Dennys Funny Quotes: 2 Funny Freud Cartoons From Raymond Betancourt

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Dennys Funny Quotes: 2 Funny Freud Cartoons From Raymond Betancourt: "Check out the funny mind of cartoonist Raymond Betancourt and how he contemplates Freud, sure to give you a laugh. His blog is Twisted or you can view his latest cartoons and drawings at flickr."

Video: Dreams Explained and What We Can Learn From Them

From Denny: Did you know that you can dream up to 20 dreams in one night? Dream analysis has long been the subject of fascination for the psychology world as well as the general public. These ladies discuss the most common dreams and to remember that dreams are metaphors in your life.

What's fun is to keep a notebook by your bed and when you wake up in the middle of the night, record as much as you can remember. Even when a dream is vivid and you think you will remember it easily a few hours later, you often don't. I've written some of my best poetry and other writings like this in the middle of the night, sketching down some brief thoughts or insights.

They also talk about how you can train yourself to remember your dreams. True. They also said you can go back into a dream that isn't going well and rewrite it to a better scenario. Also true. You can even incubate a dream to help you solve a problem in your waking life. True. I've done them all. Why waste a nightly resource of eight hours working for you to help you have a better life?

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Can You Really Separate the Liars from the Truth-Tellers?

Face illusion photo, take a look at the word the face spells

From Denny: Seems the deception researchers think they are on to something in the ongoing search to separate the liars from the nervous who appear to be lying but are not during interviews or interrogations. Most people don't bear up well under interrogation and are understandably nervous, appearing to be guilty when actually they are not. Therefore, the usual "tells" of nervousness or shifty eyes is not enough to determine a liar. You require more than that to make a sound judgment about the veracity of what the subject is telling you.

Scientists have a new theory they think works and it's called "cognitive load." We all know that lying (for most people) is mentally taxing just to keep up with a consistency of the lie over time. You know, get your story line straight. So, scientists think the trick to do while interrogating someone is to ask them to perform a task while lying - or telling the truth - and it will become evident which it is because lying is supposed to be more taxing on the liars.

I doubt how well this theory will hold up; I certainly have known what could be termed professional liars and they demonstrate complete ease at lying. "If their lips are moving; they're lying" is our motto. This theory may work for the majority of the population and in certain cultures. Time will tell as it is tested worldwide.

The researchers are in England and here is what they set up as a study to test their theory: One group was asked to lie convincingly and the other group was told to tell the truth. The story line was about a staged theft scenario that only the truth tellers had actually experienced.

Then the researchers, led by psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England (a completely different culture than in America), brought in a second pair of groups to do exactly the same but with an added condition: they had to maintain eye contact while relating their stories.

When the researchers took the videotapes back to the lab to examine for "tells" and cognitive load they did find some interesting facts. Verbal signs of cognitive load were displayed as fewer spatial details in the suspects' stories. Nonverbal signs of cognitive load were displayed as fewer eye blinks. Eye blinks, you say? Yes, eye blinks when rapid suggest nervousness; fewer blinks are a "tell" displaying cognitive load. So, guess how this is useful? Liars blink less. (I could have told you that and saved you a few million dollars...)

How did the eye contact figure in? It was subtle according to this experiment but did manage to define and magnify the difference between the liars and the truth-tellers.

What to watch for when you try to apply this new theory? Be aware some people naturally blink less than others, so you really need to spend some time getting to know a person before placing them in a stress situation to determine if they are lying or not. Other people have such good and disciplined minds they can carry the cognitive load better than others can. In short, you better actually know the person before you place them in a situation like this because individual differences muddled some of the group results here.

Conclusion

Use this theory as a general baseline to measure the liars in your life. It isn't foolproof or totally accurate like most generalizations. It will help you to grow in your own emotional intelligence about relating to other people.

And, remember, some people appear to be lying because they are withholding private information. Keep that in mind when trying to determine if a person is lying to you: what is their agenda for lying? Are they private people? Are they philanderers? Are they embarrassed for others to realize they are not quite as important as they boast to others?

There are a lot of reasons people lie. Gamblers lie about what they had for breakfast afraid you will nail them down as to where they actually were at a certain time of day and the wife may find out. Other people lie to enhance their status in life and don't want to be found out. Some people lie just to appear more interesting and worthy to others. People are people; love them any way! :)



Written by Denny Lyon
Copyright 4 August 2009
All Rights Reserved



Source: Scientific American



England, University of Portsmouth, Society and Culture, science, research, Eye contact, Cognition, Social Sciences, Psychology, Cognitive load, Emotional intelligence, eye contact, cognitive science

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed - How to Foolproof Your Mind, part 1

From Denny: From our friends over at the litemind blog comes yet another great article about how best to use our minds efficiently.

From Luciano, the author:

"Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble.

Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them.

1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts

“Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? What’s your best estimate?” Researchers asked this question to a group of people, and the estimates were seldom too far off 35 million. The same question was posed to a second group, but this time using 100 million as the starting point. Although both figures were arbitrary, the estimates from the ‘100 million’ group were, without fail, concomitantly higher than those in the ‘35 million’ group. (for the curious, here’s the answer.)

Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts.

This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example.

What can you do about it?

•Always view a problem from different perspectives. Avoid being stuck with a single starting point. Work on your problem statement before going down a solution path.

•Think on your own before consulting others. Get as much data as possible and explore some conclusions by yourself before getting influenced by other people’s anchors.

•Seek information from a wide variety of sources. Get many opinions and broaden your frame of reference. Avoid being limited to a single point of view."

By Luciano Passuello @ litemind

For the rest of this intriguing article just click on the title link, great reading!

critical thinking decision making psychology

Psychology: Hateful Humor, Hit Counts, and Positive Politics

From Denny: Here is an unusual article about writing in the blogosphere. Since I've never been a fan of political vitriol and character assassination promoted over problem-solving pressing social issues I found this interesting. First I've heard of this Losada Ratio about positive to negative emotions charting what ratio is needed for best group dynamics. There's even some psychology and science involved! :)

"Cruised any politics related web sites recently? Seen any angry, sarcastic, personal attacks wrapped in "humor"? If your answer to the first question was yes and your answer to the second was no, then you either cruise a VERY select set of websites (send me a list, please!) or …. Well, truth to tell, I can’t figure out how you might look through many of the top-rated websites and answer the second question "No."

I was cruising around the web the other day and ran into a post by a blogger who had just gotten his millionth hit. He was giving advice on how to do the same — and since I’m on track to hit that point with my blog in about 2037, maybe I should listen. Then again, maybe not, because two of his key points were to make some enemies and to use enough "vitriolic ad hominem to make sure he never forgets it." Note the lack of an exclamation point on that quote — no excitement here, just sane, sensible advice!

Now, let me note that this advice-giver also suggested that we not confuse "cyber-venom" with "real-world hate", suggesting that the vitriol in web space is equivalent to the theatrics of pro wrestling. And much of it probably is, but that doesn’t mean that engaging in such activities is consequence-free. I suspect that, for many participants, both readers and bloggers, there are very real consequences.

Losada Ratio

Two words: Losada ratio . Marcial Losada’s research established that positivity has a tipping point. At approximately three positive emotions to one negative, individuals and groups begin to experience life in a new way. Patterns of positive relationships, creativity, collegiality, and forward motion emerge that could not have been predicted before. Goals coalesce, pathways appear, and efficacy surges. Further research shows that the highest levels of group performance require a ratio of 5:1."

By Dave Shearon @ Positive Psychology News Daily

Take a look at this interesting site! Just click on the title link to take you to the rest of the article. Thanks for visiting!

