What study showed that humans can successfully detect objects within images once they are able to recognize those objects? A professor in an online lecture I was watching referenced a study which he said showed that our ability as humans to detect objects within scenes (especially complex scenes) was very much connected with our familiarity to the objects in the scene.

In particular, one of the images in the study was this one:

He said that the study reported that if the subjects had never seen a dalmation before then they often failed to segment the picture accurately.

Using Google's search by image feature, I found that the image is usually entitled Richard Gregory dalmatian.

From there, I found this page, which cites the image as coming from Gregory's 1970 book The Intelligent Eye. There's also, incidentally, a good list of Gregory's publications on this personal web page, which is probably worth looking at.

From a theoretical perspective, the image is a demonstration of the role of top-down expectations in perception - we see not what's there, but a combination of the input to our retinas and what our prior knowledge tells us should be there. This is a case of Bayesian perception, and can be read up on in Kersten et al (2004), amongst many other places.


Why people assign blame to deliberate act? Say we buy stocks. Then stocks either go up or down. Neither is deliberate. No body deliberately buy the wrong stocks.

But free market assign full responsibility.

However, if someone accidentally committed manslaughter against a kid, he'll get lower sentence than if someone deliberately murdered a child.

Why do we feel that way (and yes most of us do feel that way).

Do we take into account that deliberate mistake are often repeated? Those who deliberately rob us must have rob so many people so many times? Do we recognize that giving huge incentive do not reduce "undeliberate" mistake?

What happened?

Is there a math model or evolutionary model for that?

First, we need to distinguish between those punishments brought about by nature and those brought about by society and law. Many actions in nature have an implicit consequence, such as harm, that may come back on the performer. Regardless of whether a particular person or group agrees that the consequence is "right" or "just", jumping off a high cliff and landing on rocks will probably kill you. The stock market example is like this -- the consequence of a bad prediction can be disastrous on one's finances, and the result is basically independent of what society thinks about the situation. Many actions in society, on the other hand, have explicit consequences set by humans. Because these consequences are not determined by natural phenomena so much as thoughts of man, questions of intent, prior occurrence, and extraneous circumstance may be brought into the picture.

Free market is a system that while created by humans behaves like a natural system. Consequences in a free market generally do not consider intent, prior occurrence, of extraneous circumstance. Larger entities, as an exception, may have special treatment by governments since these entities may have strong effects on society as a whole.

Now to the question of why people (and other thinking animals) tend to consider intent when evaluating an action or inaction of another being. On the surface, one may argue that deliberate and unintentional results should be treated equally since they have the same potential for harm. If we look at the goal of preventing further harm in the future (to society as a whole), however, we see a very important difference between deliberate and unintentional results:

When the harmful result of a person's actions was unintentional, the result alone should prompt the person to control himself or herself. After all, we tend to disagree with results that do not meet our intentions. These results make us feel stupid, and they make us look stupid, the combination of which is in many cases sufficient deterrence from relapse. Those having empathy are even less likely to make the same mistake again when they see the unintended harm they have caused.

When the harmful result of a person's actions was deliberate, on the other hand, the balance of natural forces of deterrence is considerably different. Since the result was intended, the person will not feel stupid. In fact, he or she will probably feel proud of having succeeded. In some cases, we will still have empathy playing a role. In practice, however, those individuals lacking empathy are far more likely to commit crimes and other wrongdoing while simultaneously lacking any remorse. In the extreme case we call these people psychopaths. While the psychopath proper may be relatively uncommon, lesser forms such as many narcissists may still exist in sufficient number that we cannot expect empathy alone from acting as deterrence from relapse.

Hence, we must consider intent when an action leads to harm. Other important factors to consider are prior occurrence, extraneous circumstance, and the psychological profile of the individual. When a person has a history that suggests a lack of empathy, we can expect that person to be more likely to relapse and hence more dangerous to society.

A side case is that of the idiot. These individuals often lack prudence when acting or making decisions. While an idiot may not intend to do harm, he or she may be naturally unsafe as a result of being unable to make proper judgements. Punishment may be unsuitable for complete idiots since they may not be able to change their ways due to lack of awareness and understanding. In these cases, one option is to keep these individuals away from means to causing harm. For example, it is best if idiots do not operate motor vehicles or firearms.


What metrics are used to measure success in treating dysthymia? What metrics are used to measure success in treating dysthymia?

What data is available on the outcomes of dysthymic patients?

The measures of dysthymia are similar to that for major depression. Dysthymia is not as acute as major depression and one of the key indicators for diagnosis is that it is persistent.

Dysthymia is a chronic type of depression in which a person's moods are regularly low. However, symptoms are not as severe as with major depression.
The main symptom of dysthymia is a low, dark, or sad mood on most days
for at least 2 years. In children and adolescents, the mood can be
irritable instead of depressed and lasts for at least 1 year.
In addition, two or more of the following symptoms will be present
almost all of the time that a person has dysthymia:
Feelings of hopelessness Too little or too much sleep Low energy or
fatigue Low self-esteem Poor appetite or overeating Poor concentration
People with dysthymia will often take a negative or discouraging view
of themselves, their future, other people, and life events. Problems
often seem more difficult to solve.

Much of the treatment involves good mental and physical health practices. Exercise, diet sleep, taking up hobbies, having a balance between work and play.
Professional therapy my also assist, in helping the individual to work through underlying causes of unhappiness, such as destructive behavioural patterns, unresolved conflicts, etc.
SSRIs have proven to be an effective treatment for dysthymia. It should be noted that the standard treatment for dysthymia is considerably longer than for major depression. This could be because of the fact it is a debilitating, long term condition.

The treatment of dysthymia with medication:
When antidepressants are prescribed for dysthymia, the treatment lasts for up to five (5) years (range: 2 to 5 years). This is much longer than the treatment time for major depression (range: 6 to 18 months). Until the availability of the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) medications, it was difficult to keep a dysthymic person on medication for the several years needed to treat the condition. SSRIs have fewer side effects than the older types of medications for depression, namely the MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor) medications and the TCA (tricyclic antidepressant) medications.


Is "havening" pseudo-scientific or effective? A fairly recent answer here offering havening as a therapy has only upvotes. But a quick internet search found a rather brief and contested Wikipedia page alleging havening is pseudo-scientific.

So what's the status of this technique/therapy in psychology? E.g are there meta-analyses showing that it's effective? And how is the quality of primary research assessed in this area? E.g. is the sub-field reasonably free of publication bias (which nowadays is also assessed in the better-off meta-analyses)?

First off, I am not familiar with this therapy. There seems to be 251 hits on Scholar (excluding citations and patents) at the time of this writing with a search for "Havening Technique'. Of these 251, there seems to be one single journal article from Gursimran et al. (2015). The publisher of this 'journal', i.e. the Health Science Journal (Insight Medical Publishing) is listed on Baell's list and hence a suspected predatory publisher.

In all, this Havening technique can safely be considered as a technique that has not been described in the scientific literature.

I am deliberately leaving out the reference to the paper, as I regard it a source, not a reference


What is the difference between affect and feeling? What exactly is the difference between affect and feeling?

Affect seems to refer to conscious experience:

  Affect is the experience of feeling or emotion.

And confusingly, so does feeling:

  In psychology, the word is usually reserved for the
  conscious subjective experience of emotion.

I realize that the definitions of emotion and mood are dicey as there are several different approaches (with corresponding definitions) in common use today.  But is it the same for affect and feeling?  Are there accepted definitions, or even accepted parts of definitions?  Or do definitions depend on the emotion model?

According to constructionists (e.g., Russell & Barrett, 1999), affect (or "core affect") is a composite of valence and arousal, which underlies all emotional experience.  So when I feel good and highly aroused, that's affect.  When I categorize my affect (good, high arousal) as excitement, that's an emotion.

According to those who consider emotions to be multi-componential reactions to the environment (e.g., Gross, 1998), affect is an umbrella word to describe anything related to emotions or mood.  It's definition isn't as specific as the one above.

On the other hand, "feelings" has no specific definition.  It's a vague term that most emotion theorists don't use because it could refer to almost anything (e.g., interoception, nociception, exteroception like touch).  To specify that feelings are specific to the affective domain, we often use the phrase affective feelings, but it's not a word that's central to any modern emotion theory that I know of.

So when in doubt, don't use the word feelings. But do use affect, emotion, or mood, as long as you explicitly define them using whatever theory you subscribe to.


Is extreme empathy and compassion considered a disorder? Can extreme empathy and compassion get to a point where it is considered a disorder?

For example, if someone is so empathetic, when feeling someones pain it negatively affects their life to the same extent as the person they are feeling for?

Or that someone is so compassionate, that they make choices that ignores their own health and well being because they are taking care of others?

Is this ever diagnosed and if not, why?

Yes and No

By the standards of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (or DSM-IV in its current form), perhaps the most prominent all-in-one manual to assist physicians in accurately defining a patient's disorder, has specific criteria for a disorder, including:

is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with an increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom

A level of empathy such that you've described could certainly fit this definition. In practice most physicians don't consider culturally/socially sanctioned actions as symptoms of mental illness (whether they are is an age-old debate for philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists/psychologists). Indeed, even the DSM-V has proposed changing criteria C (which rules out acceptable responses to loss/stress) to exclude "a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event." It seems that most cultures value empathy enough that it's unlikely to be viewed as a disorder. In fact, even the most extreme examples of empathy (complete self sacrifice) are often considered admirable things in books and movies.

