virtually the same. We also know this about dopamine and rewards: dopamine is strongest when a reward is unexpected. That getting what you expected does not produce dopamine, and if the expected reward does not show up then the dopamine dries up. We also know that if the reward is big enough, dopamine seems to have a memory. This last point is huge. Investors who have received a large reward will experience a dopamine release if a pattern similar to the winning pattern is observed. This may result in the investor taking actions that are not sound.

What is being said here is that with addictions comes patterns of behaviour which has rewards.  Your remember how you was rewarded by certain behaviour patterns and so you strive to gain those rewards again by repeating that behaviour.

You might see patterns within stock markets or within casino games (see Gambler's Fallacy within my answer to another question).  You might get lucky one or two times and win using the pattern, increasing dopamine levels (a reward chemical within the brain) and this enforces the fallacy that the pattern exists and you commit it to memory for later use.  But the pattern does not actually exist and therefore when employed later on it fails.

Conversely to the endorphin effect proposed in your question, in this situation, the pain of losing and the stress of trying to find out how this could have happened, will increase endorphin levels and the principal function of endorphins is to inhibit the transmission of pain signals.

References

Angelucci, M. (2011). Dopamine and Pattern Seeking and Your Investments [Online]http://awmfinancial.com/uncategorized/dopamine-and-pattern-seeking-and-your-investments/

Becklen, R., and Cervone, D. (1983). Selective looking and the noticing of unexpected events. Memory & Cognition 11(6), 601–608.DOI: 10.3758/BF03198284 PMID: 6669028

Goodale, M. A., and Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences 15(1), pp 20–25.DOI: 10.1016/0166-2236(92)90344-8 PMID: 1374953

Hyman, I. (2014). The Dangers of Going on Autopilot. Psychology Today [Online]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/201404/the-dangers-going-autopilot

Hyman Jr, I. E., Sarb, B. A., & Wise-Swanson, B. M. (2014). Failure to see money on a tree: inattentional blindness for objects that guided behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 5(1), 356.DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00356

Jeannerod, M., and Jacob, P. (2005). Visual cognition: a new look at the two-visual systems model. Neuropsychologia 43(2), pp 301–312.DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2004.11.016 PMID: 15707914

Mack, A., and Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), pp 81-97.DOI: 10.1037/h0043158Reproduced in webpage format with author's permission at: http://cogprints.org/730/1/miller.html

Neisser, U., and Becklen, R. (1975). Selective looking: attending to visually specified events. Cognitive Psychology 7(4), pp 480–494.DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(75)90019-5

Simons, D. J., and Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception 28(9), pp 1059–1074.DOI: 10.1068/p281059 PMID: 10694957

Simons, D. J. (2000). Attentional capture and inattentional blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(4), pp 147–155.DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01455-8 PMID: 10740279

Treisman, A. M., and Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12(1), pp 97–136.DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(80)90005-5 PMID: 7351125

Westwood, D. A., and Goodale, M. A. (2011). Converging evidence for diverging pathways: neuropsychology and psychophysics tell the same story. Vision Research 51(8), pp 804–811.DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2010.10.014 PMID: 20951156

Wolfe, J. M. (2007). Guided search 4.0: current progress with a model of visual search. In: Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems, ed. W. Gray (New York: Oxford University Press), pp 99–119.

Zweig, J. (2008). Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster


Does the split brain disprove a materialistic mind? According to materialism, the conscious mind is the product of the brain.  Thus, if the brain is split in half such that the two hemispheres cannot communicate with each other, then there are three possibilities:

Both hemispheres gain their own conscious mind.
Only one hemispheres has a conscious mind.
A single conscious mind operates across both hemispheres.

Within a materialistic paradigm, #3 is impossible.  There cannot be unified control without communication between the two hemispheres.

Option #1 is false according to this article,

  A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called
  split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the
  researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have
  found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by
  little to no communication between the right and left brain
  hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious
  perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest
  edition of the journal Brain.

and this answer.

  So I conclude from [sic] this quick literature review that Joseph
  ascribes the presence of two minds based on something that can be
  explained at a more basic level, and hence by a more simple model,
  namely disinhibited motor control. Given the principle of parsimony, I
  conclude his observations were right, but that his conclusions were
  not.

Option #2 is false according to this answer.  The answer state consciousness does not transfer to one half, but continues to operate in both halves.

