Category: Nonsense

Online t-shirt shop and design free-for-all Threadless just ran a competition to design a t-shirt for the upcoming Michel Gondry film ‘The Science of Sleep‘.

The film is about a man whose life is constantly invaded by his dreams.

Unfortunately, the competition passed me by and has just closed. However, you can vote for the best design and the winning design will get turned into a t-shirt you can buy online.

There seems to be a lack of the sort of psychology and neuroscience t-shirts that you’d actually want to wear out of the house, but several of the designs look very promising.

Link to Science of Sleep t-shirt candidates.

“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library where he can get it if he wants it.”

Sherlock Holmes details a brief theory of knowledge in The Five Orange Pips by Arthur Conan Doyle.

The White Stripes consider the different roles of the cortical hemispheres in processing and understanding emotion in the lyrics of their song Fell in Love With a Girl. As far as I know, this is the first discussion of asymmetry in cortical processing in punk music. Rock on.

“can’t keep away from the girl
these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting

can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that all love is fleeting”

Link to video of song on You Tube.

The Imaginary Foundation has just produced a new series of t-shirts including one that involves a psychedelic riff on the Rorschach inkblot test.

The Rorschach inkblot test is a now almost obselete test in psychology where interviewees are asked to give their impressions of a series of ambiguously shaped inkblots.

As there are few reliably ways of interpreting answers to each inkblot, it has been argued that the test is nothing more than the assessor’s subjective impression masquerading as an objective psychometric test.

Hence it has been virtually discarded in modern psychology, although remains strongly associated with the discipline in everyday stereotypes.

It does, however, make for a beautiful garment when interpreted by the Imaginary Foundation’s wonderfully askew artists.

Link to Imaginary Foundation ‘Rorschach Girl’ t-shirt.

Oh. My. God. It’s a hot air balloon in the shape of an anatomically accurate brain. For hire.

According to the website, the brain balloon’s mission is to:

To capture the attention of the world and direct it toward understanding the importance of the human brain and the diseases, disorders, and injuries that afflict it.

To teach and encourage all people to seek a high purpose and achieve their potential.

To create a strong symbol of hope and human possibility.

To celebrate intelligence, promote education, and ignite imaginations!

There are stoned neuroscientists behind this, I swear.

Link to Brain Balloon website.

Child support organisation KidLink has a section that collects children’s desires for future careers. The pages for psychologist and psychiatrist are simultaneously touching, alarming and hilarious.

Anastasiya from Kazakstan: My dream-is to be a dentist or psychologist. Why? Because I want to help people and get a lot of money.

Let’s hope Anastasia isn’t planning on working for the NHS.

Kirsty from Australia: I have no idea what I will be! Either a vet, olympic sprinter or maybe a professional soccer, tennis or volleyball player? Maybe even a actress, cause i did drama. Or a singer. I like singing, I am in the chior and I have done a solo once. Oh, I know, if I don’t get professional for any of those sports I could always be a sports teacher. Or maybe even a psychologist. Or a stand up comedian. I don’t know yet. But I love sport, so i will probably do something sporty. A surfer? I like swimming in the sea, not pools. And I go to the beach a lot.

Kay Redfield Jamison? Is that you?

Chinetta from United States: i want to become a psychiatrist and i want to drive a porsche and i want a big house

Chinetta is obviously one of the America’s few remaining children who have yet to meet a psychiatrist.

Alexandria from United States: When I grow up I would like to become a psychiatrist because I really enjoy helping others. It makes me feel good when I help some one cope with their issues and see them benefit from the advice that I give them. In order to do so I plan on going to college for as long as it takes. I would like to go to Spelman but I am not sure if it is the right school to study for Psychiaty. I am determined to make it though I will go to school for as long as it takes as long as I am able to save at least one person from hurt and sorrow.

Sounds like you’ll make an excellent psychiatrist Alexandria.

Julia from Belarus: At fisrt I want to get higher education.Earlier I wanted to become a barrister but in our country it’s impossible & now I want to become a psychologist.Like every normal man I want that my work will bring me,of course,money & will make me happy.But in general I would like to be a poet — it is my dream & if I have a real chance in order to realize it I will use this chance what’s more I write verses & my friends don’t find them bad.It is all.

Link to KidLink careers: psychologist.
Link to KidLink careers: psychiatrist.

There are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t.

No idea where this quotation came from, but I always think of it whenever I come across black and white classifications in psychology.

Alternatively, McSweeney’s has a typology based on breakfast cereal.

Mind Hacks has been chosen as September’s book of the month by online review site Books in the Bog.

Mind Hacks is, fortunately for our toilet shelves, anything but an academic text book, yet manages to still do a great job in introducing how some of the mind’s systems work, though simple examples you can try at home (even in your loo if you don’t feel too odd occasionally taking in the odd volunteer).

