When the Egyptian King Intef died some 4,000 years ago, his tomb was inscribed with a song that encourages its audience to live a life of what came to be called hedonism: “Revel in pleasure while your life endures… never weary grow/In eager quest of what your heart desires.” Some 3,800 years later, the pursuit of happiness was […]
Nearly every psychologist has experienced the results of an experiment coming up inconclusive, where the statistics couldn’t tell us one way or the other whether our manipulation had worked. These experiments often go straight into the file drawer, to languish forever amongst years-old consent forms. Our distaste for such null results is due in part to […]
Randomness and human cognition generally do not mesh well. We know that all of us, including James Bond, tend to misperceive randomness in various ways. For example, anyone who has seen a basketball player make three shots in a row is likely to rate the chances of another success to be higher than if the player […]
Millions of pilgrims descend upon Mecca every year during the Hajj, one of Islam’s five pillars. The faithful gather to perform several rituals. For example, each person walks counter-clockwise seven times around the Ka’aba, a large black cube that determines the direction of prayer for Muslims around the world. Unfortunately, this event is not without its own list of […]
When the cat barks and the guitar has a bow: Neurocognitive signatures of processing perplexing text “A mouse was looking for something to eat while a bigger animal was waiting to hunt it.” What’s your best guess about which animal was lurking over the unfortunate mouse’s shoulder? I suspect you would be surprised if the […]
Here is a neat finding, originally reported by Gillian Cohen in 1990. It is easier to remember that someone is a baker than that someone’s name is Baker. Although both memories seem to require making a connection between the person’s appearance and the very same word “baker,” the profession baker is meaningful, evoking rich imagery and other associations. The name […]
In order to read this text you are focusing your attention on this single task, and you are filtering out distractions from your surroundings. People with ADHD, myself included, have difficulty doing this. A radio playing in the next room can act like an unwanted magnet to attention. But we also often struggle with distraction from […]
There is a lot more to color than most people realize. For example, color has been instrumental in experimental tests of the long-standing controversy about whether one’s language determines one’s mode of thinking. Do we all perceive colors in the same way, regardless of whether we have different words for, say, blue and green or […]
Human beings think. What’s more, we also think about our own thinking—that is, we monitor, recognize, and control our own cognitive processes. This ability is known as metacognition, and it allows us to make judgments of learning or knowing, for example when we ask ourselves questions such as “What do I already know about this topic? […]
There are many stories of dolphins saving people from various perilous situations including drowning and even shark attack. Until now, these events have been generally anecdotal and have been difficult to study systematically. However, the conspecific helping behaviour which may underlie these events is very interesting and has been scientifically documented on a few occassions. So-called […]