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 …
Airplanes are required to carry more than the minimum weight of fuel that could insure a safe flight. In seeming analogy, humans overproduce neurons in preparation for the journey that starts in early development, then discard the unneeded surplus. Tiny microglia remove excess neurons soon after birth and, later, the unnecessary connections that would otherwise …
When we’re with other people, we tend to act as they do, and they act as we do. We synchronize, in walking, singing, alerting to danger, violin playing (research here), and many other kinds of behavior. We’re not unique in this, but the extent of it can be surprising because we rarely label it the …
We follow a biopsychosocial approach almost by necessity in discussing love, though it’s possible to rely on Gilbert and Sullivan. It isn’t that emotions have three levels that must be addressed—biological, cognitive, behavioral—because love isn’t just an emotion. Rather, we apply the same term to phenomena that are organized differently at different levels. That is …
There were no psychologists to right the boat the last time we went overboard for nature. There was Wordsworth, lamenting that “the world [of affairs] is too much with us”, and there were brilliant chemists, physicists and astronomers (enjoyably described here) trying to make nature intelligible, but there was no Romantic Age of Psychology to …
A global pandemic doomed a lot of social and commercial predictions for 2020, but the epidemiologists have reminded us of the potential that still exists for accurate forecasting. The progress of the disease has matched scientific models better than politicians’ hopes. Still, predictions in any large social concern is about groups rather than individuals, meaning …
The blog post on “Play” would have been a good time to bring up game behavior, but I was preoccupied with the issue of prematurely identifying the origins of the behavior. Besides arguments about origins, the Internet contains a number of definitions and classificatory schemes, which seem to be beside the point in explaining the …
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 …
Parenting invites dichotomies: Not only are there two kinds of parent, mother and father, but their skills provoke questions about nature vs. nurture. In what sense are they innate or acquired? Are they necessary or superfluous? In each case the answer is “some of both” and we need to beware of false dichotomies. Single parents …
Some people cannot follow a beat. Such beat deafness, a form of amusia, appears in people who can hear, even in people who can dance, though some can’t clap or dance to a beat. (Here’s more.) Now, we all do things differently. Perhaps two percent of adults are unable to use mental imagery, and variations in …
Among Americans, 98 percent of scientists believe that humans evolved over time, and 81 percent of all Americans hold the same view, though in choosing evolution over intelligent design, the supporters are fewer. Not surprisingly, the answers you get depend on how you ask the question. Where do such beliefs come from, and what is …
Some people like the thrill of falling from a great height, while many others find it hard to decide about taking a jump from a high diving board. Both groups pay attention to what they’re doing. We can call them aroused. They differ on their decisions to jump, presumably because the adventure strikes some as …