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How to Read Someone’s Mind | Reading someone's mind Reading someone’s mind through telepathy has a long and legendary history. But if you want to have this ability too, you may have to rethink what mind reading is. If you envision closing your eyes and having someone from across a stage project their thoughts into yours, so that you can “hear what they’re thinking,” you are out of luck. People claim to be able to do this but they don’t teach their methods to anyone. Cold Reading is actually a set of techniques developed to give the appearance of reading someone’s mind.

Sounds pretty cool, huh? The next step is to profile your subject. You may know next to nothing about the person in front of you, and you don’t need to—they will give you the secrets about themselves without realizing they are, if you ask questions about them in such a way that they appear to be statements. Telepathy Most of the time, your subjects will supply more information than necessary from these question-statements. How the Brain Stops Time. One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? Eight Ways to Spot Emotional Manipulation. Eight Ways to Spot Emotional Manipulation. Halo Effect. The idea that global evaluations about a person bleed over into judgements about their specific traits. The ‘halo effect’ is a classic finding in social psychology. It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

Hollywood stars demonstrate the halo effect perfectly. Because they are often attractive and likeable we naturally assume they are also intelligent, friendly, display good judgement and so on. In the same way politicians use the ‘halo effect’ to their advantage by trying to appear warm and friendly, while saying little of any substance. But you would think we could pick up these sorts of mistaken judgements by simply introspecting and, in a manner of speaking, retrace our thought processes back to the original mistake. Likeability of lecturers Nisbett and Wilson wanted to examine the way student participants made judgements about a lecturer (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

The Dark Side of Self-Control. Why do people drink too much, eat too much, smoke cigarettes, take drugs , or have sex with people they've just met? What's to blame for all this bad behavior? Most people would say that, while these self-destructive acts can have many root causes, they all have one obvious thing in common: they are all examples of failures of self-control . Each of us has desires that we know we shouldn't give in to, but when faced with temptation, some of us lack the willpower to resist it.

A recent paper by psychologists Catherine Rawn and Kathleen Vohs, however, argues that if you really think about it, something about that simple answer doesn't quite make sense. In fact, it turns out that sometimes it's having willpower that really gets you into trouble. Think back to the time you took your very first sip of beer. Just getting past those first horrible experiences actually requires a lot of self-control. The short answer is, we do it in order to achieve some goal. PTSD and MDMA Therapy - Medical Uses of Ecstasy. Psychology studies relevant to everyday life from PsyBlog. Workplace Psychology. Top 10 Strange Phenomena of the Mind - Top 10 Lists | Listverse.

Humans The mind is a wonderful thing – there is so much about it which remains a mystery to this day. Science is able to describe strange phenomena, but can not account for their origins. While most of us are familiar with one or two on this list, many others are mostly unknown outside of the psychological realm. This is a list of the top ten strange mental phenomena. We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances – of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it! Déjà vu is the experience of being certain that you have experienced or seen a new situation previously – you feel as though the event has already happened or is repeating itself.

Déjà vécu (pronounced vay-koo) is what most people are experiencing when they think they are experiencing deja vu.