How does caffeine work as an analgesic adjuvant? Caffeine is used an adjuvant in over-the-couner pain medication, e.g. added to paracetamol and/or aspirin.

A brief look at the Wikipedia page on caffeine doesn't indicate any analgesic effect of caffeine itself. So, what mechanism/pathway allows it to attain this adjuvant effect for pain relief?

Zhang (2001) reports that the analgesic activity of caffeine is due to

a blockade of peripheral pro-nociceptive actions of adenosine;
the activation of the central noradenosine, pain-suppressing pathways;
stimulation of the central nervous system with subsequent actions on pain perception;
inhibition of PG (prostaglandine) E2 synthesis, just like the primary mechanism of paracetamol and caffeine by blocking the COX enzyme;
disinhibition of inhibitory adenosine actions on central cholinergic nerve terminals, leading to increased acetylcholine release and activation of cholinergic mechanisms involved in analgesia;
lastly, caffeine-induced changes in mood may help in in pain relief.

Concerning the direct COX inhibitory action (which highly surprised me, personally) - Aspirin-like drugs act on the catalytic site of the COX enzyme. Paracetamol is believed to act at a different site, such as the peroxidation site of COX, while caffeine may block synthesis of the COX-2 protein, probably at the transcriptional level,thereby leading to enhanced COX-2 inhibition. Caffeine is a nonselective antagonist of adenosine A1 and A2 receptors. Adenosine A2a receptors induce intracellular signalling events that cause an upregulation of the COX-2 gene and the release of PGE2 in rat microglia, which is antagonized by caffeine.

Tavares & Sakata (2012) also provide an interesting review on the analgesic effects of caffeine, without it being used in conjunction with other medications.

References
- Tavares & Sakata, Rev Bras Anestesiol (2012); 62(3): 387-401
- Zhang, Drug Safety (2001); 24(15): 1127–42


Has the inverted spectrum thought experiment ever been conducted (and if not, why)? The inverted spectrum thought experiment posits that you (the subject) wake up one morning to find that your colour spectrum (or some part of it anyway) has inverted.  This experiment has important implications for the idea of "qualia".  While we may not have a way to manipulate qualia directly, this experiment still seems like it would be valuable to conduct.  In Daniel Dennett's version of the experiment - "alternative neurosurgery" - he points out that you wouldn't know if your optic nerve was messed with, or your memories, and I would extend this to any apparatus that inverts spectrum at any point along the sensory pathway.

I imagine that the technology to develop goggles (similar to the prism glasses, colour filters, distortion lenses, etc, used in perceptual adaptation experiments) that invert colour is available.  However, I have not seen any reference to such an experiment being conducted.  Has it?  And if not, why not?  Are there practical limitations?

It seems to me that the construct of qualia hinges on there being some property of experience that is independent of behaviour/function/physical state, and the subjective experience of colour is often touted as a perfect example of this, via the inverted spectrum experiment.  So then the practicality of this experiment - whether or not an inversion of some kind is possible without a functional impact - is crucial.  If the experiment cannot be conducted because no inversion exists that can be done without functional impact, then it would constitute a severe blow to qualia as independent of function, and conversely, if it can be done, and the effect shown to be independent of behaviour, then it would surely be a problem for functionalism...  So why not try it?

I don't think inverted prism goggles would be a satisfactory way to empirically test the thought experiment. A key axiom of the argument is that there are no physical changes to our brains or bodies; only the qualia have changed. In a goggles design, there would be a clear physical locus of the change (and we might reasonably call this part of your body for the duration of the experiment), so the shift in qualia would have a clear physical basis.


What is the scientific term for the tendency to see familiar patterns in things, that are actually something completely different? What is the scientific term for the tendency to see familiar patterns in things, that are actually something completely different?
One of the most common examples of this bias, is the perception of human faces in clouds, cars and all kinds of other objects.
What I am looking for is a lower level misperception, which people are usually aware of on a higher, cognitive level. I.e., people either are, or can easily become aware of the fact that they are not actually seeing a face (or another familiar pattern).

Pareidolia is the term you are looking for. It is often used for the specific case you mention of seeing faces in other objects, but it's actually a more general concept that covers other types of patterns and even other (non-visual) modalities.
A search of Google Scholar returns many relevant results.


Open access 7T resting-state fMRI dataset I'm looking for an open access dataset of 7-tesla resting state fMRI images of human subjects. I've been able to find one so far (http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201454). However, I need images that were acquired using MP-RAGE (not MP2-RAGE) sequencing. I've checked the major open neuroscience repos so far with no luck. Does anyone know of an open access dataset that meets this description?

There two 7 Tesla data sets currently publicly available, bith within the OpenfMRI data collection

Here is a link to a 350 GB data set for 20 subjects watching the audio version of Forrest Gump. The authors also have all the scripts available at Github to enable reproduction. The associate publication can be found here.

The other 7T data set you allready mentioned in your question. As far as I know there are only these two as of June 2016.


Why do people tap their foot to music? When listening to music, I often see people tap their feet either to the main beat or the dominating rhythm of the music.

Why do people do this?

Short Answer:

People tap their feet due to increased activity in the cerebellum.

Detailed Answer:

There already is some evidence that music can release certain neurotransmitters, including dopamine. You can assume that people who tap their feet to the music, are in someway "pleased" by the music, meaning that their body goes into some sort of physiological joyride. Part of this joyride is an increased blood flow to the limbs, an increase in heart rate, dilated pupils, and most significantly a rise in activity of the cerebellum.

There is also the theory that music can have similar effects as drugs & addiction on the reward pathway of the brain. This pathway stimulates the flow of dopamine  to the striatum, which is a part of the forebrain, activated by reward, motivation and addiction.
In addition those dopamine levels can already peak milliseconds before something "special" in the song starts (e.g the bass drop, guitar solo, etc.), which strengthens the theory that our brain anticipates and predicts upcoming events (such as the memory prediction framework).

However, for example to songs the individual is completely unfamiliar with, the memory prediction framework may not be activated, therefore dopamine levels will not spike before the actual e.g. "drop", but after it happens, the striatum will be filled with dopamine.
Furthermore, as mentioned in the beginning of the answer, the cerebellum gets more active as certain music is played, releasing neurotransmitters, and therefore the increased activity an individual is more likely to move their e.g. legs, because of a heightened motor-system.

Sources:

Adinoff, B. (2004). Neurobiologic Processes in Drug Reward and Addiction. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 12(6), 305-320. doi:10.1080/10673220490910844
Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818-11823. doi:10.1073/pnas.191355898


Encoding of abstract concepts in memory When you read a book and you want to remember it you can encode the information into mental pictures with associations. This is a technique for remembering the content.

The problem is when you encounter abstract concepts. How would you deal with them to create pictures that are more memorizable?

Is there a branch of memory science dealing with encoding techniques?

This question was inspired by a HowToLearn.com article by Pat Wyman, How To Remember Everything You Read Using Mental Pictures.

Read "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Foer or watch or listen to transcripts of the world's memory experts, such as Ben Pridmore. You'll notice that they have their own special techniques to make abstract concepts more memorable. These individuals have increased difficulty with less concrete themes, however, and it may be best to process the to-be-remembered items not by focusing on imagery but, perhaps, semantic meaning or another sort of deep encoding.


Do twin studies overestimate heritability? Do twin studies overestimate heritability (for instance by putting the interaction between environment and genome under the label "heritable")? If so why? Would you have any research papers to point me to?

It seems likely that some percentage of twin studies would fail to account for all the systematic environmental variables that connect their twins. In this case, the effects of these variables would still cause a correlation, which would be attributed to heritability. "A second look at twin studies" by Lea Winerman discusses examples of these types of variables.


Is living with constant mindfulness necessarily good? or does it limit one's potential? Isn't mindfulness is difficult for a thinker which usually philosophers are?
Mindfulness by definition is bringing awareness to present moment non judgmentally and I agree it may relax you. I believe it happens because you shrink your attention to such a short span, in a moment by moment fashion that complex thoughts can't be formed and thus you relieve yourself from any unpleasant (or pleasant) feeling that may arise from complex thoughts. In simple words, you reduce your suffering, if any, to at it's minimum by limiting input to senses.
However, is avoiding complex unpleasant thought always desirable? aren't these thoughts and their uncomfortable feelings motivates and inspire us introspect and change?
For example: In early childhood I had my belief and respect for patriarchal social system(disbelief in gender equality). It were some uncomfortable thoughts that made me correct myself and disregard such systems which causes unnecessary man made suffering. If every time I felt uncomfortable and practiced mindfulness to avoid them, I might passively be supporting such system till date.
You may say some thoughts are useful and worth attention & others not. Like worrying about upcoming college exam won't do any good, you may just use best of the time left. However can we say that with 100% certainty? The worry is something bringing your attention and focus to a problem at hand, may be you could be one in a million who will get a brilliant idea to handle such situation or device a undetectable way to cheat, or it may just help to focus and put 100% to prep for exam or it could keep you panicking, unproductive and prove itself a useless thought pattern. Similarly if you fail on an exam, there is no good in being sad about it or is there? may be the sadness is useful in making a neural pattern in brain to put more effort and time next semester.
Hence I even find judging thoughts worthiness is difficult and inconsistent. However if you are having too many negative thoughts keeping you on the edge on a regular basis may end up in health issue, in which we can regard it as certainly a problem.
To summarize, wouldn't being too much mindful may make you too adaptive to be mal-adaptive? wouldn't it may stop your thought processes which might have produced some good for society? and wouldn't it limit your potential.

