All Questions

74 views

Does stopping hard tasks midway through negatively affect your chances of success?

When a person has embarked on an undertaking that is both unpleasant and important (a good example could be a 12 step drug treatment program), lets say they make progress, and then stall before ...
97 views

Is the price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviours more mental illness?

"Our work shows that the price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviours is more mental illness." -Professor Seth Grant Professor of Molecular Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh ...
20 views

What is the most biologically plausible model of the retina?

Perhaps, retina is one of the most well studied and well understood parts of the brain. Are there any full models of the retina that would mimic the firing of the ganglion cells based on the input ...
73 views

Can working memory actually be improved?

I'm skeptical of the claim that brain training (dual-n back) can improve working memory; the improvement seems to be task-specific rather than generalize. The average human being can only keep 7 ...
62 views

What is the lifetime of the synapse in the mature brain?

I know there is synaptic plasticity in the mature brain. There is a great number of plasticity mechanisms like LTD and LTP, acting on different time scales. Apart from the synaptic weight change, ...
43 views

Is handwriting style heritable?

My daughter (11), wife, and mother in-law all have extremely similar handwriting. Why is this? Is handwriting a inheritable trait?
315 views

Why does a person feel sad without knowing the reason?

I have known people to behave in a way they despise, and they don't know why.
71 views

How far can we train mental calculation?

Mental calculators are people with a prodigious ability in some area of mental calculation, such as multiplying large numbers or factoring large numbers. Unfortunately I forgot where I heard it, ...
80 views

Fear of things that look like or resemble humans

I remember reading this a while back. To be clear, I'm not talking about a phobia such as Automatonophobia (Fear of inanimate objects that resemble humans, such as dolls) or Pediophobia (Fear of ...
73 views

What causes students not to be interested in problem solving?

Sometimes students lack the drive for problem solving. One might say that they are bored. However, is there a scientific account on what causes ignorance of problem solving, when they simply are not ...
110 views

Mulitiple partners: macho man vs. easy woman?

I sometimes hear from my friends that a man who has many female sexual partners is regarded as macho. But on the other hand, a woman with a lot of one-night stands is thought to be easy and desperate ...
109 views

What maladaptive behaviours or cognitive distortions develop as a result of chronic childhood illness?

It's fairly well documented that childhood trauma (such as chronic illness) can lay the neurochemical groundwork for conditions like depression later in life. A paper, "The link between childhood ...
109 views

How many calories do we burn when we try to understand mathematical proofs?

While thinking we burn calories. For comparison: "And if it’s the right wood and the right chess grand masters in the middle of a tournament, they are going through 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day ...
42 views

What decision problems are better answered with analytic thinking, and what are better answered with intuition?

Most Western philosophy and psychology argue that deliberating carefully and rationally is the right way of reaching a decision. "Don't let emotions turn you" they might say. The splitting of the mind ...
43 views

Can bipolar develop in childhood?

Is it possible to develop bipolar in childhood? Does the same diagnostic criteria for bipolar in adults apply for children? In response to the comments under this question: Borderline Personality ...
72 views

What's the percentage of people that are mental calculator prodigies?

I want to reply to this comment: What's the percentage of people that are mental calculator prodigies? How do they spread over the different parts of the world?
63 views

Where to recruit and run experiments using Inquisit?

My team and I are trying to use Inquisit for a reaction-time based experiment looking at attentional bias. However, with the no download policy on Mturk and CrowdFlower, we don't know a good site to ...
131 views

What triggers people to do competitive activities?

From my past I have seen some people who like to compete in games and try to be first(by games I mean all kind of games or hobbies such as video-games, sports etc. in which competition is included). I ...
27 views

Does procrastination imply knowledge of what is being delayed?

When someone says he is procrastinating, does that imply that he knows which exact action is better than the action that he is currently doing? Is it called procrastination when you know that your ...
370 views

Can an observer of women in red lipstick or more darker shades interpret anything related to their psychology?
63 views

Difference between the strong-AI (AGI) and cognitive science [closed]

I like to know the differences in the objectives of those fields.
89 views

Is there a metric of the overall excitation of the brain or nervous system?

I'm thinking of a way to describe what's happening to a single channel EEG/MEG sensor output. I've noticed that there is significant difference in the readings from a quiet observations, versus a ...
119 views

What is a scientifically plausible method by which people might in the future be able to read minds? [closed]

I am writing a book. It will be post-apocalyptic, and the apocalypse I'm thinking of will involve people being able to read each other's mind. Can any of you give me a slightly plausible reason that ...
777 views

Why does society interpret “manliness” differently?

If, by definition, manliness is "the traditional male quality of being brave and strong," why does most of society perceive it differently? For example, a person who watches My Little Pony and is not ...
105 views

Gain EQ for Introverted Person

What method and/or technique is recommended to make an introverted person to gain high emotional intelligence, social skills and social competence in his/her personality? What I have seen the ...
2k views

How is intelligence correlated to beauty?