If, however, empathy is directed toward someone who abuses the relationship, it could result in codependency. While the DSM doesn't list codependency, it is still often diagnosed as a mental illness. In the case of codependency, the empathetic person often cannot bring themselves to end the relationship, due to their concern over the negative effect it would have on the other person. Since this relationship is dangerous to the empath and caused by said empathy, this could be a case where too much empathy in an individual is a mental disorder.

Then again, if the other person had more empathy, the situation wouldn't occur. I think it's safe to say that in theory empathy shouldn't be a disorder but in practice it can lead to disordered behavior.


Correct measure of central tendency for reaction times analysis I'd like to know what would be the less biased measure of central tendency to compare RTs in two conditions with a lot of trials (~700). Mean is really sensitive to outliers, and median really robust, so I always used this last one. However it seems to me that I'm not really catching what's happening on the tail of the distribution with this measure. I'm not familiar with diffusion model though.

You can find an accessible overview of some of the issues in Whelan (2008) which contains further references discussing the issue.
Note that from a statistical perspective,  the sample mean and median are unbiased estimators of their population equivalents. That said, with outliers, skew and the like, the standard error of the sample mean can be quite a bit larger than the sample median. Furthermore, you typically the population distribution should be seen as a multiple component mixture distribution (e.g., fast guess trials, "real trials", distracted trials). In such cases, you may be particularly interested in the central tendency of the "real trial" distribution. In that case, sample mean and median may be biased estimates of "real trial" equivalent population distributions.

Whelan (2008) suggests the following in order of preference when estimating a measure of central tendency:

Mean after trimming the raw data for outliers (i.e., taking the middle 85% to 95% of RT data)
Mean of log or negative inverse transformation of raw reaction time
Median of raw RT

That said, the justification for a given method depends on the underlying distribution of the data and the nature of the effect of condition. For example, if condition is mainly influencing prevalence of outliers or skew, this will effect the mean more than the median in the population.

A good general strategy for exploring these issues and justifying your decision is to estimate central tendency in reaction times using a range of methods. Then correlate the scores you get for each individual using the different  methods. If you are getting very high correlations (e.g., r>.95 or .99) then you will know that the method makes little difference.

Whelan (2008) also discusses strategies for estimating all parameters in the RT distribution.

If you are studying choice reaction time, then LBA or Ratcliff's diffusion model may be more appropriate.

References

Whelan, R. (2008). Effective analysis of reaction time data. The Psychological Record, 58, 475-482. PDF


Cognitive Dissonance Given the following hypothetical situation:

An individual discovers that his girlfriend has cheated on him, but decides to continue to date her after she assures him that she will not do it again. Upon reading messages on her phone he becomes suspicious and begins to believe that she will cheat on him again. He simultaneously believes he should break up with his girlfriend but also doesn't want to break up with her despite having absolutely no support for anything but monogamy.

Is that a good example of Cognitive Dissonance?

Wikipedia: cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

So yes it is an example of Cognitive Dissonance.

Belief number 1. "I trust my girlfriend."

Belief number 2. "My girlfriend is not trustworthy"

Belief number 1. "I like my girlfriend and I don't want to break up with her."

Belief number 2. "My girlfriend cheated on me, THEREFORE I should break up with her."

The first set is based on the individual's comfort with his girlfriend being monogamous. His girlfriend has displayed capability and desire to not be monogamous. Loving relationships are usually based on openness and trust-  e.g. that both know the conditions and stick to them and discuss any changes. It looks like this initial understanding is missing and the preconceptions of monogamy have now be called into question.

The second set is based on a cognitive framework of how relationships should work that logically says that cheating means breaking up.


Why do people overestimate future happiness when they imagine acquiring something like a house or winning the lottery? When a person says he would be happy to win the lottery he is usually wrong?
Why are people bad at judging their happiness in the future? A person who knows that he will get a fancy house in the future thinks he will be happy. But when he ends up living in it he is not as happy as the thought he would be.

Like many people, I do this a lot, the whole thought process "If I won the lotto...".  Following on from the term that AsheeshR linked in his comment, there has been several studies on the phenomenon of the Hedonic Treadmill.

One particular study is "Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a
time: The impact of regular religious practice
and exercise on well-being" (Mochon et al. 2008), where they assert that a sudden large event, such as winning the lotto gives an initial burst of happiness, but we quickly adapt, from the article:

  Many studies have shown that few events in life have a lasting impact on subjective well-being
  because of people’s tendency to adapt quickly; worse, those events that do have a lasting impact tend
  to be negative.

Whereas, regular small-scale events, using the examples provided in the article: exercise, religious attendance, and I'll add seeing a good movie, meeting an old friend etc may do so

  by providing
  small but frequent boosts: if people engage in such behaviors with sufficient frequency, they may
  cumulatively experience enough boosts to attain higher well-being.

The authors of the article suggest that major events, such as winning the lotto do not promote a lasting sense of well being as do frequent smaller scale events.

An earlier study that found similar results was "Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?" (Brickman et al. 1978).


What is the difference between the structure and the conception of an empirical study in psychology? Can someone explain to me the difference between the structure of an empirical study in psychology and its conception?

My interpretation is so far that structure means the test arrangement and conception the basic concept of how the study is designed. Would you agree?

The word Empirical means (emphasis mine):

Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. (Oxford English Dictionary)

relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory — an empirical basis for the theory — and capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment (Merriam-Webster)

One comment over in english.SE states

I could, eg, use some mathematical theorem as "evidence", based purely on the fact that it's been "proven" mathematically, without any sort of practical test.

In order for Psychology to be scientific, it needs to have empirical evidence to back it up, and this is where the problem lies with some people.  As pointed out, if you stick to hard and fast rules on what constitutes a science, then most psychology will be considered pseudoscientific.
The top voted answer to Is psychology a science? states:

Clinical psychology is not technically a science, but an applied science, or in other words, a technology.

If you are a "hard scientist", you will have problems with some aspects of psychology.


How common is it for twins conjoined at the head to share thoughts and visual stimuli? I've always been interested in the possibility of a pair of conjoined twins, joined at the head, being able to read each other's thoughts, react to stimuli that one of them can't see/hear/feel, and being unable to keep secrets from one another.  Until recently, every pair of conjoined twins I learned about said that they are very much two different people with different personalities and emotions.

Then I read a wikipedia article about Krista and Tatiana Hogan.  It was a newspaper article, unfortunately, rather than a piece in a scientific journal, but the description of the girls is exactly what I had been thinking of:

If one girl is blindfolded, she can see what her sister sees.  They share thoughts.  They can't keep secrets from one another.  If one of the girls hurts a limb that she controls, the other girl feels the pain as well as the girl who actually hurt herself.

I'm curious as to whether this phenomenon has been observed before.  How common is it for conjoined twins to share thoughts, see through each other's eyes, hear through each other's ears, and be incapable of keeping secrets from one another?  Has it ever been observed before this pair of twins?

Short answer
Likely, the subject pool of craniopagus twins is too small to allow for scientific research.

Background
As far as I can see after a cursory search, there is no scientific data available on the shared thoughts and experiences of craniopagus twins. Note that the incidence is only 1 in 10–20 per million births in the US. The rare occurrence, together wit the fact that neurosurgical advances increase the odds of successful separation (Browd et al., 2008) make them a truly rare phenomenon. On top of that, parents with conjoined twins will practically be living in the hospital with frequent, stressful visits to a variety of caregivers. In those difficult living situations likely the last thing they are waiting for is another white coat asking questions. In other words, the subject pool for research is minimized further by low response-rates when invitations for research participation are distributed (educated guess, being a parent).

Reference
- Browd et al., J Neurosurgery: Pediatrics (2008); 1(1): 1-20


How does the order of words influence our ability to remember a question once it's asked again? I'm about to send out surveys that I need for a project and these will be sent out every season - winter, spring, summer, fall - each supposedly having the same questions.
It's quite likely some people partaking in these surveys will be those same people who partook in them before( previous seasons)

So I'm wondering whether a changed order of words, though not the meaning - in the questions, would result in it being harder( or not?) to remember having been asked this question before.

To put it in another way - how does word order in a question influence the ability of the person( who is being asked) to remember the question, provided it has been asked before?

I wasn't able to find StackExchange for Neuroscience, so I thought I'd ask here.
Thanks in advance!

No influence

There should be no influence given two text forms are semantically identical.

Our memory isn't a tape recorder

Had our brain worked like tape-recorder, storing and retrieving information would be far less efficient - both in terms of resources (amount of neurons) and time (to store or retrieve). Remembering a full sentence gives us little - its meaning is what important.

It is associative

So our brain and memory, being a network, is associative: Everything we remember is represented by a complex sub-network of links and neurons.

The exact words in a sentence quickly turn (as they move bottom up) into higher level verbal models which represent the actual semantics.

Try it yourself, 40 seconds later

You don't remember every word in this answer (doubt you remember the starting word in the previous sentence - 'So'), but you do remember its overall meaning.

So, any changes to the text form, particularly if the exposure time between them does not allow them to stay in our working memory, should have no influence.