Mindfulness by definition is bringing awareness to present moment non
judgmentally and I agree it may relax you. I believe it happens
because you shrink your attention to such a short span, in a moment by
moment fashion that complex thoughts can't be formed and thus you
relieve yourself from any unpleasant (or pleasant) feeling that may
arise from complex thoughts. In simple words, you reduce your
suffering, if any, to at it's minimum by limiting input to senses.

For me it is the opposite. In order to stay mindful and present you need a very stable and extended attention span. Philosophy, or just thoughts in general, are just mind wandering, it requires no effort, and no stable attention. And it changes nothing in reality. It actually limits your senses, mindfulness heightens your senses, because you are actually observing more input then when you are mindless.

However, is avoiding complex unpleasant thought always desirable?
aren't these thoughts and their uncomfortable feelings motivates and
inspire us introspect and change?

What thoughts are you talking about? The content of the thought does not really matter, what matters is how you react to it. You could have thoughts about strawberries, but if you are allergic you may react in a negative way to them (resistance), if you love fruit you may react positive, and else just neutral. You can live on basic hedonistic principle if you want.

If every time I
felt uncomfortable and practiced mindfulness to avoid them, I might
passively be supporting such system till date.

Mindfulness is not about avoiding anything, it is the opposite, observe the present with as much attention as possible, but without reacting to it. That means to observe thoughts as well, but not react to them.

You may say some thoughts are useful and worth attention & others not.
Like worrying about upcoming college exam won't do any good, you may
just use best of the time left. However can we say that with 100%
certainty? The worry is something bringing your attention and focus to
a problem at hand, may be you could be one in a million who will get a
brilliant idea to handle such situation or device a undetectable way
to cheat, or it may just help to focus and put 100% to prep for exam
or it could keep you panicking, unproductive and prove itself a
useless thought pattern. Similarly if you fail on an exam, there is no
good in being sad about it or is there? may be the sadness is useful
in making a neural pattern in brain to put more effort and time next
semester.

Worrying is not a single thought. Worrying is when you react to fear with fear. It creates a cycle, a loop of fear. Just observe the thought and the sensation you label fear, but don't react to it. Worrying doesn't help you focus, it is a distraction. It does the opposite. Yes it might get you so fearful and anxious and nervous that it makes you do something, but the result will not be of the same quality as when you do something calm and with full focus.

To summarize, wouldn't being too much mindful may make you too
adaptive to be mal-adaptive? wouldn't it may stop your thought
processes which might have produced some good for society? and
wouldn't it limit your potential.

If you get to that state of awareness of a zen monk where you have no thoughts at all, you would realize that society is just an illusion. How would you even be able to help someone if you are not mindful? If all you are aware of is your thoughts, how are you supposed to notice someone who needs help. What does it even mean to 'produce some good'?
Thoughts limit potential. Thoughts are limited and limiting by nature. For example if you believe that a snake will kill you, you will stay away from snakes, and potentially never find out that their venom cures cancer (just an example). Or if you believe that slavery is something barbaric and could never happen in the modern world, you could become a slave and never realize it. In yoga and buddhism this is called karma. Thoughts that skew your perspective and make you only see reality from a specific relative perspective. If you want to learn more, I recommend this talk from david bohm, a theoretical physicists


Is the heart conscious? I have read that our heart can think like our brain. Of course it doesn't have complete functionality of brain but it has its own consciousness. Is it true?

The general consensus of the scientific community would be that the human heart is not capable of consciousness.

The machinery behind consciousness is not well understood, of course, and there is quite a bit of debate, but it is thought that some minimum level of complexity is required in order for consciousness to arise. The human heart, while containing some neural circuitry, is very unlikely to reach this minimum level of complexity.

Here is a Quora discussion that further explores this issue.


What is a sensorimotor connection in plain English? I have googled, but haven't found any definition simple enough that I understand. I would appreciate it if you could give me an example as well!

Thanks,

Jack

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word sensorimotor to be:

of, relating to, or functioning in both sensory and motor aspects of bodily activity

and the following relating to the tags you used may help to understand the word.

The idea that we learn by interacting with our environment is probably the first to occur to us when we think about the nature of learning. When an infant plays, waves its arms, or looks about, it has no explicit teacher, but it does have a direct sensorimotor connection to its environment (Sutton & Barto, 2005)

As Merriam Webster points out, the sensorimotor connections are related to sensation and to motion
Dictionary.com points out that physiologically, they relate to

both sensory and motor, as parts of the cerebral cortex.

The sensorimotor connection to your environment taught you what an object looks, feels, smells and sounds like and helps with your spacial awareness.
References
Sutton, R. S. & Barto, A. G. (2005). Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction Cambridge, MA: MIT Press


.Do students learn better when challenged (specifically, in math education)? Originally posted on Math.SE,
but it was suggested cogsci.SE would be a more suitable venue.

I'm aware of two publications that have trickled onto the radar screens
of non-specialists:

Fortune Favors the Bold by Diemand-Yauman & Oppenheimer
Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education
 by Derek Muller
(TED talk)

The former focuses on the impact of "disfluency" on retention and success when processing written material, and the latter seems to focus on learning in the
case where preexisting misconceptions need to be corrected (physics).

I'm interested to hear about similar research results in the learning of
abstract concepts, specifically mathematics.

The motivation described in the original question on Math.SE is the
fact that many mathematicians seem to hold the (painful, to students)
belief that forcing students to struggle (in some sense) is beneficial.
I've quoted multiple examples of this attitude from various sources in
the original question, you are welcome to have a look.

Does current research support the belief that (in mathematics) difficult
learning is better learning?
This might be in terms of retention, long-term achievements, motivation, etc'.

Update

I've posted an expanded form of the question on matheducators.SE beta: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/875/

Still hoping for helpful answers from the cogsci.SE community.

Let me begin by saying that the answer is nowhere near as simple as you or I would like it to be. There are several reasons for this, but the main reason is that there are myriad ways that students can struggle through the material.

I became interested in this subject when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Industrial Engineering program at Iowa State. One of the classes that I taught dealt with the concept of measurement variation, which inescapably includes several important statistical concepts, which to me (having had four advanced statistics/methods courses) were painfully obvious; however, my students had no hope whatsoever.  When lab report grading time came around, I was very disappointed to see that even my brightest students completely missed the point of the experiment, <sarcasm> despite my obviously brilliant instruction </sarcasm>.

So, I set out to do research and conduct experiments into exactly why my students had trouble with this material.  I've written two papers on the subject (with a third in-work).  Here are some of my general findings:

The learning process depends upon the learner (pre-existing knowledge and conceptions), the material (type and difficulty), and the teaching method. These three interact in a complex way, as several researchers have explored. The most comprehensive set of literature on this can be found by searching Cognitive Load Theory.
Problem-based learning (which is what @JohnYetter describes in his answer) has been proven to be a highly effective teaching method for science and math when executed properly.  Proper execution of PBL requires that students are familiar with the method, and my studies have shown that properly-designed scaffolding (things that help guide the process and point out key concepts) is a significant, essential component.
Lecture does not appear to have any effect on learning (at least for measurement variation and the related concepts), and may actually harm the learning process (this is what I am studying further right now).

The theories agree that the reason PBL is effective is that it forces students to make the necessary schematic connections to build their knowledge. The intent of the process is to take novices and begin to develop their knowledge base such that it functions more like an experts' knowledge base (there are proven differences between how novices and experts explore problems).  Along with this, I think that you need to have a particular type of student, one who has self-discipline and doesn't give up. Such students are well-suited for engineering and science; students who don't possess these abilities or who are not capable of rapidly adapting find themselves on the way over to a non-technical degree (so my studies of engineering students only automatically exclude this population of students, which is another piece I need to study further).


Does taking a deep breath reduce the experience of stress and negative emotions? Sometimes when I have negative feelings, it seems that a deep breath resets these feelings. Does that really happen? Is there any research on the effect of taking a deep breath on reducing the experience of negative emotions?

Yup; basically, it works. Varvogli and Darviri (2011) review research on diaphragmatic breathing, reporting:

  Deep breathing has been successfully used to decrease the fatigue associated with haemopoietic stem cell transplantation patients 55, to reduce the anxiety and asthma signs/symptoms of children with asthma 56, in the management of acute stressful tasks 57 showing that the slow-breathing technique can have a significant effect on improvement of the hemodynamic changes following the acute stressful tasks. Furthermore, it has been used to influence autonomic functions in patients with essential hypertension and thus reduce it 58–59, in the management of male adolescent aggressive behaviour 60, in long term prophylaxis of migraine 61, in stress related to dental visits 62.

Fatigue, anxiety, stress, and aggression are all negatively valent (see the diagram in this answer; aggression doesn't appear, but is a form of negative arousal). It wouldn't be surprising if effects on hypertension and migraine incidence are partially mediated by emotional changes either.

References
Varvogli, L., & Darviri, C. (2011). Stress management techniques: Evidence-based procedures that reduce stress and promote health. Health Science Journal, 5(2), 74–89. Retrieved from http://www.hsj.gr/volume5/issue2/521.pdf.

