On Being Human

"This meditation on the general question of what it is to be human (and, loosely, on the role of psychoanalysis for becoming more fully so) constitutes in its entirety a preliminary consideration for the development of an ethic of compassion. Such an ethic – as a general normative ethic and as a specific ethical stance for clinicians – suggests itself to me as a consequence of this exploration into the nature and deeper development of our humanness. What follows, then, is a look at the fundamental question of what it is to be human, leaving the more detailed development of a resulting ethic of compassion for a later date. "

http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/ott3.htm

The Art of Understatement in 2001

"This is the true heart and soul of the Kuleshov effect. When we are shown no explicit emotion, we infer it--but in order to do that, we are forced to experience the circumstances, and feel the emotion ourselves. This is why the Kuleshov effect can generate such a strong reaction; it's why 2001 is such a powerful experience. We don't know HAL is frightened because he sounds frightened. We know he's frightened because Dave is coming to kill him. His blank voice forces us to experience his situation in his name and feel his own fear for him. We are one step closer to the action on screen, not reacting to the actors but reacting with the characters. "

http://www.ambiguous.org/robin/word/kuleshov.html

Self-help 'makes you feel worse'

"They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8132857.stm

How to spot a psychopath

"In the mid-60s, Hare was working as a prison psychologist in Vancouver. He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers for tests. He strapped them up to various EEG and sweat- and blood pressure-measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and explained to them that he was going to count backwards from 10 and when he reached one they'd receive a very painful electric shock.

The difference in the responses stunned Hare. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock were just the penance they deserved. They were, Hare noted, scared.

"And the psychopaths?" I asked.

"They didn't break a sweat," said Hare. "Nothing." The tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should. It was an enormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/21/jon-ronson-how-to-spot-a-psychopath

William Poundstone dissects the marketing tricks built into menus

"The main role of that $115 platter—the only three-digit thing on the menu—is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain"

http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/

Synesthesia and an Inspiring Collaboration

"... Synesthesia which in short, is a gift where people see colours for sounds and numbers. The director of the film was a fellow student who had Aspergers as well as Synesthesia."

http://www.redbubble.com/people/redbubble/journal/6915657-synesthesia-and-an-inspiring-collaboration

3 Smart Things About Referees

"Tae kwon do officials scoring fighters on film gave more points to those wearing red than blue. When asked to review the same footage after the uniform colors were digitally switched, they again ruled in favor of red"

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-08/st_3smart

Identität: The Physical Gestalt of Digital Identity

"Identität: [digital-identities.com] evaluates how "digital identity" is generated by way of a series of digitally fabricated and readable data sculptures. More than 100,000 raw datasets from sources like Last.fm, delicious, Amazon and Twitter were crawled from the web to relate 4 different criteria: personal interests, communication behaviors, activities, age of their online personalities. Based on the assumption that a digital identity is measurable and comparable, these datasets were then represented using custom computational tools. The data was visually abstracted and interpreted to give the disembodied digital identity a unique and characteristic "Gestalt" in form of a data sculpture."

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/08/identitat_the_gestalt_of_digital_identity.html

http://digital-identities.com/

Memory and Fear

"Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness.

"But, ... if at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning. One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear."

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, Bantam, Copyright 2006, pp. 78-79.

http://www.delanceyplace.com

Morality and Emotions

"It's only after the emotions have already made the moral decision that those rational circuits in the prefrontal cortex are activated. People come up with persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition. When it comes to making ethical decisions, human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This inner attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hoc justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make the automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a facade, an elaborate self-delusion. Benjamin Franklin said it best in his autobiography: 'So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'"

Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer, Kindle Loc. 1922-79.


http://www.delanceyplace.com

Typalizer - What personality is behind that blog?

"What personality is behind that blog?"

http://www.typealyzer.com/

for example:

"The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions. "

Based on http://ceffylau.blogspot.com

Pain Hurts More If [you think that the] Person Hurting You Means It

"Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that our experience of pain depends on whether we think someone caused the pain intentionally. In their study, participants who believed they were getting an electrical shock from another person on purpose, rather than accidentally, rated the very same shock as more painful. Participants seemed to get used to shocks that were delivered unintentionally, but those given on purpose had a fresh sting every time."


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111307.htm

Motor Mania

"The obvious Mr. Walker/ Mr. Wheeler, Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde connection exposes a truth about the motorcar and society- perhaps one we are not so comfortable with now that we have allowed the car to dominate practically every aspect of modern life. It’s this psychological split between the driver and walker- the lead-footed petrol addict and the resident who has to keep a close eye on small children and pets. And of course they are often the same person."

http://onthelevelblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/motor-mania/

Does physical warmth engender psychological warmth?

"... people are more likely to judge others as combative and argumentative after they have assembled a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have a sandpapery texture."

"We found that the participants who had recently held the warm coffee cup rated the person as being warmer, more generous, more sociable and more caring, compared to people who'd held the ice coffee."

http://whyfiles.org/shorties/271warm_hand/

INFJ - The Protector

"INFJs are gentle, caring, complex and highly intuitive individuals. Artistic and creative, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities. Only one percent of the population has an INFJ Personality Type, making it the most rare of all the types. "

http://www.personalitypage.com/INFJ.html


http://typelogic.com/infj.html

Seeing ourselves

"Researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

" 'When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,' Dr. Bodenhausen said. 'A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.' Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself. ...

"In a report titled 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,' which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

"How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? 'Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don't look exactly the same every time,' explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. 'Which image is you?' he said. 'Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.' "

Natalie Angier, "Mirrors Don't Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes." The New York Times, Science Times, July 22, 2008, F1.


http://www.delanceyplace.com/

Faceresearch.org

"FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices."

http://www.faceresearch.org/

The Frog Who Croaked Blue

"As little Edgar Curtis lay on his porch, he remarked to his mother how the noise of the rifle range was black, the chirp of the cricket was red, and the croak of the frog was bluish."

http://www.thefrogwhocroakedblue.com/

Dolores Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Where does “Blue” end and “Red” begin?

http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2008/03/where-does-blue-end-and-red-begin/

Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language

"Over the course of our lives, it appears that an unfiltered perception of color gives way to one mediated by the constructs of language."

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/babies-see-pure.html