# Question
Title: How to measure or estimate the prevalence of psychopathology in a particular school?
I wrote a research paper regarding the mental health of adolescents at a local magnet school, emphasizing the sources and affects of stress and the subsequent vulnerabilities it poses to developing forms psychopathology.

My problem: I need to formally establish that many students struggle with mental health problems. My initial idea was administering the BDI but, long story short, it can't happen. How else should I go about "formalizing" statistically the prevalence of psychopathology among the student body?

# Answer
The answer to this question depends on your ultimate goal. If you want to know whether or not students at this school are more likely to suffer from a psychopathology/s, you'll need to compare them to some other population. This other normative population can be students at another school, students in the country, students in the world etc. If you don't have access to data on another population you won't be able to use most of the truly inferential statisticsal procedures.

If you want to look at the school in isolation, you can use descriptive statistics and "describe" the situation at the school by looking at the way in which psychopathologies present, or, are distributed at this school. Additionally, you can have some arbitrary cut-point or score that you can use to make a judgment call. This probably won't cut it in an academic journal though, depending on the journal and field.

Reiterating Russell's suggestion, you can look at the correlation between the incidence of psychopathology and these stress factors you mentioned. This will at least allow you to compare these students to a hypothetical population of students where there is no correlation between psychopathology and these stress factors.

Your starting point will likely be to properly operationise your variables and then scouring the literature to see if you can glean something to compare or even make sense of your data from it.

First prize will be using an established and validated instrument. If you can't, you can still try and wing it, but be careful of the interviews though. To use the type of statistics I think you're hinting at, you need to properly operationilse your variables and quantify them. This is going to be hard to do with open ended questions, for example.
> 2 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, statistics
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title: Does the brain have a 'debugging mode'?

text:
# Question
Title: Does the brain have a 'debugging mode'?
In computer programming we have a debugger that we can use to execute a program step by step. In that mode, the program can be suspended and we can analyze the state of the hardware, modify the state and control the flow of the program to experiment.

Now, the question: Does the brain have something similar? Like a "debugger mode" in which it can reflect about or analyze its internal structures? I think this is the mode that therapists use to analyze behavior, isn't it?

# Answer
Short answer: Not a debugger, but possibly a control flow override.

Long answer:

This is a common fallacy known as the introspection illusion:

> The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states. ... In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called "causal theories") or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.

It was long thought that self-focus, meditation, concentration, hypnosis, self-reflection, psychoactive chemicals, and similar techniques can help improve one's insight into their brain's functioning, mental state, decision-making process, cause of emotions, buried memories, and other such private information. However, research has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not the case - it is at best an illusion, where people fill in gaps with confabulated self-knowledge that they do not actually have access to.

There are too many examples of this to list here, but check out choice blindness (people give explanations for decisions that they did not make), misattribution of arousal (people misattribute the causes of their emotions), and memory confabulation (people confidently recollect incorrect memories) for some well-known cases.

More in-depth literature on the subject can be found in a review by Silva & Gendolla (2001) of over 30 years of research into an informal theory called the "perceptual accuracy hypothesis" that claims (but no evidence supports this) that self-focus increases accuracy of self-knowledge in a wide variety of aspects of the self. Another review by Wilson & Dunn (2003), notes the lack of evidence for any potential for improvement of self-knowledge using introspection. A more modern review by Bollich, Johannet, and Vazire1 (2011) comes to essentially the same conclusion:

> ... we conclude that the road to self-knowledge likely cannot be traveled alone but must be traveled with close others who can help shed light on our blind spots.

For some decades now, computer scientists have been attempting to reproduce the function of the brain using artificial neural networks, with some success. An interesting aspect of neural networks is that they, like the brain, also do not have a debugger - at least not a useful one. Ask a programmer to explain why their neural network misclassified a training input, and they will respond with a statistical analysis and abstract mathematical model that describes the overall system, not a coherent reason like “it thought this R was an A, so assumed the word was gain instead of grin…” The only way to get such an explanation is to look at the result, and then guess.

The kind of "talk therapy" psychotherapy (such as CBT) that you ask about has been demonstrated to be more effective than placebo, so we know that something about it works, but what about it works is not well understood. Perhaps even the illusion of insight has some therapeutic effect, or perhaps there is a cognitive override mechanism at work.

Dual process theory is a well established idea that suggests that we have such a mechanism of control override that allows us (like some debuggers) to change the progression of mental processes mid-way. This is typically the role believed to be played by our "conscious" mind.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Some types of **meditation** (when successful) can bring about states that can certainly be used for debugging purposes. One of the key factors is the ability to relax enough while maintaining sufficient focus to be able (a) to see why you are thinking or reacting in a certain way and (b) to stop immediately in your thinking tracks and choose a different path. While this approach may not be so low-level as desired, it can still serve meta-debugging purposes. Essentially you want to slow down enough to see individual thoughts while not being controlled entirely by them. I would imagine that certain **drugs** can also bring about debug-friendly states (when used correctly, of course). **Psycho-feedback** technologies could probably help as well, such as by making it easier to see when you are reacting emotionally to a thought or other stimulus.

Split-brain patients sometimes give hints that perhaps different regions of the brain can possess consciousness (awareness) *independently* from other parts. In theory, it may be necessary to have one brain region debug another if *low-level* monitoring is needed. How to make this happen, on the other hand, is a big question of its own.
> 3 votes

# Answer
There are three ways that you can get to know yourself better:

1. Self Inquiry
2. Alpha State
3. Default Mode Network

**Default Processing** happens when we blink, among other times. Oftentimes when someone falls in to an Alpha State, they stop blinking, so they lose awareness of themselves as separate agents. So these are two complementary possibilities. I often have to remind myself to blink while driving and listening to music, because I get in to an alpha state easily in doing that.

Default Processing is when the brain refocuses on internal states and awareness, and does "housekeeping" tasks like integrating short-term memory. You could think of this as serving some features of an "operating system" where the brain tracks its own state.
> 0 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, unconscious, metacognition, self-control, therapy
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title: What causes dopamine in our body

text:
# Question
Title: What causes dopamine in our body
I was curious as to know what are the natural causes for the secretion of dopamine in our body.

Are there any specific foods that increases the dopamine level?

It is said that dopamine are usually high when you are in love is that a myth or a fact?

How does dopamine affect ones behavior/mood?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Allow me to extend a more empathetic answer; stack exchange is great, but the rigid responses are sometimes hard to stomach.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that basically works as a messenger between nerve cells. It tells you when you do something good by releasing a chemical that tells the brain “this is nice, this is good”. It’s closely associated with risk taking & reward motivated behavior; pathways or grooves in the brain are created every time a sensation is perceived as good or makes you happy. Everyone’s perception of “happy” or “good” is different based on the life experiences that they have registered in the brain & the grooves they create over time.

Dopamine is tricky… the release of dopamine (in large amounts) tends to leave you with a “high” or feeling of ecstasy… but it can quickly lead to addiction or destructive habits as well. Every time dopamine is released, a groove is created and forms a habit; often times subconsciously you follow that groove every time a similar situation arises because the first time you did, it lead to pleasure. This is where conscious behavior really becomes an important factor, if you’re looking to prevent these habits from taking over your life.

Where certain drugs are prone to release higher amounts of dopamine than others… there are other things in life that create the same dopamine grooves that drugs do, often in equal amounts. Food, sex, gratification from work, Social Media notifications (the research on this today is astounding; now that social media platforms have been around for over a decade, we are starting to see the relationship of depression linked to social media addiction) … all of these things register as pleasing to the brain and therefore grooves are created to remind you how to behave in the future if you want to attain the same “good” feeling.

Pavlov’s dogs are a classic example of ways in which you can train the brain to perform desired reactions using dopamine; but also an example of how it can be used to enslave a being through thought forming behavior. Many arguments could be made on the latter point… from mass distraction of the population to the dumbing down of humanity by those in a position to control… but that’s for another topic 

Dopamine is an amazing function of your body… it is wise to understand how it works and how it effects your day to day decision making. I think cell phones are a prime example of how out of control we’ve allowed our behavior to become; I would argue we are all addicted to stimulation and overloading our senses. Over time, the effects will present themselves. My advice is to simplify your life and attempt to limit the sensory interaction each day. Enjoy the little things as much as possible.

References:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-google

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

# Answer
> 2 votes
The way that you are describing dopamine fundamentally misunderstands how neurotransmitters work.

It makes sense to talk about hormones as elevated or reduced above a baseline level. This does not work for neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. This is because hormones are usually synthesised and released within specific systems, and are distributed rather uniformly through blood.

