Paranormality

I have just read a fabulous book titled "Paranormality - Why we see what isn't there" by Professor Richard Wiseman. In the book he touches on subjects such as fortune telling, communicating with spirits or the dead, mind control and out of body experiences. Whilst discussing the latter, he brings up V.S. Ranachandran's Phantoms In The Brain, by citing an experiment which Ramachandran does to show how the brain can make it appear that our body appears to extend to other objects (such as rubber hands and table tops) just by a few optical tricks.

Overall, the book is very well written and is very funny. Moreover, each chapter has at least one section where Wiseman shows the reader how to perform some of the fantastic tricks that supernaturalists claim to be able to perform via some unnatural power. 

The main message of the book is that the our brains are immensely good at deceiving people, especially ourselves. He hints onto evolutionary psychology where he talks about how our evolved ability to notice patterns in nature, such as the ability to know what foods make us ill when we eat them - Taste Aversion.

To take these ideas further, and link them to an area I'm highly intrigued in, the psychology of religion is also touched upon where Wiseman talks about cults and 'mind control.'  This subject is fantastic as far as I am concerned, as it gives fantastic reasons for people believing in religions after being shown direct evidence to the contrary. He explains this in his chapter on mind control, wherein he talks about the story of Marian Keech, (which itself is in a book called When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger) who lead a cult that predicted the world's end, and after the predicted date passed, these people actually believed even more that they were correct due to a simple explanation - They had spread word enough to delay armageddon. 

This story shows how people can still hold certain beliefs despite being shown a large amount of evidence to the contrary. This, mixed with confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias and the backfire effect raised in my last post all combine to allow the belief to stay. This insight into the mind is a fantastic development that has been made in recent years in psychology and should not be ignored. In fact, the topic ought to be looked into further, so as to ensure the protection of society from further cults and other deception, like that of astrology and psychic readings, which can lead to the extortion and emotional blackmail of susceptible people.

I highly recommend this book, and I suggest it be read. The book will allow you to gain a strong knowledge of how to fool others, and enlighten you on how you deceive yourself.

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

On the website MotherJones.com Chris Mooney, in piece written on the psychology of denial, conveys a strong message about how our personal and emotional biases can greatly affect our reasoning skills. (http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney)


 He writes that, "When we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial."


This insight into how the human brain goes about actually processing ideas that we perceive to be rational can be seen as a complete illusion.


He goes on to talk about the backfire effect, which he precedes with research from Lord et al (1979) where 'pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies: one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological critiques of the fake studies—and in a scientific sense, neither study was stronger than the other. Yet in each case, advocates more heavily criticized the study whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing the study that was more ideologically congenial as more "convincing." ' 
From this, he goes on to say that, 'Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.' 
Evidence for this comes from Nyhan and Reifler (2006) who found that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group.  They also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.


For the remainder of his post, Mooney talks about Climate gate and the vaccine-autism link and how people still deny the scientific consensus for the lack of evidence to support said link. 


Now, just posting about this may seem trivial, so I feel the need to link it to my previous post about Ramachandran's book Phantoms in the brain.  The way in which I shall do this is link it to the possible asonognosia causes that Ramachandran brings up multiple times. He suggests that people who have a damaged right-brain don't have the process to "overhaul" the left-brain's representation of the world, despite a large amount of evidence pointing to the obvious fact that it is wrong. This can be extended to the backfire effect. By this I mean that, maybe, the more fervent the belief someone has, the more evidence there needs to be before the right-brain CAN overhaul the left-brain's worldview.  As a result, the influx of new information means little to the person as either they pass off the contrary evidence using disconfirmation bias, or the backfire effect takes hold, and makes their mindset even harder to shift. 


Although this is a drastic jump, I feel as though it can be said that the similar ideas can be put forward (in terms of the left-brain, right-brain balance of power.)  As it is well documented that the left-brain is far more powerful than the right in terms of expressed control. 

Phantoms in the Brain

V.S. Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain, manages to captivate the reader with such intensity, that I found it nearly impossible to put the book down.

In it he explains that our "body image... is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly, modified with just a few simple tricks." and that "Your concept of a single 'I' or 'self' inhabiting your brain may be simply an illusion."

These insights and many more are so intriguing that I feel as if Ramachandran has opened up a new doorway for me into the realm of neuroscience and has made it so that I wish to look up and read further into the way science looks upon aspects such as the 'self'. And the way in which he beautifully dissects this concept in the last chapter truly shows his immense skill in both his field and in conveying it onto the layman.

As well as this overarching theme of the book, Ramachandran introduces many neurological disorders, such as asonognosia, which is where a patient will deny the entire left half of their body is damaged/ paralysed due to a lesion in the right hemisphere. The way in which Ramachandran describes this disorder and uses analogies helps one grasp the situation, and shows that neuroscience research into the self, self-awareness and other similar fields are necessary for us to further our understanding of the brain.

Using the Internet to read about its effects.

Recently I have become quite interested in the emphasis on the internet that now seems to play a key role, not just in my life, but in the lives of many of my peers. As a result, I started looking in my local libraries for any books that were published that had any relevant information on the actual effect of the internet on the psyche. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information there, so instead, I used the internet itself. After just a few minutes (compared to the 4 hours I spent in libraries) I found a piece of research by Dr Catriona Morrison of Leeds University and the results were as follows;

"Excessive internet use is linked to depression"

"In the Leeds study, young people were more likely to be internet addicted than middle-aged users, with the average age of the addicted group standing at 21 years."

"The internet use and depression levels of 1,319 people aged 16-51 were evaluated for the study, and of these, 1.2% were classed as being internet addicted."

This has interested me, and I will now look further into the matter, and hopefully follow up this post with more information, as I would like to know what constitutes addiction in the case of internet, and if the participants were chosen randomly, were volunteers or if they were a stratified sample (as the findings are compared to the country's gambling addiction rate; "While small, this figure is larger than the incidence of gambling in the UK, which stands at 0.6%.")

Exploring Psychology Conference

I have just arrived back home from what had to be one of the most interesting events that I have been to in a long time. The Exploring Psychology conference at Nottingham University had speakers that delved deep into the heart of psychology. Examples of this include Mark Griffiths' lecture on gambling and addiction, the exhilarating talks given by James Ridgeway on liking & sexual attraction and Freud & the analysis of dreams , as well as the lecture Dr Alinka Greasley gave as an introduction to music psychology, which I felt was most intriguing, as this is a field I have always had a keen interest.

After Dr Greasley gave her lecture, I asked her what kinds of research I should look up, and she gave many examples of research only related to music preference, such as Russell 1987, Berlyne 1971, as well as a large amount of research done by DeNora, Bunt and Lamont