  If by continuity you mean, "a feeling that I am who I was before the
  operation, (perhaps with some changes)", then it seems that each
  hemisphere would separately maintain continuity, in the same way
  patients after massive strokes and other sudden brain injuries don't
  usually feel "they are a different person".

Thus, only option #3 is viable according to the available data.

If option #3 is indeed the only possible explanation, yet is impossible according to materialism, then the materialistic explanation for the conscious mind is false.

A fourth possibility is there is an alternative communication pathway that is not severed, as hinted at by this answer.

  Keep in mind that there are many other pathways between the
  hemispheres besides the Corpus Callosum - such as thalamocortical
  circuits, those via the midbrain and brainstem and of course external
  sensorimotor feedback.

Is option #3 the only viable option, or do the halves somehow communicate in a different way?

The question title reads:

Does the split brain disprove a materialistic mind?

The simple answer being no, nothing disproves that - the brain harbors the mind e.g., (Lilienfeld & Arkowitz, 2008).
Now you mention that two hypotheses on split-brain patients are false, namely...

Both [hemispheres] gain their own conscious mind.

Only one [hemisphere] has a conscious mind.

...and I agree with them being incorrect hypotheses as suggested in the linked pages.
Now you proceed with...

[Does a] single conscious mind operates across both [hemispheres ?]

Importantly, you state yourself that...

[...] there are [...] other pathways between the hemispheres besides the corpus callosum - such as thalamocortical circuits [...] and those via the midbrain and brainstem [...].

So from my perspective, up until now you have answered your own question whether one single mind operates across two hemispheres in split-brain patients. Anyway, to illustrate some additional interhemispheric commissures besides the callosal pathway, see Fig. 1. This shows that 'split-brains are in fact not entirely split; only the main causeway is severed.
Now there are wild stories about split-brain patients having a dual consciousness, including the paper by Joseph (1998) where the author speculates that one of his patients "...was possessed of two minds" based on the frustrations experienced by this person because his motor skills were erratic. Andrew & Akelaitis (1945) explain that split-brain patients can display diagnostic dyspraxia by an unbalanced inhibitory influence of the dominant hemisphere over the non-dominant side, explaining the uncoordinated behavior on the non-dominant side. These symptoms generally diminish over time, as the brain deploys alternative inter-hemispheric routing of communications.

Fig. 1. Interhemispheric pathways are indicated by numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. source: Urbanski et al. (2014)
References
- Andrew & Akelaitis (1945) Am J Psychiatr; 101(5): 594-9
- Joseph, J Clin Psychol (1988); 44(5): 770-9
- Lilienfeld & Arkowitz, Sci Am Mind (February 2008)
- Urbanski et al., *Front Integr Neurosci (2014)


A doctor told me that cephalic index can be used to measure human intelligence, is it true? I am roommates with a maxillofacial surgeon. He told me that during his studies he read that cephalic index can be used to measure intelligence.

And he further explained that as Africans and women have smaller brains according to cephalic index, so they are less intelligent than Caucasian and Asian men.

I just want to know how much of this is true, if any? And please explain.

No, the index and its correlation to intelligence is not strong.

See the medchrome.com description on cephalic index:

  The underlying assumption of craniometry is that skull size and shape
  determine brain size which determines such things as intelligence and
  capacity for moral behavior. Empirical evidence for this assumption is not very strong.
  Cephalic index consistently produced a very low or negative correlation with mental ability.

See also this article on Smithsonian.com: Why Brain Size Doesn’t Correlate With Intelligence

Healy and Rowe (2007) provide a critique of comparative studies of brain size.

Healy, S. D., & Rowe, C. (2007). A critique of comparative studies of brain size. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 274(1609), 453-464.


Word for the opposite of “hypochondriasis” This question was posted in English.stackexchange.

  Is there a word for the opposite condition of hypochondriasis? For
  example, someone who denies being sick when they clearly are? I would
  just say that they are "in denial". Is there any other adequate
  word?

Some answered egosyntonic. Is it correct?

P.S. Credits to Renan

It seems to depend on the reason for denying their illness...

Egosyntonic:

  ... a term referring to behaviors, values, feelings that are in
  harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or
  consistent with one's ideal self-image. ... Many personality disorders
  are considered to be egosyntonic ... Anorexia ... is also considered
  egosyntonic because many of its sufferers deny that they have a
  problem.