Neurotransmitters do not have this property. They are produced within specific neurons (for example, the raphe nuclei produce serotonin), and are distributed into neuronal cell bodies. They are then released by individual neurons as a signal. While one neuron may release serotonin, the one next to might not.

This is why the idea of boosting a neurotransmitter across the board is wrong, and why blanket statements like dopamine being high when in love don't make sense. Dopamine is not something that the brain pumps out, but is used as a signal by one neuron communicating to another. Certain actions or consequences may result in *more* dopamine release within certain parts of the brain, but this is because the brain is signalling the particular action/outcome that led to the dopamine release.

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Tags: neuroscience, emotion, neuro-transmitters
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# Question
Title: If orgasm triggers bonding and feelings of love, why don't people continue to stay in love?
I am a bit confused by the effects of orgasm in bonding; everything I seem to read seems to be a bit careless with the truth and does not mention why people fall out of love or why people who are in relationships cheat, etc. Could anyone please elaborate?

# Answer
Surely, orgasms do release *drain out* dopamine but you're forgetting another important factor in dopamine release, which is **novelty**.

Ever heard that couples get bored of sex after an year or two? It's because they find it routine and boring. Cheating (an e.g) gives you the thrill of novelty.

The same activities which we find thrilling / rewarding will not remain that way. It has something to do with the sensitivity of dopamine receptors. Take novelty seekers (e.g) they tend to find novel activities thrilling.

The worst scenario occurs, when a person no longer finds any activity interesting. That is nothing but Anhedonia.

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**EDIT:** I'm sorry, but I just realized that staying in love is a bit different from enjoying orgasms after reading this. A relationship is far more complicated than just producing enough dopamine.

Release of enough endorphins, helps you stay happy, if you're happy you're likely to not hate other people around you, if you do not hate them, you're likely to like them by releasing enough oxytocin (physical touch etc.). Apart from that, a sense of responsibility and well being comes into picture when you're serotonin levels are moderate.

Definitely low dopamine levels is a cause, but *not the only* cause of cheating etc. Any imbalance of neurochemicals causes not only relationships fall, but also other unhealthy / anti social behavior.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Oxytocin is the neurochemical that causes bonding. Its levels in the brain increase during sex and other activities. However, after an orgasm, dopamine levels decrease and prolactin levels increase. The combination of these things can contribute to moods and behaviors that cause disharmony in relationships.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, sexuality
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# Question
Title: Are there distinct visual perception themes that have been recognized in dreams?
I'm not aware of a distinct term for what I'm trying to describe, so I will attempt to describe this in hopes that someone can help me find if there's a term or research done in this direction.

I remember thousands of dreams, and can recall them spontaneously. From such large subset of dreams, I've observed that there are some dreams that share a common feeling/ experience/ perceptual theme. A lot of this can be described visually, but the experience extends to other senses as well.

These dreams can be experienced years apart, and the exact content does not matter. What I'm interested in is the overall theme and how perception of the visuals within the dream is affected. For example:

* Dreams with very dark environments, there are no ambient glowing light sources, and the lights that exist are more like LED specs than light bulbs. Objects are still perceived, but the contrast is very low
* Hyper-realistic dreams, bright and colorful, where details are extremely vivid, sharp, as if everything has been "photoshopped" to look better than reality.
* Dreams with landscape and characters affected by death, decay and rot, predominantly brownish, greenish, grayish hues.

**Is there a term for these different kinds of perceptual experiences in dreams?**

I guess what I'm describing can be compared to a photo filter applied to the entire environment:

# Answer
I think this is the closest article to what I'm attempting to describe -An artists illustration of the effect of 20 different drugs on perception. He draws the same image "under the influence".

Here's an example of an image with the color palette and "decay" attributes I was describing
> 1 votes

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Tags: perception, terminology, dreams
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# Question
Title: How does the brains "focused" and "diffused" modes facilitate learning?
I am insatiably curious about the topic of "accelerated learning".

Think about that scene in the matrix where trinity downloads the skill of how to fly a helicopter into her brain in a few seconds. :)

By "accelerated learning", I mean committing new information to long term memory in a highly recallable fashion with maximum efficiency - i.e. minimum time.

