The manifestation of OCD with the use of information technologies There have been many studies on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Typical OCD behavior in day to day life has been well documented. Repeatedly checking that the stove or iron has been turned off being two examples.

I can surmise that OCD behavior, within using information technologies might involve the excessive back up of files, overboard security measures, compulsively running scans, using multiple firewalls simultaneously, inability to ignore application notifications eg from Facebook, diverting phone calls, forwarding emails, ...as some examples.

Has OCD behavior within the use of information technologies been examined and if so, what are some typical behaviors associated with OCD and the use of IT?

Yes this topic has been discussed in detail. There are two main ways of describing mental illness: Continuous and Discontinuous spectrum of behaviour. (Most clinicians favor discontinuous.) The Continuous spectrum of behaviour states that OCD and other mental illnesses are just extremes of normal behavior. The Discontinuous spectrum of behaviour states that while mental illness has some traits with normal behaviour they are not on the same spectrum as normal behaviour. Both theories hold to the fact that enough extremes of normal behaviour can cause mental illness. Whether someone actually has OCD involving technology or is just at an extreme normal behaviour can only be determined accurately by a psychologist/psychiatrist.

I can't say that I agree with "iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us". Some of it is silly like counting the number of first person pronouns but some of the concepts it relates are interesting.

Obsessively checking in with technology seems to be the biggest attribute.


get signal from eye neurons Hi guys you know some scientists could get electronic signals from brain and move it to muscles (full article here)

My question is: can we get signal from eye neurons and analyze it with a computer and after that see what he/she/it is seeing?

If somebody did this research will you please give me an article about that?

A lot of people study the neural code of the retina. The output from retina are the retinal ganglion neurons (RGC). Their input-output relation and circuits are well modeled (but not fully understood).

Usual preparation is to put retina harvested from an animal on an electrode array and record their responses to movies. See references below:

Baden, T., Berens, P., Franke, K., Román Rosón, M., Bethge, M., and Euler, T. (2016). The functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse. Nature, 529(7586):345-350.
Field, G. D., Gauthier, J. L., Sher, A., Greschner, M., Machado, T. A., Jepson, L. H., Shlens, J., Gunning, D. E., Mathieson, K., Dabrowski, W., Paninski, L., Litke, A. M., and Chichilnisky, E. J. (2010). Functional connectivity in the retina at the resolution of photoreceptors. Nature, 467(7316):673-677.
Pillow, J. W., Paninski, L., Uzzell, V. J., Simoncelli, E. P., and Chichilnisky, E. J. (2005). Prediction and decoding of retinal ganglion cell responses with a probabilistic spiking model. Journal of Neuroscience, 25:11003-11013.


How can self-awareness be controlled and varied in a laboratory setting? I was reading on deindividuation and its relation to self awareness. In many places, in the text that I am reading, it is mentioned that experiments were conducted to measure the effect of self-awareness on deindividuation.

I have been trying to think about this but have so far not been able understand as to how self-awareness can be controlled as a variable in such experiments. So, in laboratory settings, and without using alcohol or other substances, how can self-awareness of an individual be varied, controlled and measured as an independent variable?

I tried searching for this as well, but I couldn't find anything helpful.

I'm not sure about a direct connection to research on deindividuation, but in general self awareness, sense of ownership and sense of agency can be altered by experimental methodologies that manipulate the perceived relationship between actions and the effects of those actions. These types of experiments are sometimes called behavioural illusions.
A common example of this is the rubber hand illusion, where participants are shown a fake hand that is stroked by a brush and end up experiencing sensations of being brushed in their own hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk
The original paper on this is:

Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see. Nature, 391(6669), 756. doi:10.1038/35784

But there are many other types of behavioural illusions...
Subliminal or perceivable primes can influence participants' experiences of self generated actions:

Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness and Cognition, 14(3), 439–458. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.11.001
Dijksterhuis, A., Preston, J., Wegner, D. M., & Aarts, H. (2008). Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(1), 2–9. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2007.01.003

Providing false or virtual representations of participants limbs can lead to changed feelings of ownership and agency for those limbs:

Wegner, D. M., Sparrow, B., & Winerman, L. (2004). Vicarious agency: Experiencing control over the movements of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(6), 838–48. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.86.6.838
Slater, M., Perez-Marcos, D., Ehrsson, H. H., & Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2009). Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 3(2), 214–220. doi:10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009

and hypnosis can also be used to alter self awareness:

Connors, M. H., Barnier, A. J., Coltheart, M., Cox, R. E., & Langdon, R. (2012). Mirrored-self misidentification in the hypnosis laboratory: Recreating the delusion from its component factors. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 17(2), 151–176. doi:10.1080/13546805.2011.582287
McConkey, K. M., Szeps, A., & Barnier, A. J. (2001). Indexing the experience of sex change in hypnosis and imagination. The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 49(2), 123–138.
Rahmanovic, A., Barnier, A. J., Cox, R. E., Langdon, R. A., & Coltheart, M. (2012). That’s not my arm: A hypnotic analogue of somatoparaphrenia. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 17(1), 36–63.

Unfortunately, there aren't really any standardised measures for specifically measuring self awareness. In most of these studies participants are simply asked to describe experience or rate, for example, how in control they felt. A scale was recently developed to measure sense of agency in hypnosis and this should also be adaptable to other contexts:

Polito, V., Barnier, A. J., & Woody, E. Z. (2013). Developing the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS): An empirical measure of agency disruption in hypnosis. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(3), 684–696. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.003


Do online mental age tests have any scientific validity? If you google for 'mental age calculator', you can find several tests that claim being able to assess your mental age, as opposed to your chronological age.

Is 'mental age' a valid scientific concept?
Do online mental age tests have any scientific validity?

No, these tests shouldn't be taken seriously.

The scientific term 'mental age' has a different meaning than the one implied by those tests. In its scientific sense, it's a historic concept dating back to the early days of IQ testing. It was defined by Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, as a means to compare the intelligence of children. The mental age corresponded to the age group which had, on average, the same test value as the child that was assessed.

Historically, the ratio of mental and chronological age formed the basis of the IQ score. However, today, the IQ scores is determined by assessing the norm of test results within age groups (see this earlier answer) and the concept of 'mental age' has lost its relevance. In addition, the definition makes clear that comparing the 'mental age' of adults does not make much sense, because at some point, the test scores are not so much related to chronological age anymore.

The online 'mental age tests' do not try to measure IQ (for the validity of online IQ tests see this earlier question). Instead they ask trivia and attitude questions that are supposed to reflect your age more in a cultural sense.

None of the ones I looked at reported any scientific backing. However several noted they were for entertainment, only.


What can be the causes of the difference in performance? The box-plot above represents the number of programming tasks performed correctly in 30 minutes during an experiment by me. Each box represents an age group:

p1 = 6 - 7 years old
p2 = 7 - 8 years old
...
p6 = 11 - 12 years old
s1 = 12 - 13 years old
s2 = 13 - 14 years old
...
b1 = 16 - 17 years old
b2 = 17 - 18 years old

When I see the results, I am surprised by the difference between p4, p5 and p6.
The set of tasks was almost identical by age. The only difference is that by increasing the age they have some less start tasks.
I think it may be due to the ability of reading comprehension and motor development ...

Are there more factors that can influence?

UPDATE

Are those reliable differences? Without knowing what confidence intervals you plotted it's difficult to estimate visually (95%? ±1 SD?), but I wouldn't be surprised that there are no statistically significant performance differences between those levels. Keep in mind that if this test emerged only after seeing the data, rather than a priori based on theory, then that changes how to interpret the significance of such tests and makes them less trustworthy:

  HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr0203_4

The main finding seems to be an increase with age, possibly non-linear. Thresholding could be due to the task complexity.


What are some examples of psychology studies with tiny effect sizes and tiny p-values that are good for teaching? I'm looking for examples of studies where the result is highly significant but the effect is so tiny that it is meaningless in a practical sense. These will be shared with undergraduate psychology students to illustrate that statistically significant doesn't always mean important or consequential.

One example might be the effect of birth order on intelligence. Given a large enough sample there highly significant effects (p<.00001). However, these effects are very very small.

For a recent example, see Rohrer, Egloff, and Schmukle (2015): the effect of one birth order position was only one tenth of a standard deviation (1.5 IQ points)

  To illustrate this small effect, in our between-family sample of sibships of two, a randomly picked firstborn had a 52% chance of having a higher IQ than a randomly picked secondborn; conversely, a secondborn had a 48% chance of having a higher IQ than a firstborn.

References

Rohrer, J. M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201506451. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1506451112


What is (or is there) a clear distinction between cognitive and motivational explanations for a hypothesis? For example, I see there is even a cognitive theory of motivation. I closest I can find is that cognitive explanations are more about the thought process of an individual which led to certain behaviour. What then, does a pure "motivational explanation" mean?

Here is an instance of cognitive vs. motivational explanation: "There are both cognitive and motivational explanations for the competence hypothesis. [...] Perhaps the major reason for the competence hypothesis is motivational rather than cognitive." This is an excerpt from "Preference and Belief: Ambiguity and Competence in Choice under Uncertainty" by  Heath and Tversky.