Education: How Gifted Children Are Assessed

Image by Kyle Jones via Flickr

How Gifted Children Are Assessed:

"It takes more than test scores that indicate whether or not a child is gifted. While IQ tests are certainly a factor in determining giftedness, they're not everything. It's also important to note than few professionals are specifically trained to assess gifted children. The gifted child has special education and emotional needs. If you suspect your child may be gifted, find a qualified professional with experience in working with gifted kids.

Testing involves administering standardized tests that report results in numbers. The information provided from tests is limited. Assessment is more interactive and requires a highly trained and experienced evaluator."

By Lela Davidson @ HubPages

From Denny: Useful information for every parent to understand how their child is evaluated. Just click on the title link to take you to the rest of the article.

Brain: Our Culture Influences How Our Brains Function

From Denny: This is the first time a brain imaging study about this question of culture has been done. It was reported in the Psychological Science January 2008 issue.

What did the MIT researchers find?

People from different cultures around the world actually use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks.

What are the differences in the cultures?

American culture values greatly the individual which in turn “emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts.”

Asian cultures “emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects.”

Studying an impersonal brain scan is far different than behavioral studies researchers have done. Behavioral studies learned that memory and perception can be influenced by cultural differences. What scientists wanted to know: But can this be proven in brain activity patterns?

The Study

Organizing the team was John Gabrieli, professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. It was a very small study of 10 East Asians recently arrived in the USA (I guess so they would not be tainted by their now new culture) and 10 Americans. Researchers asked the subjects to make quick perceptual judgments while they were being scanned in an fMRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). An fMRI is a new technology that while a person’s brain is responding to a test, this machine starts mapping the blood flow changes in the brain, corresponding to the brain’s responses.

What were those mental tasks?

They were abstract stimuli like lines within squares. People were shown a progression of this kind of stimuli and then asked to compare to the last one given. In some of these trials, people were being asked for an absolute judgment of individual objects that were independent of context. Researchers accomplished this by asking if the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares.

In other trials, researchers were looking for relative judgment of interdependent objects. They accomplished this by asking people to decide whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size.

What happened during these tests?

Different brain activation patterns were present for these two groups when performing these tasks. Apparently, Americans find it more difficult to make relative judgments. What happened to them is that these tasks activated the brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. Americans fared better in more culturally familiar absolute judgments and there was less activation of these regions.

East Asians proved to show the opposite tendency. They had to engage the attention-demanding part of their brains more so for making absolute judgments. Relative judgments were easier for them.

Trey Hedden was a lead author of the paper and also a researcher scientist at McGovern. Hedden remarked, “We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain’s attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone.”

What else did they find that was significant?

The effect was greater in individuals who identified more closely with their culture. It was shown that a stronger cultural association presented a culture-specific pattern of brain-activation. A bit of how researchers went about being able to identify this was by the use of questionnaires. They asked about preferences and values in social relations – like do you think an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member? This helped gauge cultural identification.

Researchers have long wondered how these differences came to be

Gabrieli thinks, “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks. They are trained to use it in different ways. It’s the culture that does the training. It’s fascinating the way the brain responds to these simple drawings, reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships.”

Summary

Society does affect our brains; that much is established both in behavioral and now brain scan studies. Perhaps we need to be careful what we teach…

Brain: Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

Image of Luciano Passuello

From Denny: From our friends over at LiteMind comes another useful article for your everyday life. They like to write about efficient and innovative ways to use our minds.

Here is an intriguing article about one of my favorite subjects: creative problem-solving!

This is an excerpt from the post by blog owner Luciano Passuello:

"SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful.

In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need.

SCAMPER Primer

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Magnify

P = Put to Other Uses

E = Eliminate (or Minify)

R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you."

For the rest of this great article just click on the title link!

Brain: Free Printable Brain Teasers Are Used In Business As Motivational Tools

Free Printable Brain Teasers Are Used In Business As Motivational Tools: "Printable brain teasers are being used more often in today's business as motivational tools for an incentive to encourage their employees and students."

