Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • Losing Your Sense of Smell

    Three years ago Elizabeth Zierah caught a cold; a few weeks later she was back to normal… except that she had lost her sense of smell. In Slate, she writes about the miseries of losing the sense of smell (and in the process, taste). I lost normal function on the left side of my body…

  • Suicide and Media Coverage

    The British Medical Journal has an article that I’ve spoken of numerous times lately (IRL), discussing how media coverage of suicides affects the rate of similar suicides. There is clear evidence that the media may affect method specific suicide rates. In Britain an excess of about 60 suicides by burning occurred in the 12 months…

  • Understanding and Reducing Suicide

    Discussing an article in The New York Times on understanding and reducing suicide rates, Mind Hacks’ Vaughan presents us with some other interesting research on the topic. If you want a flavour of really how simple the safety measures need to be to make a difference to suicide rate, research has found that putting pills…

  • 10 Ways We Get Things Wrong

    Psychology Today has an interesting article on fear, probability, and how we get things wrong. It’s not a very scannable article, so here’s an executive summary: We Fear Snakes, Not Cars – Risk and emotion are inseparable We Fear Spectacular, Unlikely Events – Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways We Fear Cancer But Not…

  • The Placebo Effect – Once More With Feeling

    I’ve just written a post on one of my favourite topics; the placebo effect. Triggered by the article Placebo is not what you think, it touches on the use of placebos by medical professionals (currently a banned practice) and the informed use of placebos by heroin addicts. Strangely enough, in the latter case the use…

  • Official: Money Makes Us Happy, Happiness Makes Us Money

    Newsweek ran an article last year on the link between happiness and money. Here’s an executive summary: Money will make you happier, up to a point. After that, it makes no difference. That point is the wonderfully quantitative ‘point of comfort‘. If you’re happy you’ll typically earn more than those less happy than you. If…

  • Pavlov’s Musical Dog

    Back in early December 2007, I submitted one of my favourite Psychology jokes to Mind Hacks. The comic strip I sent in was duly posted along with some other interesting links: Ivan Pavlov and Brian Wilson – together at last! This rather unlikely combination seemed to spark a bit of interest, so here is a…

  • Higher Price Makes Cheap Wine Taste Better

    Obvious stated, still fascinating. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste better: A new brain scanning study has supported what we’ve suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to. […] What the volunteers didn’t know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were…

  • Mona Lisa: The Science Behind That Smile

    Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smiling and not smiling at the same time? The smile part of the Mona Lisa’s face was painted by Leonardo in low spatial frequencies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, there’s no smile. But if you look at…