Recently, I read up several interesting questions on the web about the relationship between IQ and general intelligence and physiological symmetry. But more importantly, what explains the correlation? ...
37 views

Crossing the leg, what does it mean?

I have seen some ladies who had presented their presention, they often cross their leg (Please take a look at the picture). My question is: What personality does it say? What kind of feeling ...
90 views

How can machine possibly possess consciousness if computation is a human idea?

I feel this question may be closed as non-constructive, but I'll give it a try. Suppose a computer simulates a human brain so it passes Turing test. Suppose this brain is given visual, audio and ...
144 views

Frequency of schizophrenia symptoms related to mass surveillance?

Recently, mass surveillance by organisations like the NSA has become both more prevalent and more known to the public. Has the frequency of schizophrenia symptoms concerning mass surveillance (eg. ...
56 views

Build model to explain data [closed]

I'm not a psychology student, but I'm doing a subjective experiment which is similar to magnitude estimation: simply measure the effect of different stimulus through a number from 1-10. Now I need to ...
111 views

Why do people blame others rather than take responsibility?

In business classes we are told to be responsible and take responsibility for our action. Get mugged? Well, lock your door next time. That sort of thing. But that's not how most humans behave. Humans ...
166 views

Can we be conscious of our dreams?

During the day time, we are conscious of our surroundings and the brain does its work. During sleep, we are not conscious. We have dreams. But the brain continues to function. After we awake ...
76 views

Why is “breaking a car” considered a sort of therapy?

I've heard this several times. People breaks things to feel more relaxed, less depressed or is there some other reason? What do you call this effect?
54 views

Is there some effect that forces humans to judge things and people according to the conception of their own image?

I remember of having read that such effects do exist, but I don't remember where. If that is true or if the hypothesis exist, I'd like to have references about it.
72 views

Computational model of biological object recognition

The human brain can achieve a remarkable ability to recognize visual patterns in an Invariant, selective and fast manner. The human visual system is quite powerful. It has an exquisite selectivity ...
138 views

What is this method used in the “it's not your fault” segment of Good Will Hunting and why does it work?

I mean the "it's not your fault" part at the end of this movie segment. Could anybody explain this method and why it works? What happens if the psychologist didn't get any reaction (like crying) ...
152 views

How does the brain calculate velocity?

How does the human brain calculate velocities? For example, when crossing a road and seeing a car coming towards you, how does the brain actually compute the rough velocity of the vehicle and your own ...
27 views

What would be the result if a color-sound synesthete were to go color blind due to diabetes?

Color blindness may be caused by diabetes. Would a color-sound synesthete lose her/his ability to hear two different tones when he/she is watching, let's say, magnets: ?
130 views

What causes some women to have repeated abortions?

Fisher et al. (2005) studied the characteristics of women who have repeated abortions. The study was conducted in countries where reliable contraception and education about birth control are readily ...
73 views

Is tasting something you see a form of synesthesia?

Synesthesia is often stated as "a confusion of the senses" and some of the more common forms include "seeing sounds" or associating letters or numbers with colors. There is also a very rare form of ...
73 views

How are hallucinations generated, is it related to dreaming?

I was thinking how powerful auditory and visual hallucinations must be, for the individual experiencing them to be unable to distinguish them from reality. I, personally, have not experienced a ...
134 views

Are there any free databases of audio-visual emotional stimuli (English)?

I am particularly interested in naturalistic and induced emotional content. I have found the SAVEE, the HUMAINE and the SEMAINE databases. I have read through the Terms for LDC (UPenn) and it seems ...
106 views

Is sluggishly progressing schizophrenia recognized outside of Russia?

I've been trying to look up information about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia, but the only source accessible to me was a Wikipedia article, that states that the term “sluggish schizophrenia” was ...
31 views

It seems to me that societies frequently construct systems that may be too complicated for any individual to operate competently within. For example, the tax system, the legal system, the medical ...
166 views

Which equation is Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve and what do the constants represent?

First off, I've come across two different forgetting curve equations. $$R = e^{-\large \frac{t}{s}}$$ where $R$ is retention, $t$ is time and $s$ is strength can be found on Wikipedia. And b = ...
73 views

Are connections in the human brain directed?

Do connections in our brain have a direction, or do they behave equally in both directions? I am especially interested in the structures responsible for memory.
24 views

Order of development of certain cognitive abilities in children

During the course of normal brain development, what comes first: logical thinking or counting?
54 views

What are some psychologically normal reasons for a parent to reject their child?

In family psychology are there any normal (not abnormal) reasons to give up and cut off communication with your child (adult or otherwise)? I would think it would be rational to have a closed adoption ...
78 views

Why do programmers work at night?

I can be described as a morning person, where waking up at 4:20 AM to catch a flight is no problem. My colleague on the other hand go to bed no earlier than midnight and often later than that. We're ...
32 views

Do humans look favorably upon unselfish/mysterious actions?

Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both. If discrimination is wrong only if group averages are the same, if war and ...

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