Pleasure can be implicated in a chemical reaction in the brain, but does this really affect the intensity of the feeling? It is true that many, if not all feelings of our mind like euphoria, dysphoria, pleasure, sadness et cetera are linked to a chemical reaction in our brain. This reaction is essentially what causes us to feel these emotions.

However, is the factor that causes us to really feel what we feel inherently biochemical? If so, then what neurobiological property of these reactions causes the intensity of the feeling? For example, what separates plain happiness from blissful ecstasy?

Short answer
In case of dopamine, its amounts present in the reward pathway in the brain correlates positively with the intensity of pleasure experienced.

Background
To focus the answer I'll narrow the scope of this post to one of the most extensively investigated emotional centers in the brain, namely the reward center involving the dopaminergic mesolimbic pathway.

Dopamine (DA) release in this system rewards the brain's host for beneficial things essential to life, such as eating, drinking and having sex.

It is also one of the major neural centers in the brain involved in addiction, including nicotine, cocaine and methampetamine addiction, as well as gambling and pathological risk-taking behaviors.

The opiate class of narcotics, most notably cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, morphine, heroine and their analogues invoke a massive increase in DA levels in the mesolimbic pathway. An increase in DA levels has been shown to be a final (secondary) common pathway that mediates the rewarding properties of these drugs of abuse, explaining their addictive properties (Chiara & Imperato, 1988).

In humans it has been established by behavioral experiments that the magnitude of ventral striatal DA release (the striatum is a part of the reward system in the brain) correlates positively with the hedonic (pleasure) response associated with amphetamine (Drevets et al., 2011). In other words, more DA is correlated with more happiness and thus the amount of DA indeed correlates with the intensity of the feeling associated with its release in the reward system.

As a side note on this; a notorious problem with many drugs of abuse are their purity. For example, Coca leaves cause a mild stimulant high when chewed. As far as I know, the American Indians have not suffered from overt physical or psychological dependence on these leaves in the thousands of years they probably have used them. However, shortly after the discovery of coca leaves (and opium poppies for that matter) by the Old World, the active ingredient was purified and eventually isolated. Cocaine (and morphine) cause a sudden and massive increase in dopamine levels (Romach et al., 1999), in turn not just leading to feelings of pleasure, but to near-instantaneous, full-blown ecstatic euphoria. It is this notorious 'first-time high' that virtually every addict keeps on pursuing, and which they will unfortunately never experience again in their life due to tolerance that build up almost instantly after first use of highly purified preparations of coca (crack, cocaine) and poppies (morphine, heroine).

Post scriptum
In general, the 'biochemistry' of the brain refers to neurotransmitters. Their actions are primarily due the binding of these compounds to their respective receptors. The process of neurotransmitter release and receptor binding are not chemical reactions in the strictest sense of their meaning, as stated in your question. The secondary responses of the postsynaptic neuron may, or may not involve chemical reactions. Some second messenger systems do rely on chemical reactions (the metabotropic receptors including the dopamine receptors) while others do not (ion channel-coupled receptor systems for example).

References
- Chiara & Imperato, PNAS (1998); 85: 5274-8
- Drevets et al., Psychiatry (2001); 49: 81–96
- Romach et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry (1999); 56(12): 1101-6


Is there any research showing success of teaching with smell? Cognitive science holds that smell is the sense that has the strongest ability to trigger memories. It is discussed in awe.

We see anecdotes such as the sudden striking memory of sitting in your grandmothers kitchen when you were 6 - because you have just smelled the same scent of the food she cooked (30 years later). Has anyone been using scent timed with instruction to improve performance? I am only seeing studies of the effect of certain smells (peppermint, cinnamon, etc) on the neural activity of lab rats being watched with fMRI.

Is there any research in which a control group (no smells) performed worse than an experimental group (had smells during learning and testing?)

I am a bit amazed, but there is, at least for scent as a memory retrieval cue:

Aggleton and Waskett (1999):

  This study determined the extent to which re-exposure to the unique combination of odours present in a museum (the Jorvik Viking Centre in York) aids the recall of a previous visit to the museum, which had typically taken place several years earlier. To test this, three groups of participants completed questionnaires about the contents of the museum, but in different conditions. One group completed the questionnaire in the presence of exactly the same distinctive odours as those present in the museum at the time of their original visit. Those in two other groups were given either a different (control) set of odours or no odours at all. After a brief delay, the same questionnaire was presented again to participants in all three groups. Those who had initially been given a novel (control) set of odours were now tested in the presence of the genuine Jorvik museum odours, while the group that had received the Jorvik odours were now tested with the control odours. The third group received no odours on either test. Only the novel odour-Jorvik odours condition led to a highly significant improvement in performance. This interaction showed that the museum odours could act as effective retrieval cues for this incidentally acquired, real-world episode.

Wow 1: The average time since the last museum visit was 6.7 years!
Wow 2: At the time of writing, the paper has been cited more than 120
times according to Google Scholar!
Wow 3: Vikings!

References

Aggleton, J. P., & Waskett, L. (1999). The ability of odours to serve as state-dependent cues for real-world memories: Can Viking smells aid the recall of Viking experiences? British Journal of Psychology, 90, 1–7.


What is the difference between facets and factors? I am wondering whether there is a difference between factors and facets.

Concretely, I am doing a research about transformational leadership. My questionnaire has 8 factors which is based on a theory of transformational leadership consisting of 8 components (facets?). The questionnaire just copies the theory.

Factors and facets

In personality trait research, traits are often conceptualised hierarchically. There is also a broad consensus that a small number of broad traits (typically the Big 5, but others argue for different numbers such as the HEXACO 6) explain personality quite well. The big 5 also goes by the name Five Factor Model. The terminology of "factor" is quite likely linked to the method of factor analysis often used for scale construction in this area.

Several popular personality tests measure traits at two-levels (e.g., NEO-PI-R, HEXACO-PI-R, IPIP, etc.). So for example, the NEO-PI-R is composed of five broad factors, each of which is composed of 6 narrower facets.

So in summary, there is a range of terminology that  have similar meaning:

broad traits, domains, factors
narrow traits, facets

Another common terminology is that of scales and subscales.

On basic level, this is just convenient terminology for describing two levels of a hierarchy of measurement, particularly where the broader level is defined by the lower level.

For further discussion see:

Anglim, J., & Grant, S. L. (2014). Incremental criterion prediction of personality facets over factors: Obtaining unbiased estimates and confidence intervals. Journal of Research in Personality, 53, 148-157. https://osf.io/g8kbj/

Your case of mapping a test onto a theory

In your case, you are mapping eight scales onto a theory that includes eight components. This doesn't have too much to do with the factor-facet distinction.

Perhaps the main issue is whether there is an overall scale (e.g., an overall leadership effectiveness scale, of which there are eight subscales). You could potentially call this the leadership effectiveness factor and call the eight elements "facets". But it might be more common to merely call the eight components "scales" or "subscales".


Can dreams predict the future? On Quora there is a discussion that dreams can predict the future. I have experienced the feeling that things happening to me in real-life had occurred in my dreams, before these events actually happened. Can dreams predict the future?

Short answer
Dreams cannot predict the future.

Background
Likely you are referring to Deja reve ('already dreamed'), which has been hypothesized to be (Schredi et al., 2017):

  ...the distinct impression that the uncanny familiarity one is
  sensing has come from a preceding dream, but one not usually
  remembered until the experience is taking place.

Deja reve are reported by Schredi et al. to occur in nearly 80% of the population.

Dreams are representations of past experiences (re-)generated is our minds creates while we sleep. It has been proposed that dreams reflect biological processes of long-term memory consolidation. Consolidation strengthens the neural representations of recent events (i.e., their memories) and embeds these new memory fragments into older, existing memories. This also maintains the stability of existing memory representations in the face of subsequent experiences (Payne & Nadel, 2004). In sleeping rodents, for example, neurons in the hippocampus fire in patterns remarkably similar to those recorded during a previous maze-running session—almost as if the animals replay the experience in their sleep (source: Science Magazine).

In all, dreams are related to memories and memory formation. However, they have nothing to do with future events. The brain cannot recall what never has perceived in the past. Hence, déjà vu experiences and dreams have nothing to do with what the future may bring, other than cases of pure coincidence.

References
- Payne & Nadel, Learn Mem (2004); 11(6): 671–8
- Shredi et al., J Consciousness Studies (2017); 24:(7-8): 155-62


How to answer questions that don't seem to be possible to be answered on a Strongly disagree - Strongly agree scale and what's their point? I'm continuously being perplexed by psychological tests that display a lot of questions that don't seem to be able to be answered in a simplistic ways, but nevertheless simplistic answers are demanded.

I was subjected to such tests a few times in my life already. Each time the questions were a major challenge for me... until, out of necessity, I was stopping caring about the accuracy of the answers. Instead, I was giving rough estimations, feeling these estimations are almost meaningless.

As an example, I was once subjected to a test whether I was aggressive, submissive, assertive, or manipulative. The test contained questions like "do I think cunning is an effective way to get what one wants"? Do I think so? Yes, I think it is an effective way insofar people were able to trick me a few times in my life. Do I do this? I try not to and I don't even think I'm any good at it. Nonetheless, such questions clearly contribute to showing that I'm manipulative.

For an other example, let's take the Dark Factor test. We have here questions like:

Most people deserve respect.

My problem with this questions is that, as far as I'm aware, there are many definitions of "respect". How am I supposed to answer this question without knowing what definition of respect we're talking about?