People with personality disorders for example, may be fully aware and accepting of their behaviour, they simply don't see it as a problem.

Denial / abnegation:

  ... is used for a psychological defense mechanism ..., in which a
  person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and
  rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be
  overwhelming evidence. ... In denial, an individual does not see or is
  mostly unconscious of existence of the truth or fact. The choice to
  refuse reality, then, is unconscious as well.

Someone may deny their illness because it makes them uncomfortable in some way - eg, they are embarrassed about it or concerned about negative perceptions by others.

Anosognosia:

  ... a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person who
  suffers a certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or
  her disability. ... Anosognosia is relatively common following
  different etiologies of brain injury ..., but can appear to occur in
  conjunction with virtually any neurological impairment.

In Anton–Babinski syndrome (visual anosognosia) for example, a person is blind, but nonetheless claims to be able see, and this is due to brain damage in the visual cortex.

Hypochondria is undue alarm about any physical or psychological symptoms, no matter how minor they may be.  So I would argue that the best counterpart is minimisation - a cognitive distortion:

  ... is the opposite of exaggeration. ... downplaying the significance
  of an event or emotion ...

A medical condition that fits this description is anosodiaphoria:

  ... a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain
  injury seems indifferent to the existence of their handicap. ... a
  disorder of the body schema in which patients verbally acknowledge a
  clinical problem ... but fail to be concerned about it.

So while a hypochondriac makes a big deal out of a small problem, anosodiaphoria is making a small deal out of a big problem.

Also see hyperchondria.


Is Freuds theory of negation testable and does it survive testing? Freuds body of work not only provides a basis von clinical practice, but is also often quoted in social sciences and social philosophy. I recently came across a text that references Freuds concept of Verneinung (Negation):

  Ein verdrängter Vorstellungs- oder Gedankeninhalt kann also zum Bewusstsein durchdringen, unter der Bedingung, dass er sich verneinen lässt. Die Verneinung ist eine Art, das Verdrängte zur Kenntnis zu nehmen, eigentlich schon eine Aufhebung der Verdrängung, aber freilich keine Annahme des Verdrängten. [...]. Mit Hilfe der Verneinung wird nur die eine Folge des Verdrängungsvorganges rückgängig gemacht, dass dessen Vorstellungsinhalt nicht zum Bewusstsein gelangt. Es resultiert daraus eine Art von intellektueller Annahme des Verdrängten bei Fortbestand des Wesentlichen an der Verdrängung.

  A supressed element of thoughts or imaginations can surface in the conscious mind under the condition it can be negated. Negation is away of acknowledging the supressed, actually a repeal of the supression, but of course not an acceptance [...] By way of negation only one consequence of the supression is undone, that the content of the supressed does not become conscious. The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the supressed, while the supression mostly persists.

(German text wikipedia, translation mine)

Now my question is, is this aspect of negation testable (=falsifiable) in some way? What where results of such tests, if any? Absent tests that would satisfy a positivist, is there a body of experience from clinical practice that supports (or not) this theory of negation?

I'm aware that there's a lively debate about inhowfar psychoanalysis is  science or pseudoscience. Much of psychoanalysis is not falsifiable, but this specific aspect may be.

The correct translation of Verneinung in English is denial. Roy Baumeister, Karen Dale, and Kristin Sommer (2002) have reviewed empirical evidence for (or against) seven of Freud's defense mechanisms and have found that "denial [has] been amply shown in studies". You can read about the findings in detail in the article itself, which is currently avialable online here.

Source:

Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66(6), 1081-1124. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00043


Does distraction cause us to skip to the next step in a motor plan? Often, if one is concentrating too hard on a particular task, it seems as though it's quite easy to skip to the next step of a plan of action.  For example, a baseball infielder may attempt a throw to first base before he has fielded the ball cleanly.

Is the intervening (skipped) movement actually removed from the sequence of steps in the existing motor plan, and is this facilitated by one's level of distraction, or do external stimuli cause the original plan to be created with this flaw?

Q: Does distraction cause us to skip to the next step in a motor plan?