Features for blink detection in real-time single channel EEG I am looking to detect blink events in real-time single channel EEG. Classification of a moving window of samples to determine whether a blink artifact exists requires feature extraction (except when using deep learning, I am not experienced enough for this). What features would be useful to extract from a window of approx. 50-200 samples of time series data for detecting a blink event. The blink event can be easily seen in the below picture:

The EEG signature of eye blinks is typically visible for about 200ms of data. When you want to move a window of 50 to 200 samples, I assume that your sampling frequency is 1000Hz (you should specify this in your next question).

A classical feature for eye blink detection is the peak-to-peak amplitude, which is the absolute difference of the maximum amplitude and the minimum amplitude of the EEG within your window. Another feature could be the variance within your EEG window.

Pseudocode:

peak_to_peak_amp = abs(window.max() - window.min())
variance = var(window)

Note that both of these features are rather unspecific to eye blinks and will have a hard time to distinguish blinks from other peaks in the data. For this reason, the methods are often combined with filtering of the data and converting the amplitudes in microvolts to z-scores.

For reading I suggest chapter 6 in the canonical book by Steven Luck: An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique


What is the name of a test presenting words in different colors? What's the name of this psychological test where you.

Read and pronounce words in three colors (red, blue, green). - Words and colors match. - Say word and color (which are the same).
As above - Words and color now do not match. Say the color. - If the word is in a circle - Then say the written name.
As above - now words and colors do not match - alter (even and odd) between saying the color of the word and saying written word.

I have myself taken the test. Perhaps I remember some things wrong.

This is an experiment testing the Stroop effect, named after John Ridley Stroop who studied it in 1935, and often called a Stroop experiment. It is a classic and well understood experiment and has now become a neuropsychological test for use in clinical settings, usually called the Stroop test.


What background is required to understand the book "Principles of Neural Science"? What is the necessary background to read this book and comprehend it?  I've taken Calc I-II, Chem 1A and Bio 1A.  Is this enough?

I think you should reverse your approach.  Rather than trying to find every prerequisite, start reading sections of PNS and as you encounter something you don't understand, look up the background information.  It's an exhaustive work (and well worth reading!) but you're going to find different sections require different levels of background.  For example, the section on ion channels requires a bit of E&M physics, and the section(s) on neurotransmitters will make more sense with some basic organic chem.

If you get through some of it and feel like you need more of the basics, a book like Bear's is a bit more accessible.

There's another version of Kandel (it's probably older than you are, but your library might be able to get it) that takes a slower approach.


Do we have a psychological need to talk to people? Do we have a psychological need to talk to people?

I don't believe it's in Maslow's hierarchy, but surely.

It’s worth remembering that Maslow proffered a THEORY with very little experimental evidence to support it. Since then lots of experimental research has been done with a number of primary needs being identified. Primary needs are often those that take place implicitly and/or evoke visceral responses (typically via the amygdala) when threatened or rewarded (there’s more to it than that but just a starter for 10).

A neat summary of those primary needs can be found in David Rock’s Your Brain at Work (2009). The need I believe you’re referring to is RELATEDNESS. Neuroscientific research in this area has found that being excluded from say a conversation or group hurts us more than physical pain. Also have a look at:

The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood
Sylvia A. Morelli,  Jared B. Torre, Naomi I. Eisenberger

Naomi Eisenberger in addition has lots more great research in this area - too much to list here

Hope this helps!


How / when does neurogenesis occur while learning? I've heard that learning to Juggle (new things) helps increase neurogenesis. So, what does it depend on?

Does it have to be a physical skill only?
Or can I study / read about Economics(which is new to me) for that?
Should I have new emotional experiences like death in family, first time love etc.?

Also, when we try memorize something, say a poem, how is it decided that this has to be stored in the existing neurons or in the new neurons.

I'm aware that while connecting the dots, new connections are formed.

It has been discovered that neurogenesis takes place only on the hippocampus.

Quoting Leonard E. White:

  We now agree that the production of new
  neurons in the human brain is really
  limited to a special set of stem cells
  that seem to sit in the basal region of
  dentate gyrus of the hippocampus.
  So in this subgranular zone, we have a
  population of neural stem cells that can
  differentiate into interneurons that are
  found in the granule cell layer of the
  hippocampus.

Also as you said, this production could be modulated through some interventions (e.g. learning)

  This genesis of new
  neurons in the hippocampus can be
  modulated.
  By all kinds of different interventions
  including pharmacological agents such as
  antidepressant medications.
  As well as physical interventions, such
  as exercise.

Also, this has been mentioned in this ted talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/sandrine_thuret_you_can_grow_new_brain_cells_here_s_how

In summary, the following activities impact positively on neurogenesis:

Learning
Sex
Running
Good diet

While these ones impact negatively:

Stress
Bad sleep
Ageing

pd: Concerning how memory works, my knowledge there is limited.


does the fact that Psychology Today take neurolinguistic programming seriously delegitimize the magazine? According to Wikipedia, Neurolinguistic Programming is a pseudoscience and dismissed by most experts. However, Psychology Today, a popular magazine, appears to not thoroughly reject it. Does this fact invalidate the legitimacy of Psychology Today?

A similar question has been discussed on the Meta site associated with this Stack.

In summary: Psychology Today doesn't really have any legitimacy to invalidate in the first place. It's just a collection of blogs without any peer review process.

Psychology Today is a popular science magazine, not a peer-reviewed publication. There are some good articles on the site; there are also many bad ones. Some articles cite peer-reviewed literature: if you find a peer-reviewed source on Psychology Today, feel free to read it for yourself!

The editors may keep certain content off the site, but they are not adhering to any standards of evidence or standards of clinical care. It's fine to cite for a source of popular claims, but doesn't have any scientific weight.

The main purpose of the Psychology Today website seems to be as a paid directory for psychology professionals - basically, people sign up, post their pictures and biography and a phone number to try to collect clients.

Some of the editors have brief biographies posted - it seems clear that the editorial staff have their expertise in publishing/journalism, like you would expect for a popular magazine. They do not have the sort of editorial staff that a reputable journal has, which would include university research scientists at the top of their research field.

In their media guide for educational advertisers the site compares itself (favorably, from the viewpoint of an advertiser) in terms of # of viewers to sites like The Atlantic, Oprah, Time, The New  Yorker, Fortune, Popular Mechanics, and National Geographic. Many of those sites also have some good content, but may be more readily recognizable as popular magazines. If they were a site for reputable science content you could expect that they would instead compare themselves with other peer-reviewed content.

Many of the pages have language along the lines of "Verified by Psychology Today" but in every case I see this it seems to refer to their directory of psychology professionals rather than any of the blog content. I don't know what the verification process entails.


Why is sensory substitution not that successful? By successful, I mean made it out to the large world market or being massively funded. After looking online it seems that the most relevant research is the one done by Bach-y-Rita about the seeing with tongue in the 70's. Since then there were no significant breakthroughs. Is there a reason for that? Did someone prove that brain plasticity is limited?

Bach-y-Rita's Tactile Vision Substitution System (TVSS) project was initiated in 1963 and he has since been regarded as the founding father of sensory substitution. The concept of sensory substitution refers to the process of obtaining information about the world from a functional sensory system (e.g. touch) that would normally be obtained from a lost sensory system (e.g, vision in the blind).

Bach-y-Rita developed various devices, but his most cited one consisted of 400 vibrotactile solenoids mounted in the back of a dental chair. Camera images were converted into binary ("black and white") tactile representations onto the back of a subject ('seeing with the 'skin') (Bach-y-Rita 1969):

The results obtained with the TVSS were very promising: after sufficient practice (20 – 150 hours), blind subjects were able to perceive movement, recognize shapes and objects, and even identify faces. It also enabled the appreciation of more abstract concepts quite unfamiliar to the blind, such as shadow, depth, looming, zooming and parallax (Bach-y-Rita, 2003). A face projected onto the skin would have felt like something like this (photo of an oscilloscope image representing the voltage stimuli sent from the camera to the vibrotactile display).

However, as the first figure shows, the TVSS was large and bulky. Moreover, it was noisy and power hungry and simply not very useful outside the laboratory. Although various portable variants were constructed, they too suffered these limitations in various degrees:

Bach-y-Rita's work has been extended into electrotactile approaches and the company Wicab is currently marketing the BrainPort V100 device in Europe. It features a head-worn camera to scan the environment and translates these images onto a grid of electrodes that stimulate the tongue to elicit electrotactile sensations (much like a sip of champagne or a soda would do):

It uses electrodes instead of bulky vibrotactors which greatly reduces power consumption and this approach has made a portable application feasible. Electrodes, however, need a moist surface or very high voltages are necessary. A straightforward approach was to apply the electrode grid onto the tongue. The tongue is moist and has excellent resolution. The BrainPort currently features 400 electrodes and is able to provide graded voltages to present gray scale images onto the tongue.

The BrainPort has been marketed fairly recently in Europe (2013) and an FDA study in the US has just been finished. As far as I know they are busy with commercializing there as well.

Regarding your brain plasticity question: There is a wealth of information available on neuroplastic changes in the brain due to the use of the BrainPort or other sensory substitution approaches (VoiCE, EyeMusic etc etc). Basically it has been shown that the deafferented visual cortices are recruited for tactile information processing (e.g. Sadato, 2002), and hence, the brain actively adapts to the new source of information. So no, plastic changes are not the limiting factor.

