Beyond Rivalry - neuroscience_psychology_the_mind

Mimesis, Psych 201 and Jeans

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:27:01 -0500

Deep Glamour's "What Your Jeans Say About You" (other than, "These are the only ones I could find that fit me ...") reports on a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Consumer Research that finds that our 'attachment' styles determine what jeans we wear:

"See, when you were but a wee babe in your mother's arms you honed one of two attachment styles, 'anxiety and avoidance,' the authors explain. Anxious people view themselves as positive or negative and avoidance people view others as positive or negative.

'Anxiously attached individuals are more influenced by "brand personalities," the idea that a brand possesses humanlike traits, such as sincerity or excitement. "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand," the authors write.'

The study seems to look only at people whose styles are attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. The study summary says nothing about the jeans preferences of people whose 'attachment style' isn't anxiety, i.e., those with a 'secure' style; how do they make these ultra-important decisions? I couldn't find a free version of the full-text article to learn more.

The reason…

Intuitive or Sensory or Both?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:33:00 -0500

My blog and I have parted ways on the Myers-Briggs personality analysis. I've tested as an INTP for many years now. This blog, on the other hand, is apparently an ISTP. You can test any blog here (their first language seems to be Swedish).

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like to seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

The page shows which parts of the brain are dominant during the writing of the blog. For the ST, it's logic, mathematics, order, habit, details -- in short, practicality and concreteness.

This seems accurate to me. I don't tend to write here about my feelings or from my imagination, instead focusing on theories, analysis, synthesis, quantifiables, current events, and so on. I think one can probably surmise my feelings and my…

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

***

Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."…

Recent Reading

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:55:00 -0500

Woman killed by husband's coffin (11 Nov.)

God's Facebook Wall (12 Nov.)

Apparent 6th severed foot found in British Columbia (12 Nov)

Two Dead in Argument Over 'Bama-LSU Game (10 Nov.)

The Essential 007: A Recap of all 22 Bond Movies (13 Nov.)

Unregulated Credit Default Swaps Led to Weakness (31 Oct.)

Exxon Mobil: Biggest profit in history (30 Oct.)

The age when children begin attempting to appear racially colour-blind (27 Oct)

The Quest for the Perfect Morning Routine: The first in a series on lifehacking, at Slate (12 Nov): "The advice here is not my own, but I have clicked on it."

When Alzheimer's Hits at 40 in the WSJ (14 Nov.)

and

"I don't remember a whole lot about that period; I appear to have bought a couple of truly depressing sweaters, the kind you only wear when all you really want is to curl up under the bed for several years..." (The Likeness, p. 47, Tana French)

(Photo: Recent Drinking: Ironstone Cabernet Franc 2004)

What Makes You So Desperately Unhappy?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:04:00 -0400

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the KwikTrip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field [at his site]. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

I'm not the first to say it, but, hey, way to outsource the novel!

What I'm Reading Lately ... Death, Death and Certainty

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:21:00 -0400

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to…

Certainty and Addiction, Pattern-Making

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:18:00 -0400

A couple of interesting insights in this SciAm article, "The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw," written by neurologist Robert Burton:

First, that thinking, learning, and "feeling certain" stimulate the brain's pleasure centers ("the mesolimbic dopamine system primarily located in the upper brain stem") similarly to the way that "cocaine, amphetamines, alcohol, nicotine and gambling" do:

"It is quite likely that the same reward system provides the positive feedback necessary for us to learn and to continue wanting to learn. The pleasure of a thought is what propels us forward; imagine trying to write a novel or engage in a long-term scientific experiment without getting such rewards. Fortunately, the brain has provided us with a wide variety of subjective feelings of reward ranging from hunches, gut feelings, intuitions, suspicions that we are on the right track to a profound sense of certainty and utter conviction. And yes, these feelings are qualitatively as powerful as those involved in sex and gambling. One need only look at the self-satisfied smugness of a 'know it all' to suspect that the feeling of certainty can approach the power of addiction."

Second (and evidenced in some studies), Burton suggests that we are more likely to…

Slow Blogging

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:01:00 -0400

From Dave at How to Save the World, this descibes my process much of the time:

"The coined term (by Barbara Ganley) is 'slow blogging', but I much prefer the term my friend Chris Lott uses: 'mindful wandering'. [I like both.] The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you're reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to 'make sense' of it. I find that some of my best blog posts are those I've stopped and restarted several times, allowing time for thoughts to percolate and new ideas to emerge."

For me, blogging has become primarily a way of seeing and expressing connections among various things I read, think, experience, feel, desire, do.

Bias, Blind Spots, and Patterns

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:42:00 -0400

Along similar lines of previous research reported here comes a report of this study at Ira Flatow's Science Friday, via Overcoming Bias:

"In situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories. In a series of experiments, researchers created situations in which people had less control over their situation, and then tested how likely the participants were to see imaginary images embedded in snowy pictures. The researchers also had participants write about either a situation in which they had control, or a situation in which they didn't, and then presented stories involving strange coincidences. People who had written about a situation in which they were not in control were more likely to draw non-existent connections between the coincidences, the researchers found."

As Robin concludes:

"This summary suggests out-of-control-feeling folks are biased to see more than there is, but perhaps in-control-feeling folks are biased to see less than there is."

I tend to believe the former, because humans seem to me predisposed to make meaning, but the latter isn't out of the question, i.e., maybe there is meaning in everything and I don't see it. Or,…

we are, Who

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:50:00 -0400

"Below what we think we are
We are something else,
We are almost anything."

-- DH Lawrence