Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. You may be consciously thinking about one specific thing, but you brain is processing thousands of subconscious ideas. Unfortunately, our cognition is not perfect, and there are certain judgment errors that we are prone to making, known in the field of psychology as cognitive biases. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Acts of Kindness Ideas: Thirty Kind Deeds for Personal Growth Personal growth and development is a conscious plan for becoming a better human being. Kindness and generosity are easy qualities to nurture in oneself. Doing kind acts costs little or nothing, no special training is required, and there's no need to buy a self-help book for instruction. Kindness is a way of being, a way of behaving that is easily habituated and brings outstanding benefits to the giver, as described in Positive Psychology Studies on Happiness. Following are more than 30 acts of kindness that anyone can utilize. Self Kindness Begin the kindness-habit journey with yourself. Resolve for the next 24 hours to avoid all negative self talk.Recognize one positive aspect of your body.Recognize one of your positive personality traits.Initiate one self-care act today.Spend a full day without whining or complaining.Forgive yourself for something you regret.Forgive someone's unkindness to you.Learn something new.Take a walk by yourself in silence.Take a nap. Kindness to Others
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="
The uses and abuses of 'happiness' The happiness 'movement' has the potential to transform society, but do its proponents know what they're doing? William Davies sets out four strands of the debate - philosophical, statistical, economical and psychological - and shows how confusion between them is hindering progress The launch of Action for Happiness last week generated yet more debate about the meaning and value of happiness. On top of the Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) ‘national debate’ on how to define and measure ‘national wellbeing’, one can scarcely open a newspaper nowadays without discovering more political, scientific or pseudo-scientific pronouncements about what does or doesn’t make us happy. In a nation as stubbornly curmudgeonly as Britain, it is no surprise to find that the cynics seem equally delighted to have discovered so much Californian chirpiness to grumble about, right here in their own backyard. It is all very strange. There is no reason to dismiss any of this as a flash in the pan.
List of Values The following list of values will help you develop a clearer sense of what's most important to you in life, as explained in the article Living Your Values. Simply print out this page, mark the values which most resonate with you, and then sort your list in order of priority. As you scan the values list below, you may find that while most values have little or no significance to you (and some may even seem negative to you), there are those values that just jump out and call to you, and you feel, "Yes, this value is part of me." Steve RecommendsHere are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. Site Build It! The Big Five Personality Test Directions: The following statements concern your perception about yourself in a variety of situations. Your task is to indicate the strength of your agreement with each statement, utilizing a scale in which 1 denotes strong disagreement, 5 denotes strong agreement, and 2, 3, and 4 represent intermediate judgments. In the boxes after each statement, click a number from 1 to 5 from the following scale: Strongly disagreeDisagreeNeither disagree nor agreeAgreeStrongly agree There are no "right" or "wrong" answers, so select the number that most closely reflects you on each statement.
11 Amazing Thank You Notes From Famous People After a short stint in the New York theater world, comedienne Carol Burnett landed a job as a regular on The Garry Moore Show in 1959. She caught the attention of CBS executives, who offered her her own series in 1967. With her husband Joe Hamilton at the helm, Burnett broke new ground as the first female host of a TV variety show. The Carol Burnett Show ran for 11 seasons and earned a handful of Emmy Awards in the process. To celebrate the legendary comedienne's 85th birthday, here are some fun facts about the show and the folks who made it so side-splittingly hilarious. As Carol Burnett painfully recalled later in life, whenever she’d expressed an interest in a career in the theater as a teen, her mother would always dissuade her and recommend that she would have better luck studying to become a writer. As she was nearing graduation from UCLA, Burnett and several fellow drama students were invited to a departing professor’s house to perform at his bon voyage party.
10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life | People love to give each other advice. The web is full to bursting with all types of pseudo-psychological advice about life. The problem is, how much of this is based on real scientific evidence? Well, here on PsyBlog we’ve got the scientific evidence. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Foot-in-the-door technique The principle involved is that a small agreement creates a bond between the requester and the requestee. Even though the requestee may only have agreed to a trivial request out of politeness, this forms a bond which - when the requestee attempts to justify the decision to themselves - may be mistaken for a genuine affinity with the requester, or an interest in the subject of the request. When a future request is made, the requestee will feel obliged to act consistently with the earlier one.[5] The reversed approach - making a deliberately outlandish opening demand so that a subsequent, milder request will be accepted - is known as the door-in-the-face technique. Classic experiments[edit] In an early study, a team of psychologists telephoned housewives in California and asked if the women would answer a few questions about the household products they used. [edit] Environmental applications[edit] Examples[edit] "Can I go over to Suzy's house for an hour?" Charitable donation[edit] Notes
Neural correlates of consciousness The Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) constitute the smallest set of neural events and structures sufficient for a given conscious percept or explicit memory. This case involves synchronized action potentials in neocortical pyramidal neurons.[1] Neurobiological approach to consciousness[edit] A science of consciousness must explain the exact relationship between subjective mental states and brain states, the nature of the relationship between the conscious mind and the electro-chemical interactions in the body. Discovering and characterizing neural correlates does not offer a theory of consciousness that can explain how particular systems experience anything at all, or how they are associated with consciousness, the so-called hard problem of consciousness,[5] but understanding the NCC may be a step toward such a theory. What characterizes the NCC? Level of arousal and content of consciousness[edit] The neuronal basis of perception[edit] Global disorders of consciousness[edit]
The Metal Marvel That Has Mended Brains for 50 Years | Pharmaceuticals This article is a sample from DISCOVER's special Brain issue, available only on newsstands through December 28. Lithium is as puzzling as it is potent. It was the first drug used to treat mental illness, and more than 50 years later, it is still one of the most widely used psychiatric medications. Unlike other psychoactive chemicals—large, complex molecules like Prozac (fluoxetine) or Abilify (aripiprazole)—lithium is extremely simple. The mood-stabilizing powers of lithium were discovered by accident in the 1940s by John F. After giving himself a shot of lithium to be sure it was safe, Cade injected it into 10 patients with manic depression, the roller-coaster psychiatric condition (also known as bipolar disorder) in which people experience bleak depression alternating with agitated, frenzied highs. In the United States, lithium is now the first-line treatment for bipolar disorder, a dangerous condition with the highest suicide rate of any psychiatric illness.
Increase your productivity at work by letting go of negative men My alma mater is currently ranked number one in all of the college men’s basketball rankings. They’ve been in the top spot for 11 of the 14 weeks of the polls, and were number one in the preseason. There are five games left in the regular season, and all of the teams Kansas has left to play would love to see the Jayhawks lose. Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and Missouri fans aren’t the only ones who want to see Kansas mess up their record in the last five games. Fans of the other ranked teams would be happy to see Kansas take a tumble, and, after watching some of the games this year, I’m pretty certain there are a few referees that would be glad to see Kansas lose, too. In competitive sports like basketball, a game has to end with a winner and a loser. In our work lives, however, very few things are like competitive sports. If you want to be productive and manage your time well at work, you need to let go of the belief that your workplace is a zero-sum game.
7 Secrets of the Super Organized A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect? So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis. Write it down now, always.