Summary: it appears that the contrast from the paper cited is based on a 1970s paradigm where a cognitive approach meant information processing applied only to problem data, whereas the motivational approach allowed for other variables, such as self-esteem, which nowadays would be described as an affective variable.

Here's the fuller context for the claim:

  we propose that—holding judged probability constant—people
  prefer to bet in a context where they consider themselves knowledgeable or competent
  than in a context where they feel ignorant or uninformed. We assume that our
  feeling of competence
  in a given context is determined by what we know relative towhat
  can be known. Thus, it is enhanced by general knowledge, familiarity, and experience,
  and is diminished, for example, by calling attention to relevant information that is not
  available to the decision maker, especially if it is available to others.

  There are both cognitive and motivational explanations for the competence hypothesis.
  People may have learned from lifelong experience that they generally do better in
  situations they understand than in situations where they have less knowledge. This expectation
  may cariy over to situations where the chances of winning are no longer higher
  in the familiar than in the unfamiliar context. Perhaps the major reason for the competence
  hypothesis is motivational rather than cognitive. We propose that the consequences
  of each bet include, besides the monetary payoffs, the credit or blame associated
  with the outcome. Psychic payoffs of satisfaction or embarrassment can result from
  self-evaluation from an evaluation by others. In either case, the credit and the blame
  associated with an outcome depend, we suggest, on the attributions for success and
  failure. In the domain of chance, both success and failure are attributed primarily to luck.
  The situation is different when a person bets on his or her judgment. If the decision
  maker has limited understanding of the problem at hand, failure will be attributed to
  ignorance, whereas success is likely to be attributed to chance. In contrast, if the decision
  maker is an "expert," success is attributable to knowledge, whereas failure can sometimes
  be attributed to chance.

So basically by "motivational explanation" they refer to is the posited existence of a "psychic payoff of satisfaction or embarrassment" in addition to the concrete/monetary one. In my view, the existence of a "psychic payoff of satisfaction or embarrassment" could also be a called a "[more] emotionally charged decision".
There's been rivers of papers on the role of emotion in decision making, e.g. see Lerner et al. (2015) for a review.

By the way (and as an aside), there's a newer paper in this area by Klein et al. (2010) saying that Heath & Tversky basically confounded two effects:

  According to the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991), this pattern derives from favorable perceptions of one’s competence. In most past tests of the competence hypothesis, ambiguity is confounded with personal controllability and the source of the ambiguity (e.g., chance vs. missing information). We unconfound these factors in three experiments and find strong evidence for independent effects of both ambiguity aversion and competence.

Klein et al. seem very careful not to call controllability anything else... or advance any hypotheses for what's behind it, but there's one older paper by Harris (1996) saying

  Evidence that perceived controllability is associated with optimistic bias is reviewed. There is sufficient evidence that people are optimistically biased about
  negative events they perceive to be controllable. More work is needed to establish
  whether this is also true of positive events. There is evidence also that people often
  hold beliefs of their personal superiority on control-related dimensions. More
  experimental studies testing hypotheses about the mechanisms linking perceived
  control and optimistic bias are required. Future work should also expand the
  sophistication with which control is treated conceptually and empirically and the range of potential mechanisms examined

Wikipedia's article on illusory superiority says that "Illusory superiority's relationship with self-esteem is uncertain" (and does cite some studies in support of this statement).

It's also interesting that perceived controllability affects quite a few other things, including neural pain response; see Salomons (2004).

And back to the general question: affect and emotion are not exactly the same thing:

  Core Affect. This term is defined as a "neurophysiological
  state consciously accessible as a
  simple primitive non-reflective feeling most evident
  in mood and emotion but always available to
  consciousness" (Russell & Feldman Barrett, 2009,
  p. 104). Examples of core affect include pleasure
  and displeasure, tension and relaxation, energy
  and tiredness. A person experiences core affect constantly,
  although the nature and intensity of affect
  vary over time. Core affect can be a component
  of emotions and moods (defined next), but it can
  also occur in pure, or isolate, form. For example,
  according to Russell (2003), "pride can be thought
  of as feeling good about oneself. The 'feeling good'
  is core affect and the 'about oneself' is an additional
  (cognitive) component" (p. 148). As explained next,
  this qualifies pride as an emotion.

Since what Heath & Tversky talk about (motivation-wise) is basically an increase/decrease in feeling good about oneself (via satisfaction or embarrassment), technically I could have said "[core-]affectively charged decision" (instead of "emotionally charged") but that sounds really like a mouthful.

Also, even the broader class of affective phenomena has been disputed as being distinguishable from cognition, although this I think is a minority view. For a broader discussion of alternative viewpoints see "On the interdependence of cognition and emotion".

  We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from cognition, (ii) the affective primacy hypothesis, that evaluative processing precedes semantic processing, and (iii) the affective automaticity hypothesis, that affectively potent stimuli commandeer attention and evaluation is automatic. We argue that affect is not independent from cognition, that affect is not primary to cognition, nor is affect automatically elicited. The second half of the paper discusses several instances of how affect influences cognition.

See also "Mechanisms of motivation–cognition interaction", which details the way motivation has been studied in psychology, which is to say in a somewhat fragmentary way:

  The preceding sections highlighted the differences in how motivation is defined and investigated in various subfields. In animal behavioral neuroscience, the emphasis is on learning and conditioning processes, using primary incentives (food, liquid, and sexual stimuli) and measuring simple behaviors (physiological reflexes, response rates, and stimulus preferences). In social and personality psychology, the emphasis is on the pursuit of temporally extended goals involving high-level incentives (power, achievement, and affiliation) and assessing self-reported beliefs and goal striving behaviors. In cognitive neuroscience and adolescent developmental research, the emphasis is on neural representations of incentive value, typically using monetary rewards, and assessing how these modulate effortful cognitive processing. Finally, in cognitive-aging research, there is an emphasis on emotion–cognition interactions, using affectively valenced stimuli and measuring attentional and memory biases.

Unlike the cognitive/affective case, I have not seen a detailed discussion where motivation and cognition are contrasted... except this 1980s article: "Attribution bias: On the inconclusiveness of the cognition-motivation debate". Basically, there the cognitive perspective is taken to mean information processing on the problem alone, whereas the motivational perspective allows for other variables such as self-esteem. I think it's in this paradigm that Heath and Tversky phrased their contrast of cognition vs motivation.


What is the distinction between "relationship" and "difference" in behavioural statistics? Quoting [emphasis added] from D.C. Howell's (2012) Statistical Methods for Psychology, chapter 9 (Correlation and Regression), Pg 252:

  Although you should not make too much of the distinction between relationships and differences (if treatments have different means, then means are related to treatments), the distinction is useful in terms of the interests of the experimenter and the structure of the experiment. When we are concerned with differences between means, the experiment usually consists of a few quantitative or qualitative levels of the independent variable (e.g., Treatment A and Treatment B) and the experimenter is interested in showing that the dependent variable differs from one treatment to another. When we are concerned with relationships, however, the independent variable (X) usually has many quantitative levels and the experimenter is interested in showing that the dependent variable is some function of the independent variable.

My question is: What is the distinction between a mere difference of the dependent variable (DV) from one one level to another, and the DV as a function of the independent variable (IV)?
In other words, the distinction that Howell explains in the quoted text is unclear to me.

Howell is just making a distinction between types of independent variables (predictors in a regression context): continuous variables versus categorical ones.

In the case of categorical variables, like "Treatment A" and "Treatment B", your regression equation will contain variables that contrast between Treatment A and Treatment B - often this is by "dummy coding" where we consider Treatment A as "0" and Treatment B as "1" though there are other schemes as well. In a two-treatment case, you can consider the coefficient for Treatment to be a difference between A and B. You are likely to plot these sort of data in a box-and-whisker plot (or a bar graph like the infamous 'dynamite plot' that many statisticians abhor) where you have distinct categories on the X-axis and your dependent variable on the Y-axis. You are likely to do statistical inference to determine whether the outcomes for Treatment A are "significantly different" from outcomes for Treatment B.

In the case of a continuous variable, for example, blood pressure, now your regression coefficient for blood pressure is interpreted in terms of units of change in your dependent variable per each unit of difference in your predictor - in this case you are looking at a relationship. For a single linear predictor you are likely to discuss this relationship in terms of a correlation coefficient. You would often plot these sort of data as a scatter plot, with your predictor variable on the X-axis and your outcome variable on the Y-axis, often with a line depicting some sort of fit between the two variables. You are likely to do statistical inference on whether your predictor is significantly related to your outcome variable: that is, whether knowing your predictor gives you better than chance information about the outcome.

From the perspective of linear regression, however, these two types of predictor variables are really not all that different, and it is quite straightforward to combine them in the context of multivariate regression.


Are self-described "socially conscious" individuals less likely to show implicit bias as measured by the implicit association test (IAT)? Many individuals, in particular young progressives, incorporate their attitudes on gender and race into their identity. I am wondering if people who consider themselves socially conscious in this respect are less likely to show implicit bias as measured by the implicit association test (IAT). For example, do people who frequently and openly discuss and defend LGBT rights show less implicit bias (or reverse bias) towards LBGT individuals?

The relationship between implicit bias and individual behaviour is not direct and does not satisfactorily explain biased behaviour on an individual basis.

There are two studies that looked at cardiovascular disease, which does propose some interesting hypotheses. These studies add to the growing evidence that bias whether implicit or explicit is significant at a group or community level instead of at an individual basis. This 2014 a study of 503 cardiologists by Daugherty et al. performed implicit gender bias test and asked the cardiologists to go through a clinical vignette. The differences the recommendations in the clinical vignette according to gender was not wholly explained by the differences in the implicit bias test. We know there is a bias against aggressive management of heart disease in women by cardiologists in general by previous studies.

  The utility of secondary stress testing after an abnormal exercise treadmill test was rated as “high” more often for female than male patients (32.8% versus 24.3%, P=0.04); this difference did not vary with implicit bias. Angiography was more consistently rated as having “high” utility for male versus female patients (part 1: 19.7% versus 9.8%; part 2: 73.7% versus 64.3%; P<0.05 for both); this difference was larger for cardiologists with higher implicit gender bias on risk taking (P=0.01)

At a community level however, there is a strong correlation between communities that have a high level of black racial bias and higher rates of black deaths from circulatory diseases. This 2016 study by Leitner et al mapped over 1.4 million responses of white participants to US counties through a national survey and found that counties with high rates of implicit and explicit bias against blacks had far higher rates of "circulatory disease and in circulatory-disease-related death rates" than counties with lower racial bias. Although this study does not solely focus on implicit racial bias, (it included explicit racial bias), it does provide food for thought.

  (I)n counties with high (1 SD above the mean) explicit racial bias, the difference between Blacks’ and Whites’ death rates was 62 deaths per 100,000. In contrast, in counties with low (1 SD below the mean) explicit bias, the difference was 35 deaths per 100,000... We made this estimate at the average Black population level in counties for which we had death-rate data for Blacks (average Black population = 28,598); 11 more Blacks per county were predicted to die annually in high-explicit-bias counties (95 deaths) than in low-explicit-bias counties (84 deaths).

References:

Daugherty Stacie L., Blair Irene V., Havranek Edward P., Furniss Anna, Dickinson L. Miriam, Karimkhani Elhum, … Masoudi Frederick A. (n.d.). Implicit Gender Bias and the Use of Cardiovascular Tests Among Cardiologists. Journal of the American Heart Association, 6(12), e006872. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.117.006872

Leitner, J. B., Hehman, E., Ayduk, O., & Mendoza-Denton, R. (2016). Blacks’ Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites’ Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616658450


Obsessions: Synopsis and Effects I've been thinking about this topic quite a lot recently. What exactly is obsession ? Is it a good trait indicating perseverance for a goal ? Or is it a sign of a psychological disorder ? Is it a sort of fixation ? Is isolation its main cause ? Also, is there a reason why geniuses are often obsessed with their fields and thus, driven to insanity ?

I think the most famous kinds of obsessions are obsessions with computers, chess, books and maths. However, is there a general theory to define obsession ? Giving examples of obsessions with different fields would clear doubts.

Obsessions are defined as intrusive and recurring thoughts that an individual finds disturbing or uncontrollable, and are not a good thing.

There is a lay use of the word which means something like "a very strong interest," but it is just that: a perfectly normal if very intense interest, usually with no basis in abnormal psychology.

Note that 'fixation' is an outdated Freudian concept, unless, of course, you're talking about physically fixating your eyes on an object or area of visual space. Obsessions can be in almost any form, but common ones include recurring and distressing curse words, or a desire to perform dangerous or inappropriate acts (such as a spontaneous desire to jump out of a moving car, or to touch a nearby person in an intimate place.) Importantly, these are distressing and uncontrollable--the obsessive person does not desire these thoughts.


Is there consciouness when a person is sleeping and not dreaming? According to

Consciouness

  Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware
  of an external object or something within oneself.

I suppose dreaming qualifies as "being aware of an external object or something within oneself". But what about sleeping without dreaming. Is there supposedly consciousness in that state?

According to Giulio Tononi,"consciousness is what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep,” he explained that  "once a person goes into dreamless sleep, there is no experience, no perception of surroundings or the environment; there are no memories of the past or the future or even the present. It is thus at this point that everything disappears, which corresponds to consciousness “going away.”" [1]
You can look up his integrated information theory of consciousness [2]

Tononi G, Edelman GM: Consciousness and complexity. Science. 1998, 282 (5395): 1846-1851. 10.1126/science.282.5395.1846.
Tononi, G. (2011). The integrated information theory of consciousness: an updated account. Archives italiennes de biologie, 150(2/3), 56-90.


How does a person know if he should seek treatment for depression since feeling moody is unavoidable? Life is not a bed of roses. All of us feel moody sometimes due to failures in life. This is perfectly normal. However, depression is abnormal.

How does a person know if he needs to seek treatment for depression, given that it is hard for him to distinguish whether the moody emotions are normal or abnormal? What are some symptoms to look out for?

TLDR

Many people say they are feeling depressed when really they are just suffering from a low mood.  Andrew Solomon said

  The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. (Solomon, 2013)

This talk was about how depression affected him and his life, and is a good introduction to the subject.

The type of depression will depend on diagnostic criteria (see Different types of Depression below) but basically, depression is not just feeling sad.  When you are depressed, it is difficult to carry on with day-to-day life effectively for varying reasons, over a period of days or more.

Longer answer

There are many grey areas in the assessment of depression, just like there are with some other mental health problems.  The main traditional diagnostic systems used are currently the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems - ICD-11 (WHO, 2018), and a formal diagnosis using the ICD-11 classification system is as follows:

  A [single] depressive episode is characterized by a period of almost daily depressed mood or diminished interest in activities lasting at least two weeks accompanied by other symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt, hopelessness, recurrent thoughts of death or suicide, changes in appetite or sleep, psychomotor agitation or retardation, and reduced energy or fatigue (ICD-11 6A70).
  Recurrent depressive disorder is characterized by a history or at least two depressive episodes separated by at least several months without significant mood disturbance (ICD-11 6A71).

The DSM-5 system requires match in at least five out of nine criteria for a diagnosis of major depression, although there are moves to improve the diagnostic procedures for mental disorders through systems such as HiTOP (Stony Brook Medicine, 2017; Kotov, et al., 2017).  However, one thing I think we can all agree on is that there are two different categories of depression.

Endogenous
Depression resulting from internal, possibly biological influences, as a result of possible genetic factors, or reactions to chemical/hormonal imbalances; and
Exogenous
Depression resulting from external influences in a person’s life, such as grief, loss or trauma.

Different types of Depression

There are several types of depression.

Unipolar Depression
The sufferer feels melancholic with no experience of any highs.  DSM-5 states that the criteria for diagnosis are the same as other forms of depression, however, the diagnosis is to be recorded with the specifier “with melancholic features” (p. 185).
Bipolar Disorder (BPD)
There are Bipolar I and Bipolar II disorders, both with severity levels of mild moderate and severe, and DSM-5 considers BPD to be a bridge between schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders in terms of symptoms, family history, and genetics; so, DSM-5 has a separated Bipolar Disorders from depressive disorders (p. 123).
Suicide risk for Bipolar Disorders is 15 times greater than the general population, and may account for 25% of all completed suicides (p. 131), with a prevalence rate of 36.3% of attempts for Bipolar I and 32.4% for Bipolar II and in terms of genetics, the risk of suicide seems to be 6½ times higher among first-degree relatives (a person's parent, sibling, or child) of those diagnosed with Bipolar II compared to Bipolar I    (p. 138)
Major Depression (Major Depressive Disorder in DSM-5 (p. 160))
Again, with severity levels of mild, moderate and severe, the module notes indicate that this is the most common form of depression.  Looking at DSM-5, diagnosis requires five (or more) of the diagnostic criteria to be present most of the day, nearly every day, during the same 2-week period.
Sufferers will feel down and uninterested in any activity external to them, and they are generally less motivated to deal with their basic needs.
Suicidal behaviour has a possibility of existing at all times and most completed suicides are not preceded by unsuccessful attempts, with an increased risk of completion within men, and those who are single or living alone (p. 167).
Mild Depression
This sounds to be a separate disorder, with the sufferer still able to engage in life but finding their activities harder to do.  However, looking at DSM-5, the criteria to look for are the same as Major Depressive Disorder, with few, if any, symptoms in excess of those required to make a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (p. 162 & 188).
Atypical Depression
DSM-5 classifies this as the same as all other depressive disorders, but must have a specifier of “with atypical features”.  DSM-5 goes on to say that Atypical Depression, compared to the past, does not connote an uncommon or unusual clinical problem as the term might imply.  The levels of hypersomnia required are defined as at least 10 hours of sleep per day including daytime napping (or at least 2 hours more than when not depressed) (p. 186).
Persistent Depressive Disorder (previously Dysthymia)
Looking at DSM-5, this is a diagnosis which would be given when depression in any form is suffered for most of the day, for more days than not, over the last 2 years (p. 168), and the module notes help with other aspects by indicating that sufferers may not be aware of the condition and just see it as part of life, whilst feeling unimportant, dissatisfied and scared.
Psychotic Depression
DSM-5 states that the criteria is the same as other forms of depression, however, the diagnosis is to be recorded with the specifier

“with psychotic features”
(delusions and/hallucinations are present, of which some are mood-congruent and some are mood-incongruent),
“with mood-congruent psychotic features”
(the content of all delusions/hallucinations are consistent with the typical depressive themes of personal inadequacy, guilt, nihilism…) or
“with mood-incongruent psychotic features”
(the content of all delusions/hallucinations are not consistent with the typical depressive themes of personal inadequacy, guilt, nihilism…) (p. 185).

