The little-known roots of the cognitive revolution. Many psychologists rightly credit the likes of George A. Miller, PhD, Noam Chomsky, PhD, and Allen Newell, PhD, with kick-starting cognitive sciences in the academic world. But few are aware that earlier psychologists laid its groundwork during behaviorism's heyday. And fewer still know that one of its more pre-eminent forebears, Otto Selz, PhD, was killed by the Nazi regime at the height of his career. Selz, a Jewish German psychologist born in 1881 in Munich, studied philosophy at the influential University of Wurzburg in central Germany. At the time, German schools of psychology were experimenting with ways to examine introspection and conscious thought, and Selz became consumed with finding psychological answers to philosophical questions of consciousness.
Behaviorism—the reigning approach to experimental psychology of its day—couldn't bring much to the discussion. Finding no favor But even as his work progressed, Selz rankled many of his peers. That was not the case. Trip Hawkins: Steve Jobs, creativity and LSD. 47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself. I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. So the fact that this first one is first doesn’t mean that’s it’s the most important.. just that it came to mind first. Dr. <div class="slide-intro-bottom"><a href=" Why being relaxed makes us spend too much money.
The typical casino is an intentionally unpleasant place. The ceiling is low and the sight lines are hidden, producing a claustrophobic effect. The lights are dim and the air is filled with the clatter of randomness, as slot machines spit out coins and sound effects. The floor is a labyrinth of drunk gamblers and card tables, making it all but impossible to navigate.
(There are also no clocks, so people have no idea what time it is.) Why are casinos so uncomfortable? The standard explanation is that the cavernous spaces are meant to confuse, like a maze with a convoluted escape route. In other words, the gaming room is really a trap. In recent years, however, the design of high-end casinos has undergone a dramatic shift. The redesign of the casino had a profound effect on revenues: in 1999, the Bellagio set the record for gaming income in Vegas. There's now some interesting evidence to explain the Bellagio phenomenon. The research was straightforward. And this returns us to casinos. PS. 4 Things Most People Get Wrong About Memory. Human memory has been shown again and again to be far from perfect. We overlook big things, forget details, conflate events. One famous experiment even demonstrated that many people asked to watch a video of people playing basketball failed to notice a person wearing a gorilla suit walk right through the middle of the scene.
So why does eyewitness testimony continue to hold water in courtrooms? A new nationwide survey of 1,500 U.S. adults shows that many people continue to have the wrong idea about how we remember—and what we forget. Here are four common incorrect assumptions about memory, held by some of the survey subjects, that experts say should be forgotten: 1.
Memory works like a video camera, recording the world around us onto a mental tape that we can later replay. Nearly two thirds (63 percent) of those in the random telephone survey said that they agreed with this model of a passively recorded memory. 2. 3. Image courtesy of iStockphoto/DebbiSmirnoff. Einstein On Creative Thinking: Music and the Intuitive Art of Scientific Imagination. "The greatest scientists are artists as well," said Albert Einstein (Calaprice, 2000, 245). As one of the greatest physicists of all time and a fine amateur pianist and violinist, he ought to have known! So what did Einstein mean and what does it tell us about the nature of creative thinking and how we should stimulate it?
In our last post, we suggested that community singing might be a simple way to introduce creativity into one's life. In the post before that Einstein's musical hobbies served as an example of personal creativity providing the kind of recreation that enables professional innovation. And in an even earlier post on Einstein, we introduced the idea that creative thinking can be done with your body as well as your mind. In this essay, we want to link all these themes through Einstein's experience to suggest that the daily practice of music might actually stimulate not only everyday creativity, but genius-level creativity as well. Anyone in science education reading this?! Do Green Products Make Us Better People? Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods - latimes.com. Before John Lennon imagined “living life in peace,” he conjured “no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too.” No religion: What was Lennon summoning?
For starters, a world without “divine” messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to “God’s will.” Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion’s “DNA.” Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved “adaptations” as the building blocks of religion.
J. Are Believers Really Happier Than Atheists? Alain de Botton, a prominent writer and outspoken atheist, has a grand vision to nurture a truly secular society. He foresees awe-inspiring monuments dedicated to nature. Museum and hotel designs would encourage contemplative thought and self-improvement. Psychotherapists would occupy offices in accessible yet glamorous boutiques, providing easy opportunities for supportive interactions with others.
Although such a radical transformation of civic life—religion for atheists, as he calls it—is unlikely to make it beyond the blueprints, de Botton is on to something. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content. Stanley Milgram & The Shock Heard Around the World. Next to Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies are arguably the most famous, influential and controversial of psychology experiments. The obedience studies started in 1961 at Yale University when Milgram was just a 27-year-old assistant professor. Muzafer Sherif, also a pioneer in social psychology who conducted experiments at a summer camp to test intergroup conflict, remarked that: “Milgram’s obedience experiment is the single greatest contribution to human knowledge ever made by the field of social psychology, perhaps psychology in general.”
At the time, before Sherif and Milgram’s experiments, researchers believed that individuals who inflicted harm on others, particularly the horrific acts of the Holocaust, were somehow different from the “normal” public. Much of the research concentrated on exploring the authoritarian personality. But Milgram believed otherwise. Why Milgram Conducted the Obedience Experiments Alexandra Milgram also writes: Culture of Shock. In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever.
Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others. Half a century later Milgram’s obedience studies still resonate. They showed that it does not take a disturbed personality to harm others. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content. Why We Lie. Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
Not Interested in Having a Good Time? By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on August 14, 2009 A new study suggests a decreased desire for pleasure may be a key predisposing factor for major depression. The research is in contrast to the long-held notion that those suffering from depression lack the ability to enjoy rewards, rather than the desire to seek them. Vanderbilt psychologists Michael Treadway and David Zald led the study published by current edition of the online journal PLoS One.
“This initial study shows that decreased reward processing, which is a core symptom of depression, is specifically related to a reduced willingness to work for a reward,” Treadway, a graduate student in psychology, said. Decreased motivation to seek and experience pleasurable experiences, known as anhedonia, is a primary symptom of major depressive disorder. Anhedonia is less responsive to many antidepressants and often persists after other symptoms of depression subside. Source: Vanderbilt University. The Partner Paradox: Why Buddying Up to Achieve Goals May Backfire. MY WIFE AND I go to spinning class a couple of mornings a week. It is something we like to do together, and I feel that I benefit from having a regular workout partner. Some days I am just lazy or I do not want to venture out in the predawn cold, but having a supportive partner motivates me.
She bolsters my self-discipline when it flags. Or does she? Is it possible that having a supportive partner might create the opposite and paradoxical effect, actually undermining effort and commitment to health and fitness goals over the long haul? Two psychological scientists have been exploring this novel idea in the laboratory. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. Honey, Help Me ExerciseFitzsimons and Finkel recruited a group of women in their 30s, all of whom were in a romantic relationship, for an online experiment.
It’s Time to Stand Up for Science. Better Safe Than Sorry: Why We Believe In Tempting Fate [Excerpt] The following is an excerpt from The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy and Sane, by Matthew Hutson (Hudson Street Press, 2012). There are certain laws of nature everyone accepts. The surest way to bring about rain on an overcast day is to leave your umbrella at home. Is your line at the grocery store moving too slowly? Switch lines. That will definitely speed it up (minus you). Do people really believe such actions can change their fortunes? In recent years Jane Risen of the University of Chicago and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell have shed more light than anyone on the phenomenon of tempting fate. Risen and Gilovich argue that belief in tempting fate rests, in part, on a three-step mental process.
To summarize the three-step process, negative outcomes would feel worse after tempting fate, which makes their possibility especially attention-grabbing, and thus more likely-seeming. A predictable way to invite failure is to call attention to success. Extreme Empathy. Psycho Babble Print By Jessica Love We can quibble over the merits of being sensitive (touchy), confident (pushy), or thrifty (cheap). We can even speak ill of open-mindedness when taken by some moral relativists to its extreme. However, I would have thought empathy—the ability to understand another’s perspective—to be an unequivocal good, a virtue squeaky clean and beyond reproach.
But what if seeing ourselves in others encourages us to remember others as ourselves and thus take credit for things we didn’t do? Once 80 sentences had been produced in this manner, the participants—whether their heroine was safely in bed or dangling precariously from a fourth-story ledge at the xylophone factory—were instructed to stop. Afterward, participants answered a number of questions designed to measure social intelligence, the tendency, as the researchers put it, “to anticipate a partner’s response across a broad range of circumstances and sources.” I like this study. Edge : Conversations on the edge of human knowledge. Kids Can Be Psychopathic, Too | Philadelphia magazine. “I heard a story about her once,” said James. “She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.”
—The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson Several decades ago on Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, a group of researchers sat 1,795 three-year-olds down one at a time, clapped headphones on them, sounded a tone, waited a few seconds, and then exposed them to a cacophony of jangling metal objects. Twenty years later, the researchers identified 137 of those children who’d grown up to have criminal records—drug arrests, driving offenses, violent attacks.
One of those researchers was Adrian Raine, a small, sprightly psychologist with curly graying hair who’s considered the world’s leading researcher in neurocriminology. The brain is an incredibly complex organ. Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence. Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth. As commentators, politicians and academics struggle to make sense of the recent financial crisis and its ramifications, many of their accounts seek to identify a root cause or the “beginning of the story.”
Theories abound: Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s “easy money” for banks; the blindness of the credit-rating companies; strategies that encouraged low-income Americans to own homes; the invention of high-risk investment instruments; high-leveraged borrowing; short-sighted executives; greedy investment bankers; lying real-estate dealers, and so on. We know there was no single cause or event that set in motion the crisis and that the truth is complex and multicausal.
So why do we keep seeking the easy answers? It may be that we are hard-wired to do so. The human brain is designed to support two modes of thought: visual and narrative. Visual Thinking Nonetheless, we shouldn’t underestimate the powers of our innate visual and narrative cognitive systems. New Model. Psychology's Magician. On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik | Literally Psyched.
Why we give to charity - Ideas. How We Opt Out of Overoptimism: Our Habit of Ignoring What Is Real Is a Double-Edged Sword. Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things. Sharing the Wealth (of Knowledge): Cumulative Cultural Development May Be Exclusively Human. Hope on the Battlefield. There's no sense in revising the psychiatrist's bible - opinion - 01 March 2012. Trouble at the Heart of Psychiatry’s Revised Rule Book | Streams of Consciousness. Science Remains a Stranger to Psychiatry’s New Bible | Streams of Consciousness. Psychiatrists Are About to Shift the Boundaries between Sane and Insane | Streams of Consciousness. Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker.
CROWDS R US. Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds. Homophobes Might Be Hidden Homosexuals. On Fear by Mary Ruefle. Made to Disorder - October 28. The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower - Hans Villarica - Health. Kierkegaard, Danish Doctor of Dread.