Psychology runs hot and cold as we sample its topics. Verbal learning, or mastering paired sets of nonsense syllables and words, was hot in the 1960s. Today few people care about it. Hypnotism was once a big deal, but not any more. The reverse can also happen. When I was an undergraduate student back in …
Some sensations seem to come out of nowhere. We lack stickiness receptors, yet we know it when we feel it. Baseball players know that a smear of pine tar improves their grip on bats and balls, but maybe they don’t know why. It’s not as simple as seeing a flash of light or hearing a …
Here and there, Americans are looking for reasons to swallow hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, often brandishing studies that show positive effects of the drug. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has so far rejected each of the studies as failing to meet the requirement for a “randomized, placebo-controlled” …
Are you feeling cold? That’s not a problem, in principle. We all have a heater inside the body that brings warmth within seconds. Chilly offices and frigid houses are one price we pay for the miracle of air conditioning. Unfortunately, the way our brains keep our bodies’ temperature constant ensures that there is no ideal …
For any one of us, there is just one mistake: a violation of the plan, a failure of execution. We fail to catch an error in DNA replication or we choke on a pretzel that we intended to swallow or we step repeatedly into the same ice puddle. We might mistakenly think we have the …
If you tend to be a target for ads about everyday-carry tools, as I am, it’s understandable that you would want to sleep better, because sleep—despite its uncertain origin and adaptiveness—is the original EDC tool. It appears to benefit creativity, emotional regulation, threat evaluation, memory processing and other covert cognitive processing, waste disposal, and maybe …
The psychology curriculum has changed since some of you left the classroom. Not only has the Internet displaced many classrooms with online courses, but some courses that were once moderately popular have disappeared altogether. Fifty years ago, courses in comparative and differential psychology were common, along with behaviorism and requirements to take a foreign language. …
With the topics I’ve introduced so far, I have tried to show how biological, psychological and social approaches support each other in accounting for our experiences. I would like to be clear about what is excluded in using these paths to understanding. There are pseudoscientific and parascientific approaches that I would like to avoid, though …
Paraphrasing Robert Benchley, we may say that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who do not. Were you an orchid or a dandelion? Do you resemble a chimp or a bonobo? And of course most of us fall between the extremes. …
Is your pain the same as my pain? And how much worse is a toothache than a mosquito bite? Do some people exaggerate their pain to get more drugs? In a hospital or clinic you may have been asked to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Has it struck you that that …