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
This is depression which affects the sufferer during certain seasons.  In most cases, SAD affects people during the autumn and winter months where daylight hours are less, but less commonly, there can be affects during the summer months due to heat and/or humidity or body image issues etc. (WebMD, 2017)  DSM-5 requires this to be recorded the same as any other depression, but with the specifier “with seasonal pattern” (p. 187). This enables you to not diminish the severity of the depression based on the fact that it is just seasonal.
Postnatal Depression
DSM-5 requires this to be recorded the same as any other depression, but with the specifier “with peripartum onset” (p. 186).  This enables you to not diminish the severity of the depression based on the fact that it is a result of giving birth to a child.
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
There is a set of criteria laid out from page 171, with a requirement that the criteria must be met for most menstrual cycles that occurred in the preceding year and
in the majority of menstrual cycles, at least five symptoms must

be present in the final week before the onset of menses
start to improve within a few days after the onset of menses; and
become minimal or absent in the week post-menses

DSM-5 also talks about a depressive disorder which is specific to 7-18 year olds only, with onset before 10 years old, and that is Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (pp. 156-160).

References

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Kotov, R. et al., 2017. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), pp. 454-477. doi: 10.1037/abn0000258

Solomon, A. (2013). Depression, the secret we share — TED Talks. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share
[Accessed 8 June 2017].

Stony Brook Medicine (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP). [Online]
Available at: https://medicine.stonybrookmedicine.edu/HITOP/publications
[Accessed 23 May 2017].

WHO (2018). ICD-11. [Online]
Available at: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en


Does EMDR legitimately treat any condition? Are there any studies not funded by friends or beneficiaries of EMDR that prove it helps with a strong p-value?

TLDR: EMDR seems to be equally efficacious to other therapies.

Davidson & Parker, (2001) conducted a meta-analysis.

  Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a controversial treatment suggested for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other conditions, was evaluated in a meta-analysis of 34 studies that examined EMDR with a variety of populations and measures. Process and outcome measures were examined separately, and EMDR showed an effect on both when compared with no treatment and with therapies not using exposure to anxiety-provoking stimuli and in pre–post EMDR comparisons. However, no significant effect was found when EMDR was compared with other exposure techniques.

Rothbaum, Astin, & Marsteller, (2005). Looked at EMDR with Rape Victims.

  This controlled study evaluated the relative efficacy of Prolonged Exposure (PE) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) compared to a no‐treatment waitlist control (WAIT) in the treatment of PTSD in adult female rape victims (n = 74). Improvement in PTSD as assessed by blind independent assessors, depression, dissociation, and state anxiety was significantly greater in both the PE and EMDR group than the WAIT group (n = 20 completers per group). PE and EMDR did not differ significantly for change from baseline to either posttreatment or 6‐month follow‐up measurement for any quantitative scale.

Seidler, & Wagner, (2006) conducted another meta-analytic study.

  The superiority of one treatment over the other could not be demonstrated. Trauma-focused CBT and EMDR tend to be equally efficacious. Differences between the two forms of treatment are probably not of clinical significance. While the data indicate that moderator variables influence treatment efficacy, we argue that because of the small number of original studies, little benefit is to be gained from a closer examination of these variables. Further research is needed within the framework of randomized controlled trials.

References

Davidson, P. R., & Parker, K. C. (2001). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): A meta-analysis. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 69(2), 305.
DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.69.2.305 PMID: 11393607Free PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d703/9ab57fabe1a3b0aee33bf558b95cf228700c.pdf

Rothbaum, B. O., Astin, M. C., & Marsteller, F. (2005). Prolonged exposure versus eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) for PTSD rape victims. Journal of traumatic stress, 18(6), 607-616.DOI: 10.1002/jts.20069FREE PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d5cd/abbee19ef9886327fd77be0587e6826842d6.pdf

Seidler, G. H., & Wagner, F. E. (2006). Comparing the efficacy of EMDR and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of PTSD: a meta-analytic study. Psychological medicine, 36(11), 1515-1522.DOI: 10.1017/S0033291706007963


How happy are people relative to neutral (as measured by experience sampling)? Most studies on experience sampling are about whether some activity correlates with increased or decreased happiness/subjective well-being. However, it's often hard to tell from these studies what number corresponds a neutral point, where someone is neither unhappy or happy (or equally so), or is feeling an valence/affect equivalent to a nonconscious state. For instance Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life (2007) shows its results in terms of z-scores, which are defined relative to some average, but it's unclear whether that average would be higher or lower than a neutral point. As such, while we can say that these people are happier in this situation than another, it's hard to see whether they're overall happy or unhappy in that situation.

I'm not particularly interested in what activities or age or gender correlates with happiness, but just how happy people are relative to some clearly defined neutral point. Ideally, the study wouldn't just show some average among all study participants across all their experiences, but also what percentile corresponds to what happiness ratings, and the range of happiness scores and the frequency of different happiness ratings for each person. Is there a study that addresses this topic?

I just finished reading this article (2018) by Michael Plant, a PhD student at Oxford University.  Given that it is not a peer-reviewed paper, it would be worth checking his references, but this is what he says about the neutral point:

  Life satisfaction surveys don’t ask people to specify what point on
  the 0 to 10 scale they would consider equivalent to not being alive. 0
  is labelled not at all’ and 10 ‘completely satisfied’. ... How could
  we settle where the neutral point is? Two strategies seem possible.
  First, we could find out at what LS scores individuals report their
  lives are neutral on experience measures of SWB. Second, we could poll
  people to ask at what LS score out of 10 they would be indifferent
  between living with that score for the rest of their life or dying. I
  am unaware of any analysis which has been conducted along either
  lines. Thus, for the moment, this unfortunately remains a point of
  armchair conjecture.

Note: LS = Life Satisfaction; SWB = Subjective Well-Being.


Does sadism correlate with narcissism? I mean in the general population. I'm aware of proposals/constructs like malignant narcissism but the empirical evidence (in the Wikipedia page at least) is mostly case-based (serial killers and so forth), i.e. anecdotal.

At least among a sample of high-school students the dark tetrad correlations look like:

So there's only a moderate correlation between narcissism and sadism (0.37), but it turned out to be strongest of the six (as commonly measured). However it was only the 2nd strongest after an oblique rotation, the psyhopathic-sadistic one "winning" by small margin (0.02) in that approach:

  To evaluate if the different measures of these four
  traits loaded on a more general second-order factor, we conducted
  a hierarchical analysis of oblique factors which showed
  there was not a general deviant personality factor that was likely
  to reflect all types of traits. There appeared to be four primary
  unique factors corresponding to psychopathic, narcissistic,
  Machiavellian and sadistic traits. The four constructs thus obtained,
  appeared to display a greater degree of independence
  than the original four, with Pearson’s r ranging from .01 to .26
  (Fig. 1).

So despite their moderate correlation (all four) dark tetrad bits are seen as reasonably independent factors.

What I find strange in that figure is that after the oblique rotation there was practically no correlation between Machiavellianism and psychopathy. I'm not sure what to make of that.


What is a validated single-item measure of mood? Has anyone validated, proposed or tested a single-item  state-based positive affect or happiness measure? I am particularly interested in something for tracking mood every day.

Many single item measures of mood can be found in the literature. Those two are based on the idea that affect is bidimensional and that one's current state can be reported using a grid:

Russell, J.A., Weiss, A., & Mendelsohn, G.A. (1989). Affect Grid: A Single-Item Scale of Pleasure and Arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57 (3), 493-502.
Larsen, J.T., Norris, C.J., McGraw, A.P., Hawkley, L.C., & Cacioppo, J.T. (2009). The evaluative space grid: A single-item measure of positivity and negativity. Cognition and Emotion, 23 (3), 453-480.

You might also want to look at http://studiolab.ide.tudelft.nl/studiolab/pmri/ [Disclaimer: I know the people who developed it]. It is conceptually similar to Russell's AffectGrid but purely non-verbal.

Finally, it seems necessary to mention the Self-Assessment Manikin. Technically, it's not a single-item instrument (the original version has three, many people use only the first two) but it is very popular. Main publication is Bradley, M.M., & Lang, P.J. (1994). Measuring emotion: The self-assessment manikin and the semantic differential. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 25 (1), 49-59.