Hence, the BrainPort (and other sensory substitution approaches like the SonicGuide etc.) is useful, portable, and not less importantly, the brain actively adapts in using the alternative visuo-tactile input by recruiting the visual cortex for processing visuotactile information. Why then haven't sensory substitution approaches conquered the world of visual rehabilitation of the blind"? There are a number of important downsides to sensory substitution devices (SSDs):

SSDs substitute vision (by tactile or acoustic information), they do not restore it;
The limited resolution of SSDs does not allow for detailed target analysis, i.e., discerning the difference between a fork and a knife will be very difficult;
Instead, relying on well-established coping mechanisms and sticking to their usual routines may be far more effective in everyday life. For example, simply touching the fork or spoon will immediately tell them the difference, while scanning them with a SSD takes them ages (i.e., SSDs are not very practical);
The restricted resolution of state-of-the-art SSDs also aids little in orientation and mobility (O&M). In other words, it does not help blind folks to go about. Instead, established methods such as the guide cane and guide dog are far more effective for O&M;
Learning to use a SSD effectively takes a lot of time. Not many people are willing to undergo an arduous rehabilitation program;
In case of the BrainPort - it is very visible to the outside world and not very discreet when a blind person is using it. It is known that 29% of consumers with disabilities abandon the use of assistive devices for reasons unrelated to device performance (Phillips and Zhao, 1993).

References
- Bach-y-Rita 1969. Nature 221:963-4
- Bach-y-Rita 2003. JHCI 15:285-95
- Philips & Zhao 1993. Assistive technology 5:36-45
- Sadato 2002. Neuroimage 16:389-400


How effective is the  NLP Reverse Movie Technique in dealing with traumatic experiences? The Reverse Movie Technique (also konwn as The NLP Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure)  is named as such because it involves playing a traumatic event backwards through your head.

Is the technique effective at dealing with traumatic events?
In particular, is it more effective than playing the event forward through your head?

The Reverse Movie Technique (RMT) is a particular form of what is sometimes called exposure therapy, or prolonged exposure therapy or imaginal exposure therapy. It seems like "Reverse Memory Technique" is a niche term that isn't used in the scientific literature (e.g., 0 hits on Google Scholar). So, if you are wanting to get a scientific answer to your question, I'd check out the literature on "imaginal exposure therapy" (195 hits at time of posting) or imaginal exposure therapy without quotations.

More generally, there are a few links in the Wikipedia PTSD article to evaluations of psychotherapeutic interventions.

To take one example of evaluation research, Taylor et al (2003) compared the efficacy of exposure therapy, EMDR and relaxation training on 60 participants with long term PTSD. They found all three techniques were effective when comparing pre- and post- intervention scores, although for some symptoms (i.e., reexperiencing and avoidance symptoms) exposure therapy was more effective.
You might also find the literature review in the article useful.

References

Taylor, S., Thordarson, D., Maxfield, L., Fedoroff, I., Lovell, K., and
Ogrodniczuk, J. (2003). Comparative efficacy, speed, and adverse effects
of three ptsd treatments: Exposure therapy, emdr, and relaxation
training. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 71(2):330.
FREE PDF

Note that this is not my area of expertise, so anyone reading this, don't see it as clinical advice.


Name of cognitive bias when you diminish one's competency based on someone else's for the same function? Let's say you have a REALLY good manager, and he leaves. So you tend to underestimate/judge the next manager's competencies because the previous one was really good.

How you call the cognitive bias related to that ?

The broad topic is norm theory. Kahnemann & Miller (1986) give a nice overview of the topic. The specific effect is a contrast effect.

Higgins & Lurie (1983) have an experiment which matches the situation nicely. In their experiment, subjects read a series of short stories describing the sentences handed out by various judges for similar crimes. Some judges were harsher or more lenient than others. As you might expect, a specific sentence (e.g. Judge Wilson sentenced the guilty person to 3 years of prison) was judged as being more harsh if the other judges tended to give shorter sentences, and more lenient if the other judges tended to give harsher sentences.

Their result also suggests that your memory of the first manager's competency (the really good manager) will be affected by the exposure to the new manager. They brought the subjects back to the lab a few days after reading the original stories. When subjects came back, they were given a new set of sentencing decisions to read. Then they were asked to recall how long the sentence was of a specific judge (e.g. Judge Wilson) from the first session. The memory for the original sentence was skewed by the new stories that they read. If the new stories all tended to be lenient, then subjects underestimated Judge Wilson's original sentence. If the new stories were all harsh, then subjects overestimated Judge Wilson's original sentence. They call this a change-of-standard effect.


experimental tracking and treating bipolar disorder Is there a way to measure what neurotransmitters (and in what amount) are present in a person via blood or other method? I feel like if such information was available there could be experiments regarding the tracking and treatment of many mental disorders, but most specifically Bipolar Disorder. For example, if there could be an established "norm" of neurotransmitter levels you could then find the levels a person has and alter them via a mixture of drugs and monitor the levels periodically. This wouldn't require MRI imaging because you wouldn't be tracking when the neurotransmitters were triggered but the levels, the triggering/action potentials would be changed through cognitive behavioral and dialectal behavioral therapy. This is a alight ramble but i would appreciate any thoughts or insight.

I am not from a pure field of neuroscience so I did a bit of research. (Part put in bold by me is the bit which pertains to Bipolar Disorder (BPD))

Simon N Young of McGill University in Montréal, Quebec, Canada said in ResearchGate:

  While catecholamines and serotonin in the blood and urine are not derived from the brain sometimes, for reasons that are not known, they do reflect brain levels. For example, urinary dopamine is low in Parkinson's disease (Barbeau, Murphy & Sourkes, 1961) even though urinary dopamine levels are thought to be derived mainly from dopamine formation in the kidney. However, urinary dopamine is not a diagnostic test for Parkinson's disease. There are many papers that measured serotonin related compounds in blood or plasma in psychiatric disorders and there is evidence that sometimes there can be a correlation between blood, or plasma, and brain measures (Yan, et. al. 1993).

The Lundbeck Institute's Brain Explorer website explains that studies of serotonin receptors show "substantial evidence for the role of serotonin in patients with bipolar disorder." Research about serotonin and the way it is metabolized indicates a reduced concentration of serotonin metabolites in bipolar disorder patients (Source).

A quick Google Scholar search for "bipolar disorder and serotonin" produces a list of many studies including:

López-Figueroa, et al. (2004)
Mundo, et al. (2001) and
Rees et al. (1997).

For the bit I do know a bit about, treatment for problems with serotonin levels include SSRIs — Fluoxetine, Paroxetine or Sertraline for example — which work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

References

Barbeau, A., Murphy, G. F., & Sourkes, T. L. (1961). Excretion of dopamine in diseases of basal ganglia. Science, 133(3465), 1706-1707.DOI: 10.1126/science.133.3465.1706-a PMID: 13686753

López-Figueroa, A. L., Norton, C. S., López-Figueroa, M. O., Armellini-Dodel, D., Burke, S., Akil, H., ... & Watson, S. J. (2004). Serotonin 5-HT1A, 5-HT1B, and 5-HT2A receptor mRNA expression in subjects with major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Biological psychiatry, 55(3), 225-233.
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2003.09.017

Mundo, E., Walker, M., Cate, T., Macciardi, F., & Kennedy, J. L. (2001). The role of serotonin transporter protein gene in antidepressant-induced mania in bipolar disorder: preliminary findings. Archives of general psychiatry, 58(6), 539-544.
DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.58.6.539

Rees, M., Norton, N., Jones, I., McCandless, F., Scourfield, J., Holmans, P., ... & Redman, K. (1997). Association studies of bipolar disorder at the human serotonin transporter gene (hSERT; 5HTT). Molecular psychiatry, 2(5), 398.
DOI: 10.1038/sj.mp.4000256

Yan, D., Urano, T., Pietraszek, M. H., Shimoyama, I., Uemura, K., Kojima, Y., ... & Takada, A. (1993). Correlation between serotonergic measures in cerebrospinal fluid and blood of subhuman primate. Life sciences, 52(8), 745-749.
DOI: 10.1016/0024-3205(93)90237-W PMID: 7680408


Is there any research about effect of unfamiliar environment on stress? It seems intuitive to me that there is some kind of stress when one is put in an unfamiliar place (There's probably effect on cognitive abilities too). However, I can't find any paper in psychology which discusses that potential relationship.

I have found the following

Older people's cardiac responses as indicators of stress in familiar and unfamiliar environments (Lewis & Phillips, 2012)

I also found:

Padilla, A. M., Alvarez, M., & Lindholm, K. J. (1986). Generational status and personality factors as predictors of stress in students. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 8(3), 275-288.
DOI: 10.1002/dev.420220608

  stressful events center on loss of familial and cultural ties as well as on relative discomfort in an unfamiliar social environment

References

Lewis M. J. & Phillips J. E. (2012). Older people's cardiac responses as indicators of stress in familiar and unfamiliar environments. Psychophysiology, 49(4): pp. 478-483
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01321.x PMID: 22176515


Would a patient benefit from continuing cognitive therapy even after solving his pathology? According to this question: Would most people benefit from psychotherapy? most people would benefit from psychotherapy.

I'm trying to narrow that question to only the people who have experienced some psychopathology and went into a cognitive therapy.

Wikipedia explains that the differences between psychotherapy and counseling can be summarized in the following sentence:

  Unlike the patient in psychotherapy, the client in counseling does not
  need to be cured or helped to overcome a psychological suffering, but draws on the skills of the counselor as an aid skills they already possess in order to achieve the goals you want, in the ways and in the times that are responsive.

