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Contributed by Lucy Rowe at Totton College. Whether it’s possible for memories of a traumatic experience to be forgotten, only to be recovered years later remains controversial. One concern is that people who report experiencing fragments of buried memories of childhood sexual abuse are actually misinterpreting episodes of sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis occurs when a person wakes from dream sleep before their ability to move their body has kicked in [ Read More ]
Sometimes information from our senses is merged so that what we experience reflects a sensory combination, quite different from what any one sense would have told us on its own. Nowhere is this more striking than in the McGurk Effect. In this illusion, the sound of a person saying one thing (e.g. the sound “BA”) is played over a video showing their lips saying something else (e.g. “GA”) , with [ Read More ]
The idea that humans release chemical signals – pheromones – that affect people around them is controversial. If pheromones do exist, however, two chemicals that might fulfil this role are the testosterone derivative 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND), found in men’s sweat, and the oestrogen-like steroid estra-1,3,5(10),16-16-tetraen-3-ol (EST), found in female urine. As well as activating smell-related brain regions, these chemicals also have a different effect on a small, frontal brain region, the [ Read More ]
People tend to think children are gullible. Richard Dawkins wrote that “with so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion…”. But now a study by Yale psychologists Candice Mills and Frank Keil suggests that cynicism – interpreting what other people say in light of their biases and self-interests [ Read More ]
Just thinking that they’ve not had much sleep could interfere with the daytime functioning of imsomniacs, regardless of whether they actually had enough sleep or not. Twenty-two students (average age 21 years) with primary insomnia were recruited by Christina Semler and Allison Harvey at Oxford University. All had experienced at least three nights’ sleep disturbance per week for the past month. For three nights, the students’ sleep was measured using [ Read More ]
The Dutch are renowned for their tolerance but racial tensions have been running high in the Netherlands, fuelled last year by the murder of film maker Theo Van Gogh, not long after the release of his controversial film about the abuse of Muslim women. Now Maykel Verkuyten at Utrecht University has investigated the kind of language and arguments used by Dutch people when they talk about immigration. Seventy-one native Dutch [ Read More ]
There’s evidence that on top of their emotional and psychological suffering, victims of child sex abuse also experience learning and memory problems. But the evidence is inconsistent, and some studies comparing abused children with unharmed children have failed to take into account the possible role played by differences in the social class and wealth of the children’s families (i.e. their ‘socioeconomic status’). To investigate further, Corinna Porter (Brigham Young University, [ Read More ]
Can mediums really speak with the dead? Scientists have been testing mediums since the nineteenth century, but according to Ciaran O’Keeffe and Richard Wiseman, their experiments have always suffered from serious methodological flaws that might allow the mediums to pick up information about their ‘sitters’ (the person the reading is for) via more earthly means, like the clothes they wear. O’Keeffe and Wiseman asked five mediums to give 60-minute readings [ Read More ]
Psychologists have shown that people tend to underestimate how long things will take them, both in their personal and business lives. But most research into ‘the planning fallacy’, as it’s known, has been with individuals. Now psychologists in Canada have shown that when working in a group, we’re even more unrealistically optimistic about how quickly we can get things done. In two studies, Roger Buehler at Wilfrid Laurier University and [ Read More ]
The idea that your brain contains information that ‘you’ cannot access is, of course, not new – Freud wrote about that years ago; and neither is it an unfamiliar phenomenon in our everyday lives – how often do we struggle to find a word that we know is in there somewhere? But what is new, is the demonstration by scientists that they can use a scan to read off information [ Read More ]