For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

Link

Magenta Ain't A Colour

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence (click here to check). Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

Here’s an experiment you can try: stare at the pink circle below for about one minute, then look over at the blank white space next to the image. What do you see? You should see an afterimage. What colour is it? Link

Stroop

A simple powerpoint slide demo of the Stroop Effect

The Tongue Maps Wrong!

Link

Punishment in schools and racism

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

link

Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall Problem, named after the host of the long-running game show "Let’s Make a Deal," is a statistical puzzle that seems counterintuitive. A recurring deal on the show featured contestants choosing one of three closed doors, with a big prize behind one of them and something else, like a goat, behind each of the others.

NY Times Demo

Your living 1/10 of a second in the future!

Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.
And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.
Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Cognitive dissonance in monkeys

And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: April 8, 2008
Some experiments that purport to show cognitive-dissonance effects might be explainable by statistics alone.

Not Really.

NY Times story.

Stress and Illness

As I always tell my students, stress is really, really bad. It exacerbates a lot of psychological and physical problems. Unfortunately, most students assume I mean that it causes these problems.

Stress Test
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: June 29, 2008
Why Americans want to believe that our mental states can control our physical maladies.
NY Times

What Women Want (Maybe)

What Women Want (Maybe)
By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: June 12, 2008
NY Times

A new documentary about bisexuality provides scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.

This article cites JPSP research on images which arouse heterosexual women.

Mythbusters

From XKCD

Scientists "see" ghosts

An article about the how unreal our normal perceptual processes are.

Japanese Scientists Create Mice With No Fear Of Cats

Akiyoshi's illusion pages

Akiyoshi's illusion pages

Lobes of Steel

Consider this before skipping yet another workout: Exercise can improve your brain, too.

To Reap Psychotherapy’s Benefits, Get a Good Fit

If the outcome may be months or years away, how can a person tell whether his psychotherapy is any good?

Behaviorism going to the dogs

Interesting articles about behaviorism by a dog trainer.

A Brief Introduction to Operant Conditioning

Punishment:Problems & Principles for Effective Use

General articles.

The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain

By toggling a light switch, neuroscientists can set fruit flies a-leaping and mice a-twirling and stop worms in their squiggling tracks

Social Influence in the news

Now, scientists believe that social networks not only can spread diseases, like the common cold, but also may influence many types of behavior — negative and positive — which then affect an individual’s health, as well as a community’s.

This isn't so surprising to a social psychology, who has been trained to look at the social influence exerted upon us by our peers.

Milgram Mania!!!

Primetime recreates Milgram Experiment under the supervision of a psychologist! Follow the link for story and video.

I often use this video to illustrate a current occurrence of Milgram-type obedience



The civil lawsuit has been settled.



Derren Brown's (a British magician) reenactment



Claymation version - cute




A humorous (?) student video