A: It depends on the processes in progress, characteristics of the subject and characteristics of the signal to produce interference (based on an orientation reflex that is the beginning of an act of involuntary attention), many factors, mainly:

Characteristics of the process involved in the distraction (mainly nature of the stimulus but also what relevance it has for the subject).
The nature of the processes that are being executed in the motor plan (automatic or controlled, these processes differ in practice, memory, difficulty, relectivity, required level of effort, etc.) (processes related to sports can be automated much from training).
Characteristics of the subject (different capacities of selective attention, etc.).

See: Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing. Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84, 127-190.


What is the term for a psychological effect which does not have a neurobiological/genetic basis? When a psychological condition is the result of irregular brain structures or neurotransmitter imbalances we say the condition has a neurobiological basis; this is analogous to the classic Nature in the Nature vs Nurture discussion.

What is the term for a condition which does not have this sort of (apparent) neurobiological basis? This would be a condition caused by Nurture effects such as psychologically traumatic events.

Is there a distinction? Technically both would induce physical changes in the brain, but I often see "neurobiological basis" used as if there were a different sort of basis for a condition.

As I alluded in the comments, I think your question is underpinned by a more fundamental worry of the "best level of description" for psychological phenomena. If you a reductionist then you believe that all of psychology is best explained in terms of the activity of neurons (or systems of neurons if you are of the system perspective; note that some do not consider this reductionist. However, it does reduce to the physical basis).

On the other hand, Putnam and Fodor (and I suspect most proponents of strong AI) argue for multiple realizability: mental states and psychology can be implemented in various physical substrates, not just biological neurons. If you subscribe to this view, then it is natural to expect the best level of description of psychology to be independent of the specifics of a physical implementation (think algorithm-analysis in theoretical computer science). Since brains are physical things that implement minds, you would believe that a neurobiological basis does exist, but its details are irrelevant to your theory. Note that many theories in psychology can be viewed at the macro- or behaviorist level and as I suggested earlier: many theories in cognitive science lack a solid neuronal grounding.

If you have a physics background, then the weak analogy I would make is thermodynamics versus statistical mechanics. Thermodynamics is a macro-level theory that can exist without micro-level detail. However, eventually thermodynamics found a micro-level grounding in statistical mechanics. Does that mean we abandon thermodynamics and only study stat mech?

As for your nature vs. nurture distinction, if we accept mutliple realizability then we can use the above ideas to try to formalize the terminology. We can think of nature features as ones that are best described at the level of the specific implementation of the human brain, and nurture features as ones that are best described on a macro-level that would apply to any reasonable implementation. I don't know if this idea has been deeply studied or if it has any interesting bearing on the nature vs. nurture debate.


Why seemingly all the neuronal membrane-bound receptor are exclusively GPCR or highly homologous to GPCR family? Nicotinic AchR is known for long to be an ion channel receptor however it has been argued whether it is a GPCR, as well Muscarinic AchR is known to be GPCR.  Seemingly many other nerve cell bound receptors like   Serotonin receptor, Melatonin receptors, Dopamine receptors, Adrenaline and Nor-adrenaline receptors, known to be G-protein coupled receptor (GPCRs). Although GABA receptors are not directly GPCR by functionality, wikipedia tells a subtype of GABA receptor. is probably GPCR.

So I have basically 2 part in this question:

Why GPCR or receptors homologous to GPCR are so common in nerve cells?
Are there neuronal receptors which do not have homology with GPCRs?

I think you're confused about proteins that are GPCRs versus having homology. GABA-B is another that is a GPCR (it is not particularly related to GABA-A). These are also called metabotropic receptors.

Ionotropic receptors are from separate families, many from the Cys-loop family (see Sine & Engel, 2006) with a characteristic 5-subunit composition, or the heterotetrameric structure shared among related glutamate receptors (see Dingledine et al 1999).

Your link for nAChR doesn't seem to argue that it is homologous to GPCRs, instead it describes a possible interaction with that channel with g-proteins.

Additionally, none of this is special for neurons: because all modern proteins evolved from previous ones, there is substantial homology within protein families that can often be traced even between vertebrates and bacteria. Within the GPCR family, many different proteins have evolved different sensitivities and different specific g-protein interactions, but the general concept is conserved: something binds outside the cell, causing an internal conformational change that affects a g-protein. The ionotropic receptors are much different.

Dingledine, R., Borges, K., Bowie, D., & Traynelis, S. F. (1999). The glutamate receptor ion channels. Pharmacological reviews, 51(1), 7-62.

Sine, S. M., & Engel, A. G. (2006). Recent advances in Cys-loop receptor structure and function. Nature, 440(7083), 448.


What factors influence a person or group of people's empathy toward another group? The recent Paris terrorist attack highlights the discrepancy in the levels of empathy that Western people feel toward other Western people, compared to the empathy they feel toward Middle-Eastern people for example, who suffer such attacks regularly.

The question is:

How can a person or group of people's empathy be measured?
What factors influence this level of empathy?

Have any studies been done on this subject?

Empathy can be measured in many different ways. As this source outlines:

  Psychologists distinguish between measurements of situational
  empathy—that is, empathic reactions in a specific situation—and
  measurements of dispositional empathy, where empathy is understood as
  a person's stable character trait. Situational empathy is measured
  either by asking subjects about their experiences immediately after
  they were exposed to a particular situation, by studying the “facial,
  gestural, and vocal indices of empathy-related responding” (Zhou,
  Valiente, and Eisenberg 2003, 275), or by various physiological
  measures such as the measurement of heart rate or skin conductance.

Empathy is influenced by a very wide range of factors. Some are innate (e.g., one's capacity for empathy), some are due to upbringing and some are related to the characteristics of the individual or group involved (e.g, their familiarity, or appearance). I couldn't find a comprehensive list of these different factors (probably as there are too many), but [1,2,3,4] should give you a sense of the range of factors.

Please let me know if you require any further clarification such as a more specific question.

References:

1 McDonald, Nicole M., and Daniel S. Messinger. "The development of empathy: How, when, and why." Moral Behavior and Free Will: A Neurobiological and Philosophical Aprroach (2011): 341-368.

[2] JACKSON, P. L., MELTZOFF, A. N. & DECETY, J. 2005. How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage, 24, 771-779.

[3] GALLESE, V. 2003. The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, 36, 171-180.

[4] CHAPMAN, E., BARON-COHEN, S., AUYEUNG, B., KNICKMEYER, R., TAYLOR, K. & HACKETT, G. 2006. Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test. Social Neuroscience, 1, 135-148.


How do we know brain Is not involved in knee reflex? How do we know that compressing the knee generates a feedback signal that makes the leg extend even before the signal reach the brain?

Q: How do we know brain Is not involved in knee reflex?

A: The brain is involved in the knee reflex in the control of how fast/slow and strong/weak the reflex occurs, but it's not essential in the occurrence of the knee reflex. The knee reflex is still present even when the spinal cord is cut or destroyed at any level above L2 [1], which is above the reflex arc pathway (L2-4) and which cuts off the connection between the brain and the reflex arc. This is usually evident clinically. The only exception that the knee reflex may be absent after the incident is that the condition called “spinal shock” occurs [3]. However, this condition is temporary, and the knee reflex will return, usually even brisker than before the incident (due to the absence of inhibitory control from the brain). This confirms that the brain is not essential in the knee reflex and only has regulatory roles.

Q: How do we know that compressing the knee generates a feedback signal that makes the leg extend even before the signal reach the brain?

A: Electrophysiologic studies show that the latency of the knee reflex is normally about 46 msec [1] while the evoked potential (P37) recorded at the scalp over the leg area after electrical stimulation of the posterior tibial nerve is about 37 msec.[4] So, comparing data from these comparable but not identical experiments, it can be estimated that the knee reflex occurs, indeed, after the signal reaches the brain, as you asked. But don’t forget that the former latency is the time of the complete loop while the latter latency is of only halfway. It will take longer than 37 msec for the signal to complete the loop of leg-brain-leg and move the knee.

References

Xu D, Guo X, Yang CY, Zhang LQ. Assessment of Hyperactive Reflexes in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury. BioMed Research International. Vol 2015, Article ID 149875. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/149875
Wikipedia. Patella reflex.
Atkinson PP, Atkinson JLD. Spinal Shock. Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 1996 Apr; 71(4): 384–389.
Walsh P, Kane N, Butler S. The clinical role of evoked potentials. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 2005;76:ii16-ii22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2005.068130


Is pedophilia a sexual orientation or a mental disorder? There are some different claims being made that pedophilia is a sexual orientation rather than a mental disorder.

At the moment there seems to be a growing group of psychologists advocating that pedophilia is, or at least should be considered a sexual orientation rather than a mental disorder.

For example:

  GOOD: You're a member of a growing group of psychologists who say
  pedophilia should be considered a sexual orientation. Why?

