Measuring pain Pain is a fundamental part of life, and often a very lonely part. Doctors want to understand their patients' pain, and we all want to understand the suffering of our friends, relatives, or spouses. But pinning down another person's hurt is a slippery business. Is your relentless lower back pain more or less unbearable than my crushing headache? We begin with entomologist Justin Schmidt's globe-trotting adventure to plot the relative nastiness of insect bites and stings. NOTE: Pain Scale image remixed from CC By-SA 3.0 images from Haragayato; John Dalton; Isabelle Grosjean; Luigi Chiesa; and Sean Lamb. All About Psychology- David Webb
Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen | 10:24 AM September 27, 2011 In the Economist review of our book, The Innovator’s DNA, the reviewer wondered whether genius-level innovators such as Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs challenge the idea that working adults can really learn how to think differently and become innovators. We don’t think so. Reams of relevant research (including our own) proves Jobs right. But neither Steve Jobs nor Apple nor any other high-profile innovator or company has a corner on the think-different market. Take Gavin Symanowitz, whom we recently met in South Africa. Innovators (of new businesses, products, and processes) spend almost 50% more time trying to think different compared to non-innovators. If thinking different can make such a positive difference, why don’t more people spend more time doing it? Just do It. Shake it up. Repeat. As a leader, how often do you think different?
Game Theory First published Sat Jan 25, 1997; substantive revision Wed May 5, 2010 Game theory is the study of the ways in which strategic interactions among economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents, where the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents. The meaning of this statement will not be clear to the non-expert until each of the italicized words and phrases has been explained and featured in some examples. 1. The mathematical theory of games was invented by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944). Despite the fact that game theory has been rendered mathematically and logically systematic only since 1944, game-theoretic insights can be found among commentators going back to ancient times. Long before game theory had come along to show analysts how to think about this sort of problem systematically, it had occurred to some actual military leaders and influenced their strategies. 2. 2.1 Utility
Thinking Methods: Creative Problem Solving They further divided the six stages into three phases, as follows: 1. Exploring the Challenge (Objective Finding, Fact Finding, and Problem Finding), Generating Ideas (Idea Finding), and Preparing for Action (Solution Finding and Acceptance Finding). Description: Since the arrival of the now classical Osborn-Parnes structure, any number of academic and business entities have re-sorted and renamed the stages and phases of what we now call the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS). However, the originators' fundamental approach remains in tact. The Creative Problem Solving Institute of Buffalo, New York, has finessed the Osborn-Parnes process to include a divergent and a convergent stage within each of the six stages. In his 1988 book, Techniques of Structured Problems, Arthur B. Mess FindingData FindingProblem FindingIdea FindingSolution Finding Where to Learn CPS
Mind Hacks 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. BPS Research Digest NLP Trainings, Communication Skills and Team Building, Vancouver Island, Vancouver, B.C. Neuroskeptic A neat study from Dutch psychologists Olympia Colizoli, Jaap Murre and Romke Rouw claims that it's possible to train people to have something a bit like synaesthesia - which they call Pseudo-Synesthesia through Reading Books with Colored Letters. Synaesthesia generally comes out of the blue - some people just have it while others don't. Those who do experience it typically report that they've always had it. But could it be learned? Colizoli et al recruited 17 non-synaesthetes and got them to read books specially printed such that 4 common letters, "a", "e", "s" and "t", were always printed in a certain colour: red, orange, green or blue. The idea was that constant exposure to the coloured letters might trigger grapheme-color synaesthesia, which is a relatively common 'naturally occurring' form of the condition. What happened? So to be honest, it's all a bit inconclusive, but it's a cool idea. Colizoli O, Murre JM, and Rouw R (2012).
The story of the self Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. We know this from many different sources of evidence. Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. What accounts for this unreliability? One of the most interesting writers on memory, Virginia Woolf, shows this process in action.
Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists