Tom Stafford's Blog, page 143

Winners wanted: lucky bastards need not apply

[image error]A delightful experiment in the Journal of Gambling Studies demonstrates how susceptible we are to social persuasion to the point where even our established cognitive biases yield to the influence of others.

The illusion of control is the tendency to believe that we have influence over uncontrollable events. It has been well demonstrate in gamblers who may often put down wins and losses to their skills and abilities, even on games like roulette where the outcomes are entirely random.

This new...

Threatened psychopath articles suddenly appear

[image error]We recently reported on an academic article that criticised one of the most popular methods for diagnosing psychopaths and which had remained unpublished for four years due to legal threats by the designers of the interview.

The article was by researchers Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke who had criticised the PCL-R, a diagnostic scale by renowned forensic psychologist Robert Hare, for its supposed over-focus on criminality.

Their piece was peer reviewed and accepted for publication in 2006 by...

An attack of Open Mole

[image error]Stress, anxiety and depression are common terms used in the West to describe ways in which we become mentally distressed. We tend to think these are universal ways of experiencing mental strain but they are not. In fact, the words cannot be directly translated into many of the world's languages because the concepts do not exist.

The latest issue of the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry is a special collection of articles on 'cultural idioms of distress' and tackles ways in which people ...

Set adrift on mental bliss

[image error]Sleeping people are difficult to engage but easy to monitor, meaning that we know a great deal about what happens in the body and brain during our restful hours but little about the actual psychology of slumber.

One of the most interesting stages is the transition into sleep, where we can sometimes detect that our mind is changing as we slip into unconsciousness. These changes are known as the hypnagogic state and are when hallucinations are particularly common because the mind starts to...

The Rat or the Couch

[image error]The picture is a wonderful kid's drawing scribbled on the pages of the sole book on scientific psychology in Medellín's centre for Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Jacques Lacan was a French psychiatrist who created his own branch of psychoanalysis through an extended post-modernist riff on Freud.

I recently discovered I live in a barrio once famous for being the centre of psychoanlaysis in the city, and after some searching, found one of the parts still going strong is the presence of the centre for L...

Neuroplasticity is a dirty word

[image error]The latest refrain in popular science is that 'your brain is plastic', that experience has the potential to 'rewire' your brain, and that many previous mysteries in cognitive can be explained by 'neuroplasticity'. What they don't tell you is that these phrases are virtually meaningless.

Neuroplasticity sounds very technical, but there is no accepted scientific definition for the term and, in its broad sense, it means nothing more than 'something in the brain has changed'. As your brain is...

Fag hags and fairy queens

[image error]Jesse Bering's brilliant Scientific American column 'Bering in Mind' has a fantastic discussion of the cultural concept of the 'fag hag' - a woman who supposedly hangs around with gay men due to her own inadequacies.

I always assumed that 'fag hag' was nothing more than a particularly snide homophobic insult from the English language but it turns out that the general concept exists across the world - from Mexico to Japan.

Bering covers a recent research study that set out to investigate the...

Dendritic coasting

[image error]Morphologica is the online Etsy shop of a neuroscience postgrad who makes laser cut jewellery and ornaments from the images she sees during her time in the lab.

We've mentioned her neuron earrings before but her drinks coaster in the shape of a dendritic tree is just fantastic.

And if your drink of choice is something strong, there's a lovely symmetry as your drink leaves the dendritic tree, is absorbed by your body, to be passed on to the dendrites in your brain.

Although the analogy stops...

Sketch of the imagination

[image error]Psychologist Paul Bloom considers why imaginary characters and fictional plots can have such a powerful emotional effect in a fantastic article for the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bloom argues that we have a form of 'dual representation' for fictional reveries where we engage our emotions with the characters, plot or situation as if they were real while knowing that they are not.

Does this suggest that people believe, at some...

The future isn't what it used to be

[image error]I've just found a very odd news clip about an Australian project to create a disembodied virtual head that reminds people with dementia to take their medication.

The clip is from 2009 and is a little strange not least because the project is actually much more ambitious than described.

'The Thinking Head Project' (warning: rubbish website) is run by a heavyweight Australian research team that aims to design an artificially intelligent virtual head that you can communicate with just as you would ...