Semantic satiation History and research[edit] The phrase "semantic satiation" was coined by Leon Jakobovits James in his doctoral dissertation at McGill University, Montreal, Canada awarded in 1962.[1] Prior to that, the expression "verbal satiation" had been used along with terms that express the idea of mental fatigue. The dissertation listed many of the names others had used for the phenomenon: "Many other names have been used for what appears to be essentially the same process: inhibition (Herbert, 1824, in Boring, 1950), refractory phase and mental fatigue (Dodge, 1917; 1926a), lapse of meaning (Bassett and Warne, 1919), work decrement (Robinson and Bills, 1926), cortical inhibition (Pavlov, 192?) The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Applications[edit] In popular culture[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Further reading[edit] Dodge, R.
Made in China: European Clone Towns Taking counterfeiting to a whole new level… Paris in China In the outskirts of Shanghai stands a fake Eiffel Tower overlooking a replica of the Champ de Mars and rows of Parisian townhouses. This is not Disneyland in China, this is the gated community of Tianducheng, built in 2007 by real estate develepors Zhejiang Guangsha Co. Ltd. Rather mysteriously, very little information about the town has been made available since it’s opening in 2007. The last known population of Tianducheng is around 2,000, yet the town can comfortably house over 100,000 people. More than anything, Tianducheng is a popular place for young newlyweds to use for their wedding photography, using the fake Paris as a backdrop. This is Hallstatt, Austria: And this is it’s Chinese knock-off: A replica of an entire historical Austrian town was unveiled in the Chinese province of Guangdong earlier this year. Hallstatt: Not Hallstatt: Little London in China Photos via here, here, here and here.
Political bias Bias towards a political side in supposedly-objective information Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting or altering of information to make a political position or political candidate seem more attractive. With a distinct association with media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organisation, or TV show covers a political candidate or a policy issue.[1] Bias emerges in a political context when individuals engage in an inability or an unwillingness to understand a politically opposing point of view. Such bias in individuals may have its roots in their traits and thinking styles; it is unclear whether individuals at particular positions along the political spectrum are more biased than any other individuals.[2] With an understanding of political bias, comes the acknowledgement of its violation of expected political neutrality.[4] A lack of political neutrality is the result of political bias.[4] Types of bias in a political context[edit] See also[edit]
Milgram experiment The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.[1] The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment[edit] Milgram Experiment advertisement Results[edit] Criticism[edit] Ethics[edit] Replications[edit]
Hallstat chinese copy Just one year after announcing ambitious plans to copy of a small idyllic Austrian mountain village, Chinese developers have unveiled their clone hamlet. Located just outside the southeastern city of Huizhou, the new village is a close approximation of Hallstatt, Vienna, complete with rows of pastel-colored chalets, architectural finials, and even an exact replica of the town clock tower that characterize the 900-year old original. Overseen and operated by Minmetals Land Inc., the $940 million project was recently completed, with Halstatt mayor Alexander Scheutz on hand to open the complex to tourists this past Saturday. When news of the project spread last summer, Hallstatt residents expressed outrage at the idea of the Chinese fake, threatening to make an appeal to UNESCO to potentially halt the building. As Reuters reports, the Chinese Hallstatt is comprised of expensive housing units for the city’s nouveau riche, with other shops and sites for tourists.
Overconfidence effect Bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgment is greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high.[1][2] Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) overestimation of one's actual performance; (2) overplacement of one's performance relative to others; and (3) overprecision in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs.[3][4] The most common way in which overconfidence has been studied is by asking people how confident they are of specific beliefs they hold or answers they provide. Types[edit] Overestimation[edit] Illusion of control[edit] Planning fallacy[edit] Contrary evidence[edit]
Stanford prison experiment The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University from August 14–20, 1971, by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.[1] It was funded by the US Office of Naval Research[2] and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. Goals and methods[edit] Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. The experiment was conducted in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's psychology building). The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. The prisoners were "arrested" at their homes and "charged" with armed robbery. Results[edit] [edit]
Thames town and more By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 11:47 GMT, 6 May 2013 | Updated: 12:15 GMT, 7 May 2013 China is notorious for making knock-off designer clothes and high-end electronics. With its mock Tudor buildings, cobbled streets, red telephone boxes and a Gothic church, this could be a quaint English market town, but bizarre settlement is actually in the People's Republic. And unlike most places in the UK, its population is shrinking. Scroll down for video Quaint: Newly-wed Chinese couples pose in the streets of Thames town, a British themed town near Shanghai Chinese knock off: Thames Town is in Songjiang District, about 19 miles from central Shanghai Spot the difference: With its mock Tudor buildings, cobbled streets, red telephone boxes and a Gothic church, it is an almost perfect replica of a quaint English town Bizarre: Contrary to appearances, Thames Town is not a resort or a theme park but is actually a new town modelled on the 'British way of life' 'I think English properties are very special.