  Quinsey: Part of the definition of pedophilia is a person has a
  preference for a particular kind of partner. [...] pedophiles,
  unlike other men, show substantial sexual interest in prepubescent
  children. As far as we know—and many people have tried—these sexual
  interests are not modifiable by any method that’s been tried yet. So
  it appears like pedophilia is a sexual orientation. [...] You also can’t modify that
  interest; it’s stable through adulthood, just like pedophilia.

Another example:

  “Pedophiles are not simply people who commit a small offence from time
  to time but rather are grappling with what is equivalent to a sexual
  orientation just like another individual may be grappling with
  heterosexuality or even homosexuality,” emphasized Van Gijseghem.

  “True pedophiles have an exclusive preference for children, which is
  the same as having a sexual orientation.  You cannot change this
  person’s sexual orientation.” He added, however: “He may however
  remain abstinent.”

There is also an advocacy/support group for people attracted to minors, B4UACT, who state in a section from their website (emphasis mine):

  Why do you say that minor-attracted people are stereotyped?

  Popular beliefs about minor-attracted people are not supported by the
  evidence. Research shows that they are no more violent or aggressive
  than the general population, nor do they suffer from psychopathology
  or personality disorders. As a group, they do not share any particular
  characteristics or behaviors other than their feelings of attraction.

As I understand things mental disorders tend to have observable associated symptoms, while a sexual orientation would not as it is just an instinctive attraction (in the general sense of the term).

Are there studies that suggest that pedophilia is a sexual orientation? Do traits typically associated with a mental disorder apply to pedophilia?

Before trying to give any sort of answer, it is important to address a common misconception. In popular culture, the terms child-molester and pedophile are often equated. Scientifically, they are not at all the same. The approximate scientific definition for a pedophile is:

  an individual that has an unwavering sexual attraction to prepubescent children similar to attraction heterosexual men have for women

This means that a pedophile might or might not molest children, and a child-molester might or might not be a pedophile. Further, implicit in this definition is a close resemblance to a sexual orientation, and if you want a through and careful discussion of this (much better than my answer) then read:

  Seto, M.C (2012) Is Pedophilia a Sexual Orientation? Archives of Sexual Behavior 41(1): 231-236.

Now, the actually relevant scientific discussion (as opposed to merely a semantic distinction) is threefold: (1) can pedophilia be considered a choice in the legal sense? (2) what causes it? (3) can it be treated?

Note that for what we typically consider sexual orientations, questions (1) and (3) have clear answers: no, and no. However, for mental disorders, all permutations of answers to (1) and (3) are possible. Thus, answering these questions does not let you clear up semantic ambiguity.

To start with question (2): in broad strokes Blanchard, et al. (1999) and Cantor, et al. (2004) suggest that pedophilia has a prenatal cause. For question (3) there has been no evidence to suggest that pedophilia can be treated or "cured", much like how you cannot "cure" homosexuality. This lead to Van Gijseghem expert testimony before the Canadian Parliment's Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights that you quote from in your question. He concludes that pedophilia cannot be 'cured' through penal intervention. However, it is possible for a pedophile to abstain from becoming a child-molester.

This leaves us question (1), the legal part of this. In Canada, being a pedophile is not a crime, but molesting children is a crime. The status of pedophilia as a mental disorder or sexual orientation is irrelevant to this since both mental status and sexual orientation are protected by Canadian law as long as they do not infringe on other's rights.  To help pedophiles abstain from molesting children there is the Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) program (note: it deals with all kinds of sexual offenders, not just child-molesters). This program is aimed to manage and not 'cure'. Wilson et al. (2007, 2009) have shown that CoSA produces dramatic decrease in re-offence rates for sexual offenders.


What is the capacity of the human brain? What would a reasonable estimate be of the data capacity of the human brain expressed in bytes?

Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, stated that

  The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes.

1PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1015 bytes = 1000 TB (terabytes).1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1012 bytes = 1000 GB (gigabytes). So2.5PB = 2.5 million gigabytes

  For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

The same article states that although it is stated that the brain is capable of storing around 2.5PB of information,

  The brain’s exact storage capacity for memories is difficult to calculate. First, we do not know how to measure the size of a memory. Second, certain memories involve more details and thus take up more space; other memories are forgotten and thus free up space. Additionally, some information is just not worth remembering in the first place.