Tags / 27 quotes from 11 sources
#psychology
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
La paura del cambiamento
La tentazione di considerare questo percorso come inutile, troppo lungo, troppo difficile, con scarse possibilità di successo, è una dinamica molto nota agli psicologi. Si chiama paura. Come quando ci rifiutavamo di studiare matematica perché ritenevamo la cosa inadatta a noi…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Hallucinations are real perceptions
The assumption in popular culture and even in much of psychology and neuroscience is that hallucinations are erroneous perceptions in the absence of identifiable external stimuli. When people hallucinate they hear or see things that aren’t “really” there. But hallucinations are…
What if there is no such thing as computation?
This metaphysical assumption—that human thought is based on objective computational rules—determines much of the methodology used in research on human psychology and artificial thought. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if there is no such thing as a computation?
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Perceptual asymmetry at the heart of conflict
The story of the car keys involves a change in perspective, which I like to describe as “What is obvious to you is obvious to you.” My father did not see what needed to be done to get the kids ready (and may not have wanted to help even if he did). But my mother saw very…
Introspection versus extrospection
These asymmetries originate from a phenomenon well established in the cognitive neurosciences. Any human behavior has many moving parts, roughly divisible into background and foreground elements. Background components involve our evolutionary history, genetic makeup, and fetal…
Hermeneutics - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Psychologists turn to hermeneutics
Similarly to computer scientists, psychologists have recently become interested in hermeneutics, especially as alternatives to cognitivism. Hubert Dreyfus' critique of conventional artificial intelligence has been influential not only in AI but in psychology, and psychologists…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The invention of cognitive science
invention of “cognitive science,” a new discipline that attempts to go deeper into the nature of the mind than was customary in traditional empirical psychology. Cognitive science…
Psychology redefined as the science of behavior
Methodological behaviorism was a movement in psychology. It attempted to put psychology on a respectable scientific footing, along with other natural sciences, by insisting that psychology should study only objectively observable behavior. The “laws” that such a discipline was…
Behavior is evidence of mind, not mind itself
Chomsky claimed that the idea that when we study psychology we are studying behavior is as unintelligent as the idea that when we study physics we are studying meter readings. Of course we use behavior as evidence in psychology, just as we use meter readings as evidence in…
Black-box functionalism
The functionalists naturally wanted to know what was the nature of the inner mental brain states that enabled them to cause behavior. How did the mental states differ from other sorts of brain states? One answer was to say that this is not really a suitable question for…
The research program of cognitive science
And we now have a research project; indeed, it is the research project of cognitive science. We try to discover the programs that are implemented in the brain by designing programs for our commercial machines that will pass the Turing test, and then we ask the psychologists to…
Davidson's anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a view put forward by Donald Davidson20 for which he advances the following argument: Step 1: There are causal relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Step 2: Wherever there are events related as cause and effect they must fall under…
Tenure Track Researcher Language In Interaction - University Of Amsterdam
Modeling language
One of the major challenges in current research on the human language system is to unify formal modelling of crucial interactive linguistic activities such as communication, learning and argumentation, with the wide-ranging experimental approaches to language found in…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Two people can disagree and both be right
first encountered this exercise many years ago at the Harvard Business School. The instructor was using it to demonstrate clearly and eloquently that two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It’s not logical; its psychological.
Frankl's logotherapy
In the Nazi death camps where Viktor Frankl learned the principle of proactivity, he also learned the importance of purpose, of meaning in life. The essence of “logotherapy,” the philosophy he later developed and taught, is that many so-called mental and emotional illnesses are…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Rereading Grof on the unconscious
What made me sit down and reread Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious at precisely this point? I just don’t know. Several times in the following narrative there are going to be examples of events I can understand only as direct intervention of the unconscious in my…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Saint or brain damaged: cognitive dissonance
Imagine believing someone to be a shining spiritual example, only to then conclude that they were in fact simply brain damaged. This would provoke too much ‘cognitive dissonance’: the mental discomfort caused by holding incompatible beliefs.
Recovered memories or confabulation?
There are, however, many who doubt DID really exists. The most serious worry concerns the way in which therapists bring alters to the surface. The deep philosophical question here is most evident when you consider the memories of childhood trauma that therapists elicit: how…
Are alters created by therapy?
Confabulation is not only a potential problem when it comes to causes, however. Could it also be that the alters are themselves brought into being by the therapeutic process, rather than simply brought to light by them?
State-dependent memory
In support of this claim, Carter cites a very powerful weapon: empirical evidence. One of her biggest guns is state-dependent memory. ‘In different mind-states one does not have access to the same bag of memories, and that has been demonstrated in a lot of quite clever studies…
The social self
We been looking inwards, when perhaps all the time we should have been looking outwards. Is the key to identity to be found not in our minds, but in the social world? The idea that the self is ‘socially constructed’ has been rather in vogue in some intellectual circles for some…
The unconscious matters through the conscious
It’s also worth saying something at this point about the role of the unconscious. Many of a psychoanalytic bent also criticise the kind of analytic, philosophical account of personal identity I have presented for neglecting that of which we are not conscious. It would indeed be…
Misplaced confidence in judging character
What there is plenty of evidence for is that this confidence in our ability to know the characters of others, and ourselves, is misplaced.
The Clever Hans effect
In the early twentieth century, one called Clever Hans appeared to be able to do some basic arithmetic, repeatedly and reliably tapping his hoof the same number of times as the right answer to a sum set for him to solve. When investigated, it was discovered that Hans was…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Erikson's eight ages of man
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, which is called the Eight Ages of Man, covers the entire life span of a human being. It is Erikson’s idea that there is a task that must be accomplished at each stage of development. Successful resolution of each stage affects the…
Criticisms of Piaget
Piaget’s work has been a primary influence in preschool programs in the United States since the 1970s. The volumes of Piaget’s work provide an in-depth view of how children create knowledge. Unfortunately, much of his work is difficult to read and can be intimidating to busy…
Why The Modern World Is Bad For Your Brain (daniel J Levitin)
Cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking
Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task…