The innate respect that, according to many moral theories, is an indefeasible privilege of every human being?
The respect that is defined as a person's trustworthiness or ability to perform their duty?
The respect that stems from fearing other person?

All 3 definitions entail radically different answers on my part, including an "I don't know, I'm not strong enough in philosophy to be able to answer this" in the first case.

Or another question. "It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to help others in need." Is it? I believe yes. Can I? Sadly, rarely. Which of these two answers should I give?

Another category are questions like these two: "It’s wise to keep track of information that you can use against people later." and "I feel sorry if things I do upset people." Here, however, my problems with these questions border critiquing the test itself, so I wonder if I'm not falling to the trap of arrogance. Namely, I have a feeling (maybe very wrong) that this test here treats what is not necessarily immoral as if it was. Is it wise to keep track of information that can be used against people later? In most circumstances likely no. But there are situations when this course of action is both necessary and perfectly ethical, I suppose: to protect oneself from these people anticipated unwarranted attacks. Do I feel sorry if I do things that upset other people? This depends on circumstances even more. If I win a sport match I'm likely to upset my opponents: does my attempts to win a fair game make my personality have dark traits? Escaping one's mother's overprotectiveness is likely to make her even more upset: but as far as I can tell, the psychologists' theories were that it is most healthy and necessary to do this. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a positive answer to such a question would make one's personality darker in the results.

Could someone explain to me what's the point of such questions and how to answer them?

Really good question - I've had this exact conversation with a student.

It's important to understand that mature scales are validated:

  In the fields of psychological testing and educational testing,
  "validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support
  the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of
  tests".

An interesting example is predictive validity:

  ... the extent to which a score on a scale or test predicts scores on
  some criterion measure. ... predictive validity provides somewhat more
  useful data about test validity because it has greater fidelity to the
  real situation in which the test will be used. After all, most tests
  are administered to find out something about future behavior.

From the point of view of the developer of a psychometric test, what a subject might think of a question, how they interpret (or misinterpret) it, or what ambiguity it contains, is not as important as whether or not answers to the question contribute to the validity (especially predictive validity) of the test.  A question that seems meaningless to you, might actually be highly predictive (at least in general) of the criterion measure.

It is not always necessary for the developer to know why a question is predictive, only that it is predictive (provided other validation criteria are also met).  Scales in general are developed using the scientific method - a survey you take that contains say, 20 questions, might originally have contained over 100 questions.  After testing the scale on an experimental group, researchers may discover that 20 of those questions provide 80-90% of the predictive power of the full test, and decide to shorten it.  Researchers cannot really know in advance which questions work best - that's what testing is for!

Another interesting factor in psychometric testing is demand characteristics:

  In research—particularly psychology—demand characteristics refers to
  an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation of
  the experiment's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to
  fit that interpretation. ... A possible reason for demand
  characteristics is the participant's expectation that he or she will
  somehow be evaluated and thus figures out a way to 'beat' the
  experiment to attain good scores in the alleged evaluation.

In other words, if you feel like your test score forms some evaluation of your character, then you might try to provide answers that you think will form a desirable evaluation, rather than an accurate one.

However, it is difficult to ascertain the value or purpose of a question in a test - some scales contain questions added for testing internal validity, specifically for detecting demand characteristics and other biases that may affect results.  For example, a test may contain 2 identical questions worded differently.  Different responses to these questions could indicate dishonesty, misinterpretation, inconsistency, or inattentiveness.  Bottom line: I wouldn't worry about what the point of a question is - don't over-think it.


Which psychological word describes this situation best? A few years ago, I’ve heard that people have to be in the center if they want to truly enjoy something. For example, when someone really want to enjoy a concert, he or she needs to go to the center of the crowd. It is also true when you work.

Is there any psychological terminology or effect which describes this situation well?

Thank you.

Maybe you mean an engagement?
If though, a positive psychology have term flow state - when you fully immersed. Here is wiki article about it. Or hyperfocus - article.

Components of flow state:

Intense and focused concentration on the present moment

Merging of action and awareness

A loss of reflective self-consciousness

A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity

A distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered

Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelicexperience


Multistable perception with three possibilities I know that multistable perception refers to the phenomenon that occurs when we look at an ambiguous image like a Necker Cube or some sort of positive/negative space art, and we can’t perceive both possibilities at once, but rather waver between them repeatedly. However, all of the visual examples I’ve seen of this phenomenon only have two possible interpretations (of course, putting two Necker Cubes next to each other leads to $4$ possible interpretations, and three Necker Cubes gives $8$ interpretations, etc).

However, does anyone know of a well-known ambiguous image or piece of art with exactly three different interpretations between which the viewer switches back and forth? If not, can anyone construct such an image?

Thanks!

Here’s an image I found that triggers tristable perception (as opposed to just bistable perception):

The three possible interpretations are

A big cube with a smaller cube in front of it
A big cube with a small cubical chunk missing
A room with a small cube sitting in the corner

Apparently there is a fourth possible interpretation, but it is so “unlikely” that we can’t visualize it very readily.

This comes from a paper called The dynamics of perceptual rivalry in bistable and tristable perception.” Can anyone find any more examples?


Are emotions a function of muscle contractions? If so, how does the map look like? I hope this is the right (or rightest) place to ask this question, I wasn't sure whether this question is more appropriate for cogsci or biology. After all, it does concern the biology of emotions.

To my knowledge, it is established research that the brain 'knows' what emotions you are having by examining their manifestations in the body. This absurd rube-goldbergian wiring can for instance be used to force oneself to become happier (at least temporarily) by smiling for a few minutes.

This brings up the question, whether emotions have any identity separate from a cluster of bodily sensations (or even more specifically, muscle contractions) at all.

It is certainly true (by introspection for e.g.) that 'negative' emotions are accompanied by muscle contradictions. On the other hand, there are several different 'negative' emotions that can be easily distinguished by the person having the emotion (e.g. shame and fear). Unfortunately I am not able to simply recall the sensations I had when I was ashamed or fearful from memory and compare them, but I would assume you could even tell from the outside, simply by looking at the person afflicted, which of the two emotions they are going through.

So, what does the research say? Are emotions uniquely recognizable by facial expression/muscle contractions? Or do emotions have some kind of 'hidden variables' in the brain?

Your brain mentally represents afferent bodily input as affect, or feelings of pleasantness/unpleasantness and arousal (Craig, 2002).  In certain theories (e.g., Barrett, 2017), your emotions are cognitive interpretations (conceptualizations) of your affect in a context.

In general, there is very weak evidence that discrete emotions correspond to specific and reliable bodily responses (for the most up-to-date meta-analysis, see Siegel et al., in press).

There is also indeterminate evidence for specific and reliable correspondences with facial movements.  This has not been studied well enough to be known, although there is compelling evidence to suggest that there are no specific/reliable links on average (see Hillel Aviezer's work).

In general, emotion research is converging on the view that emotional events are highly variable, both within and across emotion categories, as well as within and across individuals and cultures. We see this variability in neural activity, physiology, behavior, hormones, vocalizations, facial movements, and so on.  From this perspective, there are no unique emotion signatures.


Name of false answer effect in surveys I'm looking for research I've read about a well known effect that happens when participants complete a survey, where they do not answer what they think is right, but what they think the researchers are expecting from them.
It can be a survey but it can also be something else...

This is called "demand characteristics":

  ... an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation
  of the experiment's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to
  fit that interpretation.

An example is:

  The good-participant role in which the participant attempts to discern
  the experimenter's hypotheses and to confirm them. The participant
  does not want to "ruin" the experiment.

Demand characteristics are a type of response bias:

  ... a general term for a wide range of cognitive biases that influence
  the responses of participants away from an accurate or truthful
  response. These biases are most prevalent in the types of studies and
  research that involve participant self-report, such as structured
  interviews or surveys.

Another related type of response bias is the "social desirability bias":

  ... the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner
  that will be viewed favorably by others.


Why do people bully other people? What is the psychology behind bullying from the bullier's perspective?

What kind of people become bullies? Do bullies generally have anything common in their childhood histories?

N.B. This question excludes Cyberbullying.

Long story short, aspiration for leadership / dominance.

By having bullied someone (and not having been told where to get off), the bully effectively establishes dominance over the victim, which indulges their ego and makes them feel strong and lifeworthy.

Anybody with power or strong character can become a bully towards less strong/powerful ones, unless educated or motivated not to.

That said, bullies do not necessarily have anything common in their childhood histories that caused them to become bullies, however, having been bullied in the past or having seen bullying increases the likelihood of one becoming a bully. Vivid examples of this are dedovshchina and ragging — where people justify their bully behaviour by "I was bullied by older mates before, now it is my turn to take it out on the newcomers", or simply seeing that as a de-facto tradition.


Any studies on the phenomenon of photo-taking even in dire situations? I have noticed a tendency these days for people to take pictures of the things they see in the public with their phones. This is fine, but I have found that it has gone to an extend where in a dire situation, people were too busy taking pictures of the scene (for blogging, Facebook, etc) to call the police or help the victims.

Having that said, I'm not sure if this is just my own observation. Are there any studies or even terms or keywords describing and explaining such phenomenon?

