Your Amazing Brain. BEING CRAZY IS NOISY. John Sterns is diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (a co-diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), chronic depression and chronic anxiety. He describes a lifetime of fighting demons ... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE I. I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). They come from all directions and fill my mind with hateful, self-destructive demands.
One comes from above the crown of my head and commands, “You must die”. But the most persistent and long-standing of my voices, which began when I was eight years old, pounds on my left shoulder like a jackhammer, repeating, “I hate myself. Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. II. I immediately hated Kevin. III. Art therapy required me to sit around a table with seven other inmates and a social worker, and stare at a blank piece of paper and a torn box of broken crayons. I misheard her, clearly. Earworms: Can They Be Killed? According to new research, around 9 out of 10 of us have experienced earworms lasting an hour or longer. An earworm is a song going around in your head that you can’t get rid of. Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.
In new research, Beaman & Williams (2010) asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences. Here’s what they found: Many earworms were pop songs, although adverts and TV/film themes and video game tunes were also mentioned.One-third generally experienced the chorus or refrain over and over again, but almost half said that it varied.10% of participants reported that earworms stopped them doing other things.Contrary to popular belief those with musical training were no more likely to experience earworms. Searching for earworms on Twitter reveals people have all kinds of songs stuck in their heads.
Not everyone was equally undisturbed by earworms though: How to kill an earworm. Why People Avoid the Truth About Themselves. Knowledge may be power, but when it comes to self-knowledge, ignorance is bliss. Sitcoms often take advantage of a very simple fact about human psychology to make us laugh. The set-up will go something like this: main character tells their partner: “I would never compromise my ethical principles for money!” Then that very same character is offered an opportunity to compromise their ethical principles for money…and they take it. The joke is not just about hypocrisy but also about the main character’s complete unawareness of his or her hypocrisy. Watching this we might assume it isn’t intended to be diagnostic of human psychology; rather it’s just a way of making a joke at the expense of the main character. But really it’s a perfectly realistic example of how people avoid the truth about themselves.
In a recent paper in the Review of General Psychology, Sweeny et al. (2010) outline the three main reasons that people avoid information: It may demand a change in beliefs. Expectation. 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Memory Without Any Training. Boost your memory easily by writing about your problems, looking at a natural scene, predicting your performance and more… You’ll have heard about the usual methods for improving memory, like using imagery, chunking and building associations with other memories.
If not Google it and you’ll find millions of websites with the same information. The problem with most of these methods is they involve a fair amount of mental effort. So here are seven easy ways to boost your memory that are backed up by psychological research. None require you to train hard, spend any money or take illegal drugs. All free, all pretty easy, all natural! 1. To do complex tasks we rely on our ‘working memory’. One way to increase working memory capacity indirectly is through expressive writing. Psychologists aren’t exactly sure why this works, but it does have a measurable effect. 2.
Nature has a magical effect on us. One of nature’s beneficial effects is improving memory. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. More effort? How to Live With an Unknowable Mind. We know surprisingly little about our own personalities, attitudes and even self-esteem. How do we live with that? How do you imagine your own mind? I sometimes picture mine as a difficult and contrary child; the kind that throws a stone at you for no reason and can’t explain itself. Or while at the beach it sits silent, looking miserable. But, at a wedding is determined to scream at the top of its lungs through all the quiet bits. One reason minds can be frustrating is that we only have access to part of them, by definition the conscious part.
Except we don’t know it’s doing things we haven’t asked it to, because we can’t interrogate it. This is quite a different view of the mind than Freud had. The idea that large parts of our minds can’t be accessed is fine for basic processes like movement, seeing or hearing. Other parts would be extremely interesting to know about. Here are three examples of areas in which our self-knowledge is relatively low: 1. Don’t be so sure. 2. 3. BrainWave Generator.