Filter bubble Intellectual isolation involving search engines The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser, circa 2010. A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation[1] that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior, and search history.[2] As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.[3] The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent.[4] Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream. Technology such as social media “lets you go off with like-minded people, so you're not mixing and sharing and understanding other points of view ... Concept[edit] Many people are unaware that filter bubbles even exist. [edit]
Sense of agency The "sense of agency" (SA) refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.[1] It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In normal, non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. Normally SA and SO are tightly integrated, such that while typing one has an enduring, embodied, and tacit sense that "my own fingers are doing the moving" (SO) and that "the typing movements are controlled (or volitionally directed) by me" (SA). Definition[edit] Neuroscience of the sense of agency[edit]
Centralia Mine Fire Centralia, Pennsylvania No one knows exactly how it started, but a coal vein has been burning under the Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia since 1961. Some trace it back to careless trash incineration in an open pit mine igniting a coal vein. The fire crawled, insidiously, along coal-rich deposits far from the miner's pick, venting hot and poisonous gases up into town, through the basements of homes and businesses. With dawning horror, residents came to realize that the fire was not going to be extinguished, or ever burn itself out -- at least not until all the interconnected coal veins in eastern Pennsylvania were spent in some epic, meatless barbecue. The government eventually stepped in, and Centralia joined an elite club of communities, including Love Canal and Times Beach. We first visited in the mid-1980s, when 80% of Centralia had already been abandoned. Today, still no trench, but charred remains of Centralia hang on. It's dusk, and we don't see any signs of the fire.
Dan Ariely on How and Why We Cheat - Farnam Street We all like to think of ourselves as honest, but there are inevitably certain situations in which we’re more likely to cheat. There are many things that make us less honest, like feeling disconnected from the consequences and when our willpower is depleted. Learning why we cheat can help us avoid incentivizing it. Three years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychology and behavioral economics professor at Duke, put out a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves. I read the book back closer to when it was released, and I recently revisited it to see how it held up to my initial impressions. It was even better. We’re Cheaters All Dan is both an astute researcher and a good writer; he knows how to get to the point, and his points matter. In The Honest Truth, Ariely doesn’t just explore where cheating comes from but he digs into which situations make us more likely to cheat than others. Cheating was standard, but only a little.
Proprioception The cerebellum is largely responsible for coordinating the unconscious aspects of proprioception. Proprioception (/ˌproʊpri.ɵˈsɛpʃən/ PRO-pree-o-SEP-shən), from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own", "individual" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.[1] It is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles and in joints. It is distinguished from exteroception, by which one perceives the outside world, and interoception, by which one perceives pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs. The brain integrates information from proprioception and from the vestibular system into its overall sense of body position, movement, and acceleration. The word kinesthesia or kinæsthesia (kinesthetic sense) has been used inconsistently to refer either to proprioception alone or to the brain's integration of proprioceptive and vestibular inputs. History of study[edit] Components[edit]
Gunkanjima: l'isola fantasma. ENGLISH VERSION: Gunkanjima: the ghost island L'isola di Hashima, sperduta tra le 505 isole disabitate della prefettura di Nagasaki, in Giappone, è un luogo spettrale e affascinante, meta di un insolito turismo avventuroso e alternativo. L'isola è chiamata anche Gunkanjima, che significa "nave da guerra", per via dell'aspetto che assume il suo profilo sul letto dell'Oceano: un'isola grigia e decadente, circondata da un grande muro di cemento e i cui edifici prossimi al collasso vanno a delineare la forma di una specie di grande nave da guerra. Questa misteriosa isola fu costruita sopra un'importante miniera di carbone (di proprietà della Mitsubishi) che, nel periodo compreso tra il 1887 ed il 1974, contribuiva notevolmente a rifornire di energia la città di Nagasaki, che si trovava ad un'ora di navigazione. Nel periodo di massima attività l'isola produceva 410.000 tonnellate di carbone all'anno, una produzione intensa che andava però a discapito della vita umana. Altri link: