thegipples/cognitive science

From the page: "Are you kidding me? She lives in the stratosphere apart from most Americans. So she has to live a normal, ratty life like the rest of those who take the poor subway. She worries about a pedicure? I worked with kids who ate, if they were lucky, one meal a day. Or a kid so abused his father raped him anally with a screwdriver. Or a deaf couple who lived in a trailer with no heat most of the year.

Your response was perfectly normal. She has a life left. She has food. She has 40 white shirts. She'll be okay. Maybe she can give her cottage to the deaf couple I worked with who have nothing.

You have nothing to be ashamed about."

From the page: "Professor Zajonc found that the size of a family, and the birth order of the children, have implications for the I.Q. of each child. He found that the I.Q. score of each successive child decreases a little, partly because only the eldest receives undivided parental attention."

From the page: "Psychologists have lots of devices for making you feel bad about yourself, and one of them is just to give you an exam. They did this with university students. Then they told half of them, you did lousy, and half of them, you did well.

And what they found was that those who were made to feel badly about themselves started to deny their own voice more, while those who were feeling good started hearing themselves talking when they weren't. Now since we didn't evolve to hear our voice on a tape recorder, we have to interpret here. But it's like self-presentation is contracting on your failure and expanding on your success."

From the page: ""People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it's also agonizing."

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten."

From the page: "The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to 'unstructured' sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones.

It is probably best known for its uses in parapsychology experiments, but it is also used to induce hallucinations and sensory distortions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sensory experiences."