Neuroscience and Psychology
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How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness | Greater Good
This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time.
smart-drugs
Sceptics about nootropics (" smart drugs ") are unwitting victims of the so-called Panglossian paradigm of evolution. They believe that our cognitive architecture has been so fine-honed by natural selection that any tinkering with such a wonderfully all-adaptive suite of mechanisms is bound to do more harm than good. Certainly the notion that merely popping a pill could make you brighter sounds implausible. It sounds like the sort of journalistic excess that sits more comfortably in the pages of Fortean Times than any scholarly journal of repute. Yet as Dean , Morgenthaler and Fowkes' (hereafter "DMF") book attests, the debunkers are wrong.
Scientists Can Now Extract, Record and Return Information To the Brain
This is uncanny: A Tel Aviv University team lead by Professor Matti Mintz have developed a synthetic cerebellum that can receive sensory inputs from the brain, analyze them, and return information to other parts of the brain! The device is now working in rats, and has effectively restored lost brain functions caused by damaged tissue. However, the most important thing is that this proves that brain-to-machine communication can work in a bi-directional way, with a machine getting information from the brain, analyzing it and then talking back to the brain. As Mintz puts it:
Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment
UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen. I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds
What you’ll be hearing is a fluid audio loop that sounds as thought it is getting lower and lower—like a balloon slowly deflating but never becoming flat. How It Works If you’re anything like HighLab, you too were totally amazed by the Shepard Tone . For this reason, we’re going to hang out a bit with Shepard’s cohort, the famed French electric music composer Jean-Claude Risset, and have ourselves more mind-boggling good times listening to this related audio high, the Shepard-Risset Glissando.
Shepard-Risset Glissando « Get High Now (without drugs)
In Go Mobile , the book I’ve written with Jeanne Hopkins from HubSpot, we review a list of the 14 most powerful words in marketing so that readers can use them in their mobile marketing campaigns. This post gives you a sneak peak at the list that’s included in the book. Enjoy.
The 14 Most Powerful and Effective Words in Marketing | 60 Second Marketer | Tips, Tools and Techniques for Marketers Around the Globe
Not too long ago, a friend of mine named Ken Robbins who runs Response Mine Interactive told me there are only three things people are interested in paying money for — Love, Weight Loss and Getting Rich. He was simplifying things a bit. After all, Ken’s company sells plenty of things that don’t have to do with love, weight loss or getting rich. But his point was a good one — that humans function in very basic, very instinctive ways.
13 Most Important Emotional Triggers for Marketers | 60 Second Marketer | Tips, Tools and Techniques for Marketers Around the Globe
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality". Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for learning: if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know — particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge — they are likely to resist the new learning .
Cognitive Dissonance and learning
10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of — And When You Experienced Them
Everybody knows what you mean when you say you're happy or sad. But what about all those emotional states you don't have words for? Here are ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain. 1. DysphoriaNew neurons help us to remember fear
Fear burns memories into our brain, and new research by University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists explains how. Scientists have long known that fear and other highly emotional experiences lead to incredibly strong memories. In a study appearing online today (Tuesday, June 14) in advance of publication in the journal Molecular Psychiatry , UC Berkeley’s Daniela Kaufer and colleagues report a new way for emotions to affect memory: The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons. The figure shows newly born nerve cells (green) colocalizing with a neuronal marker which indicates immature nerve cells (red). Astrocytes are labelled in blue. In a fearful situation, these newborn neurons get activated by the amygdala and may provide a “blank slate” on which the new fearful memory can be strongly imprinted, she said.
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas , beliefs , values , emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment. [ 1 ] The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. [ 1 ] An example of this would be the conflict between wanting to smoke and knowing that smoking is unhealthy; a person may try to change their feelings about the odds that they will actually suffer the consequences, or they might add the consonant element that the smoking is worth short term benefits.
Cognitive dissonance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Technology
Conciousness and free will
Psychopaths and sociopaths
Lie detection