This is an interesting color illusion. Our color perception, it seems, depend on context.
http://www.curiouser.co.uk/illusions/lotto/colour.htm
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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 The neuroscientist Dr Daniel Amen has looked at 66.000 brain scans to identify the four different brain types of eating behavior which may be the case why different diets work for different people.
The first brain type of eaters is the compulsive type, who has a compulsion to eat and think about food. These tend to have a high activitiy in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area related to shifting attention and adapt to change. The second brain type of eaters is the impulsive type. These eaters have low activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is related to judgment, decision making and planning. Alcohol lowers the activity in the prefrontal cortex and low levels of dopamine are equally related to poor decision making. The third brain type of eaters is the emotional type. These eaters suffer from emotional problems, and eat in order to feel better. They have heightened activity in the limbic system and decreased activity in the limbic system. The fourth brain type of eaters is the anxious type. Anxious eaters eat because they are stressed or anxious. Anxious eaters have heightened activity in the basal ganglia, which sets anxiety levels. Carbohydrates (for instance sugar) have shown to activate the basal ganglia, releasing dopamine, which may explain the addiction that may come from anxiety. Here is the original article where you can also find out which type you are. I think I am a mix of all types: http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/successful-dieting-is-all-in-the-brain-1.1169858 I have just read an interesting Swedish article on IQ, I will summarize it here. IQ, by the way, usually measures ability for language, logic and math.
1. Children with extraordinary IQ (as measured through testing) usually have strong and weak IQ abilities. For instance, they may be strong in math but weak in language. These children may sometimes be misdiagnosed with the Asperger's syndrome. 2. IQ is obviously not enough for academic success. In the 1920s, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman followed 1.500 children with an IQ of 150 over their lifespan. He excluded William Shockley and Luis Alvarez because they were considered to have an IQ that was too low. These two men later became nobel prize winners. 3. Men and women have equal levels of IQ (even though I have read somewhere that men have a larger variance than women). Women, however, tend to underestimate their IQ and men overestimate it. 4. The optimal manager has an IQ of 119. If his IQ is higher than that his decision making may be too complicated and he may have trouble connecting with the coworkers with lower IQ. A boss should be smart, but not too smart, that is. 5. Poets suffer more from the bipolar syndrome and depression than the average population. 6. The Flynn effect is the observed yearly increase in IQ. Every new year the performance of a year group on IQ tests is improved with 3 points on average. Therefore, IQ tests have to be restandardized annually, meaning that if a normal child born 100 years ago took the test today, he would perform on the same level as someone with mental retardation. We know that brain functions that are trained will develop, whereas those that are less used may be impaired or fade away. I speculate that some brain functions may be impossible to develop at the same level, partly because the processes may disturb each other, and partly because they may utilize the same areas of the brain.
As the brain processes information in parallell, I conjecture that different processes can interfere with each other. Because of learning and disposition, some brain processes may be more dominant and inhibit other processes. In most people, for instance, the left brain hemisphere's processes is more dominant than the right brain hemisphere's processes. This dominance of some brain processes over others may also be seen in cases of addiction, where the dopamine system is "hi-jacked" by the craving for a certain drug or activity so that nothing else matters. Obsessions or compulsions are similar to addiction in the way that a certain idea or behavior dominates a person's thinking or behavior. It also makes sense that inner attention (conscious thinking) will inhibit a person's body movements. For instance, if you think too much while playing sports, you will underperform. It is possible, that in order for some brain processes to be highly active, others need to be inhibited. This may explain why some highly intelligent people have had obvious problem making good decisions or have had problems in their social life. For instance, the economist Keynes had personal financial problems and it is suggested that the philosopher Plato was poor at playing the macchiavellian game of politics of his time (even though he knew a lot on politics). Savants are other examples; these are individuals with developmental disability who are highly talented in one area but have high impairment in other areas, usually for social and communicative skills. The brain system deciding which brain processes to inhibit and which to increase may be the executive functions. The executive functions are the common name for our attention, ability to multi-task, make decisions and monitor our own actions. In other words, it is our "free will". The executive system utilizes working memory to perform its' actions and it is usually what we refer to when we speak of consciousness. Damage to the executive functions can lead to poor decision making. It has been suggested that individuals with the ADHD syndrome have impaired executive functions. It is essential that the executive functions inhibit some brain processes and increase others while we are making decisions, otherwise we may be filled with a lot of doubt for any action we do or act paradoxically. We all know that it is impossible to both eat a cake and have it; once we have made a decision (or even before) we need to persuade ourselves that the action we are undertaking is the best option. We cannot be two-faced for long because of the cognitive conflict it will cause (compare with cognitive dissonance theory). Soon we will have to harmonize our thoughts, perhaps through an obsession. Psychoanalytic theory, however, suggests that repressed cognitive processes (ideas) may constantly struggle to find ways of being expressed. If this is true, inhibition of a brain process does not not necessarily have to mean the extinction of it. Here are some recent reflections by me on the problem of consciousness. May I first point out that the problem of consciousness - how consciousness come about - is far from solved, if it every will. This view, that the problem of consciousness will never be solved, is called the mysterian view. Other views include the materialist view, the idealist view, the dualist view and the cognitive/functional/phenomenal view.