Firstly  historical background:
The phenomena of people witnessing atrocities and not acting predates photo taking. It is known as Diffusion of responsibility or Bystander effect. (1) The likelihood of an individual offering assistance or calling for help is inversely proportion to the number of people present in the group.
This phenomena can be attributed to the concepts of deindividuation (2) and victim blaming (3). Deindividuation is the notion that an individual loses their independent consciousness to a degree as being drawn into a group consciousness, that acting within a group, revokes all personal responsibility and accountability for actions or inactions.
Victim blaming is the propensity for people to blame the victims of violent crimes for somehow being complicit in bringing about the crime. By reckless behavior, perceived immoral conduct. This can the false comfort people seek as a protection, that it wouldn't happen to them, as such events are not part of chance, but rather have causal roots within the victim.
I believe the cause underlying this mentality runs deeper into the human  psyche and taps into a primitive part of human nature that will form a subconscious alliance with the perceived stronger aggressor and so have less mercy towards the weaker victim. This is seen in more personal and extreme cases in the Stockholm Syndrome and on the coninuum of domestic violence. The following quote demonstrates this argument where the threat is real and present. I postulate this fear is underlying within many people's subconscious.

It is important to remember that Stockholm Syndrome develops subconsciously and on an involuntary basis. The strategy is a survival instinct that develops as an attempt to survive in a threatening and controlling environment. (4)

Photo taking:
There has always been a voyeuristic nature to photography. (5)
The advent of internet communication, social media and the glut of social networking platforms have given rise to a popular form of communication, via the image. Pinterest being a good example. The availability of new technologies enabling people to take photos and upload instantly online, makes a tragic scene an tantalising opportunity for individuals to gain recognition online. Perhaps enhancing their perceived status or popularity, at the very least gaining them attention.
The psychology of the photographer:
This is a little researched area. I cannot find much on this topic, maybe somebody else can.
This book by Joel Morgovsky examines some of these issues (I am unable to quote further  than the following):

While photographs are the most abundant image form in the world today, they are, at the same time, also the least carefully analyzed. Not one psychologist, to this writer’s knowledge, has attempted to apply relevant research on imagery and the creative process to the study of photographs as personal and cultural communications. Writers, painters, sculptors and scientists have served for years as illustrations of the creative personality, the creative process, and the creative product; photographers and photographs have not (Lindauer, 1977). (6)

It appears Joel Morgovsky has an interest in ongoing research into this:

According to Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) member Joel Morgovsky, pictures aren't just windows through which we look out onto the world--they also serve as mirrors into the photographer's mind. (7)

References:

(1) The Bystander Effect: A Lens for Understanding Patterns of Participation James M. Hudson & Amy S. Bruckman DOI:10.1207/s15327809jls1302_2

(2) Zimbardo, Phillip G. The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos, In W. T. Arnold and D. Levine (eds.), Nebraska symposium on Motiviation, Vol 17., 1969.

(3) Blaming the Victim and Exonerating the Perpetrator in Cases of Rape and Robbery: Is There a Double Standard? Steffen Bieneck, Barbara Krahé doi: 10.1177/0886260510372945

(4) Rainn.org Stockholm Syndrome Dr Joseph Carver

(5) Exposed: Voyeurism Surveillance and the camera since 1870 Sandra S Phillips and Simon Baker portrait.gov.au

(6) Noses on Our Faces: The Non-Use of Photography in Psychological Research and Practice
Joel Morgovsky DOI 10.1007/978-1-4684-1179-9_18

(7) American Pyschological Association Funding opportunities


What is the relation between fun and motivation? Are they the same? Are 'having fun in doing something' and 'being motivated to do something' the same thing?

If not, how are fun and motivation related? Is there any formal definition on this? Would it be possible to be motivated to do something without having fun in it?

As a temporary answer, and based on the comments, I will say that:

Motivation is related to the long term cost and revenue (in the broadest sense) for an activity, i.e. more extrinsic. If the long term revenue is higher than the cost, you might be motivated to undertake the activity.

Fun is related to the short term cost/revenue for an activity, i.e. intrinsic. If the short term revenue is high enough than a certain treshold you will say the activity is fun.

Improvements welcome :-)


Are superhero masks effective at concealing your identity? In modern comic book fiction, a superhero wears a partial mask to obscure their identity.  This mask is properly known as a "Domino Mask"

Now obviously these masks are not the most effective masks in the world.  However, is there any cog sci evidence that they provide any protection at all?  I highly doubt there's any evidence to show they prevent someone from identifying you, but is there any evidence to suggest they even slow identification down or increase errors?

I don't know of any proper identity recognition experiments using such a mask, and obviously it depends on how difficult the recognition test is. However, here is a paper where they found that sunglasses (and facemasks) impeded accuracy in an emotion recognition task. I would guess that often identity recognition is just as difficult as emotion recognition, so I would assume glasses or a mask would make people (slightly) worse. In general, this is a question about what features are necessary/useful for face recognition. There is lots of research about this, and studies such as this show that the eyes are particularly important. So disrupting this part of the face, and potentially the relationships between them, is actually not a bad way to disguise yourself (though obviously a full-on balaclava would be better!).


Dependency EEG signals from regions of the brain When we record an EEG signals, we apply an ICA on it. This algorithm assumes that the sources of signals are independent.

Could I assume that each region in the brain works independently, i.e., the region that the point C3 represents, is independent of the region that the point CZ represents?

The EEG signals between these regions will not be independent. The electrical activity that is being measured at the scalp, is the result of electrical flow inside the brain. This flow does not go in just one direction. It 'smears out' a little bit to surrounding areas, since the entire scalp/body is conductive.

Another reason that the activity measured at different sites is not completely independent is because brain areas interact with each other. The old Brodman Area topography is kind of outdated, and made place for networks of activity. To say that each channel is independent is thus inherently false.

ICA does assume independent sources, but with this they do not mean the channels. For example, the ICA finds a pattern, e.g. jumps of blinks, in, say, 15 channels. ICA then assumes that they are caused by only one thing, and this pattern will thus be extracted to only one component, not two. The different components, which are the result of an ICA, are thus in fact the independent sources.


Rat between two walls viewed as a product in a category I'm reading the book "A New Foundation for Representation in Cognitive Brain Science -  Category Theory and the Hippocampus" by Jaime Gómez-Ramirez (a terrible book, if you ask me).

On p. 164 the author introduces the product of two objects in a category. I.e. the product of two objects $A$ and $B$ in a category $\mathcal C$ is another object $P$ equipped with two morphisms $p_1: P\rightarrow A$ and $p_2: P\rightarrow B$ such that for any pair of morphisms $x_1: X\rightarrow A$ and $x_2: X\rightarrow B$ there is a unique morphism $h$ making the figure commute.

The author goes on to say that the main characteristic of a product is that the constituents are retrievable via the projections. The following example is given: Let $W_A$ and $W_B$ be two walls that the delimit the maze a rat is moving in. After reaching both walls, the rat would develop the concept of a middle point $P$. This middle point $P$ corresponds to the categorial product $P=W_A \times W_B$.

I struggle to make sense of this. If the walls, or more generally, any location in the maze, are objects in a category, then what are the arrows (morphisms)? My first guess is: paths. Translated into the maze-world: There is a "concept" $W_A \times W_B$ that gives me paths from each wall to the middle $P$. And given any point $X$ in the maze there is a unique path $X\rightarrow P$ from $X$ to $P$.
This interpretation doesn't make sense at all.

The second guess is that the walls $W_A, W_B$ are not actual locations in space, but the rat's concepts of these walls. But it is still unclear, what the arrows between concepts are supposed to be.

Is there a way to make sense of this? Specifically, what exactly is this "maze-category"? Because to me, so far, this is just half-baked, abstract nonsense jibber jabber.

Any pointers to more substantial literature would be greatly appreciated!

According to the author, in this maze-category the objects are memories (or mental objects).

The author references to chapter 3, when discussing the maze-category. Chapter 3 of the book, gives an application to Memory Evolutive Neuronal Systems (MENS). There, a morphism represents a way of relating mental objects. This is a general description.

The author gives as examples for the maze-category:

travel time
number of steps needed to go from one mental object to another.

The product $P$ of two memories is two memories at once. The concept of a middle point requires that the agent has the memories of both memories. One wall only requires one memory.

$X$ can potentially represent any of the points between the two walls.


Where is the visual "image" that we "see" finally assembled? David Hubel's online book, Eye, Brain and Vision describes in great detail our early visual system. The image that we are conscious of when we open our eyes goes through a complex path:

The final seamless, stereoscopic (2.5D) "image" that we "see" can only be assembled after V1, the primary visual cortex. Unfortunately, V1 is as far as Hubel's book goes, and as far as I can tell its a mystery to Google too, exactly where the final "image" we "see" is assembled. Does any one have better info than the Google regarding this?

I think you are succumbing to the homunculus argument, the fallacy that there is some sort of image in the brain for someone to view. There is no magical theater in your head where what is incident on your retina is projected. All you have in your brain is complicated patterns of neural activity, there are no images and nothing to view. However, these patterns of activity give rise to your phenomenological experience. To fully understand this you should ask:

What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?

But lets try to clear up some of the conceptual difficulties with vision in particular. Your experience of the visual world is effected by two types of inputs: (1) the data from your retina, and (2) data from the rest of your senses, including memory. Why is obvious that not everything comes from (1)? Consider one the following:

You experience a whole visual scene, there isn't a certain nothing-ness somewhere. Yet on your retina, there is a blind-spot, something fills in that part of your experience for you.
You have an experience of certain far away buildings being further then nearby buildings. Yet your eyes are too close together for the difference in angle of the two images to be measurable at the fidelity of your retina. How does your mind know the buildings are further? Parallax and memories of how big certain objects typically are and how this scales with distance.