As cited within Varvogli & Darviri (2011):

$55$. Sang-Dol, K., & Hee-Seung, K. (2005). Effects of a relaxation breathing exercise on fatigue in haemopoietic stem cell transplantation patients. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 14(1), 51–55.
$56$. Chiang, L. C., Ma, W. F., Huang, J. L., Tseng, L. F., & Hsueh, K. C. (2009) Effect of relaxation-breathing training on anxiety and asthma signs/symptoms of children with moderate-to-severe asthma: A randomized controlled trial. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 46(8), 1061–1070. Retrieved from ResearchGate.
$57$. Nogawa, M., Yamakoshi, T., Ikarashi, A., Tanaka, S., & Yamakoshi, K. (2007). Assessment of slow-breathing relaxation technique in acute stressful tasks using a multipurpose non-invasive beat-by-beat cardiovascular monitoring system. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc, 5323–5325.
$58$. Mourya, M., Mahajan, A. S., Singh, N. P., & Jain, A. K. (2009). Effect of slow- and fast-breathing exercises on autonomic functions in patients with essential hypertension. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(7), 711–717.
$59$. Kaushik, R. M., Kaushik, R., Mahajan, S. K., & Rajesh, V. (2006). Effects of mental relaxation and slow breathing in essential hypertension. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 14(2), 120–126.
$60$. Gaines, T., & Barry, L. M. (2008). The effect of a self-monitored relaxation breathing exercise on male adolescent aggressive behavior. Adolescence, 43(170), 291–302.
$61$. Kaushik, R., Kaushik, R. M., Mahajan, S, K., & Rajesh, V. (2005). Biofeedback assisted diaphragmatic breathing and systematic relaxation versus propranolol in long term prophylaxis of migraine. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 13(3), 165–174.
$62$. Biggs, Q. M., Kelly, K. S., & Toney J. D. (2003). The effects of deep diaphragmatic breathing and focused attention on dental anxiety in a private practice setting. Journal of Dental Hygiene, 77(2), 105–113.


The mathematics of dreams, or better, the dreaming of mathematics I know that the meaning of dreams is a controversial topic and I do not think that they have a specific meaning, although I am certain, by experience, that dreams are deeply connected with what happens to us in everyday life. That is, most dreams are personal and thus an objective study of dreams would seem a bit of a paradox to me. In any case, I might already have shown my ignorance in the cognitive sciences by giving my misinformed opinion, but I am writing here to ask you how it is possible to prove a relatively simple mathematical theorem in a dream, which happened to me this early morning shortly before waking up. Proving a mathematical theorem is extremely complex, on a cognitive base, how is it possible to prove it while sleeping? My idea was that I registered the theorem and I had it embedded somewhere in my memory and this night it just bubbled up, with no rational implication. What do you think?

Did you remember the mathematical proof after you woke up?

You did not.

We often dream that we achieve something without actually achieving it. For example, we often dream that we meet a specific person, but in out dream that person does not have any specific characteristics but rather a blurry face and only a general shape. We just attach the label of a certain name ("Bob") or characteristic ("beautiful") to that general shape and thus feel that we have dreamed of Bob or a beautiful stranger. This makes it possible for us to dream of persons that are both our mother and our daughter at the same time, by simply attaching multiple labels to the same indistinct shape.

Similarly, we see a blurry page with vague but indiscernible mathematical symbols on it and the label "mathematical proof", so we feel that we had the proof in our dreams, while in fact there was nothing but a blurry page with the feeling of "solution" attached to it.

How does this work?

We know what a mathematical proof feels like. We know what meeting Bob feels like. And in a dream we can attach these feelings to anything. For example, a female shape might somehow feel like Bob to us; or dreaming of a field of flowers might feel like the solution to a mathematical problem to us. The attachment of the lable to this image might mean something (e.g. you think that Bob's wife is ruling him, or mathematical solutions have the same beauty to you as flowers), but they certainly don't mean that whatever the label is attached to is what the label says.

Think of a dream of flying. You feel as if you fly, because you remember or extrapolate that feeling from similar feelings (falling, being carried as a child, riding a car, etc.), but you certainly don't fly, because of course you are lying in bed. You just attach the feeling to some imagery (that you remember from tv) and then the label that you "fly".
You did.

Your conscious mind is very limited and weak, compared to your unconscious mind. Many problems are so complex that you cannot solve them consciously. In the case of difficult decisions, it usually helps to "sleep over them". Einstein famously found the solution to a theoretical problem while he slept.

When you sleep, what you do is you let the problem be, consciously. You stop considering it. And by doing that, you allow your unconscious to work it out (if it can). You don't have to sleep to do that. Often it is enought to stop thinking about the problem once you have accumulated all the fact, and allow your mind to wander. Mediation helps, daydreaming helps, whatever you can do to let the problem go and not focus on something else will allow your unconscious to solve the problem for you.

In the case of decisions, this is called intuition. You just know, but you cannot explain.


How do people develop abstract thought processes? By abstract thinking, I am referring to not only notions of self and identity, but also aspects that can not be directly observed and 'thinking outside of the box'.  Essentially, from my own experience as a teacher, where a student gradually develops the ability to go beyond 'concrete' thinking (based on what they can sense), to be able to incorporate abstract ideas and knowledge (based on what can not be sensed).

An example of this is learning chemistry, it has been my experience in the classroom that junior science students don't always get the notion of atomic structure because they can not see or adequately visualise the details necessary; however, the can understand what happens in chemical reaction as it is clear to see.

What cognitive processes occur that allow a person to be able to think and problem solve abstractly?

A 2013 book tackles this subject : Surfaces and Essences, written by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander. They mostly cite anecdotal evidence (not only, Emmanuel Sander worked on this subject for years), but the theory is very convincing, and quite beautiful. The book received praise from some big names (including Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Loftus).

So, their theory in a nutshell : we naturally reason by analogy. Analogy is defined here as "recognizing something perceived as identical to something stored in memory" - a very large definition, that encompasses categorization. We are bad at purely abstract thinking (as the famous Wason (1966) task shows, or most tasks used in reasoning psychology), but we are very good at making abstract links between concrete things, without noticing it.

The book is filled by loads of examples, a striking one is comptuer science vocabulary. Even though computers brought loads of new "things", few new names have been invented. For example : desktop, file, directory, keyboard, window, program, application... all those words existed before computers, they have been used by analogy. When one makes such an analogy between a real, concrete desktop and a computer one, one extends the meaning of the word "desktop" - before, desktop refered to the piece of furniture ; after the analogy, desktop acquires a new, more abstract sense that encompasses the 2 concrete (furniture and computer) : a desktop is a working space... where you can store files, etc.

So, for your question : it seems that we extract abstract structures as we encode concrete examples - we can't (or at least it's much harder) directly understand the abstract knowledge. Providing good analogies is probably a very good way to teach something - if there are no such analogies, the domain remains very hard to grasp (statistics, probabilites and quantum physics are probably good examples of that).


In psychiatry, what does double-bookkeeping mean? TL;DR What does double bookkeeping mean? +1 for sharing stories about your Tappy
Tappy (Talbott) has always been a tad odd, but who'd blame him, right? The guy took a whole bunch of tropane delieriants, then locked everyone out of his apartment, flipping out for reasons unknown, then in all the chaos, seriously cut an artery on the side of his head.
Now, Tappy tells me that one term he picked up from his $350/hr psychiatrist is the concept of "doublebookkeeping" ... My impression is that it has to do with
From wiki:

Double Bookkeeping. The tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive reality and the delusions as both being real, while remaining unbothered by the discrepancy or inconsistencies between the two.

Isn't this description the same as the concept of reality testing? You may have weird things go on all around you, but it's not so much as "aliens are inserting thoughts into my mind as it is just merely a more open-minded approach to one's phenomenology: "It would appear as though..." "aliens are doing this to me
So, within the context of psychistry, mental-health, or psychology, how might one interpret the term doublebookkeeping?

Does it relate, if even only thematically, to the actual accounting concept of of double-entry bookkeeping?

My alternative interpretation is that it means "take the raw crazy inside your head" ("insanity"), run it through a cultural appropriateness filter, process, shake, dress it up for mainstream consumption, and then release: hello outsanity.

Or, do you reckon Tappy lied to me just to sound cool?

Within Psychiatry and psychology, Double Bookkeeping, also known as Double Entry Bookkeeping is not quite the same as double entry bookkeeping within accountancy.  Within Psychiatry and Psychology, it refers to the tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive both the reality and the delusions as being real. There are discrepancies or inconsistencies between the two within psychiatry which the affected person may not be bothered about, whereas within accountancy, the two entries made in different parts of accounts records are there to reconcile the records and ensure there are no discrepancies or inconsistencies.

Example Accountancy Double Bookkeeping

The main accounts ledger may have a record of a transaction paying $100.00 towards a dept to Debt and Renters Ltd.

Meanwhile another entry will be made in the debts record for Debt and Renters Ltd. stating that on the same date in the main ledger, \$100.00 has been taken off the debt, with the running balance remaining being $100.00 less than previous.

All records reconcile, showing no discrepancies or inconsistencies.

In psychiatry and psychology

Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist, Eugen Bleuler in Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (his 1911 seminal study, translated from German into English in 1950 by Joseph Zinkin) said on pages 56:

  It is especially important to know that these patients carry on a kind of “double-entry bookkeeping” in many of their relationships. They know the real state of affairs as well as the falsified one and will answer according to the circumstances with one kind or the other type of orientation—or both together. This last is especially frequent in mis(-)recognizing people: the physician “is now here as Dr. N.,” at other times he becomes the former lover.

With this, "Dr. N." is both a former lover and their physician whilst in reality, Dr. N. was never their lover.  Without the ability to carry out reality checking efficiently, they can refer to either or both as being true.

In accounts ledgers terms there are two entries in the person's main record within the mind recording the facts concerning Dr. N. without a strong second record to refer to regarding the person's past lovers.

Jeneen Interlandi, wrote in The New York Times Magazine (2012)

  While we waited for the doctor to evaluate him, my father did what mental health professionals refer to as double-bookkeeping. He remembered most of what transpired earlier in the day but still believed he was in the hospital to have his pacemaker checked.

References

Bleuler, E. (1950). Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias. Oxford, England: International Universities Press.

Interlandi, J. (2012). When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind - New York Times MagazineAccessible from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/when-my-crazy-father-actually-lost-his-mind.html

See also

Bortolotti, L., & Broome, M. R. (2012). Affective dimensions of the phenomenon of double bookkeeping in delusions. Emotion Review, 4(2), 187-191.
DOI: 10.1177/1754073911430115

and

Carruthers, B. G., & Espeland, W. N. (1991). Accounting for rationality: Double-entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of economic rationality. American journal of sociology, 97(1), 31-69.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230304253_12


Two possibilites to increase the effect of binaural beats I collected references, supporting the hypothesis that binaural beats have an influence in our brain (see here).

I currently see two possibilities to possibly increase the (measurable) effect of binaural beats:

What-ever brain wave doesn't have a fixed frequency but a range. Sweeping across the frequency band could be an improvement.
Sweeping the volume from left to right.

Is this already researched?

EDIT 2: Sometimes (white, pink, brown) noise is mentioned to increase the effect. There might be a optimal signal-to-noise ratio...

EDIT: The frequency of the sweep shall be low. My focus lies on hitting your personal resonance frequency to increase the effect of binaural beats. As written in the linked post: This maximum declines as the
carrier moves away from 440 Hz.

Both of your proposed methods to increase the measureable affect of binaural beats on the brain would introduce a monaural beat. For example, sweeping the volume from left to right means the volume in at least one ear is changing over time. You would hear a beating if you listened to just this ear. Similarly, to sweep the frequency range, you would need to change the frequency in at least one ear. If you listened to just this ear, you would hear a "beat" (or more precisely frequency modulation).

I am not aware of any research on how sounds that have both monaural and binaural beats affect the brain. My guess is that people who are interested in using binaural beats to influence the brain would stay away from stimuli that have monaural beats since you can hear the monaural beat with a single ear. From my understanding of the literature on using binaural beats to influence the brain, there is something special about binaural beats since the beat is created by the brain (which is sort of true and sort of wrong).


Exact Medical situation name for Guided Meditation/Visualization to "Re-live a moment" There are lots of videos & audios for Guided Visualization for particular things like forest, beach, sky etc.. But what should I exactly search to get result for "ReLive past Moment". Is there dedicated word in psychology?
Thank you.

Before I give the answer to your question, I must point out that pursuits into recalling past events through hypnosis etc. can lead to mixed results.  You can be lucky and gain true insight into a past event previously forgotten, but it cannot generally be relied upon in legal and forensic terms due to the risk of false memories being inadvertently implanted.  See my previous answer to a similar question and also this answer.

The term you are looking for is either

guided regression hypnosis,
memory recall therapy or
memory recall training

All involve trying to get you to recall one or more specific events in such detail that you can remember them clearly.  The problem is that these methods have been found through research to cause False Memory Syndrome.  Although as with many pieces of research, there are opponents to the idea.


Can prolonged neural adaptation lead to HPPD? The human brain adapts to a constant stimulus of our neural system. For instance, if we ride a train and look out of the window for a long time and the train stops, we have the feeling of slowly moving backwards.

There are other, more extreme stimulus like a neave strobe as shown in this picture:

This particular animated image produces a rapid neural adaption causing us to see things moving for about 10 seconds. I have also observed that binaural beats cause minor ear ringing symptoms if listened to for a longer period of time.

The burning question here is: Can prolonged stimulus to such images or sounds cause Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder?

No.  This disorder requires the sufferer to have used hallucinogenic substances in the past:

  Previous use of hallucinogens by the person is necessary, but not sufficient, for diagnosis of HPPD. For an individual to be diagnosed with HPPD, the symptoms cannot be due to another medical condition.

from Wikipedia following the DSM-IV criteria reproduced here.

  A. The reexperiencing, following cessation of use of a hallucinogen, of one or more of the perceptual symptoms that were experienced while intoxicated with the hallucinogen (e.g., geometric hallucinations, false perceptions of movement in the peripheral visual fields, flashes of color, intensified colors, trails of images of moving objects, positive afterimages, halos around objects, macropsia, and micropsia).


Spontaneity as object of investigation in the cognitive sciences What are known studies, experiments, thoughts and literature on spontaneity? I am looking for anything relating to questions like "What does it mean for someone to be spontaneous?" or "What factors are involved in being spontaneous?" or anything else.

EDIT: aspects of creativity, improvisation in the arts are not meant, but spontaneity in the way of life or in daily behavior. Excuse being unprecise.

I appreciate any hints.

These should get you started, relating to spontaneous behaviour of humans in society, in contrast to normality behaviour:

Spontaneous Alternation Behavior by W.N. Dember, C.L. Richman
How does complex behavior spontaneously emerge in the brain? - Lisa Zyga
Brain modularity controls the critical behavior of spontaneous activity - R. Russo, H. J. Herrmann  & L. de Arcangelis
The Wisdom of Spontaneity (Part 1) - Leon F Seltzer Ph.D
Identification of spontaneous and deliberate behavior - Vernon L. Allen, Michael L. Atkinson
Some factors influencing spontaneous alternation in human subjects - Wingfield, R. C.


How do cognitive scientists measure creativity? Einstein said once something like creativity is more important than intelligence. Intelligence as it is measured is really one's speed and efficiency at processing information. How one processes the information is the 'province' of creativity.

Are there any effective, psychologically-approved tests that measure creativity and ones capacity for interesting or clever creative associations between sets of ideas?

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is a good place to start.  It scores for fluency (number of responses) as well as originality (statistical rarity of responses) and elaboration (level of detail) on a variety of different tasks. The validity of the TTCT has been examined with several long-term studies, so there is a fair amount of data on its measurements as well as the form of the test itself.

Torrance, E. P. (1981b). Empirical validation of criterion-referenced indicators of creative ability through a longitudinal study. Creative Child and Adult Quarterly, 6, 136-140.


Common components of other cognitive architectures and the Semantic Pointer Architecture In the papers I've read about it, the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) embodied in Spaun is said to be more biologically plausible than many other proposed architectures such as the Neural Blackboard Architecture, ACT-R and ICS. However, I was wondering if they had any shared attributes? If this is too broad of a question, which one can SPA considered most similar to?

I am currently reading "How to Build a Brain" by Chris Eliasmith to answer these questions and will post my own answer shortly, but I was hoping for other perspectives.

In "How to Build a Brain", Chris Eliasmith draws parrallels between Spaun and various architectures. All of my quotes in my answer are from that book.

The Dynamic Field Theory of Cognition is similarly pre-occupied with outside stimulation as being essential to understanding cognitive function, consequently "there is little in the SPA that could not be reformulated using terms more familiar to dynamic systems theorists"

Leabra shares an emphasis on implementation on a realistic biological substrate. In particular, the cortex->basal ganglia->thalamus loop for action control/decision, as well as the effects of dopamine on Spaun, were heavily influenced by Leabra.

ACT-R also shares the cortex->basal ganglia->thalamus loop, but more importantly puts a similar emphasis on timing. That is, there is a specific time for switching between tasks and reacting to stimuli that must be followed.

ICS shares the similar mathematical binding operation as SPA, thus many of the results of the ICS are informative for SPA and "how such representations can be related to a wide variety of linguistic processing".

While these similarities give a good reference frame of where Spaun stands in the realm of neural architectures, it is much more interesting (and important!) to note where it deviates. A topic which is obviously covered in great detail in "How to Build a Brain".


Is acceptance of the science of global warming by politicians primarily a result of the bandwagon effect? While denial of global warming is without a doubt from bandwagon appeal furthered by campaign donations, I get the impression that the acceptance of global warming by politicians is also primarily a result of the bandwagon effect. The bandwagon fallacy being

  [An argumentum ad populum] that concludes that a proposition is true
  because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is
  so."

The main reason I think so is because it is not a major issue for most of them. I get the impression that if they knew how serious it is, then it would be a major issue for them, and they would have made more efforts to combat it.

First off, political agendas in Western democratic countries are, of course, shaped by the masses.

Secondly, global warming is becoming a science in its own right. Climatology is important and is based on models based on historical data to predict the future, taking into account current greenhouse gas concentrations, melting of the polar caps, sea levels, population growth and what not. In other words, it is far too complicated a subject to be completely understood by the regular ground folks.

Thus, indeed, [intelligent, capable] politicians rely on scientists to do the thinking for them. In turn, politician's agendas are shaped by the populace so their focus is, and should be guided by the masses.

This should, however, not be a reason to adhere to hypotheses and theories to be correct or incorrect based on the people's opinion. And hence I do not agree that politician's opinions in general are shaped according to the bandwagon appeal.


Reading words without pronunciation I have been trying to practice speed reading, and found the removal of subvocalization technique, but it seems almost impossible to understand words without pronouncing them in my head.

