Browsed by
Category: Psychology

IQ tests can’t measure it, but ‘cognitive flexibility’ is key to learning and creativity

IQ tests can’t measure it, but ‘cognitive flexibility’ is key to learning and creativity

Einstein thought imagination was crucial. Robert and Talbot Trudeau/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, University of Cambridge; Christelle Langley, University of Cambridge, and Victoria Leong, University of Cambridge IQ is often hailed as a crucial driver of success, particularly in fields such as science, innovation and technology. In fact, many people have an endless fascination with the IQ scores of famous people. But the truth is that some of the greatest achievements by our species have primarily relied on…

Read More Read More

On dream sharing and its purpose

On dream sharing and its purpose

Matthew Spellberg writes: Among certain philosophers it is a commonplace that dreams are radically private, that no one can follow you into them. A fragment from Heraclitus distills the problem: “The universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe.” Hegel, commenting on this same fragment, says that “the dream is a knowledge of something of which I alone know.” Consider how you might teach a child to…

Read More Read More

William James: Free will requires that we be able to exorcise habits

William James: Free will requires that we be able to exorcise habits

Gordon Marino writes: William James (1842–1910) is arguably one of the most brilliant and fecund minds this nation has ever produced. James and his friend Charles Sanders Peirce were the progenitors of the only distinctly American philosophical movement, pragmatism. The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, marked James as the first prominent American psychologist. His The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) established him as a pioneer in the study of comparative religion. Americans have long looked to Europe for intellectual…

Read More Read More

Social media and the neuroscience of predictive processing

Social media and the neuroscience of predictive processing

Mark Miller and Ben White write: Levi Jed Murphy smoulders into the camera. It’s a powerful look: piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a razor-sharp jawline – all of which, he says, cost him around £30,000. Murphy is an influencer from Manchester in the UK, with a large social media following. Speaking on his approach to growing his fans, he says that, if a picture doesn’t receive a certain number of ‘Likes’ within a set time, it gets…

Read More Read More

The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities

The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities

Kathleen Wallace writes: Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought…

Read More Read More

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

Max Fisher writes: There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children. All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so,…

Read More Read More

Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Kate Crawford writes: At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects. Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community….

Read More Read More

Do we have free will? Maybe it doesn’t matter

Do we have free will? Maybe it doesn’t matter

Jim Davies writes: Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. It’s the “most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity humanity has evolved,” he writes, the power to “see and feel and know something—an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth—that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to…

Read More Read More

Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes: There’s a new virus in town and it’s not fooling around. You can catch it through face-to-face contact or digitally – that is, via a human or bot. Few of us possess immunity, some are even willing hosts; and, despite all we’ve learned about it, this virus is proving more cunning and harder to eradicate than anyone could have expected. Misinformation isn’t new, of course. Fake news was around even before the invention of the printing press,…

Read More Read More

How will people act after getting vaccinated? The complex psychology of safety

How will people act after getting vaccinated? The complex psychology of safety

Robert Klitzman writes: A friend invited me to her home for a birthday party. “Ten of us will be there,” she wrote. “I’m pretty sure we’ve all been vaccinated, so we should be OK.” It was the first invitation to an indoor dinner I had received in almost a year. Six other friends are planning a tropical vacation and invited me to join them. “Aren’t you worried about Covid?” I asked, feeling a bit nerdy for raising the question. “Not…

Read More Read More

The voice in your head

The voice in your head

Sophie McBain writes: Patsy Hage began hearing voices when she was eight years old. She was playing with her brother in the attic when her scarf caught alight on a candle. She would always remember running downstairs to her mother, her clothing on fire, convinced she was going to die. She was rushed to hospital and treated for serious burns. It was in hospital that the voices first started talking to her. She heard them for the rest of her…

Read More Read More

The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

Judy Batalion writes: In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair. She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She…

Read More Read More

Martin Luther rewired your brain

Martin Luther rewired your brain

Joseph Henrich writes: Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes? You are…

Read More Read More

We live in a wake-centric world out of touch with our dreams

We live in a wake-centric world out of touch with our dreams

Rubin Naiman writes: In the Old Testament, Jacob, on the run for his life from the twin brother he betrayed, beds down for the night in the wilderness and there dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and Earth, of angels ascending and descending, and of God assuring him of an auspicious future. With his head on a pillow of stone – symbolic of matter in its densest form – Jacob dreams of a structure linking the material and ethereal…

Read More Read More

Being kind to others is good for your health

Being kind to others is good for your health

Marta Zaraska writes: Newspapers started writing about Betty Lowe when she was 96 years old. Despite being long past retirement age, she was still volunteering at a cafe at Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester, UK, serving coffee, washing dishes and chatting to patients. Then Lowe turned 100. “Still volunteers at hospital”, the headlines ran. Then she reached 102 and the headlines declared: “Still volunteering”. The same again when she turned 104. Even at 106, Lowe would work at the…

Read More Read More

People depolarize after elections as their attachment to their preferred political party weakens

People depolarize after elections as their attachment to their preferred political party weakens

PsyPost reports: Affective polarization — one’s level of animosity towards political rivals – tends to decline in the wake of elections, according to new research that examined data from 42 countries. The study, published in the journal Electoral Studies, indicates that this depolarization is partially the result of citizens becoming less strongly attached to political parties over time. “Affective polarization is one of the main concerns for the health and quality of contemporary democracies. Some polarization may be beneficial for…

Read More Read More