If we concentrate only on method (1), then all the information is there from the retina on-wards and only degrades (as part of the signal is thrown away, compressed, or undergoes noise) on its way to V1 and on-wards. However, its encoding changes to become more compatible with integration with other sensory and memory information. By the time the data has reached V1 and V2, it is in an encoding that we understand well enough to reconstruct videos of what people are seeing/experiencing. As the Gallant Lab that ran the linked study summarizes:

  The human visual system consists of several dozen distinct cortical visual areas and sub-cortical nuclei, arranged in a network that is both hierarchical and parallel. Visual information comes into the eye and is there transduced into nerve impulses. These are sent on to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then to primary visual cortex (area V1). Area V1 is the largest single processing module in the human brain. Its function is to represent visual information in a very general form by decomposing visual stimuli into spatially localized elements. Signals leaving V1 are distributed to other visual areas, such as V2 and V3. Although the function of these higher visual areas is not fully understood, it is believed that they extract relatively more complicated information about a scene. For example, area V2 is thought to represent moderately complex features such as angles and curvature, while high-level areas are thought to represent very complex patterns such as faces. The encoding model used in our experiment was designed to describe the function of early visual areas such as V1 and V2, but was not meant to describe higher visual areas. As one might expect, the model does a good job of decoding information in early visual areas but it does not perform as well in higher areas.

Remember, there is no video in those areas. It is just firing of neurons that the scientists have figured out how to decode and interpret. As the quote mentions, the higher visual areas are not well understood right now, but presumably that is where a lot of the type (2) feedback is happening. Even inside the mildly understood visual areas, a lot of processing is distributed. For instance, take a look at the question about face-blindness:

Does the fusiform face area in patients with Prosopagnosia (face blindness) show lower activity under an fMRI?

By damaging one part of the brain (the fusiform face area) you are able to continue to 'see' tables and chairs perfectly fine, and yet you can't properly identify or recognize faces.

Hopefully this convinces you that it doesn't make sense to look for 'the image' in the brain. Together the mind and the eye are able to shape what you perceive and give it meaning, but it is a pseudo-question to ask where that image is finally assembled. It is not assembled, there is no image, there is only encoding of retina activity into higher level firing patterns that produces in us the experience of vision and meaning.


Is there a waterfall visual after-effect with discrete inputs? If you watch a waterfall for several seconds and then suddenly change your gaze to a fixed object it appears to briefly move upward.

But if instead you're looking at a scrolling LED marquee sign, does the motion aftereffect still take place? In reality nothing is actually moving on the marquee sign because the LEDs are all fixed in place.

The answer to this question probably has interesting implications as to where in the visual pipeline motion is being processed. The difference between the actual waterfall and the scrolling LED marquee might also be a good way to separate out various aspects of motion processing. I'd be curious in hearing commentary on this.

The waterfall after-effect is an illusion falling into a broader class of visual illusionary apparent movements caused by watching a constant motion for an extended period of time. The motion after-effect can be explained by adaptation of visual neurons that respond selectively to movement. Motion-sensitive visual neurons are tuned to a specific direction. Exposure to a continuous motion in one particular direction fatigues specifically those visual neurons that are tuned to that direction as they continuously fire. When the visual stimulus stops, it alters the balance of activity in favor of cells tuned to the opposite direction, as these are the least fatigued by the stimulus and this causes the after-effect (Mather et al., 2008).

The motion-after effect does work well with more discreet stimuli too.

To start with, here is an example of a more standard waterfall effect illusion (see Fig. 1 for a related impression still image).

Fig. 1. Waterfall. source: Carlos Vasquez

And in this video an example is shown of the waterfall after effect with more discreet stimuli. Not particularly your standard marquee sign but it comes close and there's a definite motion after effect observable (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Movie still from this video

However, I think your question is specifically whether a motion after-effect occurs with chase-lighting as often seen in Marquees signs (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Marquees sign showing illusionary apparent motion. source: Old Turnpike School

The chasing-light stimulus in itself is a visual illusion, as there is no true motion involved. Instead, it is generated by using electronic circuitry to activate lights serially with a certain time delay in-between activations. Because there is no motion involved as such, I believe the after effect will not occur, or very weakly. At least, I couldn't observe an after effect after watching several chase lightings for a while. For example, the chase lightings in Fig. 1 become ambiguous when I look at it a while, i.e., the lights actually spontaneously reverse their direction when staring at it for a while. The only thing I see when I look away, personally, is a colorful blob, and no motion after-effect.

Reference
- Mather et al., Trends Cog Sci (2008); 12(12): 481-7


How much we should trust our brain Our brain is trained from culture and environment that we're raised in. So we don't control what we're learning until we get to teenage. But by that time our behaviour is already been shaped. This shapes our intuition part.

Also we can't be rational because we know so very less, how can a person take rational decision in constraint partially observable space. This shapes our analytical part.

So my question is how much we should trust our brain ? Neither intuitive nor analytical part is controlled by us !

Firstly not trusting the brain in itself does more harm than good, as it gives way to paranoia and anxiety, and serves to be a very unhealthy mental disaster.

Secondly, there is much more to decision making in the brain than just intuition and the analytical part of function, as factors such as personality, perception stemming from the frontal , and gathered experiences and learned memory from the hippocampus work together as well and much more as the brain works in an integrated manner interlinking both conscious and subconscious aspects of the brain. But what the brain does best is learn from experiences, and it keeps doing so and the best way to maintaining a healthy life is to have a healthy brain, and a healthy brain demands trust and constant learning.

Thirdly recent evidences based on research suggest that the prefrontal cortex continues to get developed and shaped even until a person hits his 30’s while the other parts of brain continue to grow and develop which is where neuroplasticity also finds its role through out our life(Hötting & Röder, 2013).

If you guys want to further understand my comprehension,refer to this article, hope it was helpful:). Reference :
Hötting, K., & Röder, B. (2013). Beneficial effects of physical exercise on neuroplasticity and cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(9), 2243-2257. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.04.005
Mullally, S., & Maguire, E. (2013). Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future. The Neuroscientist, 20(3), 220-234. doi: 10.1177/1073858413495091


My Mind Shows Me My Future When I sleep, I can see some phenomenon as a dream. After some days or months or years that phenomenon happens in my life and forthwith my mind reminds me of that earlier dream that I saw. There are simple things such as for example getting down pen from my hand like wise.

My problem is how can this happen? I have heard this happens to others also. What kind of situation is this in the mind? Is it normal or abnormal?

It's a phenomenon called déjà rêvé, the French for "already dreamed":

If you've ever felt like you predicted something in a dream, you might have felt it wise to keep that feeling to yourself so that others don't think you're as out-there as an ancient oracle. Well, good news: you don't need to be so secretive about your psychic dreams. They're actually a well-documented phenomenon called déjà rêvé — but they don't actually mean you can see the future. [...]
According to a new study that looked back on the medical reports of epileptic patients from 1958 to 2015, déjà rêvé experiences are common after electric brain stimulation, a pretty standard treatment method for epileptic symptoms. It suggests that the "already dreamed" feeling is the result of something happening physiologically in the brain, and that in turn could point to a better understanding of how dreams work.  [...]
If you experience déjà rêvé, take comfort in knowing that it's totally normal — the feeling is just a harmless quirk of your brain.

And there's is actually a 2017 paper, on the occurrence in the general population; it looks like it happens to most peple at least some times:

Deja reve ('already dreamed') has been hypothesized as a cause for various forms of déjà experience. With deja reve one has the distinct impression that the uncanny familiarity one is sensing has come from a preceding dream, but one not usually remembered until the experience is taking place. In this exploratory investigation, 2,492 respondents filled out online questionnaires in which they were queried about the incidence of their deja reve experiences, about dream frequency, and about their attitudes to dreams. The Big Five personality factors were also measured using a separate, standardized questionnaire. Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence. The results of the Big Five personality factors are also presented.

Studies of déjà rêvé aren't very numerous however. The "new study" mentioned in that first popsci article distinguishes déjà-rêvé from déjà vu (basically déjà-rêvé elicits some specific dream/memory content, not mere impression of having seen something before) and proposes a further sub-classification:

Déjà-rêvé appears to be different from déjà-vu—the two must not be confused. By construction, all déjà-rêvé episodes we collected had content, which is not the case for déjà-vu. Furthermore, déjà-vu and déjà-rêvé never involved the same bipolar contacts in the instances when both could be induced by EBS [electric brain stimulation] in the same patient. These results are critical since they support the idea that déjà-rêvé is a true phenomenon, different from déjà-vu.
Moreover, déjà-rêvé is a generic term for distinct entities: recollection of a specific and detailed dream similar to an episodic memory, reminiscence of a vague dream or elements of dream(s) which feels familiar, and finally experiences that resemble or feel like what happens during dreams. Explicit content with mental imagery referring to a previous dream exists in the first two types, but the exactness of the details and contextual elements vary. In the third type, the content of the experience is not at the foreground, but the subject has the feeling of a known sensation or a state of consciousness similar to night dreaming. Only the first two types should be called déjà-rêvé, while the last type should be referred to as “dreamy state”.

