April 7, 2012

Are You Racist, Sexist, Homophobic?

Harvard University has online implicit association tests that you can take to determine if you make automatic associations about race, gender and sexuality etc.The IAT requires the rapid categorization of various stimulus objects. Faster responses are interpreted as being more strongly associated in our memory than the more slower responses. This determines our unconscious tendencies/preferences that we might not even be aware we have. Of course this is just a test and doesn’t define who you are.
Try some for yourself!
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html

April 6, 2012

A documentary about a few women suffering from eating disorders. It gives insight on to what people with eating disorders are really going through and the difficulty of recovery.

April 6, 2012 • 2 notes

Can’t Be Unseen

In the picture below, what do you see? For people who have never seen this picture before it can look like black dots on a white background

But what if i told you the fragments make up a picture of a dog sniffing the ground? Can you see it? Now you can’t view the picture like you originally saw it. Once your brain processes and perceives the picture it cant be undone; you will always perceive it as a a dog sniffing the ground even if you view this photo years from now. Here’s some more funny examples:





March 31, 2012

Anterograde Amnesia
The inability to form new memories (but past memories are still intact). Essentially you are stuck in a certain period of time in your life and anything new that happens is erased completely from your mind. People can still believe they are in their 20s but when they look in the mirror they see an old person looking back at them. This is because they cannot form memories of time passing by!

March 28, 2012 • 5 notes

who needs to know how to spell when our minds work like this…

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

March 24, 2012 • 13 notes

Mental Disorders in Winnie the Pooh

March 24, 2012 • 1 note

Mistake or Crime? When Absentmindness Turns Deadly.

Most people think that leaving a child in the backseat of a car is an unforgivable mistake that would never happen to them. But cases turn up where very loving parents have forgotten their child in the backseat of the car and carried on with their day. This can happen when you are doing something out of the ordinary of your daily routine such as dropping your kid off at day care when its not usually your job to do so. When people get into their car, especially with their minds flooded with the stresses of work, bills, and possibly personal problems, their mind is spent focusing on those thoughts and driving becomes almost autopilot of their usual route to work. This is where absentmindedness can occur. If children are in the backseat sleeping and not making noise, parents can forget they are there and continue on their way to work. In 2011 33 children died from hyperthermia by being left in hot cars with 52% of those deaths caused by the forgetfulness of the parent or caregiver.(http://ggweather.com/heat/) But is this a crime? Or is it a genuine mistake that unfortunately can happen to anyone with a possible horrible outcome that itself is punishment alone? Do they deserve jail time? Even these events have been covered by the tv show One Tree Hill where the son survived but the father found it almost impossible to forgive himself.

A father’s tragic story can be read here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html


March 22, 2012 • 1 note

when good people go bad.
the power of the situation and how it can cause normal people to do things unimaginable.

March 21, 2012
the great pleasure and feeling in my right brain is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you. -Roger Sperry
March 21, 2012

Change Blindness

We can be extremely inattentive to what is going on around us that we can become blind to major changes around us. This is because our brain only has a certain attention capacity and we can only attend to so much. In order for something to be transferred into our short term memory we need attention. Without attention we can almost instantly forget something we just perceived. Seems careless of us but our brains only want to attend to what is important. With all that is going on around us in our day to day endeavors can a major change happen right in front of our eyes without us noticing? Experiments in change blindness shows us how we can be “blind” to these large changes. (Gazzaniga 2012)


Watch for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg