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Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works

If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.

If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.

It's called the "sunk costs" phenomenon, where the more resources we sink into an endeavor, the likelier we are to continue -- even if we sense it's futile.

Photographic memory, eidetic memory, Hyperthymesia, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, perfect recall, there are a number of labels to choose from when discussing formidable memory prowess.

However, the idea that someone has a “flawless” memory, is able to remember everything from any aspect of their lives in great and accurate detail, is far from confirmed by available scientific evidence.

when you ask more personal life events that things get tricky. If someone describes the scene at their 7th birthday and what presents they got, how you are supposed to confirm if they’re remembering it correctly?

there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias

Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats.

those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result.

A survey from the National Geographic Society in 2012 showed 36% of Americans (around 80 million people) believe UFOs exist. A further 47% said they were undecided, while just 17% gave a firm no.

evidence suggests certain personality traits make people far more likely to believe in UFOs and all that goes along with it.

"You get the sense that there's kind of a dimension of suggestibility, so if you're high on that spectrum ... [you may be more] willing to entertain new ideas and fantasies. You start to get into the domain where people believe things that seem highly improbable.

With people around the world practicing social distancing and self-isolation to curb the further spread of coronavirus, some are starting to feel the effects of a lack of human touch.

“Touch is the fundamental language of connection,” says Keltner. “When you think about a parent-child bond or two friends or romantic partners, a lot of the ways in which we connect and trust and collaborate are founded in touch.”

It’s not just about how we feel emotionally. Keltner adds that “touch deprivation” can impact people on a psychological and even physical level

The most common problem that we can make as message senders is coding our thought, feeling or need in a way that has a low chance of being understood by the receiver.

if you don't know certain words or the message is too complex, then there is a low chance of really understanding it.

no single person is 100% at fault for any communication problem.

Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent

We rely on our memories not only for sharing stories with friends or learning from our past experiences, but also for crucial things like creating a sense of personal identity.

we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising.

Smartphones, those digital portals of constant information, have become so integrated into most Americans’ lives, they’re like extra—yet essential—appendages. Some 72 percent of Americans own a smartphone, compared to the global median of 43 percent. But studies have shown that overuse can have a negative impact on your posture, eyesight, and hearing, not to mention distract drivers and pedestrians. More recently, researchers who study the relationship of mobile phone use and mental health have also found that excessive or “maladaptive” use of our phones may be leading to greater incidences of depression and anxiety in users.

Cell phones, and smartphones in particular, have an undeniably addictive quality, earning an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 5th edition. A review of literature on cell phone addiction, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, describes cell phone and technology addiction manifesting in one or more of the following ways: choosing to use your device even in "dangerous or prohibited contexts;" losing interest in other activities; feeling irritable or uneasy if separated from your phone; or feeling anxiety or loneliness when you’re unable to send or receive an immediate message. The researchers also find that adolescents and women may be more susceptible to this behavioral addiction.

So while the research remains inconclusive, it might be worth taking a look at how you feel before and after you spend copious amounts of time on your cell phone. It may be harmless—or it may offer an opportunity to improve your mental health.

Of all the passions of which the human heart is susceptible, there is none which possesses so striking a character as the Love of Glory. The traces of its operations may be discovered in the primitive nature of man, but it is only in the midst of society that this sentiment acquires its true force.

According to that sublimity of virtue which seeks in our own conscience for the motive and the end of conduct, the love of glory is the most exalted principle which can actuate the soul.

Despite our better nature, it seems, fear of foreigners or other strange-seeming people comes out when we are under stress. That fear, known as xenophobia, seems almost hardwired into the human psyche.

Researchers are discovering the extent to which xenophobia can be easily—even arbitrarily—turned on. In just hours, we can be conditioned to fear or discriminate against those who differ from ourselves by characteristics as superficial as eye color. Even ideas we believe are just common sense can have deep xenophobic underpinnings.

But other research shows that when it comes to whom we fear and how we react, we do have a choice. We can, it seems, choose not to give in to our xenophobic tendencies.

In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.

Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.

“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.

Our approach, which borrows from physics and in particular the work of Richard Feynman, goes under the bonnet. It attempts to capture the mathematical structure of the phenomenon – in this case, the pandemic – and to understand the causes of what is observed. Since we don’t know all the causes, we have to infer them. But that inference, and implicit uncertainty, is built into the models

That’s why we call them generative models, because they contain everything you need to know to generate the data. As more data comes in, you adjust your beliefs about the causes, until your model simulates the data as accurately and as simply as possible.

A common type of epidemiological model used today is the SEIR model, which considers that people must be in one of four states – susceptible (S), exposed (E), infected (I) or recovered (R). Unfortunately, reality doesn’t break them down so neatly. For example, what does it mean to be recovered?

I work as a psychotherapist and my specialism is ultra-high net worth individuals.

I got into working with billionaires by accident. I had one wealthy client, who passed my name around to their acquaintances. They are called the 1% for a reason: there are not that many of them and so the circle is tight.

Over the years, I have developed a great deal of empathy for those who have far too much. The television programme Succession, now in its third season, does such a good job of exploring the kinds of toxic excess my clients struggle with that when my wife is watching it I have to leave the room; it just feels like work.

Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery

But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain. And he found that predictive processing provided the essential links among the brain, body, and world.

There’s a traditional view that goes back at least to Descartes that perception was about the imprinting of the outside world onto the sense organs. In 20th-century artificial intelligence and neuroscience, vision was a feed-forward process in which you took in pixel-level information, refined it into a two and a half–dimensional sketch, and then refined that into a full world model.

More than a year after Donald J. Trump left office, the QAnon conspiracy theory that thrived during his administration continues to attract more Americans, including many Republicans and far-right news consumers, according to results from a survey released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan group found that 16 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, believed last year in the three key tenets of the conspiracy theory

Those are that Satanist pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation control the government and other major institutions

Satya Doyle Byock, a 39-year-old therapist, noticed a shift in tone over the past few years in the young people who streamed into her office: frenetic, frazzled clients in their late teens, 20s and 30s. They were unnerved and unmoored, constantly feeling like something was wrong with them.

“Crippling anxiety, depression, anguish, and disorientation are effectively the norm,”

her new book, “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.” The book uses anecdotes from Ms. Byock’s practice to outline obstacles faced by today’s young adults — roughly between the ages of 16 and 36 — and how to deal with them.