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Psychology and The Brain

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R. D. Laing Quotes. R. D. Laing. Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label.[2] Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.[3] Early years[edit] Laing was born in the Govanhill district of Glasgow on 7 October 1927, the only child of David Park MacNair Laing and Amelia Glen Laing (née Kirkwood).[4] Laing described his parents – his mother especially – as being somewhat odd. Career[edit] Laing and anti-psychiatry[edit] Did You Used to be R.D. Laing ? (Full Documentary)

Do Rats Know When They Don’t Know? | Science Blogs. Photo: Alexey Krasavin, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. Humans are masters of metacognition: thinking about thinking. We can evaluate what we know and what we don’t know. If you don’t know how to get somewhere, you Google directions. When studying for a test, you have an idea of which material you’re most unsure of and devote more time to it. Psychologists studying human metacognition usually rely on self-reports. One such behavioral indicator is information seeking: If an animal doesn’t know the correct response, will it take appropriate action to seek out the information that it needs?

In studies with rhesus monkeys, apes, and two-year-old children, experimenters placed several opaque tubes horizontally in front of the subjects. A-Maze-ing Rats Most of the evidence for metacognition in animals comes from studies with primates. In their first experiment, Roberts and his colleagues trained rats to press a lever at the central point in a T-maze. Reference: Kirk, C.

Understanding Dreaming

Diana Deutsch - Illusions and Research. Introduction The following entries describe and illustrate some of Deutsch’s illusions of music and speech. Many of them show that people can differ strikingly in the way they hear very simple musical patterns. These disagreements do not reflect variations in musical ability or training. Even the finest musicians, on listening to the stereo illusions described here, may disagree completely as to whether a high tone is being played to their right ear or to their left. How do we explain these striking perceptual discrepancies?

Another theme that runs through these illusions concerns relationships between music and speech. Other illusions, such as Phantom Words, and Mysterious Melody, as well as the stereo illusions referred to above, point to the strong influence of our knowledge, beliefs, and expectations on how we perceive speech and music. The illusions described here lead us to wonder what other curiosities of music perception might exist that have not yet been discovered.

Topographical disorientation. Topographical Disorientation, also known as Topographical agnosia and Topographagnosia, is the inability to orient oneself in one's surroundings as a result of focal brain damage.[1] This disability may result from the inability to make use of selective spatial information (e.g., environmental landmarks) or to orient by means of specific cognitive strategies such as the ability to form a mental representation of the environment, also known as a cognitive map. It may be part of a syndrome known as visuospatial dysgnosia. Classification[edit] Topographical Disorientation is the inability to orient in the surrounding as a result of focal brain damage.[1] Topographical Disorientation has been studied for decades using case studies of patients who have selectively lost their ability to find their way within large-scale, locomotor environments. Several dozen case reports of topographical disorientation have been presented over the last century.

Developmental Topographical Disorientation[edit] Trust Me. This is what trust looks like inside your head. In the late 1930s, a teenaged boy named Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. ran away from his family home in Lawrence, Mass., to embark upon an extraordinary career of deception that earned his the nickname "The Great Imposter. " Over the next couple of decades, Demara managed to pass himself off as a college psychology professor, a Catholic priest, a high school teacher, and even as a Canadian Royal Navy surgeon who was trusted to perform delicate operations. How did Demara, who had no qualifications for any of these jobs, manage to convince other people to believe in him and trust him with lofty responsibilities? Judging from photographs, Demara's biggest asset—besides his high intelligence and brazenness—may have been his appearance. And as it turns out, evaluating facial features generally is a fairly effective way to make a quick judgment about whether or not a person is worthy of trust.

How Trust Happens in Your Brain psychologist Vikram K. PsychTronics. 10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of... and When You Experienced Them. Psycholinguistics - What language, if any, do deaf people think in? - Linguistics Beta - Stack Exchange. Steven Pinker (in The Language Instinct, 1995) suggested a name for the language that people "think in": mentalese.

This language, of course, is not a real language and it only vaguely resembles the actual languages that people speak or sign. On the other hand, it is universal; every human being is born with it. His argument is that no natural language could possibly serve as a good medium for reasoning, for several reasons: ambiguity, lack of logical explicitness, co-reference, deixis and synonymy. In his own words: People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. The same argument can, of course, be applied to deaf-mute people, even to those who have never learned any language at all. This is what cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists call "computational" or "representational" theory of mind, according to which, what takes place in the mind is a mere manipulation of symbols, much like a computer, hence the name.

Explanation: How Brain Training Can Make You Significantly Smarter. How to Plant Ideas in Someone's Mind. 5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness. Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know. But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want.

We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain... #5. So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald's, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you're going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood... hopefully. "SLEEEEEEEEEP... uh...

What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? Holy Shit!