Edited (a long time) after comment: Most authors in this field argue that mood or affect are fundamentally bi-dimensional, if not more, so it makes sense that measures would also be bi-dimensional. The closest you can come to a single Likert-type item would perhaps be the SAM valence scale.

Another issue is that traditional psychometrics is almost entirely focused on dealing with item-specific variance, i.e. how to select items to build a scale, how many items are needed to reach a given level of reliability, how to model latent constructs using different items, how to equate scales or build population norms, how to adapt scales to different populations, etc. There is not much you can do with single items.

Consequently, it's not very complicated to create a new “valence measure” by drawing some smiling faces, altering the response format or slightly changing the wording. If the new measure is not completely idiosyncratic, you will obtain some level of correlation with other valence measures but beyond that what could make it a “valid” or superior measure of mood?


At what age are women perceived to be most attractive? Someone once quoted a research at me:

Men were shown photographs of female body parts and asked to judge the attractiveness. The result was that men (of all ages) found 14 year old females the most (sexually) attractive.

I have tried to locate this or similar research, but to no avail.

Do you know of experiments researching at what age (men or) women are perceived to be most attractive (by male or female judges)?

Are there any moderators of this judgement (like age or gender of judge)?

OkCupid, a free online dating website (through which I've met two girlfriends myself, incidentally), does some pretty interesting research on the profiles and activity of its users. This particular research blog post presents some fairly on-topic results in "Exhibit C: Looks":

@ArtemKaznatcheev rightly pointed out some range restriction here, so this can't address the validity of an age estimate below 18 years directly, but two things are worth noting:

The overall slope resembles a simple linear trend that might continue upward past 18 years young.
The absolute maximum here appears to be around 19, not 18. I doubt the difference is "significant".

It's not clear to me whose ratings these are or how exactly they were collected (as a user of the site, I remember a 1-5 rating index, and chose to rate women only), so it's hard to trust these results, especially in terms of their representativeness of a general population. Artem also pointed out that a better method for controlling social desirability in these ratings would hide direct information on age from respondents; OkCupid's research differs from the kind you're asking about in that regard too. Nonetheless, it's an empirical hint at the more explicit answer to the related, subjective question where respondents do have this info. Social desirability and age info are present in many normal social interactions after all, so removing age info deliberately might reduce naturalistic applicability of results anyway.
This blog post presents many more graphs on related topics that might interest you (e.g., as alternative operationalizations of attractiveness, or as behavioral correlates), but only one seems to address a moderator directly. That moderator is attractiveness itself! A quote follows this graph:

If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won't realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else's attractiveness doesn't change much with age.
In other words, given that nobody is drop-dead gorgeous or drop-dead hideous, your average 25 year-old is roughly as good-looking as your average 35 year-old. Yes, throwing out the prettiest of the pretty young things is a clumsy handicap to put on an age-by-age comparison. But at the same time, for the vast majority of men, the best-looking women are simply out of reach, so it's actually accurate to exclude them as possibilities. In fact, unrealistic male expectations inspired this article, so we want to do everything we can to correct for them.
Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.

I'm particularly doubtful of this second graph though, because it doesn't seem clear that the top and bottom deciles were identified and excluded separately within each year of age. "If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young" actually sounds more like excluding the top decile while ignoring age, which might invalidate this graph. Removing the most extreme deciles of the sample while ignoring age would necessarily flatten the "everybody else" line somewhat, given any asymmetry in relationships between age and membership in these deciles of attractiveness across all ages.

Edit by what. Delete or edit as you see fit.
Nick, I too see a problem with how the most and least attractive women were deleted from the sample. I add this as an edit, as it does not warrant its own answer, but is too long for a comment.
If attractiveness declines with age, we must assume that it declines equally for all women, until this is disproven. So we must assume that a woman who is among the most beautiful at age 21, while still among the most beautiful at age 35, will have lost in overall attractiveness. The same goes for the average and the unattractive woman. We must assume (because we don't have the data) that over all women of all ages and all levels of attractiveness, we have a parallel decline in attractiveness with age, as shown in the graph below:

Now, if you delete the most and least attractive women from your sample, across all ages, you will, as the graph shows, create a sub-sample with no decline in attractiveness. This is an artifact of you tampering with the data and has no explanatory power whatsoever.
If on the other hand you delete the most and least attractive women for each age group, the general "slant" of the graph and the decrease in attractiveness that it represents does not change at all.
What I believe is that okcupid.com do not want to anger their older female customers, so they pimped or sugarcoated their data in a way that flatters the vanity of those women and allays their fears of being unattractive. In short: this section of their blog is advertising, not research.


What is the mechanism behind "gut feelings"? I'm thinking of a phenomenon that I've first observed in myself when taking an IQ test. Upon looking at the question, I selected an answer, but got this "gut feeling" or a hint that something was wrong with my response. Upon seeing the answers, the question was indeed answered incorrectly. I've observed this phenomenon several more times in different situations and can define it as a very quick flash of awareness or feeling that quickly subsides.

What is the neuroscience behind such "gut feelings" or "intuitions"?

I'm particularly interested if such "almost" answers are some form of cognitive process, where some neurons fire, but not enough to produce a fully formed insight/idea/judgement.

Because the question that I was originally trying to answer was not lexical, but involved some rational thinking, I do not believe that this is exactly the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.

Intuition and implicit learning

I recommend you have a read through Lieberman's (2000) review and theory article on intuition.

Lieberman argues that intuition is a cognitive and behavioural consequence of implicit learning processes. Intuition is contrasted with more deliberate thought processes. It also reflects situations where it is often not possible to articulate the reasons for a decision or belief.

These links with implicit learning are extensive. Much of skilled performance is performed automatically without conscious effort. We also build extensive associations between stimuli and decision relevant information.
Furthermore, processes of learning can lead us to forget the reasons why something is true or why something is good, while retaining the fact that it is true or that it is good.

Lieberman suggests various neural components important to intuition:

  It is concluded that
  the caudate and putamen, in the basal ganglia, are central components of both intuition
  and implicit learning, supporting the proposed relationship.

Answering multiple choice questions

Your specific question concerns answering multiple choice questions.

One explanation of the phenomena you describe is that you may retrospectively analyse your feeling of doubt once you know the correct answer. You may dwell more on your feelings of doubt when you get an answer wrong, but presumably are less likely to do so on the questions where you had doubt but ultimately got the question right.

More generally, partial knowledge is not unusual when answering multiple choice questions. And presumably that feeling of uncertainty regarding the correct answer could come about by either deliberate reasoning or some intuitive unarticulated reason.

References

Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological bulletin, 126(1), 109. PDF


Are there any significant alternatives to the theory that the mind exists? Are there any psychological models which do not presuppose the existence of the mind?

In the same way that there are theories of physics which do not presuppose the existence of a luminiferous aether, is the sort of thing that I mean.

Can there be, or is it impossible by definition?

Theory of mind doesn't really "presuppose" a mind. Theory of mind is just a name for a particular cognitive capacity: the ability to know that you have a mental state and to realize that others have a mental state, and that their mental state is not the same of yours. Calling this ability "theory of mind" might be a bit confusing because it sounds like it's a scientific theory, but it's not, it's just referring to an ability to theorize (make educated guesses) about the contents of other peoples' mental states. It could have been named something else (see Why is the theory of mind named as such? as well). Therefore, it doesn't really make any sense to think about "alternatives" to theory of mind, maybe just alternatives to the name of the ability.

Theory of mind is really important to human social interactions, and impairments in theory of mind are part of the spectrum of social difficulties in autism.

As one example of how theory of mind works day-to-day, very young children who have not yet developed theory of mind have difficulty understanding that knowledge they have is not shared by everyone. If they see you hide a candy under one of two cups, they would be confused why someone else who wasn't in the room to see where the candy was hidden doesn't know which cup the candy is under (Frith and Frith, 2005, tell a similar story to explain theory of mind).

The nature of the mental state is not actually a part of the definition of theory of mind. You might be thinking of philosophy of mind.

Frith, C., & Frith, U. (2005). Theory of mind. Current Biology, 15(17), R644-R645.


Can you override priming? Assume that you are using priming as a technique to improve your performance in a specific area. Ex: When I am sleepy in the morning I use more alert music to get my mind up to speed. If I want to stay focused I try to visualize a focused person or I try to focus on an object for a few minutes. With these I am trying to used the ideomotor link (as Khaneman calls it) and to increase the concentration power directly or indirectly.

Now let's assume that I want to go back and get out of being focused and staying alert and I expose myself to stimuli that would send me in the opposite direction. Would the initial priming be an obstacle in this direction?

Note: in Kahneman's example imagining yourself smiling will actually improve your mood. Same way, imagining yourself concentrating on something should improve your focus.

Would the initial priming be an obstacle in this direction?

Yes. But not an exceedingly difficult one to overcome since you manage to prime yourself into being focused in the first place.

Personality plays a vital role of course. If you're a natural hyperactive person it would obviously be an easier task to prime yourself into being alert than to enter a state of complete focus and calmness.


Are there any types of good addiction Many more things than I previously thought can be considered addiction, so I was wondering whether an addiction is always bad

As I pointed out in Technical term for "hidden addictions", the term addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you. Often it can start with a habit but then it becomes an addiction because there is a compulsion to continue the habit.

You can continue with your daily life without carrying out a task which is habit, but if you are addicted to doing it you have a feeling of necessity to do it otherwise you cannot function.

  Addiction is most commonly associated with gambling, drugs, alcohol and nicotine, but it's possible to be addicted to just about anything

So to answer your question, there can be good habits but there are no good types of addiction as they affect your life to the point where you "cannot live" without the addiction.


Can information be lost while traveling through neurotransmitters? Can information be lost while traveling through neurotransmitters, if so then why? If information can be lost while traveling then is it possible to retransmit them and put back in order? For example data can be lost while traveling through network therefore we need to use TCP (transmission control protocol).

If information can be lost while traveling through neurotransmitter. Then is it possible that, not being able to remember something you want or remembering something that are not in their orders?

Synapse Information Processing

In the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF), synapses are:

Leveraged to provide filtering of spikes at different time scales. This allows for managing heterogeneity in neurons, as well as allowing to trade-off speed of response for information integration over time.
Used to create dynamical systems using these filtered spikes including oscillators, integrators and temporal memory networks.

In all of these cases, information can be lost. However, this is always framed as a trade-off between informational integrity (which can be measured various ways, such as how well a signal is classified, how well a dynamical system is approximated, how much information is compressed over time) and resource use.

Retransmission as Information Recovery

In the context of the brain, TCP doesn't really make sense. TCP assumes there is a copy of the information that is desired to be transmitted somewhere, but that's usually not the case in the brain. That being said, there is something called the phonological loop which appears to be a short term store of what was heard. Consequently, you could interpret this replay as a retransmission and consider it to be information recovery.


Is there scientific evidence that IQ tests measure intelligence? IQ tests are quite popular, but they seem to be lacking a scientific proof confirming their accuracy of measuring ones intelligence.
No matter how hard I've searched I haven't been able to find a scientific paper proving the result, all I could find was some questionable statistical studies but I am not interested in such, I am looking for a more fundamental proof, one that shows the relation of this test with the actual biological processes in the brain.
My guess would be that the only thing IQ tests measure is how good someone is at IQ tests, since one can actually get a good score due to training.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, people working in mathematics, physics and related sciences tend to get better scores and this can be explained by the fact that this is what they do, this is their job and they have spent a large amount of time studying patterns, but this however does not mean that they are necessarily smarter that others they are just trained at this.
A mathematician for example, given a sequence 2,3,5,7,... can see that the next term is 11 since this is a familiar sequence to him, but to an artist it may not be familiar at all.
Having said that, do IQ tests actually measure human intelligence?
Is there a strict proof that confirms this?

There is no universally accepted definition of "intelligence", so there is no universally accepted measure of it. An IQ test can be argued to measure specific types of intelligence like pattern recognition, but may completely ignore other types of intelligence like creativity and social intelligence. IQ has been shown to be associated with many factors like income, educational attainment, job performance and incarceration rates, so IQ tests clearly measures something meaningful and associated with many aspects of one's life, but whether you call that "intelligence" is open to debate. It's reasonably well accepted that an IQ test can measure specific kinds of intelligence, but there is no way to even define, much less quantify, intelligence in a general sense.


Do ADHD drugs harm the brain? Particularly, the amphetamine "vyvanse". If one was to take a 30mg dose once a day for 50+ years, would it damage brain function at all? Would the brain simply get used to the drug and become 100% tolerant to it? Would the brain damage be permanent? Would the brain's performance be improved for the whole time taking the medication? These are some of the questions I have regarding ADHD amphetamines.

This section from the Wikipedia page on Neuroplasticity indicates (emphasis mine)

  Reviews of MRI studies on individuals with ADHD suggest that the
  long-term treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
  with stimulants, such as amphetamine or methylphenidate, decreases
  abnormalities in brain structure and function found in subjects with
  ADHD, and improves function in several parts of the brain, such as the
  right caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia.

The following studies are cited as reference:

Meta‐analysis of structural MRI studies in children and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder indicates treatment effects (Frodl et al 2012)
Meta-analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies of Inhibition and Attention in Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Exploring Task-Specific, Stimulant Medication, and Age Effects (Hart H, Radua J, Nakao T, Mataix-Cols D, Rubia K 2013)
Effect of Psychostimulants on Brain Structure and Function in ADHD: A Qualitative Literature Review of MRI-Based Neuroimaging Studies (Spencer TJ, Brown A, Seidman LJ, et al 2013)

I had a quick read on these papers and they do not appear to isolate Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine) specifically. The one from 2012 doesn't even mention it; the other two address both methylphenidate and lisdexamfetamine. Each paper has their own limitations, for instance, standardization concerning comorbid conditions, age, etc.

From what I can understand, long-term use of ADHD stimulants in individuals with ADHD (this is important) does not appear to be associated with brain damage, but rather the opposite, they appear to promote "normalization" of certain structural deficiences. Not all deficiences, though (i.e. effects visible on the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) but not on the left ACC).

The paper from Spencer et al cites another - Potential adverse effects of amphetamine treatment on brain and behavior: a review (Berman, Steven M. et al 2009). I didn't have a chance to look into that just yet.


When to use standard versus moderator regression techniques for the most parsimonious approach? I know how to run multiple regressions (SMR, HMR, and MMR) in SPSS but I'm still a little vague on when it's appropriate to use each of them to achieve the best and most parsimonious result. (SPSS being the mathematical software, SMR being standard multiple regression, HMR being hierarchical multiple regression, and MMR being moderated multiple regression, SMR and SPSS are further explained in this video, hierarchical multiple regression in this video, and moderated multiple regression in this blog post).

e.g. in a case where I want to see the impact of social anxiety, and sense of humour on life satisfaction, I hypothesise that both social anxiety and sense of humour will be individually associated with life satisfaction.

When controlling for age, gender and anxiety, participants high in sense of humour will have higher life satisfaction.

Also, when excluding variables of age and gender, I predict that the negative association between anxiety and life satisfaction will be stronger for those with low sense of humour ratings.

I feel that for most of these questions, the answers could be found using an SMR, and the last question, with an MMR, but is there a simpler and more parsimonious way to do this? Can I gather the data for the first few questions from the MMR analysis, for example?

You write:

  When controlling for age, gender and anxiety, participants high in sense of humour will have higher life satisfaction.

This is standard regression. Predictors that are control variables are the same as any other predictors, it's just that their inclusion in the model is mostly there to facilitate a desired interpretation of a focal predictor.

  Also, when excluding variables of age and gender, I predict that the negative association between anxiety and life satisfaction will be stronger for those with low sense of humour ratings.

Here you have described a moderation hypothesis.
i.e., in regression terms, you might express it like this:

lifesat ~ anxiety * humour

However, technically, you have not assigned anxiety or life satisfaction a particular status as the outcome variable. Whether you "exclude age and gender" is irrelevant to the status of the hypothesis as a moderation hypothesis.

You ask specifically:

  I feel that for most of these questions, the answers could be found using an SMR, and the last question, with an MMR, but is there a simpler and more parsimonious way to do this? Can I gather the data for the first few questions from the MMR analysis, for example?

Don't be afraid to run several regression models. Ultimately, a moderator regression is simply a model with an interaction term. Adding predictors generally alters the regression coefficients for other predictors (an exception would be for orthogonal variables, such as in experiments).


What is a source of case studies of personality disorders? What is a good source for case studies on a broad range of personality disorders?

I'm a writer and I'm interested in reading some case studies for character work. I've found some websites with classic case studies, but I would really like to find some something less historical, more modern.

Everything I've found online so far is topic related or deals with research studies that put people in tests (like the Stanford Prison Experiment).

Something like Clinical Case Studies would be great, but the articles are about $30 bucks online. Are there any open-access journals or website with articles like Clinical Case Studies?

Clinical Case Studies  is a journal devoted to the write up of case studies. To quote the site:

  It presents cases involving individual, couples, and family therapy.
  The easy-to-follow case presentation format allows you to learn how
  interesting and challenging cases were assessed and conceptualized,
  and how treatment followed such conceptualization. This practical
  format allows clinicians to replicate successful treatments in their
  own practices.

Articles follow a 12 step format:

  Theoretical and Research Basis for Treatment
  Case Introduction
  Presenting Complaints
  History
  Assessment
  Case Conceptualization (this is where the clinician’s thinking and treatment selection come to the forefront)
  Course of Treatment and Assessment of Progress
  Complicating Factors (including medical management)
  Access and Barriers to Care
  Follow-Up (how and how long)
  Treatment Implications of the Case
  Recommendations to Clinicians and Students.

You can search within the publication using Google Scholar (publication = clinical case studies).

If price per article is an issue, a few options include:

get access through a library or university.
Subscribe to the entire journal ( this is generally cheaper than per article costs).
examine the subset of articles where authors provide a copy of the PDF online. In Google scholar, see the articles with [PDF] in brackets.

