psicostuff

"The whole brain is responsive to a potential threat, at the expense of anything else."

Followup to: Simultaneously Right and Wrong [/lw/1d/simultaneously_right_and_wrong/] "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu There is an old yarn about two skeptics who stayed overnight in a supposedly haunted mansion, just to prove they weren't superstitious. At first, they laughed and joked with each other in the well-lit master bedroom. But around eleven, there was a thunderstorm - hardly a rare event in those parts - and all the lights went off. As it got later and later, the skeptics grew more and more nervous, until finally around midnight, the stairs leading up to their room started to creak. The two of them shot out of there and didn't stop running until they were in their car and driving away. So the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality. That happens all the time. Is there any reason to think this story proves anything more interesting than that some skeptics are cowards? The Koreans have a superstition called "fan death [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death]": if you sleep in a closed room with a fan on all night, you will die. Something about the fan blades shredding the oxygen molecules or something. It all sounds pretty far-fetched, but in Korea it's endorsed by everyone from doctors to the government's official consumer safety board. I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't believe in fan death. But my reactions to spending the night in a haunted mansion and spending the night with a fan are completely different. Put me in a haunted mansion, and I'll probably run out screaming the first time something goes bump in the night1. Put me in a closed room with a fan and I'll shrug and sleep like a baby. Not because my superior rationality has conquered my fear. Because fans just plain don't kill people by chopping up oxygen, and to think otherwise is just stupid. So although it's correct to say that the skeptics' emotions ov

Scientists at Imperial College London took EEG readings of subjects under the influence.

In this episode we welcome Yale psychologist Laurie Santos who discusses her new podcast — The Happiness Lab — which explores how wrong and misguided we can be when we pursue those thin…

A podcast from Dr Laurie Santos examining the latest scientific research on happiness and sharing practical takeaways that will forever alter the way you think about happiness. Brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

La felicità, per Dan Gilbert, dipende in buona misura dal ridimensionare desideri ed eventi spiacevoli che ci capitano: è una capacità del nostro cervello