Does the evidence support the idea that most people affected by psychopathology would strongly benefit from continuing cognitive psychotherapy / counseling after the main problems disappear?

No, people who have experienced some psychopathology, went into cognitive therapy and resolved their problems would most likely not benefit strongly from continuing cognitive therapy. However, they may still benefit from additional therapy in case of relapsing or future problems.
Cognitive therapy
Cognitive therapy is a short-term therapy that was designed to "modify an individual's idiosyncratic, maladaptive ideation" (Beck, 1970).

The basic cognitive technique consists of delineating the individual's specific misconceptions, distortions, and maladaptive assumptions, and of testing their validity and reasonableness. By loosening the grip of his perseverative, distorted ideation, the patient is enabled to formulate his experiences more realistically.

Strictly speaking, therefore, once maladaptive ideation can no longer be detected in the individual, the individual's problem is solved to the extent it can be solved, at least insofar as cognitive therapy's notion of psychopathology is concerned. This does not necessarily mean the patient is problem-free, only free of detectable problems that cognitive therapy applies to.
References

Beck, A. T. (1970). Cognitive therapy: Nature and relation to behavior therapy. Behavior therapy, 1(2), 184-200.


Who was the first to use Softmax to model decision making? Softmax is a mathematical function frequently used to model probabilistic choice between multiple alternatives associated with different values, e.g. two arms in a bandit task; See for example [1] and [2].

Where was this method first applied?

[1] Shteingart, Hanan, Tal Neiman, and Yonatan Loewenstein. "The role of first impression in operant learning." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142.2 (2013): 476.

[2] Egelman, David M., Christophe Person, and P. Read Montague. "A computational role for dopamine delivery in human decision-making." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10.5 (1998): 623-630.

According to Sutton and Barto:

  The term soft-max for the action selection rule ... is due to Bridle (1990).
  This rule appears to have been first proposed by Luce (1959)


What tasks does Bayesian decision-making model poorly? Bayesianism has been a relatively successful paradigm for modeling decision-making. However, not every psychologist is a bayesian, and there are tasks such as the Tversky & Shafir (1992) experiments that are hard to reconcile with the bayesian approach.

Is there a list (or suvery-paper) of decision-making experiments that are hard to account for with the probabilistic approach? What are these experiments? What are some of their common features?

References and related questions

Shafir, E., & Tversky, A. (1992). Thinking through uncertainty: Nonconsequential reasoning and choice. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 449-474. PDF
Tversky, A., & Shafir, E. (1992). The disjunction effect in choice under uncertainty. Psychological Science, 3, 305-309.
What are some of the drawbacks to probabilistic models of cognition?
Introductory resources on bayesian modeling for cognitive sciences
How can the success of Bayesian models be reconciled with demonstrations of heuristic and biased reasoning?

There is currently a lot of debate surrounding what questions Bayesian modeling is appropriate for answering within cognitive science, as well what makes a "poor model."  Unfortunately these become extremely thorny issues very quickly, partly because what is called "bayesian modeling" actually refers to a rather heterogeneous set of approaches and philosophies, and partly because different models serve very different purposes, making the definition of a "poor model" very difficult to agree on.

Nonetheless, I can strongly recommend two papers that deal with these issues in depth.  The first is Jones & Love's 2011 Behavioral & Brain Sciences paper "Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition."  Fortunately, BBS articles include open peer commentary - so you can see the reaction of the larger field to their claims.

The second paper is Bowers & Davis's 2012 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review article titled "Bayesian just-so stories in psychology and neuroscience." These papers both make very credible arguments that Bayesian models are actually "poor models" even when they would claim to be good; both papers highlight a number of phenomena that are difficult to fit with Bayesian models without resorting to the same kinds of parameter twiddling that Bayesians tend to criticize other modelers for.

Finally, there is a paper that just came out today describing the failure of a Bayesian model to capture some phenomena in the domain of causal reasoning.  This has been traditionally understood as a relative strong suit of Bayesian modeling, making the findings of this paper somewhat striking.  I have not read it, but it's in press by Bes, Sloman, Lucas & Raufaste at Cognitive Science, titled "Non-Bayesian Inference: Causal Structure Trumps Correlation."

References

Bowers, J.S. & Davis, C.J. (2012). Bayesian just-so stories in psychology and neuroscience.. Psychological bulletin, 138, 389.PDF
Jones, M. & Love, B.C. (2011). Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34, 169-188. PDF
Bes, B., Sloman, S., Lucas, C.G. & Raufaste, E. (2012). Non-Bayesian inference: Causal structure trumps correlation. Cognitive Science. PDF


Bias in which you judge others by what you are good at? Motivated by this question about programming and intelligence, I've noticed that people often judge other people's competence in terms of how well they perform on the domains that they have more expertise. A few examples:

I'm a good programmer. This manager can't program.
I'm a good manager. This programmer doesn't know how to lead others.
I'm a good statistician. This applied researcher knows so little about statistics.
I'm a good applied researcher. this statistician knows so little about the substantive problems in this research context.

In particular, while such claims may be factual statements. The bias occurs when a person's overall competence is evaluated relative to your own standards of expertise, rather than what is objectively important for the other person.

Does this bias of evaluating others competence by your own areas of expertise have a formal name?

I think its Professional Ethnocentrism. That is the professional culture of the programmer promoting itself automatically above the culture of the manager and likewise. Judging and comparison is a major problem in all ethnocentric behaviors.

Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity. Ethnocentrism may be overt or subtle, and while it is considered a natural proclivity of human psychology, it has developed a generally negative connotation.
..."the technical name for the view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it."...

-Wikipedia Ethonocentrism


Why do people tend to reply to only one topic when multiple topics are brought up simultaneously? This is a situation more frequent in online conversations, where you can type many things before the other person has a chance to reply.

Perhaps cognitive load, multi-tasking ability, have something to do with it? At any rate, it does seem like the person "ignores" the other unanswered question at times.

I believe it has to do with two main factors:

1) Emotional response to one of the topics

Consider the case where a webpage or paragraph of text contains multiple topics. Each one with different emotional response from the reader:

Topic 1: X____|
Topic 2: XX___|
Topic 3: X____|
Topic 4: XXXXXXXXX
Topic 5: XX___|

Where the number of X's is how strong the response is. Suppose 5X's are needed to bother responding. Assuming the topics are encountered sequentially, Topic 4 will activate the strongest emotional response. Since it's also above 5X, the person may start responding, leaving topic 5 unread and un-responded to.

2) Social/technical norms of the online communication system

In many web platforms, the main means of commenting/replying is via typed text boxes, usually with minimum and maximum length limits. That's the technical norm. The lower the limit (i.e. a tweet), the less likely more than one topic will be responded to. Expectation of interruptions could also play a role. For example, in an online chat, many other emotional topics may be mentioned while typing out a long, nuanced response, potentially stopping it from being finished.

The social norms come into play when a reader observes how others have responded to the item and in what format. If others responded with short one-liners, the reader may be inclined to respond with a one-liner. If others wrote up elaborate essays as responses, perhaps the reader may do so as well.


Do pictures help young children read (understand meaning) better or does it give them a delayed sense of imagination when decoding information? I have started to read a book called "Vexed Texts: How Children's Picture Books Promote Illiteracy" by Pamela Protheroe and her belief is that images promotes illiteracy. There seems far too much evidence that pictures books aid children in a vast amount of ways.

But, it did make me wonder on children's dependency of what they see in comparison to what they imagine. My investigation is to find out children's understanding of the words and what they see internally without the visual cues.

I wrote Vexed Texts a long time ago. Since then I have asked the same question and found no research on it, so I did my own research as my doctoral thesis. You can find the results if you want to in my published thesis (I received my PhD from Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand). The title is: The Effect of Illustrations on the Ability of Children to Draw Inferences while reading Narrative Texts.


Measuring originality of a person on a sentence completion task I conducted an experiment where I had 20 people complete 100 sentences with only one word. They had to come up with their completion independently of others and could give any answer they thought was suitable.

Here's a sample question with responses from 20 people:

Yesterday I bought a:

House
(No answer)
Sandwich
Car
Ticket
Sandwich

...

Car
Sandwich

I now need to measure, how creative every participant was, meaning I want to rate each participant on a certain scale from completely uncreative to absolutely creative (let's say 0 is uncreative, sticks to popular answers and 100 is highly creative with unique answers to every question).

Please help me find suitable formula for rating each participant's originality of responses.

Crucially important: some sentences were left unanswered by some people, meaning total number of answers for a question was smaller.

Thank you.

First, I am a bit worried about your comment:

  (a) They are told to finish a sentence differently of others.

Are they given any other instructions? Do the answers have to "make sense" somehow? What's to stop someone from answering "yesterday I bought a stomach" for instance? That would certainly be unique. You do say they had to have answers they thought were "suitable" but, still, that's a huge range! Maybe not "stomach" but what about "heart lung machine"?

Second, I think you have to precisely define what you mean by "creative". You say (also in a comment) that "least used words mean higher creativity" but I am not so sure that I agree.

But, if you want the least used word and you want to account for the "no answers" then one way is:

All no answers get a 0 score on creativity.
Call the number of answers (excluding those with no answers) $N$
For each answer, call the number of people who gave that answer $Q_i$ where i ranges from 1 to the number of different answers.
The creativity score of each answer is $N/Q_i$

The key is step 4. There are certainly other formulas you could use. Which one to choose depends on what you want the distribution of creativity to look like and whether you thing "only person with this answer" is twice as creative as "one of two people with this answer".