They also discuss why  déjà-rêvé is apparently not simply a hallucination, basically because of the association of the phenomenon with electrode placement in memory- and dream-related brain regions:

It may be disputed that we cannot be sure that déjà-rêvé (episodic-like or familiarity-like) are linked to true previous dreams. EBS could simply produce a random combination of visual and auditory elements, creating phantasmagoric and unrealistic experiences similar to dreams. However, EBS-inducing déjà-rêvé were all located in the temporal lobes, although extratemporal brain areas were commonly stimulated [4]. They were also exclusively induced by medial temporal lobe EBS in our database. Thus, like other subtypes of experiential phenomena, specific locations of EBS seem to correlate with déjà-rêvé subtypes. This suggests it is improbable the déjà-rêvé we reported here are pure hallucinations, otherwise patients would have reported similar phenomena after stimulation of other brain areas. Furthermore, the brain regions implicated in déjà-rêvé include structures involved in long-term memory (especially in episodic memory and familiarity processes) [27, 28, 29], in memory formation during sleep [29], in normal dreaming [30,31] and probably in dream recall [32].


Is there a mental condition that makes people unconditionally gullible? The last several years in my country there has been a string of fraud that involves people, claiming to be police, asking citizens to contribute large sums of money to aid "police investigation".

The cases persist even though news about it is all over the place, leading me to presume that the whole operation might be targeting people that suffer from a specific mental condition.

When I was a child, there was this kid that you could trick literally any number times in a row, the same thing, in a sequence, just seconds apart, and it would fall for it each and every time. This memory leads me to presume that there is indeed such a condition, and that the aforementioned fraud operation targets people with that condition, so I was wondering if this kind of behavior is studied and documented.

EDIT: The answers so far focus on trust, which is understandable, since I did say "gullible", and it is an omission of my own that I didn't mention it in the initial post, but in many of those cases there is also an element of intimidation immediately prior to the request to "help catch the criminals", which probably plays a significant psychological role too, slightly expanding the context beyond just "unconditional unfounded trust".

Some neurodegenerative diseases cause extreme gullibility, in particular Alzheimer

  Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the scientists were able to determine which parts of the brain govern a person’s ability to identify sarcasm and lies.  The images revealed the associations between the deteriorations of particular parts of the brain and the inability to detect insincere speech.

  “These patients cannot detect lies,” said UCSF neuropsychologist Dr. Katherine Rankin, a member of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and the senior author of the study. “This fact can help them be diagnosed earlier.”

  The frontal lobes are strongly associated with complex, higher-order human thinking; thus being unable to detect a lie is only one of several ways the disease may manifest itself. Early symptoms may include any number of differences in behavior, including acting out in socially inappropriate ways or experiencing fundamental shifts in beliefs — changing political views or religions, for example.

As such brain-damage related phenomena, sometimes accidental or neurodevelopmental versions are found, but they are usually rarer.

Regarding the latter, Greenspan et al. (2001) have proposed that gullibiltiy be considered a defining characteristic of mental retardation, but their proposal is not mainstream:

  Recent efforts to redefine mental retardation (MR) have been based on the belief
  that invented scientific criteria, e.g., IQ and adaptive behavior, are insufficient to
  diagnose a disorder which over the centuries was diagnosed on the basis of intuitive
  prototypes (Greenspan, 1997). In this chapter, we argue that a central aspect of the
  MR prototype which has been largely overlooked in recent conceptualizations is
  a tendency toward unusual credulity and gullibility. In our view, it is credulity and
  gullibility, as much or more than deficiencies in daily living skills, which cause
  people with MR (and, for that matter, other forms of cognitive impairment) to be
  viewed as "disabled" and, perhaps, in need of protections such as conservatorship
  arrangements.

Their evidence (in that paper) is mostly in form of case report series rather than more systematic. A more systematic study was conducted by Sofronoff et al. (2011) on children with Asperger syndrome (AS). This choice of subjects had the advantage that IQ effects could be separated from social intelligence. Sofronoff et al. had devised a "Social Vulnerability Questionnaire" (fairly PC name) some 4 years prior, and it turned out they could even distinguish between gullibility and credulity using their instrument, a distinction inspired from Greenspan's ideas:

  Constructs related to deficits in social intelligence are credulity and
  gullibility. Greenspan, Loughlin and Black (2001) defined credulity as ‘a
  tendency to believe something, usually a highly questionable statement or
  claim, despite scanty evidence’ (p. 102) and gullibility as ‘a vulnerability
  to being tricked or manipulated’ (p. 102). The authors stated that the two
  constructs are very closely related in that the presence of credulity invariably
  leads to a gullible outcome and that, while a tendency to be trusting
  may generally be a good and stable attribute, survival in the social world
  requires an ability to discriminate those occasional situations where
  compliance or agreement may result in an adverse outcome. The authors
  state that low social intelligence and specifically high credulity and gullibility
  may lie at the heart of poor social outcomes for children and adults
  with AS (Greenspan et al., 2001).

  Table 1 shows the items
  and their factor loadings after rotation. The two factors relate to getting
  tricked into things or bullied (factor one) and believing others’ statements to their own detriment (factor two). A Pearson’s correlation revealed the two
  factors were moderately correlated with one another, r = .519, suggesting
  that while related they are different enough to be two distinct factors.

However despite this statistical feat, the number of Asperger's children who were outright identified as gullible as fairly low, around 11% of the sample; credulity was more widespread at 23%.

Given that the SVS questionnaire invited examples from the respondents (parents)  in order to substantiate their Likert scale choices, the authors could illustrate with some snippets:

  Other areas that were mentioned by more than
  10% of parents included credulity or deception:‘believes everything other kids say,
  even if it’s wrong’ and ‘has watched TV and insisted that we buy something because the
  salesmen said “you must buy this”’; [...]
  and gullibility ‘today J threw a girl’s hat on the school roof because another child told him
  to’ and ‘told to jump in the school fish pond’.

A 2018 paper by Seward et al. was rather skeptical of Sofronoff et al.'s claim of two clear factors in children; they could not replicate the finding using a different questionnaire:

  Specifically, the first factor (gullibility) contained
  victimisation items and the second factor contained
  both credulity and gullibility items. Consequently, these
  findings raise doubt as to whether the two-factor conceptualisation
  of social vulnerability described by Greenspan
  et al. (2001) is applicable to children.

  The two-factor
  conceptualisation of social vulnerability (i.e., credulity and
  gullibility) proposed by Greenspan et al. (2001) did not
  emerge in the current study, even when a two-factor solution
  was forced, despite having items clearly representing
  both credulity and gullibility and a large sample with considerable
  variability. Rather, our results indicate that credulity
  and gullibility are part of the same factor, suggesting that
  the theoretical conceptualisation of social vulnerability
  described by Greenspan et al. (2001) is not applicable to
  children. It is possible that, for children, social vulnerability
  is a unitary construct, and that as individuals develop,
  the construct becomes more complex and delineates into
  two factors (credulity and gullibility) as seen in older adults
  (Pinsker et al., 2011). Further research conducted across the
  lifespan will be required to determine if this is in fact the
  case.

However Seward et al. did find something else of interest (again proposed by Greenspan) namely that gullibility/credulity wasn't the same thing as general weakness in social skill altogether:

  Furthermore, the weak negative relationship between parent
  reports of social vulnerability and prosocial behaviour
  indicates that being socially vulnerable is not simply having
  a lack of social skills, providing support for discriminant
  validity. This is consistent with Greenspan et al. (2001)
  who suggested that poor social skills are likely to contribute
  to (but are not the same thing as) being deceived
  or cheated

Regarding William's syndrome; the actual systematic research on this looks somewhat limited to me. Wikipedia does indeed claim that they are unusually trusting... but what the actual papers citedy say is...

Dykens &  Rosner:

  Interest in other were seen as well in the Help Others domain, with both the Williams and Prader-Willi groups showing "strong desires to help others" and being "very happy when others do well". The Williams syndrome group, however was singularly high in the item "feels terrible when others are hurt".

Udwin et al.

  overanxious to please and constantly seeking reassurance of satisfactory progress (34%)

Einfeldad et al. don't actually have any findings of their own in this respect, but cite Gosh an Pankau for

  higher levels of indiscriminate friendliness

One can presumably manipulate people with Williams by playing this card... I guess this qualifies as gullible to some degree, although perhaps not as credulity. All the papers cited in Wikipedia on this are pretty old (all predate Greenspan's 2001) so maybe it's a matter of terminology. Greenspan et al. offer some commentary:

  Reis (1998), in a study of young adult women with Williams
  syndrome--a chromosomal disorder associated with mild or borderline MR---
  found that virtually 100% of them had been sexually abused by male peers or
  workers. Dykens (1998), confirming this finding, has attributed it to the extreme need to please which is an aspect of the Williams syndrome behavioral phenotype.
  While such affective and motivational factors undoubtedly are very important (see
  the multidimensional model depicted in Fig. 1), it should not be assumed that
  social-cognitive factors, such as credulity, are irrelevant. There is considerable
  research (Dykens & Hodapp, 1998; Rourke, 1995) suggesting that social deficits
  in people with various syndromes are typically more significant than their academic
  deficits. Furthermore, the tendency to think of social competence primarily in terms
  of agreeableness may blind observers to the very real social intelligence deficits
  of individuals (such as most people with Williams syndrome) who are extremely
  affable and verbally facile.

And about the news stories... scamming the average person by phone is easy enough without access to health records and the like. The Bulgarian cases reminded me of the Taiwanese located in Spain or even Kenya scamming mainland Chinese with a scheme in which a caller pretend to be police asking for help.