The materialist view equates consciousness with brain processes. It has its´ functional advantages but it also causes new issues. For instance, where does consciousness start? Why is a stone unconscious and a living brain not? The opposite view of materialism is idealism; the idea that everything is consciousness only, an equally logically consistent idea to materialism and difficult to argue against. Solipsism is an example of idealism; the idea that my mind is the only thing there is. Modern dualism is different from Cartesian dualism. Old dualism distinguished the soul from the body and it was believed that the soul could affect matter. Modern dualists usually do not believe it is possible, because that would go against the laws of nature and physics. From that point of view, the placebo effect must be an entirely physical process. Examples of modern dualism are property dualism and epiphenomenalism. A property dualist acknowledges that the brain consists of matter, but that consciousness is a distinct property of the brain. Epiphenomenalists also accept that consciousness is distinct from matter, but that consciousness it is causally impotent, meaning that it cannot exercise any influence on the material world. It is a passenger just tagging along. This of course threatens our everyday notion of a conscious free will (but not the idea of an "unconscious" free will) If the dualist view is drawn to its extreme, we may come to some extreme conclusions, if the view is to be consistent. For instance, if we believe that consciousness is a property of matter, we may come to believe that all matter has consciousness. An alternate view on consciousness is the cognitive/functional/ phenomenal one. This view holds that consciousness always is a representation of something else. This representation can be either conscious or unconscious. So, for instance, if I am feeling an itch, I am actually perceiving a representation of some disturbance in my body. Or if I am thinking on my last vacation in Paris, I am experiencing a mental representation or memory of my vacation in Paris. From this light, higher order thinking, so called metacognition, are actually higher order representations of thoughts. A representations of a representation of a representation, so to speak. Some philosophers even believe that consciousness emerged with the development of human culture; once we learned to represent the world in images and stories we also became conscious beings. Schema theory is related to the cognitive perspective. When it comes down to it, we may never be able to more than describe the properties of the mind, never explain its´ origins and emergence. On the other hand, this is also the case for other sciences, such as physics and biology, that tend to describe the world, but cannot explain why the phenomena being studying came about. Big bang, yes - but why and before that? Evolution, yes - but why? Here are two tests to see whether you are good at reading facial expression, and therefore are good at spotting lying. The first one relates to at reading microexpressions:
http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test The other test relates to reading emotions around the eyes. I got 30 on this test, which I think is pretty good for a man. http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/Faces/EyesTest.aspx That last webpage also have tests for autism. This is a good website where you can find information about new social science research:
http://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/social.php For instance, articles from yesterday show new research on the relationship between sleep deprivation and Alzheimer's disease, that memory is improved if we hold items in our hand (I suppose it is because we then are using more senses or because memory can be coded in relation to proprioception of our body), that caffeine consumption decreases risk for depression in women, that our clothes give clues of our race because of stereotyping (white men dressed as cleaners were taken for black and black people dressed as businessmen were taken for white. Akinetopsia, or motion blindness is a rare neurological disease in which the patient cannot perceive motion. He or she can see stationary objects without issue but the world is devoid of motion. Most of what is known about of akinetopsia comes from the case study of LM. Patients with Alzheimers disease may also have varying degrees of akinetopsia.
LM has reported having trouble pouring a cup of tea or coffee, because the fluid appears to be frozen and she does not know when to stop pouring because she does not see the fluid rising. It is also difficult for her to follow conversations, because she cannot see lip movement or change in facial expressions. She also gets nervous when people are walking around in the room because she never sees them move and therefore suddenly sees them at another place of the room. In addition, it is difficult for her to cross a street, because she cannot estimate the speed of cars. However, she can still hear well and can use her hearing to estimate distance. Deception, making people believe things that aren't true is a fairly well understood behavior. But what about self deception? Is it really possible to deceive oneself? Self deception is a controversy for philosophers and psychologists alike, as it challenges the common view of the self. Some even claim that self deception is impossible.
In real life, however, we see behavior that may best be explained by self deception. In this world there seems to be many who refuse to face the truth and reality for various reasons. A common psychological explanation of self deception is freudian. According to Freudian theory, uncomfortable and anxiety provoking thoughts can either be denied, repressed or rationalized. In addition, Freud distinguishes between wishes and thoughts. It can be argued that because we want to and have a need in believing in something we sometimes confuse reality with our desires. Freudian theory also distinguishes between the conscious and unconscious self, which opens up for the possibility that our unconscious self can "deceive" our conscious self and vice versa. According to cognitive dissonance theory, two conflicting ideas creates mental anxiety and discomfort. We therefore have a tendency to either repress one of those thoughts or rationalizing our behavior or ideas to such an extent that we can harmonize the conflicting ideas. For instance, if you want to smoke but know it is bad, you may claim that you are only a party smoker (you may however often go to parties and therefore smoke a lot) There is also an evolutionary explanation of self deception. Trivers (the same researcher that developed the altruistic theory of self reciprocity) believes that self deception is a behavior that has evolved in order to be able to deceive others. If you truly believe in a lie that you are telling someone else, it is best to believe in it yourself. Then it won't show in your body language that you are lying. |
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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