I think our brain is wired in a way that words are first converted in speech, and then we really understand them. Is it possible to rewire the brain to skip the speech process and start understanding words without experiencing a voice in head?

So far, I have come across the following exercises:

Keep your speech centre busy while reading (e.g., keep repeating "1,2,3,4" or "a,e,i,o,u" in head while trying to understand what words mean).
Think by visualizing words in your head without sound.
Visualize the name of the object or action seen, without pronouncing it.

So far, I have made no progress, but this might be more difficult than learning a new language. Maybe I need to be patient and keep practicing these, but are there other better methods, exercises?

Your initial intuition, that eliminating subvocalization makes understanding more difficult, seems to be consistent with empirical evidence. Slowiaczek and Clifton (1980) investigated the effect of eliminating subvocalization on reading comprehension, and concluded the following.

  In these experiments, reading for meaning was severely impaired when subvocalization was suppressed. Listening comprehension was also reduced by suppressing subvocalization, but the effect was much smaller. We conclude that there was a general interference effect from the secondary task, but that the significantly greater interference effect for reading was due to the specific function of subvocalization in reading.

In general, all of the methods listed for suppressing subvocalization could also be understood as forms of articulatory suppression. Under the influential Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory, the phonological loop subsystem is believed to facilitate long-term learning in part via articulatory rehearsal, and articulatory suppression corresponds to tasks which interfere with this function.

References

Slowiaczek, M. L., & Clifton, C. (1980). Subvocalization and reading for meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(5), 573-582.


What does it mean to "control for differences in factors" when looking at gun ownership and homicide rates? What does it mean "with control for differences in factors" in the sentence :

"Several studies used cross-sectional analyses to detect a positive relationship between the prevalence of gun ownership at the neighbourhood, county, regional or state level and homicide rates, with control for differences in factors associated with homicide (e.g., urbanization, race/ethnicity, unemployment, poverty, crime, and alcohol use)."

What did they do to those factors when they "control" them ?

The full report can be found here, if that helps for context: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409

Does that mean that they took in consideration all those factors (urbanization, race/ethnicity, poverty, etc.)  in the method to minimize the impact those factors have in the results of the factor that matters the most to homicide rates in  this study, in this case gun ownership? If so, how can it be done? An illustrative example is enough.

There are various ways of controlling for other other factors.

Probably the most common is to include these control variable as additional variables in whatever statistical model you are running.

For example, you could run a multiple regression predicting homicide rate from gun ownership on a set of neighbourhoods.

You could then run another regression model that included all the control variables.

In both models you would get a coefficient for the effect of gun ownership on homicide rate. However, in the one with control variables, it would be statistically adjusted for the effect of these other variables.

There are lots of debates about how best to control for other factors and which factors to include. But that's the general idea.


What's this cognitive bias that relates to misremembering exact stimuli? Say a participant is shown a reference stimulus of white colour. Afterwards, they are shown a number of test stimuli that range from yellow to blue like this (yellow -> less_yellow -> whitish -> white -> less_whitish -> blueish -> blue) and they are asked to note which one is identical to the reference stimulus

In my experience, the participant is likely to underestimate, and pick the stimulus before the actual "white", but rather somewhere in the area of "whitish". This may be because they're shown stimuli that progressively go towards the target they are looking for, and they are worried they might miss it, and every new stimulus looks more and more like the reference stimulus.

Anyone knows of a psychological bias that relates to this?

Edit: After going through some lists of cognitive biases, contrast effect is similar to what I am referring to, but it does not relate to other facts such as fear of passing the threshold.

Edit2: Less-is-better effect seems to be related to this too.

As opposed to the contrast effect which relates to stimuli that are presented simultaneously or in immediate succession, the similar distinction bias constitutes a possible/partial explanation for the phenomenon that you conjecture: stimuli are experienced as more distinct when presented simultaneously than when they are presented separately.

Another bias that may play a role here is anchoring, which describes the tendency to take that piece of information which is presented first in some context as a reference.

Note that this applies to (perceptual) judgement, not so much to memory/misremembering (but I think that this is what your question is actually about).

I am sceptical regarding the observation of underestimation being more likely. It is possible that some worry to miss leads to a hasty decision, but isn't it equally possible that a more optimistic participant has an opposite tendency, missing the correct stimulus? This will depend on the design, too – it should make a difference whether the displayed series just starts with the yellow sample, shows the blue sample before starting with the yellow, shows the whole continuum before starting at either end, etc.

In general, the accuracy of perceptual judgement is the subject of signal detection theory which considers tendencies to falsely miss a present target stimulus, or to falsely rate an absent target stimulus as present. Signal detection theory explicitly includes response bias and reasons why responses may be either liberally or conservatively biased.


why we failed to convince our own mind by reasoning and rational arguments over mental illness like depression, anxiety, phobia? For example, one of my friend has fear of heights, even if there is a strong glass window and no reason for him to fall off. He is even aware and admits his fear is irrational.

Many may say it’s in subconscious mind or neurologically left brain, in that case, can you let me know experiments(better if I can do it myself) , research paper and scientific resources that explains this phenomenon in details.

Is there no way to communicate to this part of brain? Does it not follow rationality?

Does philosophical perspective helps? As some of spiritual/non-spiritual thinker may claim?

Edit:
Reference: https://acmelab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/our_unconscious_mind.pdf ”Research has recently brought to light just how profoundly our unconscious mind shapes our day-to-day interactions“

Some scientists will say that a fear of heights (and spiders, snakes, and the dark) are innate, i.e. that we are born with them because they confer an evolutionary advantage. In other words, a fear of heights tends to prevent falls, and a fear of snakes tends to prevent snake bites. We tend to have little control regarding when these fears arise.
However, the amount of fear/anxiety we feel for any given thing or situation can be modulated. For example, many therapists use a strategy called "exposure therapy," exposing the patient to the feared thing or situation repeatedly, in a safe manner, which typically results in a reduction in the intensity of the anxiety response. Another example: when people do regular physical exercise, many studies show that their mood rises and they react less strongly to negative events. They even feel less physical pain when injured (compared to sedentary adults). There are many other strategies one can use to modulate painful feelings, which can be found in the book of Sudism (sudism.org). EDIT (Dec 14 2019): Sudism is a philosophy, not a science, owing to the fact that it is not currently possible to precisely measure positive and negative affect (i.e. our feelings of pleasure and pain). Take care.
EDIT (Dec 14 2019) -- Here are some supporting references that illustrate that (A) exposure therapy is beneficial for reducing anxiety, that (B) physical exercise is beneficial for reducing physical pain, and that (C) certain fears are innate:

From this meta-analysis: Parsons, Thomas & Rizzo, Albert. (2008). Affective outcomes of virtual reality exposure therapy for anxiety and specific phobias: A meta-analysis. Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry. 39. 250-61. 10.1016/j.jbtep.2007.07.007.
"A good deal of research has shown that exposure therapy is effective for reducing negative affective symptoms (Rothbaum & Schwartz, 2002)."

From this review of literature on exposure therapy: Johanna S. Kaplan, PhD and David F. Tolin, PhD. (Sep 2011). Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders. Psychiatric Times.
"Over a quarter of the people in the US population will have an anxiety disorder sometime during their lifetime. It is well established that exposure-based behavior therapies are effective treatments for these disorders; unfortunately, only a small percentage of patients are treated with exposure therapy."

From this study: Einat Kodesh & Irit Weissman-Fogel. Exercise-induced hypoalgesia – interval versus continuous mode. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 2014, 39(7): 829-834, 10.1139/apnm-2013-0481.
"In conclusion, interval exercise (85% HRR) has analgesic effects on experimental pain perception. This, in addition to its cardiovascular, muscular, and metabolic advantages may promote its inclusion in pain management programs."

From this 2017 press release from the Max Planck Society on recent research comparing infants' reactions to various stimuli (from benign fish and flowers to non-benign snakes and spiders):
"We conclude that fear of snakes and spiders is of evolutionary origin. Similar to primates, mechanisms in our brains enable us to identify objects as 'spider’ or 'snake’ and to react to them very fast."


Is there a known reason why people feel a bit bad after other people do something for them? There's an Thai word: kreng jai (the feeling of not wanting to disturb/inconvenience another person, or feeling uneasy due to your own request of someone)

Likewise in Burmese the word "anade" which is "a strong sense of consideration for others' feelings and a desire not to cause them to feel psychological distress, unease, or burden" and in Japanese the similar word "enryo".

There seems to be a common cross-cultural feeling of distress at being a burden.

Is there a psychological explanation for why people feel bad instead of good, if someone were to help them with something?

What you seem to be talking about here are cultural influences affecting your judgement on what is right and wrong to say and do in certain situations.
Ecologies shape cultures, and cultures influence the development of personalities (Triandis & Suh, 2002).

The conceptualization of culture is by no means a simple matter. One possible way to think about culture is that “culture is to society what memory is to individuals” (Kluckhohn 1954). It includes what has worked in the experience of a society, so that it was worth transmitting to future generations.

Triandis & Suh (2002) went on to say that:

Funder (1997) defined personality as “an individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms— hidden or not—behind those patterns” (pp.1–2)

The kind of situation you talk about would not be seen as often in Western countries, but it seems to be widespread in Eastern cultures.  To use the Thai culture of เกรงใจ (Kreng Jai) you linked to in your question, as you pointed out, it is insisted that you must not cause anyone distress or discomfort.  But, Kreng Jai can be vexing and cause distress in itself as the insistence can even be

at the expense of efficiency, honesty, or one’s own interests (Thailand Family Law Center, 2012).

