This is an interesting experiment. Participants looked at two small screens attached to their eyes. The screens showed what two cameras attached to a dummy's eyes was seeing. When participants were asked to look down at their own body, the cameras looked down at the dummy's body. When the researchers rubbed the dummy's belly and the participants belly at the same time and the participants could see the dummy's belly being rubbed, they experienced it as them being the dummy. It even went so far as when the researchers threatened the dummy with a knife, the participants felt threatened, as measured by an increase of their skin conductance.
This experiment suggest that the brain constructs the sense of a physical self and it may also help in the understanding of delusions of your physical self (such as anorexia) or out-of-body experiences that may just be illusory. Or are they? Because if our sense of our physical self is a construct, is there a physical self "for real"? Maybe Buddha was right, that the self is an illusion. Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind
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A truth serum is a drug that can be given during interrogation to obtain information from an individual. Of course there is no drug that can make people be completely honest, there are drugs that can make people delirious and talk a lot, mixing fantasy with reality. Truth serums are illegal in many countries, but many intelligence agencies use them. Many different types of drugs have been used as truth serums, including alcohol, LSD and Scopolamine. Why scopolamine should be successful as a truth serum, I don't know, because it actually inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, blocking your memory.
Some believe that our knowledge of oxytocin may be used for truth serums in the future. Oxytocin increases your attachment and trust of other people, so an intake of it may make you trust your interrogator (or perhaps fall in love with him). Here is an article on truth serums: Some believe truth serums will come back This tedtalk might interest you:
Optical illusions show how we see Beau Lotto also have a website where he shows other illusions that he has made: Lotto's illusions Here is a link to a podcast on fMRI and other neurological devices:
http://www.nature.com/neurosci/neuropod/index-2011-10-28.html This might interest you while trying to learn the working memory model and the multistore model of memory. A song about them, with music from jingle bells and rudolf the rednosed reindeer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vmpRKsk_nk&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gg6Xd1teZ0 Almost 90 years ago, Gestalt psychologists identified some principles of perception, among many still stand. The principles are:
1. The law of proximity; the tendency for us to perceive objects close to each other to belong together. 2. The law of continuity; the tendency to see imaginary lines or curves even if the line/curve don't have connected parts. 3. The law of closure; the tendency to fill in information of missing parts. 4. The law of similarity; the tendency to perceive similar objects as belonging to each other. 5. The law of pragnanz; the tendency to prefer symmetric, regular, orderly and simple shapes. 6. The law of figure-ground; the tendency to differentiate an object from its' surrounding area. Here is a website that summarizes the principles: Gestalt principles In modern cognitive psychology, this area of research is called pattern recognition. For instance do we seem to have a function in the brain for recognizing faces. We are now fairly certain that pattern recognition is an innate ability of humans and that the mind actively organizes and make meaning out of the environment based on their pattern recognition system. The issue is how the mind does this. One problem is that it is impossible for the mind to store an image of a particular object for every possible angle or variation, our memory storage capacity just isn't large enough. (this is why we have the ability for imagination, where we simulate movement and angles of objects mentally. See Kosslyn's research) Another similar problem is how we can recognize variations of a particular object, even if we have never seen the variation before? How can we recognize the letter Y for instance, when it is written in a different font? According to Neisser's feature analysis theory, the mind stores features of certain objects (such as the vertical and horizontal lines, curves and diagonals of letters) and then compare the features with the object. The more the features match the object, the more likely we are to identify the object as belonging to that particular category. This may be a useful tool for anyone who wants to achieve something, such as sports, ending bad habits, for improving performance in school etcetera. It is very cognitive in its' nature and a very likely activity for a cognitive psychologist to use with patients.
Force field analysis was developed by Lewin who had been inspired by the field theory of physics. In analogy with physical objects, Lewin believed that humans live in force fields or "life spaces" are affected by forces that either help or prevent them from reaching their ambitions. In his force field analysis, our individual force fields are mathematically described and graphically illustrated. When doing the force field analysis, you can see what you can do to reach your goal. One way of conducting a force field analysis is to first write down what you want to achieve on a piece of paper. On the left side of your goal you list everything that can help you achieve that goal and on the right side you list everything that can prevent you from reaching the goal. Next you assign a score from 1 to 5 for each force (1=weak and 5=strong). You then add the totals to see if you are likely to reach the goal. This may help you to see what is preventing you from reaching a goal, and what you need to change or increase. Here is a website with a worksheet for force field analysis: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_06.htm I stumbled upon this funny piece of writing by Harry Harlow on how to write psychology journal articles.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/editorial.htm This may be of "help" for you while you are working on your internal assessments. Harry Harlow, by the way, is famous for his research on attachment. His studies, however, where he isolated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers are considered to have been very unethical. It didn't help that he had terrible names for the devices that he had made for his animal research, such as the "pit of despair" or the "rape rack". This is an interesting color illusion. Our color perception, it seems, depend on context.
http://www.curiouser.co.uk/illusions/lotto/colour.htm This is a funny and interesting talk by the Israeli behavioral economist Dan Ariely on our irrational decision making. Dan Ariely has written two books; Predictably irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions and The upside of irrationality. I have his second book on my bedside table but I haven't taken myself time to read it yet. I will comment on the book when I have read it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjUJTw2i1M |
AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
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