Example article

E.g., See this example by Leedy, Jackson, and Callahan (2007):

  The following case study illustrates a client-centered,
  cognitive-behavioral approach to the psychological treatment of Mr. M,
  a 41-year-old male diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, a mood
  disorder from Lyme disease, and narcissistic personality disorder. Mr.
  M’s personality difficulties are conceptualized as representing
  compensatory narcissism, a strategic way of coping with feelings of
  insecurity. The goals of treatment included positively integrating Mr.
  M’s chronic illness into his identity, decreasing depressive symptoms,
  and improving his interpersonal skills. Treatment was successful in
  decreasing both Mr. M’s depressive symptoms and his narcissistic
  orientation to thinking and interacting with others.

References

Leedy, M.J., Jackson, M. & Callahan, J.L. (2007). Treating Depression and Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Style in a Man With Chronic Lyme Disease. Clinical Case Studies, 6, 430-442. PDF


Are there any recorded cases of hearing the outside world while in a coma? There are plenty of stories flying around of people having been in a coma, but able to hear the outside world. They usually include either hearing malicious things said by staff, or encouragement by loved ones.
Are any of these cases recorded and verified, not just apocryphal?

Here's a study on Brain Response to One's Own Name in Vegetative State, Minimally Conscious State, and Locked-in Syndrome:
http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=791093

  Background  A major challenge in the management of severely
  brain-injured patients with altered states of consciousness is to
  estimate their residual perception of the environment.

  Objective  To investigate the integrity of detection of one's own name
  in patients in a behaviorally well-documented vegetative state (VS),
  patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS), and patients with
  locked-in syndrome.

  Design  We recorded the auditory evoked potentials to the patient's
  own name and to 7 other equiprobable first names in 15 brain-damaged
  patients.

  Results  A P3 component was observed in response to the patient's name
  in all patients with locked-in syndrome, in all MCS patients, and in 3
  of 5 patients in a VS. P3 latency was significantly (P<.05) delayed
  for MCS and VS patients compared with healthy volunteers.

  Conclusions  These results suggest that partially preserved semantic
  processing could be observed in noncommunicative brain-damaged
  patients, notably for the detection of salient stimuli, such as the
  subject's own name. This function seems delayed in MCS and (if
  present) in VS patients. More important, a P3 response does not
  necessarily reflect conscious perception and cannot be used to
  differentiate VS from MCS patients.


Which is the shortest duration for a pitch difference in audio signals to be perceived by the human auditory system? If I have two short audio signals, for example pure tone C4 and C#4, so half-tone difference, how short can they be that the human can hear the difference in pitch? Was there any blind-experiment/research with a good set of subjects done about this?

I was causally testing with a short script and it seems I am able to distinguish down to 30 ms long samples if I play one sample, then one second of pause, and another half tone higher sample.

I can also do it for shorter, but I am not sure anymore if I really hear it, or if I just imagine hearing the difference.

Bonus question: how short can it be if the signal consists of two tones. So of both C4 and C#4 at the same time. Can one hear that there are both C4 and C#4 in the signal if it is only 30 ms long?

It really depends on what you mean by difference in pitch. Subjects can discriminate differences in frequency for very short tones, but it does not mean they are being perceived as pitch differences. The classic paper in this area is Moore (1973):

As the duration is reduced from 200 ms to 6.25 ms, performance falls off, especially for low frequency tones. It is worth noting that creating extermely short sounds with narrow bandwidths is difficult. With a 12.5 ms duration, subjects can still discriminate between tones with frequencies of 250 Hz and 255.7 Hz (a Delta f of 5.7 Hz and a (Delta f)/f of 0.023).

C4 has a frequency of 261.63 Hz and C4# has a frequency of 277.18 Hz for a Delta f of 15.55 Hz and a (Delta f)/f of about 0.06. One would expect that you could discriminate C4 from C4# with durations substantially shorter than 12.5 ms

In regards to your "bonus question", when the stimulus consists of two tones, things get very complicated. Judgements like can you hear both tones are very different from can you hear the difference between a single tone and the pair of tones.


Perception of abrupt noise First question - sorry Cognitive Science is a closed book to me so I hope someone can give me an insight into this phenomenon.

We have a child's toy that is activated by clapping of the hands. To me, I always perceive the activation of the toy to take place a split second before I perceive the sound of the hand clap - even, perhaps especially, when it is me that is doing the hand clapping.

I recognise that this must be a perception issue because the sound has to travel, perhaps 12 times the distance to the toy compared to my ears, then be processed by the electronics before the sound of the toy reaches back to me. How is it possible that I hear the sound of the toy before the sound of the handclap?

Judging from your description I think it has to do with the predictability of a certain event (the activation of the toy in this case) after a certain action (the hand clapping), altering your perception of temporal order between the event and your action. David Eagleman has done some research on this suggesting that when one has the intention of generating a certain event that has a high probability to occur, this event can be perceived to happen earlier than the action that caused it. That maybe explains why it especially happens when you are the agent. At least that is what I got from reading this paper http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/research/papers/EaglemanHolcombeTiCS2002.pdf Feel free to correct me if you think my description is wrong.

Nevertheless, the field of time perception has generally revealed many illusions in human timing and if you are interested in more you can read the work of Benjamin Libet as well on time and conscious awareness http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Time-Consciousness-Perspectives-Neuroscience/dp/067401846X


Are there any journal articles in psychology that have promoted and discussed reproducible data analysis? I consider reproducible analysis to be really important.
In particular, I'd like to see more researchers in psychology:

sharing their data
producing their journal articles using literate programming technologies like Sweave and knitr that combine data analysis code and text into an integrated documenst.

I consider this particularly important in light of  concerns over research fraud (e.g., data fabrication) and  various forms of data fishing (e.g., testing many hypotheses and only reporting the significant one).

Certainly in statistical fields, there is a lot of discussion about the importance of reproducible analyses (e.g., see here, and here). However, I sometimes feel that in psychology this is only starting to filter through.

Thus, my question is:

Are there any journal articles in psychology that have advocated reproducible analysis?

There are many angles that such articles might take: reward structures that discourage open science and reproducible analysis; technical challenges which make it difficult to do such analyses; how-to articles that outline how to perform reproducible analyses in psychology. I'd be interested in any articles that address these topics.

It's not a journal article, but it's a project, called Reproducibility Project.
They are re-doing psychological studies to estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies. They try to stay as close as possible on the original study (they e-mail the author(s) for the exact stimuli etc.).
Here's the main site and here's the link to their spreadsheet.

This is a short article promoting the sharing of data in psychology. Another related study (by the same author) is also mentioned.


Could bioinfomatics explain consciousness? There's a theory that consciousness is the result of information processing. Many speculate based on this that the brain is conscious because it is processing information. If this theory of consciousness is true, would it be correct to assume that consciousness initially occurs within each neuron cell, rather than the brain as a whole?

Secondly, given that cells within the brain transmit data via synapses to do collective computations, would it be fair to assume that they would also form a collective consciousness from this process? In other words, would several connected neurons performing a computation together all share consciousness, and if divided into 2 groups would their shared consciousness also be divided? If so, perhaps this could explain how some studies indicate that consciousness can be divided (ie duel/divided consciousness in split brain patients)?

Just to clarify, I realize this assumption is not proven by science and I'm not meaning this to be an opinion based question. I'd just like to know whether there's any logical/scientific errors here.

I’m not certain but think that the theory you referred to is Single-neuron Theory of Consciousness [1]. Anyway, if it is not the one, let’s discuss this theory because it has the concept like the one in your question. The abstract of this theory is as follows:

  By most accounts, the mind arises from the integrated activity of large populations of neurons distributed across multiple brain regions.  A contrasting model is presented in the present paper that places the mind/brain interface not at the whole brain level but at the level of single neurons.  Specifically, it is proposed that each neuron in the nervous system is independently conscious, with conscious content corresponding to the spatial pattern of a portion of that neuron's dendritic electrical activity.  For most neurons, such as those in the hypothalamus or posterior sensory cortices, the conscious activity would be assumed to be simple and unable to directly affect the organism's macroscopic conscious behavior.  For a subpopulation of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortices, however, an arrangement is proposed to be present such that, at any given moment:  i) the spatial pattern of electrical activity in a portion of the dendritic tree of each neuron in the subpopulation individually manifests a complexity and diversity sufficient to account for the complexity and diversity of conscious experience; ii) the dendritic trees of the neurons in the subpopulation all contain similar spatial electrical patterns; iii) the spatial electrical pattern in the dendritic tree of each neuron interacts nonlinearly with the remaining ambient dendritic electrical activity to determine the neuron's overall axonal response; iv) the dendritic spatial pattern is reexpressed at the population level by the spatial pattern exhibited by a synchronously firing subgroup of the conscious neurons, thereby providing a mechanism by which conscious activity at the neuronal level can influence overall behavior.  The resulting scheme is one in which conscious behavior appears to be the product of a single macroscopic mind, but is actually the integrated output of a chorus of minds, each associated with a different neuron.”

