Category: Psychology

Did you know they’ve taken the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary? This one went around endlessly at school and I almost fell for it the first time, but never again. Why would I?

And so I segue mysteriously (yet relevantly) into the Channel 4 ‘Bodyshocks‘ series of documentaries. This week’s programme focussed on ‘the girl with the x-ray eyes’. Natasha, a seventeen-year-old from Russia claims to literally see inside people in order to diagnose their medical conditions. Having submitted to the sceptic’s tests, she was debunked, but not entirely satisfactorily.

And now my final, and not so mysterious segue, is into Professor Richard Wiseman’s research into spoon-bending. He had two sets of undergrads witness the trick. In half, the wannabe Yuri suggested that the spoon continued to bend after he put it down. Sure enough 40% reported the spoon continuing to bend – as if by magic.
→ Read on about why the debunking might not have been satisfactory.

It’s much easier to make a credible looking website than it is to make a credible looking book. So when you’re on the web, how do you evaluate the credibility of the information you’ve found? On average, it seems, not very well!

Research carried out a couple of years ago found that people use only superficial cues when making judgements about a site. In other words, if it looks professional, then it is. People are generally ‘cognitive misers’, tending not to check the credentials of the author or their motivation in making the information available. The new buzz phrase for this type of skill is ‘information literacy’.

One immediate practical implication is that every organisation needs a professional looking website or visitors won’t take it seriously.
→ From the New York Times (Free registration required)

“A specially prepared extract of the herb St John’s wort is at least as effective in treating depression as the powerful antidepressant drug Seroxat and has fewer side-effects, a study has indicated.”

For a little more background on St John’s wort (left) have a look at the Netdoctor site.
> From Netdoctor

The Guardian asks leading scientist to gaze into their crystal balls and ruminate on the next scientific revolution. V S Ramachandran, the neuroscientist, comes up with my favourite quote:

“The next revolution will be understanding the organ that made all the previous revolutions possible. Your mind, your ambitions, your love life, even what you regard as yourself, all of it is the activity of little wisps of jelly in your head. Once we figure out the code, that’s going to be a big revolution and another humbling experience. The ultimate triumph of the human mind is to understand what the mind is.”

> From The Guardian

The green box contains a brand new rat neuron. Why is this important? Well, until quite recently researchers were unsure of two things: whether it’s possible for the brain to change and whether it can grow new cells. With the help of rats and monks, the answer is emerging: quite possibly yes.

This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity and is all the rage in neuropsychology at the moment. As none of us are getting any younger, it’s good to know our brains still have the capacity for change.

> Read about rats in Science Daily, and monks in the Orlando Sentinel

Ecstasy’s emergence as a popular recreational drug can be traced back to one man. Although the drug was first synthesised by Merck in 1914, it was initially thought to be useless, and immediately forgotten. It wasn’t until 1976 that an eccentric chemist, Alexander Shulgin (above), resynthesised it on the suggestion of a former student.

Shulgin wasn’t particularly impressed with its effect, describing it as being like “…a particularly lucid alcohol buzz,” but he did find that, “It opened up a person, both to other people and inner thoughts…” He wondered if perhaps it would be useful in psychotherapy and recommended its use. By the late 70s a number of therapists were encouraging their patients to use it – and with some success. In the following decades word eventually spread, and its recreational use began to take off.

Meanwhile Shulgin continued to research hallucinogens, synthesising and testing them first on himself, then on his wife and friends. He carefully catalogued the effects of every single one in his self-published works, ‘Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,’ and ‘Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved’.

Unsurprisingly, Shulgin has now become a hero of the counter-culture.
> From The New York Times [Free registration required]

With changes proposed to the licensing laws in the UK there’s been lots of talk about binge drinking. The suggestion is that opening the pubs and bars at all hours will encourage binge drinking.

This is the same as saying that increasing the number of gyms will make us more healthy, or lowering the price of sofas will make us more lazy, or paying lawyers the same as binmen will decrease their number and make us less litigious and argumentative.

The answer to all these: it might but it won’t necessarily.

Research carried out on students into binge drinking – and after all these guys are professionals – suggests that it has much more to do with our expectations for drinking. The student’s belief that it made them more attractive, socially inviting and articulate, was directly predicting how much they drank.

Remember, reality is often not as important as our beliefs in affecting our behaviour.

> The abstract from the Journal of Addictive Behaviours

> You can check whether you’re a binge drinker on the BBC site