The review also includes an interview with co-author Matt Webb on how he developed his own interest in the mind and brain, so head on over if you want Matt’s take on the book and his other favourite reads.

Link to Mind Hacks review.

In particular, must a cognitive theory about memory that would please you be stated in a way that could be tested by brain scientists?

Sure! But an even better idea might be to demand that a cognitive theory be stated in a way that the Almighty himself could pass judgment on.

Legendary memory researcher Endel Tulving setting high standards, from p93 of Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences (ISBN 9780262571173).

Continuing on from Vaughan’s discussion of Psi research at the BA Festival – I wonder if the likes of Prof. Lord Robert Winston ought to have been more concerned about some of the content in one of the mainstream BA Psychology Section seminars.

Prof. Geoffrey Beattie of Big Brother fame was this year’s Psychology Section President so it was perhaps no surprise that he organised a seminar on body language and invited along his fellow Big Brother psychologist Dr. Peter Collett.

However, Collett’s talk was really just a collection of highlights from his channel 4 show, in which he identifies ‘tells’ that give away what a politician is really thinking. For example he said that compared with his cabinet colleagues, Gordon Brown exhibited about 5 times as many discomfort gestures (e.g. looking down, chewing his lip) when Tony Blair was giving a conference speech. This prompted a journalist next to me to ask – “wouldn’t it have been more logical to have compared how many discomfort gestures Brown made during Blair’s speech with how many he made during a speech by someone else?”.

“Yes, you’re right” Collett admitted, “but you’re talking about an actual experiment, this is just something I put together for a TV programme”.

Hmm. Well at least he was honest about that – but wasn’t this supposed to be the BA Science Festival?

Another audience member suggested that Brown might have been displaying these discomfort gestures because of other events in his life – the conference may have been near in time to when he lost his new-born baby, for example.

“Yes, the interpretation of these gestures is up for grabs” Collett answered. “It’s all about taking into account the context…but with individuals this IS NOT A SCIENCE“.

At least a lot of parapsychology research uses sound scientific methodology whereas this was, as Collett pretty much admitted, just a load of speculation put together for a TV programme.

The runaway success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the book written from the perspective of a young autistic boy, has not entirely pleased its author Mark Haddon:

“I’m just suspicious that too many people liked it. All the books I really like are loathed by some people…It’s like you want to be Radiohead and then you think, shit, I’ve accidentally turned into Coldplay”.

Source: The Week.

I’ve always been slightly suspicious about the Freudian tendency to read meaning into everything. You see hidden meanings and get paid for it and you’re an analyst, you do it for free and you’re psychotic.

I suspect this is why there’s so little psychoanalytic work on psychosis, the infinite regress of hidden meanings would probably cause a dimensional rift and the universe would collapse.

There’s a curious letter in today’s New Scientist that takes issue with a recent criticism of V.S. Ramachandran’s theory of the neuroscience of art.

The criticism attacks Ramachandran’s theory on the basis that it fails to distinguish between images of big-breasted women such as Hindu statues of goddesses and actual big-breasted women such as Pamela Anderson.

In contrast, the letter to New Scientist says that the comparison is fair because Anderson’s image “is deliberately created using the specific techniques of plastic surgery, diet, exercise, make-up, clothing and photography”.

Hopefully, the world of neuroaesthetics will now be at peace over this particular issue.

Link to letter in New Scientist.

I’m going to be in beautiful Seville, Spain, for two weeks from Monday 28th trying to improve my Spanish. If there are any local psychologists, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists or students of the mind and brain who want to meet and chat about psychology and neuroscience while I’m there, drop me a line.

So this Flickr group just seems to consist of pictures of beautiful women wearing ‘I [brain] Cognitive Science’ t-shirts.

Why? Your guess is as good as mine…

War poet Rupert Brooke describes an unsettling experience of apophenia in this 1913 poem.

I came back late and tired last night
  Into my little room,
To the long chair and the firelight
  And comfortable gloom.

But as I entered softly in
  I saw a woman there,
The line of neck and cheek and chin,
  The darkness of her hair,
The form of one I did not know
  Sitting in my chair.

I stood a moment fierce and still,
  Watching her neck and hair.
I made a step to her; and saw
  That there was no one there.

It was some trick of the firelight
  That made me see her there.
It was a chance of shade and light
  And the cushion in the chair.

Oh, all you happy over the earth,
  That night, how could I sleep?
I lay and watched the lonely gloom;
  And watched the moonlight creep
From wall to basin, round the room,
  All night I could not sleep.

Brooke seems to have been interested in the scientific investigation of anomalous experiences, as one of his poems (‘Sonnet‘), was inspired by reading the journal of the Society for Psychical Research.