For contrast, Greenspan in his 2009 book has a vignette of someone with Williams syndrome... and it's much more extreme... most people can't be convinced to leave their home and sleep under a bridge:

  Larry’s need for support [from a neighborhood association] stemmed from his extreme gullibility, and the
  threat that this posed on numerous occasions to his wellbeing. Specifically,
  Larry—who lived alone—was very lonely, and he tended to befriend homeless
  people living on the street. He would give them keys so that they could use
  his bathroom or sleep in his apartment, would agree to give them money
  (when he barely had enough to make it through the month), and was even
  persuaded, until someone intervened, to run off to live under the boardwalk at
  Coney Island with one of his homeless friends. Aside from the costs to Larry
  (such as having his meager possessions repeatedly ripped off ), the presence
  of these strangers in the building—many of them with criminal backgrounds
  or severe mental illness—was very upsetting to Larry’s neighbors, who feared
  both physical damage to the building (e.g., a shower left running in Larry’s
  apartment caused major water damage) and for their own safety. Thus, the
  decision by Larry’s neighbors to create a “circle of friends” was motivated not
  only out of affection for him but also because they saw it as an alternative to
  his eviction (which had been considered at one time) and as a way to protect
  themselves and Larry from his own gullibility, a gullibility that reflected his
  cognitive limitations as well as his strong social neediness.

On the other hand, older people are apparently more susceptible to scams:

  “When emotionally aroused, either excited or frustrated, older adults may be more susceptible to being victimized by scammers than are younger individuals,” says Ian H. Gotlib, professor of psychology and author of a new report from the Center on Longevity at Stanford University.

This gives a much simpler way for scammers to profile their targets.

  Studies show that the elderly – individuals aged 60 and over – are targeted more frequently
  by financial fraud and scams than other age groups. A recent MetLife Study of Elder and
  Financial Abuse found that in 2010, $2.9 billion (yes, that’s billion with a B) was stolen from the
  elderly through financial fraud, scams, and exploitation. Additionally, research conducted by the
  Federal Trade Commission found that 80% of telemarketing scam victims are over the age of 60.


Where can I study cognitive science - long distance program? Just recently discovered the field of cognitive science. The more i read, the more I discover how complex this is. I would love to study this and be able to find out that specific segment for me and then develop it. In Romania (where I live) this is not a developped domain. I would like to study abroad but I could not afford moving for 1 year in another country. In case you can recomment short term workshops in Europe i would very much appreciate it.

There are a huge array of options here depending on the sophistication of the course you are looking for.

I would suggest for a free option starting with MIT, they provide a large range of modules online associated with psychology and neuroscience (please see the attached link) with videos of the lectures they have conducted within the university. A wonderful starting point in my opinion.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/

The british geoscience association also list a number of online courses here, however these are often more biologically focused than cognitive in nature. Most the short courses are less than £70.

There is also a range of courses on coursera provided by various universities, which will provide you with accreditation for the courses, here is a list.

As for workshops, they tend to be relatively expensive as most are provided for post-grads, many of which are working with individuals conducting neuroimaging studies as part of MSc or PhD projects and beyond. These are only really helpful when you start conducting studies. You can find many courses listed here on the British Neuroscience Associations website (the courses are based across many European countries).

I hope you enjoy your journey into what I believe is the most exciting area of scientific investigation. I would add one piece of advice, make sure you develop a good back ground in research methods and statistics (both are equally important) as this is what helps you to understand if research is good or bad, along with developing your own research skills for the future. Here is a basic but free starting point, I would recommend something with more advance statistical methods for going further.

Hope that helps.


How beneficial is attending a funeral in the process of grieving and why? Is there any established literature that indicates that attending a funeral aids in the grieving process? I would like to know if funerals pay a critical role in the grieving process and what makes them important.

So I had a quick look into your question (not my area). It turns out there is long established  journal called "Death Studies" that focuses specifically on "bereavement and loss, grief therapy, death attitudes, suicide, and death education".

From a quick search on Google Scholar for "funerals grieving", I found an article by  Romanoff (1998) that looked like it might provide a starting point. That said, it's not especially empirical (i.e., it is not an RCT evaluating the effectiveness of funeral attendance).

For example, to quote the text:

  Funeral rituals are symbolic enactments that provide meaning- ful and affirming experiences for the bereaved. Funeral rituals mediate the transition of the deceased from life to death, and mediate the transition of the bereaved from one social status to another (Pine, 1989). They provide opportunities for the public display of grief, structures for the delimitation of grief, vehicles for affirming the relationship of the deceased to the community, and
  the continuity of the community in his or her absence (Fulton, 1988) . During this time of transition, members of the social group tend to the bereaved in an outpouring of human support that tran- scends social status ( Turner, 1969) . Postfuneral bereavement rituals, while rare in American culture (McGoldrick et al., 1991), provide structure to the grieving and full incorporation into a new social status ( Goldberg, 1981) .

References

Romanoff, B. D. (1998). Rituals and the grieving process. Death studies, 22(8), 697-711.


Regarding the mind and what it can affect About the question 'Can the mind mind affect the brain?': Some responses are 'no' because the mind is a physical 'thing' or structure (if I read it correctly). Yet if the Mind is only a physical structure why couldn't the mind affect the brain if they are both physical systems? The brain, the physical system regarding active neural excitation events and the mind, the physical system dealing with the manipulation and organization of 'established' patterns of neural-signalling. The 'higher-level' organization of the physical system, the mind, could manipulate or alter the physical system called the brain.

The question that you are referring to is worded in a way that I think is leading to the confusion. The question in the title is "Can the mind affect the brain?" but in the question body the final question posed is "Does [a thought producing a tear] not contradict the (physical) law of cause and effect?".

The answer is yes to the title question: the mind can affect the brain. The answer is no to the question posed in the body: it is not a contradiction of the law of cause and effect because the mind is a physical entity.

So you are exactly right, that the two are mutually interactive.


Paper discussing economic rationale of IQ-based hiring practices TL;DR

I'm looking for a paper that explicitly quantifies the ROI an employer would likely derive if personnel selection involved intelligence testing and only those +2 SD in cognitive ability were hired.

There's a correlation between IQ and job performance, ranging from .20s for low complexity jobs and .50 for high complexity jobs. Hardly unity (r = 1.00) but regardless, it's still considered to be the best predictor of job performance.

A number of years ago as an undergrad I read a paper discussing the economic rationale of an employer administering an IQ test and only selecting candidates who scored +2 SD above the mean. From the pool of candidates remaining, the employer would then interview for the best candidate as per usual. The author's thinking was along the following lines:

Suppose you had a group of employees who you were paying an annual salary of \$100,000 and their productivity was normally distributed between say, \$100,000 - \$300,000 (mean = $200,000).
By selecting those who are +2 SD in cognitive ability, the employer would increase the chances that those who are hired will return them closer to $300,000 per year.
Total economic gain = Number of employees x Increased return ($) x Duration of tenure

This topic is relevant to a publication I'm preparing and I've been racking my brain trying to find it. For the life of me I simply cannot find it.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Ideally, I'd like the specific one that I'm mentioning, but failing that, something in a similar vein. Essentially: suppose you hired only those >130 IQ -- regardless of the rightfulness/wrongfulness of doing so, what I want to know is what the $ amount benefit to the employer would be.

I believe I know which paper you're referring to. My guess is the widely cited Schmidt & Hunter (1998) paper. The paper summarizes 85 years of practical and theoretical implications of research in personnel selection. To see that they address what you're asking for, here is a quote from the paper

  If a superior worker is defined as one whose performance (output) is at the 84th percentile (that is, 1 SD above the mean), then a superior
  worker in a lower level job produces 19% more output than an
  average worker, a superior skilled worker produces 32% more
  output than the average skilled worker, and a superior manager
  or professional produces output 48% above the average for those
  jobs. These differences are large and they indicate that the payoff
  from using valid hiring methods to predict later job performance
  is quite large.

Then later they state

  At one extreme, if an organization must hire all who
  apply for the job, no hiring procedure has any practical value.
  At the other extreme, if the organization has the luxury of hiring
  only the top scoring 1%, the practical value of gains from selection
  per person hired will be extremely large. But few organizations
  can afford to reject 99% of all job applicants.

However, a more recent paper on the subject has been published. That's the Schmidt, Oh & Shaffer (2016), which summarizes 100 years of practical and theoretical implications of research in personnel selection. This paper is an update on the former, so you may as well just look only at this latest one.


Is there evidence to suggest that receiving angry emails increases stress levels? There are plenty of helpful descriptions of how to avoid angry emails. The reasoning is largely that it doesn't solve the problem. That is, sending an email whilst angry causes more problems for you than it solves.

But what about the recipient? Logically and analytically we know that people don't respond well to an emotive email. But is there statistical or experimental evidence of the changes in brain/body state (or behaviour) that occur when people receive emotive emails?

My question is: Is there evidence to suggest that receiving angry emails increases stress levels?

The reaction to an angry email is just the same as reacting to any angry comment (verbal or written). It is usually seen as a provocation and triggers the urge to retaliate or invoke self-defense. The mental stress is a consequence of this situation. Often this stress is transient.

I have no nowledge of any documented evidence of stress or the level and duration of the same.


What human limitations are there to object tracking and recognition? I'm thinking about trying to implement object recognition/tracking using a silicon retina (also known as the Dynamic Vision Sensor) and using the Semantic Pointer Architecture as my cognitive model. However, I want to make sure that it is biologically plausible, that is it respects the experimental limitations observed with human subjects.