If you look at Fitzroy (2014), there are good aspects to Kreng Jai in business and general society.

By demonstrating more courtesy amongst the team you show more compassion and empathy which can lead to better teamwork and better results.

However, there are many ways where if Kreng Jai was over used, it can cause all sorts of problems.  For example, being too Kreng Jai to ask your boss for help can result in an important task not being completed on time.  This can cause cause loss of revenue for the business, and embarrassment for both parties.
When feeling bad for "being inconsiderate towards others feelings on the matter", it can cause a lot of psychological discomfort, and this is what you are describing here.
References
Fitzroy, P. (2014). เกรงใจ (Kreng Jai) – overused or misunderstood? Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141015014001-50338470-%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%87%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%88-kreng-jai-overused-or-misunderstood
Funder D. (1997). The Personality Puzzle. New York, NY: Norton
Kluckhohn, C. (1954). Culture and behavior. In Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G Lindzey, 2:921–76. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley
Thailand Family Law Center. (2012). Demystifying Kreng Jai. Retrieved from: http://www.thailand-family-law-center.com/demystifying-kreng-jai/
Triandis, H. C., & Suh, E. M. (2002). Cultural influences on personality. Annual review of psychology, 53(1), 133-160. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135200


Hebbian Learning Rule, Local or Global? I just learned about the Hebbian Learning Rule. It essentially says "Neurons that fire together, wire together". I'm wondering if the learning rule is affected by the spatial distance of the two neurons. When two neurons are far from each other, why is the connection formed?

It's a local rule.  All that it means is that the connection between two neurons gets stronger if you use that specific connection more.  The specific connection (the synapse) must be used though; it doesn't apply to two random neurons that aren't connected that happen to fire at the same time.

Hebbian learning is generic term for outcome; there are actually two separate mechanisms I know about (probably many more, too).  First, there's "silent synapses" which have only NMDA receptors, but not AMPA receptors.  NMDA receptors have Mg+ molecules blocking their channels and require AMPA activation to expel the NMDA.  So if you have a synapse with no AMPA, it won't be an effective synapse.  However, if you have another synapse activing the tissue, expelling the magnesium, then the silent synapse has a short window to activate the synapse during the Mg expulsion.  As it does this, it activates a series of protein signaling and transcription signaling that tells the cell to bring more AMPA up (a response to all the Ca signaling that these signals rely on).  This is also a mechanism for conditioning (the two different synapses representing the pathway of the conditioned and the unconditioned response.  The conditioned response would be the pathway with the silent synapse).

Another example is astrocytic regulation of glutamate levels.  ATP is what your whole body uses for energy, but there are ATP detectors in astroctyes, which couple in the tripartite synapse as a synaptic regulator.  As the synapse is more active, ATP is released, which activates the astrocyte and causes it to release extra glutamate, bringing the postsynaptic neuron closer to firing.

All of these require only that the neurons make contact at a synapse, distance between somas is not a factor. Of course, the distance between the axon and the dendritic spine have to be close enough to form a synapse.


Does caffeine improve performance for habituated consumers? I've seen a fair few studies over the while that suggest caffeine increases arousal in the short term and that for some tasks, this will also increase performance (there's a few citations here).

However, as with most drugs, habituation leads to withdrawal effects and adjustment, so that in some senses once a person gets used to caffeine, having a regular dose of caffeine may just bring a person to something like a normal level of functioning.

Thus, in a general sense,
for someone used to consuming a certain level of caffeine, does having that regular quantity increase arousal or performance over and above the level that would be obtained at that moment had the person never got in the habit of consuming caffeine in the first place?

Nehligh's 2010 review

Nehlig (2010) wrote a systematic review article called "Is caffeine a cognitive enhancer?" (link to publisher, no PDF).
On page S89 to S90 Nehlig reviews the evidence of caffeine as a cognitive enhancer within the context of a history of caffeine consumption:

  In
  caffeine non-deprived young (20–25 years) and older subjects (50–65
  years), 250 mg caffeine slightly offset the decline in performance
  found in the placebo group on a digit span memory test. However,
  caffeine did not improve performance in the immediate word recall
  task in either age group [11]. Caffeine (12.5–100 mg) given after
  overnight abstinence improved cognitive performance in a relatively
  difficult and stressful task involving rapid visual information
  processing and using a high load of working memory in 11 males and 12
  females, aged 18–56 years. The effect was more marked in individuals
  with a high habitual caffeine intake [78]. In 68 volunteers
  consuming a regular daily amount of caffeine, 2 mg/kg caffeine
  improved the speed of encoding new information in a categorical search
  task [79]. Likewise, in a study comparing 24 non-consumers (20
  mg/day) to 24 consumers of caffeine (217 mg/day), there was no
  baseline difference between group performances. Caffeine improved
  numeric working memory reaction time and sentence verification
  accuracy; alertness was also increased, but in general caffeine tended
  to improve more the performance in non consumers [80].

  In adult
  subjects, a higher habitual caffeine intake with no additional
  caffeine administration on the day of testing was positively related
  to better performance on incidental verbal learning and visuospatial
  learning tasks [15]. There was also an association between estimated
  caffeine intake and performance in a choice reaction time task, and in
  delayed recall of a verbal word learning task [81]. In the former
  study, older sub- jects appeared to benefit more from higher caffeine
  intake [15], while this was not the case in the latter study [81].
  Also, in real life activities, regular caffeine consumption might
  benefit cognitive functioning in a non-working population [82].

Smith's 2002 review

Another good review is provided by Smith (2002, PDF).
The main claim relevant to the present question argues that coffee remains beneficial despite habituation:

  It has been claimed that the positive eﬀects of caﬀeine really reﬂect
  removal of negative eﬀects of caﬀeine withdrawal. This view cannot
  account for eﬀects observed in non-consumers or nondeprived
  individuals. In addition, there is little evidence of caﬀeine
  withdrawal impairing tasks which show improvements following ingestion
  of caﬀeine.

The article is worth reading if you want to read about the relevant empirical evidence and some of the limitations of existing research.

References:

[11] Rees K, Allen D, Lader M (1999) The influences of age and
caffeine on psychomotor and cognitive function. Psychophar-
macology (Berl) 145, 181-188.
[78] Smit HJ, Rogers PJ (2000) Effects of low doses of caffeine
on cognitive performance, mood and thirst in low and higher
caffeine consumers. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 152, 167-
173.
[80] Haskell CF, Kennedy DO, Wesnes KA, Scholey AB (2005)
Cognitive and mood improvements of caffeine in habitual con-
sumers and habitual non-consumers of caffeine. Psychophar-
macology (Berl) 179, 813-825.
[81] Hameleers PA, Van Boxtel MP, Hogervorst E, Riedel WJ,
Houx PJ, Buntinx F, Jolles J (2000) Habitual caffeine con-
sumption and its relation to memory, attention, planning
capacity and psychomotor performance across multiple age
groups. Hum Psychopharmacol 15, 573-581.
[82] Smith AP (2009) Caffeine, cognitive failures and health in a
non-working community sample. Hum Psychopharmacol 24,
29-34.
Smith, A. (2002). Effects of caffeine on human behavior. Food and chemical toxicology, 40, 1243-1255. PDF


Attributing change in DV to IV manipulation: between-groups (control group) vs mixed-model (pre&post measure) One often sees researchers attributing a change in the dependent variable to their experimental manipulation, semingly without considering whether this change in DV occurs between or within groups.

For instance, in the classical Bargh et al. (1996) paper on behavioural priming, subjects in an experimental group were shown word primes recalling stereotypes of old age (e.g. "forgetful"), while subjects in a controlg group were shown neutral words. Everyone's walking speed as they left the experiment was measured, and because the first group's was slower, it was concluded that priming people with words relating to a certain concept (in this case: old age) makes them unconsciously take on characteristics of that concept (in this case: walking more slowly).

The question that comes to my mind is, however: how do we know that the mean difference in walking speed is not just due to pre-existing (baseline) differences between the groups? How can we be sure it is due to the IV manipulation (different word primes)?

To me, believable evidence for this claim would be if they had measured everyone's speed pre&post-experiment, and then found an interaction showing that, while controls' speed stayed the same pre-to-post, that of the old-age-primed group had decreased. Without such an interaction (involving the use of a mixed between-within model), is the authors' between-groups-only inference statistically correct?

There's a short straightforward answer, and a more nuanced answer.

The short answer is that people were randomly assigned to the two groups. Any baseline differences between people will be equally likely to affect both groups. Will there still be differences? Absolutely. This is why researchers use statistical inference to rule out the possibility that baseline differences are responsible for the observed difference.

The more nuanced answer is that we can't be certain that the observed differences aren't due to these random baseline differences. In any experiment, there will always be noise that causes differences in the groups. When researchers use statistical inference, they aren't able to say with certainty that the effect was due to the manipulation. They are merely assessing the probability that random noise could account for the data. If the probability that random noise can explain the data is very low, then researchers claim that the manipulation had an effect. However, this is a probabilistic inference and sometimes the researchers will be wrong and the difference really is due to noise. Within-subject designs help remove some of this noise, but not all of it, because people change over time, even over the short timescale of a social priming experiment.


Why I value celebrities opinion more than a person I have actually met? I have been working on project with a person who is climate change activist, and after all those months I had a feeling he is on to something, but I was not convinced.

