The social involvement of our brains is amazing. A thoroughly social brain doesn’t come to us just through biological evolution. A baby’s brain must be shaped by interactions with caregivers for optimal development. That is to say, brain development is not programmed entirely by genes but interacts with the environment beginning in the embryo. This …
You can’t learn something unless you almost know it already. Decades ago, that principle was known as Martin’s law. There’s a corollary: It’s harder to learn something strange than something familiar; or, new learning builds on old learning. These old observations are true for nonassociative learning, like habituation, and for associative learning, which asserts itself …
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 …
The New Year is almost here! If you want to start it off right, here are some suggestions. Of course we know deep down that eating a sensible diet and getting a good night’s sleep on New Year’s Eve makes more sense, but our friends reinforce a departure from normal behavior. We’re familiar with children’s …
Joe Pyne was one of the first rude disk jockeys. Callers found themselves off the air when he interrupted a comment that he didn’t like with “Take a hike”. Many others followed, though the genre is in decline. We still find rudeness entertaining, as long as it’s someone else who gets hurt, though it can …
When we’re navigating over long distances, making long treks, we don’t worry much about the positions of our bodies from one minute to the next. We’re more concerned about the dangers of getting lost, perhaps travelling in circles. Wayfinding is different in several ways from short moves over familiar territory: walking to the car and …
Chocolate has a psychology. Nougat does not, even though both confections are popular, with long histories. According to legend, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés did not enjoy his first cup of chocolate, offered to him by the Aztec ruler Montezuma. It was bitter; but, with the addition of sugar became a fad that swept Spain …
When it comes to avoiding nasty surprises, most of us rely on our experience to get by. We understand less of the physical world than we should, but we have our hunches, our clinical judgment, our gut feelings, and sometimes we’re successful. In linking vaccines to autism or fluoridated water to common cancers, we don’t …
Amid the grieving and financial desperation that arrived with COVID-19, the difficulty in recognizing our masked friends must seem like small potatoes. It’s apparently a big concern for security systems that no longer work as well and a headache for programmers who must develop new algorithms. Officials can detect whether masks are being worn, but …
Some folks just don’t make sense to others, eating fugu or cave diving when the mortal threat is plain to see and easy to avoid; but that’s what makes thrills interesting. We seem to share many of the same brain mechanisms (research here) for generating emotion, though it’s far from certain that it’s a universal …
The recent coronavirus has taken us back in time, from luxury travel last year to subsistence travel this year, from an inviting vacation world to countries barricaded in fear of disease-bearing migrants. There is a big difference between the pursuit of pleasant adventures in other lands as we experienced travel a year ago, versus launching …
The psychological differences between a frog’s vision and ours should not be overlooked. The frog’s vision is passive and its responses are automatic. The bug-shaped templates in its eyes, called receptive fields, will “capture” a bug that flies by and the frog will enjoy a meal. Frogs can’t pay attention. Stimuli are never ambiguous. A …