Consequently, what human limitations on object tracking and recognition have been observed?

I think you will want to look into ecological psychological models for perception.

Some cornerstones include 'the gorila study' show inattentional blindness

Others are among the many sub-phenomenon with Persistence of Vision studies, many of which now focus on the a concept called Iconic Memory.  These matters deal with misapprehension of (usually incomplete) visual stimuli due to the action of cognition to create a meaningful recogition (e.g. probably what is 'ready for encoding / memory').  This also generally covers the phenomenology where we receive too-few stilimuli (objects moving too fast), and must cognize the available information to create meaning.

Here are a few good perspectives on human vision.  This is far from being a comprehensive set of human vision limitations, but if you dig into their references, you will find much of the community that studies this topic.

Shaffer, D., Dolgov, I., Maynor, A., & Kelly, K. (in press). Blind(fold)ed by science:
A constant target-heading angle is used in visual and nonvisual pursuit.
Psychological Science.
Schwark, J., Sandry, J., McDonald, J., & Dolgov, I. (2012). False feedback in vigilance
tasks. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 74, 1583-1589
Dolgov, I., McBeath, M., & Sugar, T. (2009). Evidence for axis-aligned motion
bias: Football axis-trajectory misalignment causes systematic error in projected
final destinations of thrown American footballs. Perception, 38(3), 399-410.

(source / disclosure, I know some of the authors of the above papers)


What do brains do when processing information, that Von Neumann machines cannot (yet?) imitate? What makes a human processing information so different from a set of instructions in a computer? Solving a problem for any human operating with concepts is still much superior to lots of computer processing. I fail to verbalize what this 'extra' capability is. I just see the result when observing humans solving problems, but what is the mechanism that allows humans to process differently.

I'm taking your question to be equivalent to "how does the human brain differ from a computer?".  Indeed, it's well-established that humans outperform computers in a large number of contexts, but it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why this is.  The best answer you'll get is one that outlines how the two computational systems differ.
Let me start with three obvious differences, which IMHO are the most important:

Brains are analog machines, whereas computers are digital.  This means that brains can apply any number of continuous, non-linear transforms to solve problems.  If you're mathematically or programmatically inclined, here's a wonderful paper that demonstrates how a brain can elegantly and efficiently discriminate between two stimulus frequencies (supplementary materials here if you want to mess with the code yourself).

Brains are good at fuzzy-logic and uncertainty.  Contrary to computers, brain activity can "evoke" or "activate to varying degrees" similar representations.  Intuitively, you can think of this as local activation spreading to adjacent areas (although this is a gross oversimplification).  On a more cognitive level, this enables things such as semantic priming to be implemented quite naturally, whereas this is horrifyingly complex with digital computers.

Synaptic connections are much, much, much, much, much more complex than logic gates.  Synaptic connections can be reinforced and inhibited on either end of the cleft (presynaptic or post-synaptic).  Moreover, the dynamic nature of synaptic connections allows for some interesting emergent properties such as mutual inhibition, or the formation of multiple iso/nullclines in firing rates via more complex interactions (see the Machens et al. paper I linked to in point 1).

With this having been said, let me reiterate the point I made in my previous comment.  Human brains have cognition, in the true sense.  This alone makes them able to solve problems that other systems can't.  To use your own words, humans have conceptual reasoning, whereas computers do not... which is to say the answer was in your question to begin with.
EDIT:
To expand on what is admittedly a not-very-useful last paragraph, it seems as though you are conflating concept and representation.  A concept implies conceptual knowledge, which is simply non-applicable to a non-cognizant system.  As to how the representations differ, this is where point 2 is relevant.  In this case, the representation of a face evokes activation corresponding to various related representations (e.g. on the semantic level).  Importantly, this "spillover" occurs by the very nature of the system -- it's not something that's artificially tacked on.
It's the relationship between your representation, other representations, and the sensorimotor system ("self") that arguably constitute a concept.

References:
Fletcher, P. C., Shallice, T., Frith, C. D., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Dolan, R. J. (1996). Brain activity during memory retrieval The influence of imagery and semantic cueing. Brain, 119(5), 1587-1596.
Machens, C. K., Romo, R., & Brody, C. D. (2005). Flexible control of mutual inhibition: a neural model of two-interval discrimination. Science, 307(5712), 1121-1124.


What study examined the effect of number of traumatic life events on falling into poverty? I recall a study that concluded the risk of falling into poverty / homelessness increases dramatically after experiencing 5 (or 7?) traumatic life events, such as

Death of a loved one
Abandonment by spouse
Bankruptcy
Being fired
Foreclosure

etc (a threshold effect). That's about as clear a memory as I can form, and search engines don't help. Anybody know about this study? It might have been from New Zealand.

This effect was identified in a report by the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development (Jensen et al., 2006). It specifically indicated that individuals experiencing eight or more "life shocks" (negative life events) experienced significantly more negative socioeconomic outcomes.

This effect is referenced on Wikipedia's Cycle of Poverty page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty), which links to a news story on the report (Berry, 2006) and the report itself.

A summary of the report's findings were later published in an academic journal (Jensen et al., 2007).

Berry, R. (2006, July 12). "Life shocks" tip people into hardship.
The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10390891
Jensen, J., Krishnan, V., Hodgson, R., Sathiyandra, S., Templeton,
R., Jones, D., ... & Beynon, P. (2006). New Zealand Living Standards
2004 Ngā Āhuatanga Noho o Aotearoa. Wellington: Ministry of Social      Development. Retrieved from:
http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webcontent/document/pdf/living-standards-2004.pdf
Jensen, J., Sathiyandra, S., & Matangi-Want, M. (2007). The 2004 New
Zealand Living Standards Survey: What does it signal about the importance of multiple disadvantage?. Social Policy Journal of New  Zealand, 30, 110-144.


Which computer video games can improve intelligence, barring Medal of Honor? Source: Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009). p. 49.

    We have every reason to believe that these sorts of visual exercises actually improve fluid-intelligence skills and the executive functions that underlie them, including working memory and control of attention. Researchers have shown, for example, that video-game players can attend to more things at once than can nonplayers. Video-game players can also ignore irrelevant stimuli more effectively than nonplayers and can see objects in a broader visual field than nonplayers. To make sure that what they have observed of computer-game players is not just a self-selection effect (with the fluid IQ hotshots being the ones most likely to play computer games in the first place), the researchers had non- players learn a game—Medal of Honor [emboldening mine]—that they thought would teach the attention-control skills of their video-game players, and had other nonplayers play a computer game that the researchers did not believe would be capable of teaching attention control, namely, Tetris. Subjects played the computer games for an hour a day for ten days. At the end of the period, Medal of Honor players did better on the attention-control tasks than did Tetris players.

Exclude Medal of Honor that's already cited overhead.

This paper by Shams, Foussias, et al. (2015) gives a good meta-analysis of studies that have been conducted on the effects of video games on intelligence. Some games described as improving cognition were:

Super Mario 64:

  "Significant increase in gray matter volume in the right HC, right DLPFC, and bilateral cerebellum in the video game group compared to the control group"

Tetris:

  "Puzzle game group improved in attention and visuo-spatial ability"

Starcraft and The Sims 2 (female subjects):

  "Games that emphasize rapid switching between multiple information sources led to a significant increase in cognitive flexibility"

There's many other games covered in this paper, displaying a variety of cognitive and neuroanomatical changes in subjects who played them regularly for a somewhat extended period of time (typically 1-2 months).

Additionally:

  "A number of structural imaging studies have found that video game play can alter brain structure, especially gray matter volume. These studies have typically analyzed a particular video game or video game type. The most commonly studied category in the last few years has been complex strategy games such as Super Mario 64 or Space Fortress..." (emphasis added by me)

Reference:

Shams, T. A., Foussias, G., Zawadzki, J. A., Marshe, V. S., Siddiqui, I., Müller, D. J., & Wong, A. H. (2015). The Effects of Video Games on Cognition and Brain Structure: Potential Implications for Neuropsychiatric Disorders. Current Psychiatry Reports, 17(9). doi:10.1007/s11920-015-0609-6


What's the difference between a Hamming and Hopfield network? I have recently discovered that both Hamming and Hopfield networks are both content addressable memories. However, what is the difference between these two networks designs and their performance?

Hopfield and Hamming networks are older connectionist networks used to classify noisy binary input data.

Hopfield networks are the basis for Hamming networks, so let's focus on those first.

A Hopfield network is a set of neurons that do classification via mutual inhibition, as shown in the figure below from Wikipedia:

Note the neurons are not like your typical biologically plausible neurons, they have two states "+1" and "-1". Their update rule, which forces them into an output pattern, enables these two states.

A Hamming network is a two-layer network, as shown in this figure (taken from here) where the data is flowing from the bottom:

As you can see, the second layer, sometimes called the MaxNet layer, is identical to the Hopfield Network, however the input layer resembles a classic single-layer perceptron. This single-layer perceptron is train according to the Hamming Distances of the inputs.

Performance wise, as shown in the conclusion "A Comparison of Hamming and Hopfield
Neural Nets for Pattern Classification" by Lippmann et al., Hamming nets generally out-perform Hopfield nets.


Is there research to prove that humans achieve more when challenging ourselves or when we challenge others? Given that there is a single player game, let's say, Tetris. I play the game for 5 days and my friend is also playing the game for 5 days. At the end of the 5 days we would like to see who has the highest score and that person wins some prize.