By Dottie1 @ HubPages

Photo of brain management center @ free-puzzles.net

From Denny: Another fun article about brain teasers from my friend over at HubPages, enjoy!

Brain: The Technology of Mind Reading

Animation of an MRI Brain Scan Image via Wikipedia

From Denny: Published last fall in Nature - and their academic snooze writing decoded by Psychology Today - come most curious findings from an fMRI study of human brain activity. It seems science is on the outside edges of being able to read your mind!

Right now researchers have been able to learn what a subject is looking at as long as it is a photo of a scene in nature. "Using fMRI, the investigators acquired a template response from each subject's visual cortex and then used this template to "decode" the brain's response to novel images," says Psychology Today.

How were the investigators able to decipher to a high degree of accuracy what the subjects were viewing? Using a computer algorithm they scanned the visual cortex of the subject. Basically, it came close to mind reading with a 92% accuracy.

In the experiment all the algorithm was required to do was look at the known brain activity and then proceed to choose from a known set of images to determine which one was the best match. The algorithm did not take the brain activity and then reconstruct what the subject was actually seeing - there is a difference here. If there was a large image library maybe some day the computer just might be able to do this reconstruction process and practically "read minds."

Written by Denny Lyon

Video: Antisocial-Personality-Disorder

Sociopaths and psychopaths are both listed under antisocial personality disorder. Certainly explains why the global financial markets created an economic meltdown: no restraints on ruthless people!

This plain-talking therapist calls it as she sees it about the interaction of psychopaths and understanding their behavior.

The Joy Makers: Feel the Love

Photo by -Gep- @ flickr

The Joy Makers: Feel the Love:

"Improv group brings joy to surprised thousands

Stop here for free joy, hugs, love and a happiness high that will last for days!"

by Denny Lyon

From Denny: If ever there was an exercise in right-brain teaching launched upon unsuspecting thousands of people, these videos collected in this article demonstrate it! Check it out AND laugh a lot at the same time. This is your go-to article when you have a lousy day with 9 videos in it to lift your spirits.

Brainy guy, better sperm?

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“A group of researchers has issued a study finding that higher IQ men have better sperm. So, smarter guys tend to have higher quality sperm, they found. But the reality is, there is no intellectual push-up a man can do to give himself better— that is, more fit or more aggressive sperm.”

From Denny: OK, I could make some wise-cracks here but will behave myself for the time being. Short informative article about research that gives geeks, nerds and other brainy folks hope: Smarter people finally get the last laugh!

Sunk Cost Bias: How It Hinders Your Life and 4 Ways to Overcome It

"The sunk cost bias is a thinking trap that not only slows down personal improvement efforts, but one which can make people literally waste their whole lives on — something I’ve seen happening with disturbing regularity. The good news is that, like most thinking traps, the biggest step you can take to overcome it is by simply becoming aware of it."

By Luciano Passuello

How to Develop Your Visualization Skill

"Think about this: everything we do begin as a thought. Every action, every word, every human creation exists first in our imagination.

The ability to see things before they actually happen is what enables us to pursue our dreams and ultimately achieve them. In fact, the better we visualize the future we want, the better our chances to make it happen.

Training the Mind is Training the Body

Your brain cannot differentiate well between real action and mental action. There has been research done showing that thinking about an action — even while your body is at rest — will fire the neural pathways in your brain just as you were actually doing it."

By Albert Foong

Various forms and levels of visualizations have been used for decades now by people in all walks of life. Here it is explained in an easy and useful manner to apply immediately.

Psychology

Psychology - "Are there any good things about psychology? If so then what are they? These are some questions that often ask by people who are curious and interested about psychology and about studying it. I have done a good research in order to answer these questions and below I have enumerated them all."

By raymondphillippe

Thought about studying in the field of psychology? This writer has given you some ideas of where to start and what to consider.