Month: July 2006

PsyWar is a website dedicated to the dark arts of psychological warfare and propoganda.

It has a huge archive of propoganda and psychological warfare material from wars past, including copies of leaflets dropped into enemy territory to persuade soldiers and civilians that they were fighting for a lost cause.

The website also has articles and analyses of the techniques used in times past (including a fasinating article on the use of rumour campaigns) with commentary on their effectiveness and cultural impact.

It is interesting to compare these historical materials, largely created by government departments, with the increasing trend for corporations to provide ‘psyops’ services on a consultancy basis (as previously reported on Mind Hacks).

More recently, PsyWar reports on how psychological warfare is being used in the current campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Link to PsyWar website.

In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies have agreed to print ‘autism awareness’ messages on the side of their US breakfast cereal packets in partnership with American lobbying group Autism Speaks.

Autism Speaks is a controversial group in some areas, as they claim to speak for people with autism and tend to use emotional messages (compare with the UK’s National Autistic Society) to promote the idea that autism is a “neurological disorder” and “the nation’s fastest-growing serious developmental disorder”.

Although autism is associated with serious learning disabilities in some, many with autism are quite functional and happy to be autistic, and resent the idea that everyone with autism has a ‘neurological disorder’.

Along these lines, a recent edition of NPR radio show All Things Considered looked at the views of people with autism who argue that we should be aiming to accept people with autism, rather than ‘cure’ them.

Furthermore, the idea that cases of autism are on the increase is controversial, largely owing to the fact that the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders has significantly widened in the last 30 years (as discussed recently on Mind Hacks) and the knowledge of autistic-like traits has become more common.

The cereal packets contain a list of “a few of the possible early signs” of autism and then encourages people to consult their doctor if they have concerns about their child.

Link to info on campaign from Autism Speaks.
Link to critical view from Autism Diva blog.

Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University in Japan, has created an android double of himself and intends to use it to give lectures to test how well his creation recreates the ‘presence’ of genuine human interaction.

Ishiguro was recently in the news when he demonstrated a female android he had created which was a copy of a popular Japanese news reader.

One of his main aims is to understand the subtleties of face-to-face human interaction so he can reproduce this artificially and overcome the so-called ‘uncanny valley‘ that makes close-to-human robots seem synthetic and unnatural.

Link to Wired article on Ishiguro’s android double.

The 4th International Conference on Memory is currently in full swing in the beautiful Australian city of Sydney, and there’s been a couple of interesting news reports from presentations on deja vu and jamais vu research.

I’m sure d√©j√† vu is familiar to you, but you may never have encountered jamais vu before. [Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I shall be here all evening].

Although details are a bit sketchy, a report from AFP News gives the outline of an experiment on déjà vu by Chris Moulin and colleagues who used hypnosis to experimentally induce familiarity in participants for information they had not recently encountered.

The 18 [participants] were told that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it. But if they saw a word in a green frame, they would think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.

The volunteers were then taken out of hypnosis and presented with a series of words in frames of various colours. Some of the words were not in the original list of 24 and were framed in red or green. Ten of the volunteers said they felt an odd sensation when they saw new words in red, and five others said this sensation definitely felt like deja vu.

ABC News reports on an experiment on jamais vu (a feeling of unfamiliarity when encountering something familiar) by Akira O’Connor and colleagues that involved asking participants by write down the same word over and over until it started feeling ‘peculiar’.

These experiences were described as being similar to classic jamais vu, as described in the literature on people who have permanent or intense jamais vu as part of a neurological or psychiatric condition.

The abstracts of all the talks are available as one large pdf file, but for convenience, I’ve included the abstracts of the d√©ja vu and jamais vu presentations below the fold.

By the way, if anyone attending ICOM-4 has any photos or reports online, let us know, as it would be great to link to them.

Continue reading “It’s like jamais vu never again”

The ever excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has a special edition on the psychology of stalking, investigating the drives and motivations of persistent stalkers as well as the impact on their victims.

In order to better understand stalking, Paul Mullen’s group have categorised people who stalk according to what motivates them. There’s the rejected stalker, usually ex-partners trying to reinstate a relationship. The intimacy seeker, who professes love but is oblivious to their victim’s feelings – people who stalk celebrities usually fall into this category and are the most persistent. There’s the incompetent suitor, who lacks the social skills necessary to establish an intimate relationship; the resentful stalker, who’s motivated by anger and a desire for revenge – they can be very frightening but rarely physically violent. And lastly, and thankfully the most rare, is the predatory stalker – they are driven by sadistic pleasure, their stalking is sexual in nature and often leads to attack.

The British Psychological Society magazine The Psychologist published an article on stalking a few years ago (pdf) also examining this intriguing yet disturbing phenomenon.

Link to audio and transcript of AITM on stalking.
pdf of article on stalking from The Psychologist.

After attending April’s “Who’s the greatest? Minds that changed our minds” debate, and last night’s “From bad to worse: the worst ideas on the mind” debate – both hosted by the Royal Institution, I thought I’d give a quick summary of the results.

In winning order:

Who’s the greatest
1) Aaron T. Beck inventor of CBT
2) Freud
3) Hans Eysenck
4) Karl Jaspers

Worst ideas on the mind
1) Lobotomy
2) Drug company advertising
3) Post-trauma counselling
4) Freudian theory of hysteria

The BBC kicks off a season on memory in a few days that aims to explore the impact of memory on our everyday lives as well as encouraging people to improve their memory to keep it sharp.

The Memory Experience includes a series of TV programmes, radio programmes and web resources that will also attempt to explain the psychology and neuroscience of memory to viewers and listeners.

You can even test your memory online and take part in a national survey of autobiographical memories of people in the UK.

Link to ‘Memory Experience’ TV website.
Link to ‘Memory Experience’ website with links to radio programmes.