But, again, I'd hesitate to call this creativity.


Is "Incremental learning" pseudo-science? I've recently come across the following article:
http://www.super-memory.com/help/il_full.htm
The author makes the claim that "Incremental learning" is the best way of learning and goes as far as to claim that the problem of "forgetting" is nearly completely avoided. For me the whole thing just sounds like advertising for the program "SuperMemo" but apparently the author Piotr Woźniak holds a PhD and is in fact a researcher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotr_Wo%C5%BAniak_(researcher)
Is he a known fraud or is the information presented a mainstream opinion shared by psychologists?
Thanks in advance

The merits of any given body of work is best assessed by looking at it, regardless of whether you want to label it as 'pseudoscientific' or not based on that judgement.

Unfortunately, this proved to be quite troublesome for the SuperMemo application, which makes some pretty strong claims that require justification to be considered academic. For example:

  Incremental learning is the fastest and the most comprehensive way of learning available to students at the moment of writing (2013).

  Incremental learning easily ensures 95% recall of top-priority learning material for lifetime

To be considered scientific, there would have to be publicly accessible publications backing up those claims. I found the following list of 50 publications in reference to SuperMemo. But, I could only find the following 4 publications out of the 50 listed on Google Scholar:

A hypothetical model of processes involved in the release of norepinephrine in the adrenergic synapse. (Gorzelańczyk & Woźniak, 1991): cited by 2; the abstract seems irrelevant to the claims made
The educational technology of repetition spacing in information systems development. (Wozniak & Abramowicz, 1997): 4 references, all self-citations; no tracked citations on Scholar; furthermore, listed twice in the list of 50 publications
SuperMemo (Wharton, 1994): a 5-page software review, representing a subjective case study at best ("As a new German student, I have been using SuperMemo ..."); no tracked citations
Optimization of repetition spacing in the practice of learning. (Wozniak & Gorzelanczyk, 1994): 4-pager, 7 references, cited by 79

The fact that the majority of these publications are not available indicates these were not made 'archival' by the conferences/journals they were presented at. This gives a first poor assessment of the adequacy of this presented work. Rigorous, peer-reviewed, work would be accessible and cited by subsequent research.

The last paper (4 page 'short communication') with 79 citations presents:

  A universal formula for computing inter-repetition intervals
  in paired-associate learning has been determined for the knowledge
  retention level of 95%. It is claimed that the formula could be used in
  the practice of learning for a wide range of subjects, regardless
  individual learner's capacity.

The method they employed to evaluate their algorithm:

  The subjects taking part in the experiment were 7 unpaid
  volunteers, students of computer science at the
  Technical University of Poznan. In the period of 18
  months, they memorized and repeated altogether
  over 35000 items of their choice (the items had the
  form of Polish-English word pairs).

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you agree with their conclusion:

  The obtained results unequivocally indicate the superiority of progressive repetition spacing over massed or distributed spacing and may be used in practice of learning in order to minimize time necessary for memorization and retention of the learned material.

Or, alternatively, follow-up on the 79 citations to see how experts in the field formulate the work. One example (Lindsey et al., 2014), emphasis mine:

  Outside the academic literature, two traditional adaptive-scheduling techniques have attracted a degree of
  popular interest: the Leitner (1972) system and
  SuperMemo (Wozniak & Gorzelanczyk, 1994).

Interestingly, Wozniak seemed to have been a reviewer on that paper!

Conclusion

While the SuperMemo application does seem to have made a noticeable commercial impact, of which the Wired article "Want to remember everything you'll ever learn? Surrender to this algorithm" and citations to the one paper is a good indication, it does not seem to be embedded in rigorous published scientific research.

This does not necessarily make the application 'pseudoscientific' as it might still base itself or correspond to 'proper science', but, the way the website represents itself as scientific is grossly overstated. I would not place much trust in anything written there.

Wozniak, P. A., & Abramowicz, W. (1997). The educational technology of repetition spacing in information systems development. In Systems Development Methods for the Next Century (pp. 341-344). Springer, Boston, MA.
Gorzelańczyk, E. J., & Woźniak, P. (1991). A hypothetical model of processes involved in the release of norepinephrine in the adrenergic synapse. BioSystems, 25(4), 275-281.
Wharton C. (1994). SuperMemo. CALICO Journal
Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 1994), pp. 66-70
Wozniak, P. A., & Gorzelanczyk, E. J. (1994). Optimization of repetition spacing in the practice of learning. Acta neurobiologiae experimentalis, 54, 59-59.
Lindsey, R. V., Shroyer, J. D., Pashler, H., & Mozer, M. C. (2014). Improving students’ long-term knowledge retention through personalized review. Psychological science, 25(3), 639-647.


Is the brain inherently social? The concept of the "social brain" is thrown around a lot, but it's not entirely clear to me what it means.

To me, it could mean a few different things:

Modularity: We have some sort of modular, hardwired network that supports social behavior and cognition
Domain-General Processes: The benefits of human sociality through evolution have promoted certain psychological processes that are useful for human interaction, but these processes are not specific to sociality (i.e., they're domain-general)
Domain-General and Specific:  Somewhere in the middle of (1) and (2).
Prepared Learning: Akin to (2), we are not born "social," but we are born with a set of more basic tools that prepare us to learn to be social

I have superficial familiarity with the area of social cognition and the brain structures (TPJ, DMN, mirror neurons) and chemicals that support it (oxytocin).  Based on these literatures, my assumption is that social cognition is supported by domain-general processes that have been co-opted for social use--but we don't have "social" modules or chemicals.

Any thoughts? :)

The "social brain" concept likely originated with Robin Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis, proposed in 1998.  However, Dunbar was not suggesting that the brain has dedicated "social modules".  Rather, the hypothesis was that the evolutionary driving force behind intelligence (increased brain size and capacity) was social - most prominently the need to track relationships in communities of up to 150 people (henceforth known as Dunbar's number).  However, I'll focus my answer on the question as asked.

Plasticity:

If the criteria for "inherently" social requires some "module" of the brain that has no value outside of a social context, then it is difficult to argue that the brain is "inherently" anything because the brain is so plastic (contrast this view with nativism).

For example, say we argue that the brain is "inherently" visual as there is a fairly distinct visual cortex dedicated to this function.  However, in blind people and others, this area can be co-opted for auditory, tactile, and spatial processing, so there is nothing "inherently" visual about it.  Perhaps we should focus on a "lower level" part of the visual processing system, such as the LGN, that really is only ever used for visual processing.

Language:

It is difficult (though not impossible) to imagine evolutionary value for language and speech production outside a social context, and this function does appear to have domain-specific modularity in the brain.

For example, Broca's area is considered the "motor speech cortex", and appears to be dedicated to speech production.  But like most areas of the brain, the boundaries of this region are not well defined, and on closer inspection, neither is its function - although just about all functions attributed to Broca's area are social.  While language processing has for a long time been associated with Broca's and Wernicke's areas on the left side of the brain, language processing can spread out as far as the right hemisphere, and some individuals with lesions in these regions can retain largely unaffected language capabilities.

Relating:

The FFA, in the fusiform gyrus, is another potentially social part of the brain, critical for face recognition - a lesion in this region leads to prosopagnosia (face blindness).  This function is distinct from the system for recognizing inanimate objects, such that other visual agnosias may not affect facial recognition ability.  This function is already developed in infancy, and is a strong candidate for domain-specificity.  However, once again, this region of the brain may have other functions, and facial recognition can be subsumed (although less efficiently) by other regions.

                                                                      Fusiform face area

Both autism and Asperger's provide another hint at the social nature of the human brain.  Though their etiology is not well understood, it is considered biological, suggesting a disruption of some inherent social mechanism of the brain.  However, since ASD affects other cognitive functions as well, it is again not clear that a distinctly social element of the brain is involved.

Learning:

Both social reward and social pain have been shown to largely recycle the non-social reward and punishment systems, suggesting that there may be nothing inherent in the brain to support learning by social motivation.  However, as pointed out in the question, Theory-of-Mind capabilities may have some modular support in the brain, though no domain-specific mechanisms have been implicated.

Noam Chomsky famously argued that language acquisition in humans happens far too quickly to be accounted for by simple learning - that is, our brain must be somehow predisposed for language acquisition.  How this happens is still not well understood, but the same logic is applicable to many other aspects of our social capabilities: We are simply too well honed at social functions such as language, relationships, modelling, and other social behaviours to be accounted for by learning / culture alone.


What is the bias that arises because a thing is way more common than the rest? So I have a sentence: Hence this option is free of abundance bias

I've made up the phrase "abundance bias" and I want to replace it with the proper scientific term. What is the exact term that would denote that the option will account for all subtleties and won't be biased towards stuff that happens to be more common?

Like for example, if a doctor sees 100 patients with X and someone who has Y (which has symptoms similar to X) comes in. The doctor fails to consider any subtleties that might make it different from X and just diagnoses X. This doctor has the "abundance bias" because the X was more common. You could say it's actually confirmation bias but that'll be when the doctor diagnoses based on his subjective experience and personal judgement rather than X being more widespread.