I believe that developing the optimal accelerated learning algorithm requires a deep understanding of how the brain actually learns (at the level of neurons and synapses).

It is from this perspective, that I am considering these 2 "modes" of the brain called "focused mode" and "diffused mode".

I would like to state my intuition about how these 2 modes are used by the brain to learn and then have someone more knowledgeable than I tell me where I am wrong. Or perhaps improve the explanation.

My intuition is that "diffused mode" is about making associations.
i.e. Noticing how things are similar.

When we learn something new, we try to associate it to something we already know.
Like maybe when you see a pomelo for the first time, you might associate it to a grapefruit.

My intuition is that "focused mode" is about making discernments. i.e. Noticing how things are different.

For example, a pomelo is different than a grapefruit in several ways:
It's bigger.
It's inner skin is thicker.

I *think* the process of learning the concept of "pomelo" then involves refining a "sparse distributed representation" of the object in the brain.

A "sparse distributed representation" is just a bunch of neurons that fire together to signify the thought of a unique concept.

So learning involves starting with a sparse distributed representation for an existing concept that we are familiar with, and then making changes to that representation via discernment until we have a new unique "sparse distributed representation" for our new concept.

Is this correct?

# Answer
> 4 votes
A big assumption here is that diffuse mode is something you can activate at any time. Where as most teachers on the subject view it as a process that activates through inattention (think daydreaming). Inattention can be difficult with work, commute, home, and family as sources of stress or focus.

Another is that focused mode is only for unique identification. Every researcher I've come across acknowledges that making connections is readily available in the focused mode, but it's going to be more limited to the concept you're working with. In her class on Learning how to Learn Barbara Oakley states,

> With the focus mode... You're able to figure out the problem you're trying to solve or the concept you're trying to understand while it's related to something you're rather familiar with.

Segway into the zero-sum-game of these modes. While one is turning on the other is turning off. Not in a binary sense, but along a spectrum. Which is why you might let a problem sit in the back of your mind while you work on similar subjects and all of a sudden you reach an 'aha' moment and make the final necessary connection. Or at least move onto next steps. Instead of inattention to a problem leading you straight into sandy beaches. Again from Barbara Oakley,

> As far neuroscientists know right now, you're either in the focus mode or the diffuse mode of thinking. Being in one mode seems to limit your access to the other mode.

Salvador Dali would take advantage of the diffuse mode and spoke about such with his "sleeping key" method. The idea is to relax to the point you're about to enter the first stage of sleep while keeping a primary thought in mind. As you drift off you'll lose focus letting your mind make connections, until the key drops and you wake up ready to jot down ideas or work.

Further Reading:

* **A Mind for Numbers** by Barbara Oakley
* **Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow** by Daniel Kahneman
* Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, **"Rest is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain's Default Mode for Human Development and Education"**

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Tags: learning
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# Question
Title: Ground a student survey in academic literature
I'm planning to do a survey with students (age around 16) with questions/answer-possibilities that have been 'proven' to be significant indicators of student success/good grades. So, I'm not really interested in the relationship of the variables to the outcome, instead, I want to feed the data of the survey to a machine learning algorithm to check the algorithm's correctness.

Instead of coming up with the questions of the survey myself, I would like to ground them academically, i.e.: based on academic literature. I don't need very 'original' ones, the significance of the variables themselves is not the focus of my research (actually, I want 'proven' significant variables).

Best case scenario would be to find a canonical list of survey questions and answer-possibilities which have been 'proven' to be influential (significant) indicators of student success/grades, from which I can take the ones appropriate for my research.

Another thing that would be help me is a source which discusses good and bad practices for setting up a survey such as mine (which might also point me to the questions I want to ask).

I have found some papers, such as (Sykes & Kuyper, 2009) about predicting student success/grades, from which I can pick some variables/questions, but none of them were close enough to my case to be fully satisfactory for my purpose. If anyone can help me with a good paper that investigates roughly the same as my research, this would also help, as I might then base my survey (partly) on this research.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Both Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth have fairly brief tests meant to measure student success and by some extension grades.

Dweck's work focuses on how having a "fixed mindset" limits a students ability to grow in a subject and is used to explain why students are so apt to give up when met with challenge. Her quiz would have to be formatted for pen and paper and her research is rather sparse on the subject.

