Description: Perhaps you have had enough of trying to summarize how you are feeling and doing “these days” as the pandemic rumbles along and has not vanished at the sight of the first few raised vaccination needles. There have been many, many attempts to explain what we, or may be, experiencing: it is a problem… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Consciousness
Child Minds vs Adult Minds: One Species or Two?
Description: Here is a scientific creativity problem for you. What might it mean to say that, in terms of how their minds are organized and how they engage with the world, that human adults and human small children are basically different species? Puzzle on that for a little bit, drawing upon what you know or… Read more »
Pandemic Dreams: With or Without Anxiety?
Description: How are your dreams these days? Not so good? Rather frightening? Does it make sense to say that the unsettling nature of your dreams are, in some way or ways, tied to our current Covid circumstances? If that makes sense, what is the mechanism by which our dreams are influenced by our current socially… Read more »
Is DID Real?
Description: I am sure you know about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or, what used to be called, multiple personality disorder. Is is also quite likely that you owe your understanding of the disorder to popularized accounts in books and films like the three faces of Eve or Sybil. Would it surprise you to read that… Read more »
Psychology of Covid-19: Be a Different Person Post-Pandemic
Description: Whether the year and then some that we have been engaged by the pandemic will result in people’s personalities seeming to have changed once we get to see them and spend time with them face-to-face again is an interesting question. But how about this question. Do you want to be a different sort of… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Covid Personality Change
Description: Longitudinal research tells us that personality is reasonably stable over time and that when there are changes, as we age, they tend to be positive changes with us becoming somewhat calmer, more self-confident and socially sensitive with age. Sounds just fine, doesn’t it. But what about this past year? As we pass the one-year… Read more »
Covid and the Speed of Time
Description: I am sure you have heard something of the debates going on as to whether we should be shifting our clocks forward in spring and backwards in fall each year. Part of the science discussed within that debate concerns the impact of the time change (especially the one in spring) on our circadian rhythms… Read more »
Therapeutic Use of Magic Mushrooms in Oregon
Description: Even if you are not old enough to have experienced the 1960’s and 70’s personally you are no doubt aware that one of the things that era was known for is the illicit use of drugs and of psychedelics like LSD, peyote, mescaline and magic mushrooms. Within what was referred to as counterculture (outside… Read more »
Anxiety and Entrenched Habits: Treatability
Description: I will not even ask whether you know what anxiety is, of course you do, especially given how much experience we have all had with it recently. Have you also heard about the Yerkes-Dodson Law? Basically, it says that for most tasks that we take on, a certain amount of stress increases our performance… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Re-emerging and Adaptation
Description: No matter how you spent the past year I suspect that it was different than the previous 5, 10, or many many more years and that the biggest difference was the nature and extent of your social contacts. Perhaps you got really good at zoom (despite the force personal appearance fixations it can produce);… Read more »
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