So, what is the right scientific term that would mean the same thing as "abundance bias"? Basically, the cognitive bias that arises when a particular thing is perceived to be much more common than the rest and hence it is considered to be the only case and the rest is disregarded/not considered

Wikipedia refers to "regressive bias" though I admit I have never heard the term used, defined as:

  A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated

However, in addition to not recalling this term's use before, I also did not find it used in quite that context in the majority of results on Google Scholar for "regressive bias" - so I would use it only with caution (and probably not at all in the context you refer to) and along with your own definition if at all.

You could also possibly refer to the default effect although this mainly refers to a default action rather than a default conclusion, one could argue these are one and the same (i.e., if the default diagnosis for the symptom is X).

The availability heuristic is also relevant. Although this bias is normally focused on recency of exposure, surely the most common diagnoses would be most 'available' simply because it is encountered more often, whereas it is unlikely that the doctor has recently experienced disease Y. Of course, once they do encounter someone with Y, the availability heuristic would suggest that in the future they will be more likely to diagnose or at least consider Y when X is more likely based on simple probability.


Research on how problem, presented in practical, real world format, is solved much more easily? I read a description of this phenomenon in a book (can't remember which one).

Basically, if a problem is presented in a dry, academic format, it's MUCH more difficult to solve than a problem presented in a real-world format.

The example from the book was something like this:

Problem presented in academic format - 10% of people are able to solve it:

You have 3 cards. One side of each card has letters, the other side has numbers. 2 cards are showing - one shows an A, the other shows a 3. How many cards do you have to turn over in order to figure out if all of the numbers are even?

Problem presented in real-world format - 95% of people are able to solve it:

There are 3 people in a bar. One of them is drinking a coke. Another one is a senior citizen. How many people's ID's do you need to check, to see if they're of legal drinking age?

This isn't exactly right, but it was along these lines. You'd remember if you read it as well, it was a very striking and very believable difference in people's ability to solve the exact same problem (logically) but just in different formats.

Can somebody remind me of where I found this, and what it's called, maybe the book it came from or something?

Pretty sure you're talking about the Wason selection task, and the bar variation is generally attributed to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task


Getting started with EEG data I want to get started with getting signals from EEG and learning on how I can read data. I have some programming skills, so designing a database and manipulating data with ruby (python seems also cool, but never worked with) wouldn't be a problem, but I don't know where to start.

I'm interested in Neuromarketing because I'm working in advertising, but health is in my heart.

So can anyone please send me some books on what data I can get from EEG (theory) and what hardware should be good to use? Also books on how I can easily develop and calculate the data (emotiv sounds nice but not much electrodes and may not be working well, however for that money maybe good to begin with).

So something like getting started with EEG... Like with programming my first "Hello world" :)

UPDATE: Bought EPOC EEG Research edition :) And there I can even choose, I think I will go with ruby then :)
But still need some very basic book on how to get long with all that data, I had suggestion on Introduction to Event Related Potential Technique and is there some easier to learn video tutorial or book... real basics :)

Steven J. Luck's "An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique" is a great beginner's book on EEG. It's basic but not too simple, and it goes into the structure of the signals as well as into issues on experimental design.


Is there a developmental purpose to adolescent transgressions? Many adolescents transgress rules and break laws, not out of criminal intent or because they have some disorder, but "for fun", as an adventure, for the experience.

How is this explained from the perspective of psychology and cognitive sciences? Does this behavior serve a developmental purpose, or is it merely a dangerous side effect that is best suppressed and controlled by parents and authorities?

The following functions have been suggested1 for adolescent risk-taking behavior, such as psychoactive substance use, risky driving, or antisocial behavior:

self-affirmation and experimentation / exploration
identification and social acceptance
ritual and emulation
social visibility and desirability
self-exoneration
escape through action and excitement

But the term "risk" implies that these behaviors are not necessarily functional in the sense that they help the individual develop healthily. Smoking may lead to peer acceptance, but it is certainly not healthy.

Yet, the ubiquity of these behaviors suggests that they must serve some functional purpose. What is it?

1 Bonino, S., Cattelino, E., Ciairano, S., Mc Donald, L., & Jessor, R. (2005). Adolescents and Risk: Behavior, Functions, and Protective Factors. New York: Springer.

The function of rebellion is to challenge conclusions reached by previous generations.

If the conclusions of each generation were not challenged, errors in judgment would be perpetuated, leading to larger and larger errors in subsequent generations as each successive generation built upon the false conclusions of the previous generations.

This can be observed in technological and entrepreneurial "disruptions", in which rebels (entrepreneurs) gain competitive advantages by challenging established assumptions about the market, or "conventional wisdom," and generate creative solutions that serve as more than just clones  of established business models. (PayPal, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and perhaps even Tesla could be said to have profited from this disruptive, creative paradigm.)

Adolescents transgress for many reasons, but important to remember is that they often do so not in directed pursuit of goals, but rather to explore the possibility space and establish their sense of self-determination. Later, as goal-attainment becomes important, individuals who have explored larger spaces have larger bodies of experience upon which to draw, from which they can generate creative solutions.

I have no academic sources for these assertions. They are simply observations of learning patterns that I have seen others exploit, and thus learned to exploit myself.


Is there a relationship between body composition and intelligence? Does being fat or thin have any significant effect on cognition? For example, I have observed some very fat people who are extremely intelligent and some very thin people that are not and vice versa. John von Neumann was fat and very smart. Are there any studies on this?

A systematic meta-analysis of the relationship between IQ and obesity (Yu, Han, Cao and Guo, 2010) suggested that lower IQ in childhood was associated with later adult obesity via educational level. No evidence of a relationship between IQ and obesity was found for adults.

  Our study and review of the literature overall suggests that there are inverse FIQ/obesity associations, except in pre-school children. However, after adjusting for educational attainment, this FIQ/obesity association became null. In the present study, a lower IQ score in childhood is associated with obesity in later adulthood; this relationship is perhaps mediated via educational attainment in later life.

References

Yu, Z. B., Han, S. P., Cao, X. G., & Guo, X. R. (2010). Intelligence in relation to obesity: a systematic review and meta‐analysis. Obesity reviews, 11(9), 656-670.


Have different mental strengths evolved in men and women? I think that men and women are different mentally (but nonetheless equals), however this way of thinking is very hard for me to explain philosophically, so I'd like to learn about what roots this concept might have in science.

It seems logical that per our different roles throughout history, especially in more primitive times, men and women would have evolved different strengths in areas our brains to excel in different ways.

Have different mental strengths evolved in men and women?

Edit: By "mental strengths", more specifically I mean specific types of cognitive thought processing. Behavioral capacities, for example. Areas of our brains that function at different strengths.

There is little neurological evidence that finds a difference between men and women. However there are psychological studies that do find a small difference in mental strengths. This interesting TED talk debunking psychological myths by a lecturer from the University of Liverpool discusses the psychological differences between men and women.

Males and females are slightly different when it comes to spacial awareness (the top 1/3 of females perform as well as the top 1/2 of men) and language (the top 1/3 of men perform as well as the top 1/2 of women), but the difference is so slight that its not worth taking into consideration.

I moved this answer over from the biology question.


Is this optical illusion the visual equivalent of binaural beats? The optical motional illusion shown below, makes your brain see some motion, where there is none.

In my opinion it's fascinating, although after a while you get a headache. It reminds me of binaural beats, where the brain simulates the difference tone, which is obviously not there. The way that these illusions work is obviously quite different than how binaural beats work, as stated in the comments.

Despite that, it's said that the beats stimulate your brain, so my questions are

What is the name of this optical illusion?

  Akiyoshi Kitaoka studied these kind of optimized Fraser-Wilcox illusions.

Does it affect the brain in a similar way to binaural beats? I mean the overall effect, not the specific way how Fraser-Wilcox illusions or binaural beats enter your mind.

For those who liked the previous picture, here it is:

Binaural beats result from a difference between the stimulus presented to each ear. The brain tries to integrate them and the perceived low-frequency beat is an artifact of that processing. There are optical illusions that involve presenting distinct, isolated inputs to each eye, and I'd consider those the closest equivalent to binaural beats.

The apparent motion in the image doesn't rely on binocular vision; you can see that easily by looking at it with one eye closed (in fact, I think that makes it stronger). I'd guess it's probably based on edge detection or lateral inhibition, which don't (I think) have a particularly close analog in sound perception.


How does the brain learn abstract maths? I have found quite a bit of information of how, on a neurological level, we learn the most basic forms of maths. We seem to be hardwired from the get go, to deal with manageable quantities, can intuitively decide whether something is more or less and even add or subtract small integers together. There have even been tests that six-month-old children already have an intuitive sense of small numbers.
Basically, this covers basic arithmetic on natural numbers.

However, I had a hard time finding anything about how we learn to deal with more abstract, higher level maths. What happens in our brain when we deal with functions and variables? Will they still be processed in the same region that is used for counting? - Especially when it comes to functions that do not even take numbers as inputs or outputs.

Edit:

I am asking about math that can not be solved with simple arithmetic, and I wonder how an intuition of a generic mathematical concept would be represented in our brains. Has any research on this already been done? - Like something which isn't a numeric algorithm but rather symbolic manipulation.

The parietal area and prefrontal cortex from the neocortex are the source of ones ability to perform algebra and most other logic and analytic intensive tasks.

  In a brain imaging study of children learning algebra, it is shown that the same regions are active in children solving equations as are active in experienced adults solving equations. As with adults, practice in symbol manipulation produces a reduced activation in prefrontal cortex area. However, unlike adults, practice seems also to produce a decrease in a parietal area that is holding an image of the equation. This finding suggests that adolescents' brain responses are more plastic and change more with practice. These results are integrated in a cognitive model that predicts both the behavioral and brain imaging results.