Duckworth focuses on both grit and self-control. She has researched heavily the effects of grit over the last 10 years while Walter Mischel works on self-control and has been for the past 40 years. Duckworth was Mischels student. Unfortunately, his test for self-control would likely be too abstract for your needs.

Needless to say her work has been shown to measure student success over the last ten years. Her website offers several quizzes on grit or self control for adults and students. The same links provides access to her publications.

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Tags: reference-request, methodology, experimental-psychology, educational-psychology, survey
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# Question
Title: Survey tool with clickable version of the "Geneva emotion wheel"
For my master thesis i would like to make a survey on user emotions on using a web user interface. The proband should write down his emotions using the "Geneva emotion wheel". (More information here: http://www.affective-sciences.org/gew).

Now i would like to know if there are any survey tools out there which offer this GEW as a clickable version. Or is it somewhere availlable as a "widget" which i can add then to my self created online survey?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I made up a SVG version connected to a hidden html form. It's not perfect, but it may be useful anyway. You can find it here.

Note that a sufficient screen resolution is required.

Please send me feedbacks if you use it so that I can improve it.

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Tags: emotion, survey
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title: Why are disorders discrete?

text:
# Question
Title: Why are disorders discrete?
Disorders are usually discrete. For example, if you are given a test for, say, ADHD, they are usually only two results "you have ADHD" or "you don't have ADHD". Autism is treated as a spectrum, but this spectrum is by no means continuous, also being in discrete parts.

Why is this? Why can't you get a result of "76% ADHD"? Intelligence, for example, is measured continuously, as is personality (psychometrics). Of course, tests can't be continuous, having a finite number of questions, but neither are rulers, which measure the continuous quantity of length, or IQ tests, which measure the continuous quantity of IQ.

So, why are disorders measured discretely? For example, if one person has 38% of a disorder, they may benefit from different treatment than someone with 87% of a disorder in a predictable way.

Why are disorders discrete?

# Answer
The question is why sometimes we report certain psychiatric conditions as being discrete (henceforth categorical) and sometimes as being dimensional (or in a spectrum).

The answer is related to the history of psychiatric classifications. By the time DSM-III was designed, there was an increasing resistance to psychoanalysis in America. Psychoanalysis tended to organize disorders in a dimensional fashion (have a look at this podcast. So the final product (DSM-III) translated that resistance by organizing all conditions in categories, increasing significantly their number as well.

In the past 10 years the lack of success (this is questionable, but psychiatry did not developed as well as, say, oncology) of the field made some scholars rethink about the exclusive use of categories.

It seems that categories are suited health insurances and legal objectives. For instance, judges are normally interested to know whether someone has or not a condition in order to decide about responsibility (necessary and sufficient conditions). The same with health insurance companies.

The problem is that psychiatry should be thinking on advancing the field, instead of satisfying the legal system or the health insurance companies (these are very important issues as well, don't get me wrong, but they are secondary).

Now the question is: are mental disorders really dimensional things? What are the evidences for thinking this way? I will only mention on argument and then I will suggest some readings to read all the other findings that suggests so.

The level of co-occurrence of mental disorders (co-morbidity) are very high. So that alcoholism is commonly accompanied by anxiety and depression. Depression and anxiety are themselves commonly found together, and the same for almost all the other hundreds of conditions. That means that perhaps a dimensional approach would be a better one to treat theses concepts.

Why do we accept that personality and intelligence are the type of things that should be treated as dimensional, then? Because the psychologists have been working without giving as much attention to politics than the psychiatrists in the last half-century. And they developed the statistical scaffolding for their theories on personality and intelligence, quite independently from psychiatrists. That is why these subjects are treated today as dimensional, whereas mental disorders are treated as categorical (note though that personality disorders also exists in the classification systems and DSM-5 attempts to introduce some dimensional approach on the subject).

Finally, why Autism has been taken as a spectrum condition? Simply because its study has gained traction only recently, and also because the main researchers in the area used methods from psychology to develop their ideas.

So the answer is that your perception that disorders are discrete is something inherited by the long use of classification systems like DSM, but that it will change shortly.