Now comes Leonardo DiCaprio with his National Geographic documentary and I am completely sold and have started to slowly participate in the climate change movement.

Why do I value celebrities opinion, a person I have never met, more than a person I have spent months together in meetings, pubs and even birthdays?

My take on this is because there are no other options. We have no previous emotional involvement, attachment or knowledge of them on a personal level.

We trust strangers on a daily basis. We get on a bus, which is driven by  a stranger. We go out to eat food and that food is cooked by strangers. We also work for strangers (until we get to know them, better). Celebrities are paid, celebrities are smart. They build up reputation and we trust statistics more than just one example from our personal lives. Thousands of people know Leo. Millions. There are probably no public statistics on our friends or co-workers, people we work with or spend time with. We just go by our opinion.

When you meet someone and work with them, what does that relationship entail? Emotional involvement. You get to know them and form opinions. Things you like about them and things you don't like. You're listening to more than just a few conversations about a given topic.

If you're listening to a speech from a celebrity you know of and their opinion is to your liking, that's all you're hearing. You don't really know anything else about them to have any other options but to trust them.

  This is also very similar to why some people trust their therapist
  over their friend, even if what both of them say are similar. Sometimes, they aren't similar. We tend to trust what we're more objective towards. Who you're surrounded by makes a huge difference. They can be abusive, vulgar, rude. You're seeing more than just one side to them. You're only seeing one side of your therapist. The helpful, knowledgeable side.

If we spend enough time to form an emotional bond with a therapist or let's say someone we've never met, we could very well go back to square one. Not trusting them as much as another celebrity you're objective towards.

When we're listening to the opinion of someone we know, other emotional factors are involved. Our dislikes (and other opinions of them) influence our trust in them and their opinions or knowledge of a given topic.

It's about things being objective. What we don't know can't  hurt us. In your case, you don't know much about Leo's personal life. You only know the opinions he shares. There's nothing else to go by and usually documentaries give you the best parts specified information. Nothing that sounds inaccurate, immoral, wrong or questionable.

Helpful Sources

Why We Trust Strangers More Than Our Friends
We Trust Strangers, Even When It Doesn’t Make Sense to Do So
Why do some people prefer to trust what strangers say rather than those they know?


Condensed NEO-PI test I'm looking for a condensed form of the NEO-PI test. Current short forms come in at 40-50 questions, I'm wondering if it's possible to achieve a very basic degree of accuracy with 20 items.

There is a very short 10 item questionaire. The BFI-10 (see Rammstedt & John, 2007). I have never used it on my own, but i just read through it quickly. Although it seems fairly acceptable. So, if you want to use it, you should definitely read the article carefully.

Regarding your question: I would answer a careful 'yes'. In some cases it is possible to achieve a very basic degree of accuracy with just using a few items. However, this highly depends on the way the test is constructed and the kind of construct you want to investigate. The broader your construct, the more items you will need in order to account for every facet appropriately (e.g. a very broad personality aspect like 'extraversion' vs. a specific facet like 'assertiveness'). Furthermore, the longer your test, the better the reliability will tend to be (see Spearman-Brown Formula).

To sum up: It depends on the situation whether or not a short questionnaire can be basically accurate. You should always check for it´s reliability and validity.

Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of research in Personality, 41(1), 203-212.


Is it easier for people to remember longer words than words mixed with symbols? I'm doing a study on why it is difficult to remember passwords. I would imagine that it would be easier for people to remember a password like "strawberryhouse" than "$tr@wb3rr!", even though the former has more characters.

Is there any research that backs up that idea?

One basic explanation would be a chunking one -- that it's easier to combine several words into a single memory unit than letters and numbers. In 2000, Alan Baddeley proposed the episodic buffer as an important component of the working memory (WM) system. According to Baddeley, the episodic buffer imbues WM with the ability to join information together, even when that information is of different modalities (e.g., sight and sound). Even though "$tr@wb3rr!" may be as memorable as the word "strawberry," with enough practice "strawberryhouse" can be just as facile (and a stronger password to boot).

Another concern is that while you'll likely always remember "strawberryhouse," only remembering the gist of the alphanumeric password ("I remember it sounds like 'strawberry'") can lead to verbatim errors of recall ("Was it '$tr@wb3rr!,' '$tr@wb3rri,' or "$tr@wb3rry?'"). I can find some empirical support on this track if it's useful, too.

  Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: a new component of working
  memory? Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 417-423.


Are there validated measures to perception of decision making process alignment? I want to test an idea about how the perception of decision making process alignment with another party influences the tendency to accept information from that party. For example, if my wife and I both consider the cost, nutrition, and the presence of a toy when considering breakfast cereals, I'm more likely to take her cereal recommendation when I go to the grocery store. Likewise, if somebody else only considers taste, I'm less likely to heed his advice.

Looking in the literature, I can't seem to find any measures of decision making process alignment between two people. Does anybody know of a related construct that has been validated?

The following article addresses the issue of decision-making process alignment:

Clemen RT (2008) Improving and measuring the effectiveness of decision analysis: Linking decision analysis and behavioral decision research. In T Kugler, JC Smith, T Connolly, Y-J. Son (eds.) Decision Modeling and Behavior in Complex and Uncertain Environments, Springer, New York: 3-31

Additionally, the following article presents another specific measure which was used to validate the group alignment among the participants by following a particular decision-making process:
Supporting Multicriteria Group Decisions with MACBETH Tools: Selection of Sustainable Brownfield Redevelopment Actions. Group Decision and Negotiation


Psychology behind repeated viewing of certain pictures and songs Often it happens that we like to frequently listen to a particular tune or song or view some pictures or images repeatedly time after time. What are the reasons and psychology behind this?

That's a difficult to say I assume many kind of past memories* linked with emotions subconsciously play certainly a critical role nevertheless I found an interesting link (http://www.gizmag.com/predicting-hit-songs/20939/) which is about a formula on how to find out the next hit song.

*by memories I mean more kind of episodic memories rather than semantic although it could be semantic if someone would be expressed of a song by its lyrics.


Has the labelling and overshadowing effect from the Hannah Experiment been replicated? "The Hannah Experiment" (Darley & Gross 1983) is cited as an example of labels biasing evaluation. This is described in "Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter" which I've paraphrased below:

Princeton University students decided whether a young fourth-grader named Hannah was performing above, below, or precisely at the level expected of an average student in the fourth grade.

During the first phase of the experiment, the students watched one of two brief videos:

Lucky Hannah is shown to come from a college-educated family and lives in a wealthy neighbourhood.
Unlucky Hannah is shown to come from a family with a high-school education and a poor neighbourhood.

At this point, some of the students watched a second video, in which Hannah was asked to answer a series of twenty-five questions from an achievement test. The questions were designed to assess her mathematical, reading, science, and social science skills. Instead of presenting a clear image of her ability, the video was ambiguous: sometimes she was engaged, answering difficult questions correctly, and sometimes she seemed distracted and struggled with relatively easy questions.

Hannah’s ability was difficult to discern from the video, but some of the students began watching with the labels “wealthy” and “college educated” in mind, whereas the others began watching with the labels “working class” and “high school educated” in mind. These labels functioned as tiebreakers when Hannah’s performance was neither flawless nor disastrous. The students who expected Hannah to succeed saw exactly that pattern of achievement in her responses (ignoring her missteps and distractibility), whereas those who expected less from Hannah saw exactly what the negative labels implied (ignoring her intermittent engagement and mastery of the difficult questions). In the end, the Lucky Hannah was judged to have performed above her fourth-grade level, whereas her Unlucky counterpart seemed to perform below fourth-grade level. The Hannah study showed that people are suggestible, willing to view the world with the guidance of labels when faced with an otherwise unbreakable tie.

Does this bias have a name? Has it been replicated/generalized?
References
Darley, J. M., & Gross, P. H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.20

This is basically describing stereotyping. (Several biases overlap to form these, depending which theory you prefer the most.)
The most cited paper that cites Darley & Gross seem to be a 1995 review titled "Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes". It cites D & G for implicit stereotyping (research):

Although research on stereotypes has often used direct or explicit
measures (see Judd & Park, 1993), there are also substantial
research programs on stereotypes that use indirect measures—
ones in which a stigmatizing feature with which a stereotype
is associated (e.g., weight, race, or gender) is peripheral
to the respondent's judgment task (e.g., Darley & Gross, 1983)
or in which the purpose of investigation is otherwise disguised
(e.g., Hamilton & GifFord, 1976). Crosby, Bromley, and Saxe
(1980) were able to locate enough research using indirect measures
of prejudicial stereotypes to conclude that "anti-Black
sentiments are much more prevalent among White Americans
than the survey data [i.e., direct or explicit measures of stereotypes]
lead one to expect." Although the use of indirect measures
in these studies often reflects the researchers' intent to
avoid intrusion of unwanted demand or impression-management
artifacts (which would plausibly suppress accurate expressions
of conscious stereotypes), some of the research that is
summarized just below was designed specifically to investigate
unconscious operation of stereotypes. These studies suggest that
stereotypes are often expressed implicitly in the behavior of persons
who explicitly disavow the stereotype. The next two sections
focus attention on race and gender stereotypes because
these, having been much more heavily investigated than other
stereotypes, have provided the most persuasive evidence for implicit
stereotyping.