-The change of the brain activation patterns as children learn algebra equation solving


How is brain processing different for situation-less vs. situated emotional faces? In traditional emotional face perception paradigms, participants are shown circle cut-outs of emotional faces.  All context has been removed.  Participants only see the face.

However, it's well established that how we perceive emotional faces depends largely on context.  For example, Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron (2011) point out that Serena William's face in the first picture looks to be in pain, but in the second picture she's clearly ecstatic from victory.

To the best of our knowledge, how does our brain differentially process (e.g., which brain regions are recruited for) the emotional faces in these two pictures?

Edit: To be clear, I'm familiar with psychological theories of emotion face processing (and why we perceive these faces differently).  I'm more interested in the brain level of analysis.

Alright, it's high time I actually answer this question.  Beatrice de Gelder and crew published two papers that examined this with fMRI (here) and EEG (here).

fMRI study

In the fMRI study, they presented participants with emotional faces against threatening and neutral backgrounds, with various controls (a triangle, a scrambled background).

The results are kind of complex and lengthy, so I'll quote the authors' summary:

  [W]e found no evidence of brain areas responding more to faces in a threatening background than to faces in a neutral background […]. On the other hand, the sgACC and right anterior PPA responded more to neutral than to threatening backgrounds surrounding faces […]. Additionally, the results show that while similar background effects also obtain on bodies in the right anterior PPA, the effect in sgACC is face-specific and furthermore correlates with empathic ability: higher empathy scores are related to smaller background effects on faces.

They suggest that activation of the sgACC represents mentalizing processes. Faces in a neutral background might make participants attribute certain thoughts to the figures ("What is he thinking?").  On the other hand, faces against a threatening background might elicit "orienting responses" (e.g., "What is going on?").

The right anterior PPA is involved in topographic processing, which may be inhibited by the presence of a face. Inhibition may be greater for threatening vs. neutral scenes.

The left FG was also active, which may be involved in "processing the affective face-context congruency."

EEG study

The goal of the EEG study was to examine the temporal dynamics of perceiving discrete emotions against complex, affective scenes.

Again, the results are relatively complex, so I'll quote the abstract:

  Fear perception elicited significant activity at the earliest time segments, followed by disgust, happiness, and sadness.  Moreover, fear, disgust, and happiness were characterized by two time segments of significant activity, whereas sadness showed only one long-latency time segment of activity.

Above (the yellow part) you can see how emotions are not represented continuously in the brain across time and how the type of emotion being processed may be differentiable.

They also attempted to localize the temporal activity in the brain, and they found widely distributed activity for fear (mostly RH), disgust (mostly RH), and happiness (mostly LH), and more limited activation for sadness. For example, see the results for fear>neutral localization below:

However, no brain area was unique to the perception of a specific emotion. Instead, there was lots of overlapping brain activity (which supports a constructionist approach to emotions).

Overall, I'm not sure either of these studies satisfactorily elucidate how we perceive emotional faces in different scenes, but they're a great start.


Kendrick et. al version of Maslow's Hierarchy The above reinterpretation of the hierarchy by Kendrick et. al (2010) is straightforward enough. I am trying to see if there is any work done on generalizing the top portion there beyond peaking out at parenting e.g. mate acquisition-retention and parenting applied for life pursuits like academic or professional accomplishments. Maybe subject-acquisition-retention and progeny?
References
Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 5(3), 292–314. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369469

Peterson & Park (2010) provided a commentary on Kenrick et al (2010) whereby they pointed out that although the revision makes an important contribution by grounding the hierarchy in modern evolutionary thought, it may be premature to remove self-actualization from the hierarchy by reducing it to other needs associated with status and reproduction.

  We suggest that it is premature to jettison self-actualization from this revised version of Maslow’s hierarchy. We write from the perspective of positive psychology, which regards what is good in life to be as genuine as what is bad (Peterson & Park, 2003). What is good is not secondary, derivative, illusory, epiphenomenal, or otherwise suspect—at least until the data show otherwise. In their revision of Maslow’s hierarchy and their dismissal of self-actualization as a motive in its own right, Kenrick et al. seemed to reflect business-as-usual psychology by reducing what is good to something more mundane and perhaps not so good.

  However, Kenrick et al. mentioned positive psychology in their article and concluded that their evolutionary perspective is consistent with the view that human nature indeed has positive aspects. So, their revised pyramid may well accommodate the various emphases of positive psychology. And someday, if we take the pyramid metaphor literally, psychologists may follow the earlier examples of Egypt and Mexico and build several, including one that reflects Maslow’s (1971) deficiency needs and another one that reflects his growth needs.

It is important to note that Maslow's (1943, 1954) five-stage model was expanded to include cognitive and aesthetic needs (Maslow, 1970a) and later transcendence needs (Maslow, 1970b).

More can be read on that in an article by McLeod (2018).

So answering your question on generalizing the top portion of the pyramid by Kenrick et al. beyond peaking out at parenting may not be relevant as Maslow went beyond parenting with his expanded pyramid.

References

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96. doi: 10.1037/h0054346

Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper and Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1970a). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper & Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1970b). Religions, values, and peak experiences. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1966)

McLeod, S. A. (2018). Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Retrieved from: https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2003). Positive psychology as the evenhanded positive psychologist views it. Psychological Inquiry, 14(2), 141–146. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449822

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2010). What happened to self-actualization? Commentary on Kenrick et al.(2010). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(3), 320-322. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369471


Is there a specific name for the emotion I'm feeling? I looked around and it doesn't seem to match the definition of guilt NOR shame.

I made up a lie that works this way:

1.Tell people someone I made up is "special," "unique," and a variety of other things.

2.Lock myself in a paradigm where I both know and don't know I am this person in some way to gain approval or represent my true feelings under the guise of this person expressing them.

3.When people speak of this person, I can somewhat "feel" what that person would. So if I feel like a massive loser, I lie and tell people that "X" person did something amazing so that when they talk good about them, I can somehow know it links back to me even though I won't admit it to myself.

I've been lying to myself for years and doing it so much that I sometimes hardly realize that it's untrue, or have trained myself so much that it's like it was true and I am conditioned to not admit it's false to myself. Whatever "X" person does, I can take credit, so it gives my life some meaning, even if it's not real and I won't consciously admit it or have deluded myself into accepting this.

But I've been doing this with my mother lately and I fear I can't tell her the truth about all of the lies and fake stuff I've told her about this person, and it's making me feel bad but I have no idea how to categorize this emotion. Is it just simply "bad emotional feeling?" Is it guilt and shame? I have no idea. My emotions have always been a mystery to me since I never know what I'm feeling.

This sounds a little bit like a mild form of Depersonalization.  From Wikipedia:

  The core symptom of depersonalization disorder is the subjective experience of "unreality in one's sense of self", and as such there are no clinical signs. People who are diagnosed with depersonalization also experience an almost uncontrollable urge to question and think about the nature of reality and existence as well as other deeply philosophical questions.
  Individuals who experience depersonalization can feel divorced from their own personal physicality by sensing their body sensations, feelings, emotions and behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. Also, a recognition of self breaks down (hence the name). Depersonalization can result in very high anxiety levels, which can intensify these perceptions even further.
  Common descriptions: Feeling disconnected from one's physicality; feeling like one is not completely occupying the body; not feeling in control of one's speech or physical movements; and feeling detached from one's own thoughts or emotions; experiencing one's self and life from a distance; a sense of just going through the motions; feeling as though one is in a dream or movie; feeling "weird" being alive; and even out-of-body experiences.

Does the above describe your feelings?

If so, you may want to talk to a professional, play sports, and lower your overall anxiety levels.


How effective is lying down with eyes closed as a substitute for sleep? Resting, as opposed to sleeping, helps with physical recovery and relaxation, but much of the benefit of real sleep is mental.

If I can't sleep, how much, if any, sleep-related benefit is gained by lying down for 6 hours with my eyes closed?

I believe the important⁽¹⁾ point is paradoxical sleep. If you cannot sleep, you should try to defocus your thought, in order to allow neurones to "run freely"⁽²⁾.

(1) It has be shown that rats deprived of paradoxical sleep died in 16-54 day.

(2) I don't know if this will work, but I've been taught at university that neurons can die from sub or over stimulation. For this reason I've come to the conclusion that one of the objectives of dreaming is to allow neurons to fire action potentials in regards with their own physiological needs, instead of coordinated thoughts needs of the brain.


How close is it to reality in future of consciousness to be transferable as shown in the movie Chappie? This question was inspired by the most creative thing ever to come up in a movie, namely the transfer of a consciousness from one body to another (may it be biological, or via non-biological methods).

I have always thought of consciousness as the result of a neural network communicating with the various parts of the brain, which in turn stores all of our experiences, thereby giving meaning to the sensations we perceive through our sensory organs that may aid in self-sustainability.

I have seen - and enjoyed! - the movie last week-end and asked myself the same question.

Let's face it, we are so far from being able to transfer knowledge from one human being to a machine with the help of a "mind-reader". The main point is that we don't have a useful brain signal to read from (the ones we know have structural limits).

No good brain signal, no associated technology and no reading device. On the contrary, we probably have the technology at the end of the human-to-machine process (a way to transfer and store a mind).