**References:**
> 4 votes

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Tags: measurement, personality-disorder
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title: Publicly Available NEURON models

text:
# Question
Title: Publicly Available NEURON models
NEURON is a software package for simulating neurons and networks in great detail. Although it's quite easy to find papers that use NEURON with a simple Google Scholar search, is there some way to find which models are publicly available? For example, some repository of NEURON models and their associated publications?

If there is no standard, an answer with a few examples of recent (last 10 years) publications with a freely available NEURON model would be appreciated.

# Answer
A repository of publicly available NEURON models can be found on ModelDB by filtering for Models that contain the Modeling Application: NEURON.
> 5 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling
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# Question
Title: Do 10.000 hours of practice make you an expert?
With his book "Outliers" Malcolm Gladwell has widely popularized the idea that the requirement to become an expert in any field is largely to invest at least 10.000 hours of deliberate practice.

1. **What is the scientific basis of this conclusion?**
It seems to have originated from this research by Ericsson et al. (1993). In what way does this paper support the conclusion of a 10.000 hour rule?
2. **What is the current state of the research on this question?**

**Reference**

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

# Answer
> 8 votes
The answer is more involved than it seems. Expertise research programmes, including Ericsson's line, has tended to blend quantitative and qualitative research methods (e.g., case studies, talk-aloud protocol, etc.), and there is a veritable host of critiques and qualifications that apply. For the scope of this answer, I will therefore try to err on the side of too restrictive than too broad.

# 10,000 hours?

The **10,000 hours** figure, supposing that you are right to pin Malcolm's work on this article, appears to derive from an analysis of retrospective practice accounts of violinists. In any case, from the article, page 379.

> "The number of hours of practice accumulated by a violinist at a given age can be easily calculated by adding the yearly estimates at and below that age. The average number of hours of accumulated practice for each of the four groups is shown in Figure 9 as a function of age."

In my experience, rather than giving the **10,000 hours** figure, Ericsson himself instead often proffers **10 years**, as he does in the abstract of this article. This is more consistent with recent research on effects like spaced repetition and the generation effect, since using hours seems to imply that hours of deliberate practice are interchangeable and independent, which they are evidently not. I don't know if it's meaningful to give a year value, but I subjectively doubt it.

# Is deliberate practice effective?

I will interpret the second question as, "**What is the state of research on the training efficacy of deliberate practice?**" instead of the alternative meaning about 10,000 hours, which I have argued is flashy, but not meaningful or central to expertise acquisition.

Deliberate practice has been studied and compared with traditional training and educational methods fairly extensively across a number of domains. Here, I will restrict myself to studies dated 2011-2015 which were not published by K. A. Ericsson himself. I found a convenient meta-review of 14 studies, which found deliberate practice combined with simulations to be effective for clinical training (McGaghie et al., 2011), the area in which deliberate practice sees the most use by far.

Multiple recent studies have taken a critical view of Ericsson's strong theory of deliberate practice (i.e., *performance is a monotonic function of deliberate practice*), but no one appears to seriously dispute that it is a substantial factor in expertise acquisition for some domains. A critical meta-analysis of deliberate practice by Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (2014) reported:

> "We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions."

# Concluding remarks

For the purpose of this question, I would say this: on the one hand, the number of hours is meaningless and more likely than not to vary substantially between domains, persons and situations. **The 10,000 hours figure is therefore only illustrative, not practically meaningful.**

On the other hand, **there is evidence to support the efficacy of deliberate practice** as a learning strategy. Finally, though it remains influential, recent research suggests that **deliberate practice alone is not sufficient to explain expertise acquisition**, and that interacting factors need to be considered.

Despite the waning star of strong-form deliberate practice theory, I thoroughly recommend Ericsson et al.'s *Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance* (2006) for an introduction to this increasingly relevant area of psychology. Personally, I think the recent studies finding that deliberate practice doesn't seem to predict anything in some domains are absolutely fascinating, but I can only speculate as to why.

# References

* Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press.
* Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions A Meta-Analysis. Psychological science, 25(8), 1608-1618.
* McGaghie, W. C., Issenberg, S. B., Cohen, M. E. R., Barsuk, J. H., & Wayne, D. B. (2011). Does simulation-based medical education with deliberate practice yield better results than traditional clinical education? A meta-analytic comparative review of the evidence. Academic medicine: journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 86(6), 706.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Ericsson doesn't emphasize on the precise number of hours needed to be a world-level expert. What he emphasizes is the importance of deliberate practice in gaining expertise.