Comment:

Fist, I think it is certain that the signaling activity of each neuron, among other millions of neurons, in the neural circuit that creates consciousness contributes something to the whole consciousness. But I think whether we call this minute contribution “consciousness” is a matter of individual’s opinion. However, if we call it “consciousness”, we should be aware that, whatever this minute consciousness is, it is not and cannot be the complex and highly informative consciousness that we feel in our mind, because a single neuron is too simple to be so.

Now, let’s examine the content of the theory. It appears strange to me that the theory asserts that dendritic electrical activity corresponds to consciousness. Dendritic activities are processing activities of incoming information that arrives at dendrites. They are ongoing, unfinished activities. On the other hand, the completely processed, synthesized information comes out at the axons. Also, a lot of current evidence shows that consciousness corresponds to recurrent neuronal activities among and synchronization of various cortical areas [2-5]. The recurrent neuronal activities and synchronization entails activities in the axons too. Therefore, it seems more evidence-based that the composite of all electrical activities, both dendritic and axonal, not dendritic alone, among various cortical areas that include the consciousness neural circuit should be the one that corresponds to consciousness.

Next, regarding assertion i), it’s hard to believe that the spatial pattern of electrical activity in a portion of the dendritic tree of each neuron individually manifests a complexity and diversity sufficient to account for the complexity and diversity of conscious experience, but it’s more probable that the combination of the spatial patterns of electrical activities of a very large group of neurons can manifest the require complexity and diversity. Assertion ii) is possible but needs objective evidence to confirm. Assertion iii) is not a novel assertion but a current standard model of neuronal processing. Assertion iv) is questionable, but it may just an inaccurate wording. I think the wording shouldn’t be “dendritic spatial pattern is re-expressed at the population level by …” but should be “dendritic spatial pattern is processed, and a new axonal spatial pattern is synthesized and expressed at the population level by …”.

References

Sevush S. Single-neuron Theory of Consciousness. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 2005..
Babiloni C, Marzano N, Soricelli A, Cordone S,  Millán-Calenti JC, Percio CD, et al. Cortical neural synchronization underlies primary visual consciousness of qualia: Evidence from event-related potentials. Front Hum Neurosci. 2016;10:310.
Dehaene S, Sergent C, Changeux JP. A neuronal network model linking subjective reports and objective physiological data during conscious perception. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Jul 8;100(14):8520–8525.
Fisch L, Privman E, Ramot M, Harel M, Nir Y, Kipervasser S, et al. Neural “Ignition”: Enhanced activation linked to perceptual awareness in human ventral stream visual cortex. Neuron. 2009 Nov 25;64(4):562–574.
Pollen DA. On the neural correlates of visual perception. Cereb Cortex. 1999; 9(1):4-19.


What causes muscle stiffness contraction and tension during stress What causes muscle contraction in times of stress? People say it's caused because of fight or flight response is activated, but this not exact. I am looking to find the direct cause, i.e is it a direct effect of adrenaline or maybe a direct effect of cortisol? Maybe is because glucose levels rise and it's the way of our body to use that extra energy? I don't really know and searching doesn't help.

Presumably you to mean to ask what pathway mediates muscle tension. muscle tension is controlled by the reticular formation (in the brain stem), so it doesn't require anything special to happen in the bloodstream. The reticular formation is connected to many other areas of the brain.

To save this question from triviality and relate it to your prior one (which was about anxiety), muscle tension is the most common (if not the defining) feature of GAD, yet muscle tension cannot be understood in terms of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) response to stress (according to a 2009 review of Pluess et al.) That's basically a coy of saying we don't know what exactly causes muscle tension in GAD. Furthermore, some studies of GAD reported that the typical ANS responses to stress are not present in many GAD patients (according to the aforementioned review citing in Hoehn-Saric et al.). The latter issue is more controversial because a later (and more cited) study of Thayer et al. did find some correlates with ANS in terms of cardiac activity, but this still doesn't quite provide a complete explanation. Another 2009 GAD review discussed 5 different conceptual models of GAD, yet none of these theories does much to explain muscle tension in GAD.


What are the top contributions from neuroscience to AI and viceversa? How much progress has been made from the interaction between these two fields? What are the top contributions from neuroscience to artificial intelligence and viceversa? How much progress has been made from the interaction between these two fields? Is there a formal research area dedicated to the study of topics in the intersection between AI and neuroscience, with papers being published and maybe conferences being held periodically?

There is a really close correspondence between Auditory Scene Analysis and Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. If you tried to build a speech recognition system, especially for use in noisy environments, while ignoring what we know from auditory psychophysics, physiology, and anatomy, I would guess that you would not get too far. The things we have learned from CASA have lead to better hearing aids and cochlear implants, which in turn have taught us about the auditory system, which of course leads to further improvements in CASA.

Bregman has a nice summary (along with conferences) on his webpage


Does chess enhance cognitive abilities? Some texts advise playing chess with children and mature people. Should I take them seriously, and why should chess boost intellect?
For instance, I would like to be able to read and understand technical texts quickly. Should I learn playing chess for this? In this text, for instance, they hype all kinds of advantages gained from chess, but they raise the meaningful questions at the end:

• Is there anything else besides playing chess that these GMs can be experts at?
• Granting these GMs were already genius by birth, is it safe to infer that playing chess has enhanced their overall intellect?

In the course of trolling, they conclude, "Go ahead and grab a chess board." This leaves me pondering if the effect they hyped indeed exists.

Giovanni Sala was concerned by this same question, so he did a meta-analysis of 24 studies in "Beyond the 64 Squares: Does Chess Instruction Enhance Children’s Academic and Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis" and found that there was still a lot of doubt in the results. Specifically, in all the papers, he never found the control group was reasonable. Of course children who played chess rather than doing nothing performed better at various tasks, as can be seen in "Enhancing Creativity in Children by Imparting Chess Training". But what about regular instruction or playing other games?

Consequently, he followed his meta-analysis up with a randomized plucebo controlled trial focused in mathematical cognitive skills in "Does Chess Instruction Enhance Mathematical Ability in Children? A Three-Group Design to Control for Placebo Effects" and found that the effect of chess, when compared to actual mathematics instruction (Control), was meaningless as shown in the tables below. However, it did surpass the game Go in transfer learning outcomes.

As he concluded at his talk at the CogSci 2016 conference (where all the papers I cited come from) which I attended, far transfer-learning is really hard. To improve skills in certain domains, it is better to study that domain than to hope a marginally related activity will grant insight. To make studying that domain easier, new materials need to be developed rather than searching for new related activities.

Note: This area is still under active research, as discussed in "The Effects of Chess Instruction on Pupils' Cognitive and Academic Skills: State of the Art and Theoretical Challenges"


Calculating brain-part volume percentage? How is the approximate volume occupied by a brain component calculated?

For example, how would you know the approximate brain volume percentage of both hippocampi or both parts of the striatum, or the cortices of the brain?

Is there an application that I, as a non-neuroscientist could use to get such an estimation for a given part in the human brain?

Short answer
Magnetic resonance imaging can be used to calculate volumes of brain areas.

Background
A state-of-the-art method to determine volumes in brain tissue is by making use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI segments the brain into 3D pixels, called voxels. Voxel is derived semantically from the fusion of pixel and volume. Hence, each voxel has a certain volume and thus the number of voxels inside a certain brain area (e.g. the hippocampus) can be calculated yielding your desired volume measures (Fig. 1).

Of course you cannot do MRI in your attic, but you can search the internet for the right articles. Two leads are cited below.

Fig. 1. Brain divided into voxels by MRI. source: Everything Zoomer

References
- Andica et al., J Neuroradiol (in press)
- Aquartz et al., Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci (2001);251(6): 255-61


Searching for real biological neuron firing data [numeric] I am searching for real neuron firing data, so I can look at each neuron for fire timing (frequency) and incoming/outgoing signal-strength. I already found short youtube videos of real neuron firing footage (measured via calcium), but I am searching for numeric data.

Data-Requirements

Region is not important
the longer time range, the better

The website crcns.org hosts open source data recorded from neurons in various brain areas.


Do synapses have special types? I assume synapses/dendrites/axons are relations which connect one entity/neuron to another, for example:

a car is a vehicle: "is" relation
Bob has a sister: "has" relation
etc.

I would just imagine that when car is fired it would activate the connected neuron vehicle. But how does the brain differentiate between the relation types? What makes it "know" that a car "is" a vehicle and not "has" a vehicle?

This question seems to be asking "How is knowledge represented in neurons" and then jumps to the assumption "synapses represents relations". As discussed in the linked question, there is a lot of evidence that this method of binding is not biologically plausible, given that it doesn't scale well to the level of human vocabulary.

So, to answer your question, it is hypothesised that there are "special" synapses to do certain operations/relations, however the model you seem to be holding in your mind is incorrect. For more information, please check out "How to Build a Brain" by Chris Eliasmith or the other reference below.

Reference

Eric Crawford, Matthew Gingerich, and Chris Eliasmith. Biologically plausible, human-scale knowledge representation. In 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 412–417. 2013.