Wikipedia also has a more specific article on implicit stereotype, although it seems someone was unhappy with it... The wiki article claims:

Implicit stereotype was first defined by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in 1995

which is probably referring to the above 1995 review, but I'm not sure how correct is the claim that Banaji & Greenwald were the first to define the notion. (They clearly were not the first to study it.)
Greenwald has actually co-authored a more recent (2019) review titled just "Implicit Social Cognition", which (I guess) could  be useful to check for research progress on implicit stereotyping. Most of the later research seems to have involved (the veritable explosion of) IAT studies. Greenwald (2019) summarizes several meta-analyses and does some moderator analysis.
For a broader theoretical perspective (and to clarify what Greenwald and
Banaji actually introduced--it's actually the term "implicit cognition", with a specific def), Hahn  & Gawronski (2015) write contrasting Greenwald's conception with De Houwer et al.'s:

Drawing on the notion of implicit memory, Greenwald and
Banaji (1995) defined implicit cognition as “introspectively
unidentified (or inaccurately identified) trace of past experience
that mediates responses” (p. 5). Although this definition was
meant to imply unawareness of the sources of mental contents,
it has often been interpreted to imply unawareness of the
mental contents themselves (e.g., unawareness of the source of
an attitude vs. unawareness of the attitude itself). However, the
latter interpretation conflicts with a considerable body of
evidence, suggesting that the psychological constructs captured
by nonreactive, computerized measures are consciously accessible
and thus not unconscious (e.g., Hahn et al., 2014).
More recently, De Houwer et al. (2009) proposed an alternative
conceptualization to overcome the common confusion
regarding the meaning of the term implicit. [...]
Measurement procedures [...] may be
described as direct if their measurement outcomes are based on
participants’ self-assessment of the to-be-measured attribute
(e.g., when participants’ racial attitudes are inferred from their
self-reported liking of Black people). Conversely, measurement procedures may be described as indirect if their outcomes are
not based on a self-assessment (e.g., when participants’ racial
attitudes are inferred from their reaction times to positive and
negative words after being primed with Black faces) or when
it is based on a self-assessment of attributes other than the
to-be-measured attribute (e.g., when participants’ racial attitudes
are inferred from their self-reported liking of a neutral
object after being primed with Black faces).

Applying the latter categorization to D & G (1983) study, they clearly used an indirect measure in De Houwer's categorization. Thus from this methodological perspective (after glancing over De Houwer et al.) D & G (1983) is an affect priming study.


Why are we so possessive of our significant others? Something about falling in love seems to make people very possessive about their significant other. This happens even though sharing is almost universally acknowledged as an act of kindness and regarded positively.

For example suppose Alice is married to Bob, and Charlie is their friend (genders don't matter; I'm only using these names because they correspond to A, B and C in the alphabet). If Charlie wants to borrow from Bob:

a vacuum cleaner, Bob will likely say "sure".
Alice for a one-night stand (and Alice is willing), Bob will likely say "no way", and might even get violent with Charlie and / or threaten divorce if Alice goes ahead.

Oddly, if Bob refuses to share the vacuum cleaner, outsiders will generally perceive his behavior negatively, but the reverse applies to Bob not agreeing to share Alice. Most outsiders will approve of Bob's stand, which sounds contradictory.

Why do we encourage sharing but discourage infidelity? The only thing I can think of is sexually transmitted diseases - if Bob allows Alice to have a tryst with Charlie, she could become infected with something that she later passes to Bob. But there're many ways to have protected sex these days, so this doesn't seem like a valid reason.

I've not been able to find anything on Google about this - all the results treat different issues.

The big hot potato here is the evolutionary hypothesis that men are more sexually jealous whereas women are more emotionally jealous.
Contrast Harris (2003) totally dissing it (but also giving a nice summary of it, which is why I'm quoting it first):

The specific innate modular theory of jealousy hypothesizes that natural selection shaped sexual jealousy as a mechanism to prevent cuckoldry, and emotional jealousy as a mechanism to prevent resource loss. Therefore, men should be primarily jealous over a mate's sexual infidelity and women over a mate's emotional infidelity. Five lines of evidence have been offered as support: self report responses, psychophysiological data, domestic violence (including spousal abuse and homicide), and morbid jealousy cases. This article reviews each line of evidence and finds only one hypothetical measure consistent with the hypothesis. This, however, is contradicted by a variety of other measures (including reported reactions to real infidelity). A meta-analysis of jealousy-inspired homicides, taking into account base rates for murder, found no evidence that jealousy disproportionately motivates men to kill. The findings are discussed from a social-cognitive theoretical perspective.

Harris (of course) has her preferred counter-theory (as the last quoted sentence suggests; more on that in a moment). The contrast I want to make on the evolutionary issue is with Frederick and Fales (2016):

One hypothesis derived from evolutionary perspectives is that men are more upset than women by sexual infidelity and women are more upset than men by emotional infidelity. The proposed explanation is that men, in contrast to women, face the risk of unwittingly investing in genetically unrelated offspring. Most studies, however, have relied on small college or community samples of heterosexual participants. We examined upset over sexual versus emotional jealousy among 63,894 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual participants. Participants imagined which would upset them more: their partners having sex with someone else (but not falling in love with them) or their partners falling in love with someone else (but not having sex with them). Consistent with this evolutionary perspective, heterosexual men were more likely than heterosexual women to be upset by sexual infidelity (54 vs. 35 %) and less likely than heterosexual women to be upset by emotional infidelity (46 vs. 65 %). This gender difference emerged across age groups, income levels, history of being cheated on, history of being unfaithful, relationship type, and length. The gender difference, however, was limited to heterosexual participants. Bisexual men and women did not differ significantly from each other in upset over sexual infidelity (30 vs. 27 %), regardless of whether they were currently dating a man (35 vs. 29 %) or woman (28 vs. 20 %). Gay men and lesbian women also did not differ (32 vs. 34 %). The findings present strong evidence that a gender difference exists in a broad sample of U.S. adults, but only among heterosexuals.

And what's the (alternative) social-cognitive theoretical perspective? Based on Wikipedia's summary (since Harris' own is waaay too long):

The social-cognitive perspective proposes the transactional model of jealousy, which can be used to explain why there may be differences in the degree to which individuals experience sexual jealousy within genders, as well as between genders. This model examines how three variables – (1) arousability, (2) commitment and, (3) insecurity – moderate jealousy.

Individual differences in sexual jealousy are determined by the difference in levels of physiological arousal: individuals who are easily aroused have more intense jealous reactions, than those with lower physiological arousal.
Commitment refers to the degree of dedication a person has in the relationship: the more committed a person is to a relationship, the greater the threat of loss, which leads to greater feelings of jealousy
Insecurity refers to the perceived level of commitment of the partner: if we perceive our partner to be uninvolved or disinterested in the relationship, we feel more insecure.

The degree to which these factors are experienced together determine the intensity of sexual jealousy felt by an individual.

Wikipedia's summary seems mostly based on Erber, R., & Erber, M. W. (2016). Intimate relationships: Issues, theories, and research. New York, NY: Routledge.
The latter book actually has a chapter (TLDR) and the cheat-sheet at the end lists more theories:

• Prototype model defines jealousy as a subtype of anger
• Cognitive appraisal approaches contend that jealousy is a bona fide
emotion
• Bringle’s (1991) transactional theory of jealousy proposes that it arises
from the interplay between the individual and the situation
• Cognitive motivational approaches emphasize attributions and how we
think about jealousy-provoking situations
• The SEM [self-evaluation maintenance] approach focuses on the interaction between rival characteristics
and the jealous person’s self-evaluation
• Attachment model of jealousy predicts the intensity and frequency of
jealous reactions based on attachment type


How to get started in Cognitive Science? I'm currently studying Philosophy and am planning to focus on the Philosophy of Mind/Perception + Philosophy of Language in the forthcoming years. However, I'd really wish to get into Cognitive Science for my further postgraduate career, but I'm not sure where to start given the vastness of the field. I believe that I still can incorporate some Psychology or Computer Science modules into my current curriculum in the next semester.

My question is, if I want to get into the Cognitive Science, which pre-requisites are essential to master beforehand? By pre-requisites I mean the range of subjects that would facilitate my transition into the field. I've found several 'Introduction to Cognitive Science' textbooks, but none of them happen to elaborate upon the pre-requisites.

Cognitive sciences is an extremely broad term, and really more of an interdisciplinary term for fields related by a focus on explaining behavior in terms of mental processes, with varying ways of operationalizing what that means exactly. (See MaríaAnt's excellent answer to a previous question, "What is the difference between behavioral science and cognitive science?")
Mathematics
Mastering some types of math is extremely helpful for postgraduate work. You will need to be very comfortable with doing algebra at least to a high school precalculus level, for starters. Understanding and expressing a hypothesis in the form of a statistical model is almost entirely algebraic, and unless you're comfortable manipulating differences and interactions between variables, you'll be limited to relatively simple questions. You'll also have a considerable head start if you have at least a passing familiarity with inferential logic, standard probability theory, matrix algebra and basic calculus.
Theoretical content
There is no theoretical content which should be learned universally before going into cognitive science, really. If you want to work in a particular field of cognitive science, then it is of course necessary to familiarize yourself with that particular field's literature. If you want to work with perception, you should be intimately familiar with the perception literature and relevant models, but need not necessarily know much about the clinical literature; if you want to work with AI, computer science is essential, where it's not at all critical in educational psychology. Different (sub)fields tend to be their own little fiefdoms.