Richard E. Cytowic's Blog, page 18
January 20, 2012
The Key to Self-Esteem? Accomplishment.
January 9, 2012
The Placebo Response: Not in Your Head but in Your Brain
* A surgeon cuts the skin over your knee instead of performing arthroscopic surgery, but your knee pain still goes away.
* You swallow a dummy pill that contains nothing but starch, and yet your migraine vanishes as if you had taken an Imitrex.
* A saltwater injection eases your asthma the same amount that puffing on a bronchial inhaler does.
December 13, 2011
Tune Stuck in Your Head? You May Have an Earworm!
This blog is different from those that I normally post. In this one I ask readers to share a specific experience that might seem unusual, even strange perhaps. Given my long history with synesthesia, however, it shouldn't be a surprise that I am open to hearing about strange and unusual experiences.
December 1, 2011
Image & Ego 2: Decision Time: How to Know What You Really Want
Being a person takes work. Being the person you want to be takes special effort, much of it centered on making decisions everyone has to face but many try to avoid. Which is to say that most consequential things in life depend on knowing how to choose. In the first "Image and Ego" post I illustrated how ego defense mechanisms work.
November 6, 2011
Image and Ego 1: Bruised, Inflated, or Right-sized?
In these next few columns I'll talk about ego and image, two big factors when it comes to self-perception. Today's culture places enormous value on image. You want to project yourself in the best possible light, but so does everybody else. This makes for inevitable competition. We often fret over what people think about us, or act tentatively in situations where we want to look good.
July 30, 2011
See With Your Tongue!
Take a gander with your tongue??? I must be joking, right? Except that I'm not.
You can see with your tongue. No kidding. Here's how, and here's why the tongue is a fantastic brain-machine interface with many real-world applications.
June 2, 2011
Time Travel: The Trip of a Lifetime
Time travel seems like science fiction, but hundreds of scholarly papers explore the mind's capacity to go forward and backward in time. Welcome fellow space cadets!