Is it better that we see the scores of our opponent and try to better it, or is better that I do not see my friend's score and focus on just constantly beating my own score?

Which of the 2 scenarios is likely to yield the higher score at the end of the 5 days? And why?

I'm doing some research on gamification and how competition can help us progress a skill.

Generally, being observed raises performance on simple tasks and can hinder performance on complex tasks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation

For trivia, notice that the experiment widely regarded to be the first in social psychology was of observed vs. unobserved cycling. Being watched made people cycling faster: https://www.simplypsychology.org/Social-Facilitation.html excerpt:

  "According to Cottrell (1968), it’s not the presence of other people that is important for social facilitation to occur but the apprehension about being evaluated by them. We know that approval and disapproval are often dependent on others’ evaluations and so the presence of others triggers an acquired arousal drive based on evaluation anxiety."


Who first used the term 'filter' in cognitive science context? Donald Broadbent's 1958 book Perception and Communication is the oldest work I can find that makes use of this term.

However, I wonder if perhaps someone else had used the term earlier, or if Broadbent had used the term in published work before that date.

Colin Cherry coined the phrase the Cocktail party effect to describe the ability for people to tune or filter out distraction and focus on one thing; the illustration being able to focus on a conversation amidst all the background noise at a cocktail party.

Broadbent's filter model of attention  was developed from Cherry's work proposing the concept filtering information. Cherry first used the idea of a filter.  Broadbent was the first person to officially coin the term filter as it is used within this context and within a cognitive model.


Does Big 5 measure preferences for physical activity? While working on my amateur studies on personality differences, I use both Big 5 and MBTI to map traits. Using the MBTI theories I can fairly easy recognize the "Sensing" personalities, those who prefer experience and physical activities above philosophy and creativity.

Trying to map MBTI to Big 5 I suddenly realised I have no idea how the Sensing trait correlates with Big 5 traits.
So my question is: Do these preferences show in Big 5? If so, where?

For a quick description on Sensing personalities, see http://www.gradschools.com/get-informed/before-you-apply/choosing-what-study/sensing-and-intuition-meyers-briggs-type-indicator-mbti )

One study found a slight correlation between physical activity and extraversion (r = 0.23), neuroticism (r = −0.11) and conscientiousness (r = 0.20), though the results were relatively inconclusive. Another study found that physically active individuals ranked slightly higher on all scales except for neuroticism. A third study found correlations between all traits except agreeableness, with neuroticism being the only negatively correlated trait. [1]

Though not every study showed replicable and statistically significant result, they do seem to agree that neuroticism is negatively correlated with physical activity. Among the Big 5, the trait with the highest positive correlation tended to be extroversion, though by a marginal amount at best.

To be fair, I'm not sure if there is a trait that explains 'those who prefer experience and physical activities above philosophy and creativity'. A facility for philosophy and creativity is highly correlated with openness to experience on the Big 5 model. The contrast to this (according to the model) is not an inclination towards the sensate; rather, people with low scores on openness tend to have more conventional, traditional interests, and thus tend to prefer the plain, straightforward, and obvious over the complex, ambiguous, and subtle. [2]

What I think that you are describing is a trait that can be used to describe those who prefer to engage in external activities (sports, physical recreation, external experiences) over internal ones (philosophy, creative abstraction). Based on the evidence above, it would be reasonable to assume that there is no one 'trait' to describe this phenomenon, but rather the contrast is made more evident the higher in extroversion and the lower in openness that a person may be, compared to someone of the opposite temperament.

Sources:

[1] Kathryn E. Wilson, Rodney K. Dishman. (2014) Personality and physical activity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

[2] McCrae, R.R.; Costa, P.T.; Jr (1987). "Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1): 81–90.


What percentage of those diagnosed with schizophrenia didn't have brain abnormalities? Scientists in a wide study of subcortical brain abnormalities from the ENIGMA Consortium, Schizophrenia Working Group, published in Molecular Psychiatry, analyzed the brain scans of more than 2,000 people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I doubt diagnosis is 100% accurate, so I'm thinking a percentage of those diagnosed didn't have abnormalities. What is that percentage? (There is a table in the Molecular Psychiatry article, with information which might or might not be related to my question, but I don't know how to read it).

This ENIGMA study did not assess brain abnormalities at an individual level. Rather, it examined if the volumes of a range of subcortical brain structures differed between patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects at the group level, using a meta-analytic approach. The term "brain abnormalities" might be misleading in this context: The study was not about the type of brain abnormalities that would be detectable by a neuroradiological exam (for a study focusing on this, see Sommer et al, 2013, Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi: 10.1093.schbul.sbs037). It is therefore not possible to determine the percentage of patients who had brain abnormalities from the study.


Are there connections between some properties in peoples faces and their behavior? I hear a lot of people making inferences about others based on their faces, but that's common sense. Are there really properties that could be deduced from ones face?

There is some research in the realm of sex differences and hormonal effects of aggression. The hypothesis meant by that is not so much the rather obvious one that male faces reliably cue "male" behaviour; although that is an important fact. For example, if a person has a beard, they are much more likely to be sexually attracted to women than to men. However, perhaps more in response to the intent than the phrasing of the question, researchers have speculated that "sexually dimorphic facial width-to-height ratio may be an 'honest signal' of propensity for aggressive behaviour". The idea behind this is that a common component, testosterone, underlies and causes both wide, masculine faces and aggressive behaviour.

I personally am not yet convinced of the reliability of this research - for example, in the progress of this research programme, more and more mediators are discovered, which by some might be interpreted to indicate an unreliable finding. However, the basic concept seems to be what you're looking for.

More generally, for now, even the linkage between hormones or neuroanatomy on one hand, and behaviour on the other hand is rarely clear, reliable and strong. Few of the variance in behaviour can be expected to be read off of facial configurations.


Is there a complete connectome of a minicolumn of the neocortex? I know that there are projects that try to map brain connectivity. My question is whether there is a dataset available with the complete connectivity of just a single minicolumn of the neocortex. Doesn't have to be human.

Unfortunately not. The closest publication would be Lee et al 2016, which is a reconstruction of a network of functionally-characterised neurons in mouse V1. They state the data "will be available" at neurodata; currently only the EM dataset appears to be there, and not the correspondence with functional imaging. I encourage you to contact them for the data set.

Alternatively, there are functional measurements and small networks available from mouse visual cortex Cossell et al. 2015 (self-cite; data available on request); and anatomical statistical measurements available from rat somatosensory cortex Markram et al. 2016 (data available from NMC).


Is reading from the screen more difficult than reading from paper and how can screen reading be made easier? I've noticed that as a student when reading material, there is a choice between reading from the screen or reading from paper.
When reading from paper I find that I concentrate more and that  comprehension is  much better. I can partially memorize the material rather than reading from screen. In addition, I find reading from screen is more tiring. When I feel tired reading from the screen I often print to paper, and it provides relief.

Questions

Does research support this observation that reading from paper results in less strain and greater comprehension?
Are there any techniques to improve reading from screen?

Research would suggest that reading from (well printed) paper is easier; due to ease of making annotations, navigation and the lower risk of eye strain that can be caused from VDUs.

There are ways to minimise potential eye strain on VDUs, due to lighting and positioning.

Friendly User Interfaces would ease navigation, and the development of new technologies for monitors, would assist in visual acuity and reduction in potential eye strain and problems associated with glare.

  We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to
  reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major
  advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick
  navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow
  readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of
  its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other
  documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design
  implications of these findings for the development of better reading
  technologies.

A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
Kenton O'Hara & Abigail Sellen
Rank Xerox Research Centre (EuroPARC)
61 Regent St.
Cambridge, CB2 1AB, U.K.

  The advent of widespread computer use in general and increasing
  developments in the domain of hypertext in particular have increased
  awareness of the issue of reading electronic text. To date the
  literature has been dominated by reference to work on overcoming speed
  deficits resulting from poor image quality but an emerging literature
  reveals a more complex set of variables at work. The present review
  considers the differences between the media in terms of outcomes and
  processes of reading and concludes that single variable explanations
  are insufficient to capture the range of issues involved in reading
  from screens.

Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature
Ergonomics
Volume 35, Issue 10, 1992

Proof-reading: VDU and paper text compared for speed, accuracy and fatigue
Behaviour & Information Technology
Volume 6, Issue 2, 1987

Visual strain during VDU work: the effect of viewing distance and dark focus
Ergonomics
Volume 31, Issue 10, 1988


What would this dream mean? Alright, so last night I had a dream about someone being murdered in my apartment, basically the floor right above me, and there's this guy who always plays loud music and throws stuff out his window (I'm guessing he's distressed), what would this mean?

Dreams don't always make sense, nor do they always have to make sense, although founder of the psychoanalytic field Sigmund Freud believed in dream interpretation: that dreams have a manifest content (literally what goes on in the dream) and a latent content (symbolic, not-initially-apparent meaning of the dream). It's worth noting there's no scientific evidence to back this up, and it's just something Freud believed.

In the case of your dream, it could simply be that your mind associated your neighbor's aggression/distress with a display of aggression (homicide) and somehow connected the two in one dream. Freud would probably argue something along the lines of "Your repressed anger or frustration towards this individual manifests itself in the form of a dream in which he is murdered". Don't overthink this, and don't think your dream means anything bad. Dreams can be pretty bizarre.