BTW, Macnamara et al.'s meta-analytic research has some severe weaknesses. For example,

* **Not representative** : They categorized the previous researches into 5 domains -- sports, games, education, professions, and music. For instance, in the professions domain, they concluded that DP explains 1% of variance in performance. However, the more carefully you look into their research, the more you will be surprised. The professions domain includes only 4 researches. Researches about soccer referees, pilots, insurance sales agents, and computer programmers. Even more the sample size for each effect size in that domain doesn't go over 100. For games domain, there are 8 researches and the six are about chess and the rest two are about scramble. I don't think it can represent something like "professions" or "games".
* **Not balanced** : If a paper included multiple effect sizes for different samples (for example, the study divided the sample group into ages), their research treated each one as significant as any other effect sizes from different papers. The problem with this is it could be biased by that particular research setting and method. For example, in the education domain, the total number of effect size analyzed here is 51, and almost half of them came from just two papers. How they defined and measured the deliberate practice and performance in those studies might have had a bigger influence to the result of the meta-analysis.
* **Loose definition of performance and deliberate practice** : The definitions of those two were not strictly following what Ericsson has emphasized. For example, in the study of pilots, they considered flying hours as deliberate practice hours. And in the study of computer programmers, they considered job level as performance -- it has been already shown job level is not a good predictor for performance. Also, in the study of soccer referees, they asked the referees to recall the accumulated hours of deliberate practices, and moreover, their definition of deliberate practice included running and flexibility trainings, and even sauna times, whereas the performance was perception and judgment test like foul and offside assessments. You see they measured and compared so remotely related things.

There are more to point out, but I will stop here and let you read it and think yourself. Their research data is open at https://osf.io/rhfsk/ and their methodological details are at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/suppl/2014/07/01/0956797614535810.DC1/DS\_10.11770956797614535810\_SupplementalMethodsandResults.pdf

Recent researches in deliberate practices has been focusing on the quality of deliberate practices and I am more interested in this area.

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, training, expertise
---


# Question
Title: In a forced-choice task, what proportion of responses is above chance level?
If I give a task in which there are only two response-options, and I want to categorise the participant according to their responses, what is the 'cutoff' or required proportion of one type of response?

E.g.

50-50 would be chance level performance: 50% Type A responses; 50% Type B responses.

100-0 would be a perfect Type A performance: 100% Type A responses.

Presumably a significant number of Type A responses (say, probably around 65%) would qualify as 'Type A' as opposed to 'chance performance'. But how should I decide on what that number is - what is a justifiable criterion and how do I justify using it?

# Answer
This is a binomial distribution and the answer depends on the total number of Type A and B questions as well as what confidence level you want to use for the cutoff. There is probably a formula for determining what you want, but I don't know what it is. You can compute it yourself using a permutation test.

Generate a null hypothesis distribution of random guesses and then use this to find the cutoff for whatever p-value (probability that randomly guessing will give a score greater than a certain value) you are comfortable with. The easiest way to get that value is to sort all of the null performance scores and get one that is 95% higher than all of the others (say Score #950 if you did 1000 random guesses and sorted the scores).

Here is some Matlab code to estimate this:

```
n_trials = 50;
p_cutoff = 0.05;
n_permutations = 100000;
% Create a vector of n_trials 'correct' responses and replicate it across n_permutations
expected_values = repmat(randi([0 1],[1 n_trials]),[n_permutations 1]);
% Create an array of n_permutations x n_trials random guesses
random_responses = randi([0 1],[n_permutations n_trials]);
% Compute the percent correct for each permutation
percent_correct = sum(expected_values==random_responses,2)/n_trials;
% Compute and print the cutoff percentage for desired p value
fprintf('\np=%1.3f Cutoff for %d trials: %3.1f%%\n\n', p_cutoff, n_trials, quantile(percent_correct,1-p_cutoff)*100);

```

Here are some cutoffs for p=0.05 assuming the same number of Type A and Type B questions:

```
n_trials cutoff
10       80.0%
20       70.0%
30       63.3%
40       62.5%
50       62.0%
75       60.0%
100      58.0%
250      55.2%
500      53.6%

```

More total questions (trials) and the cutoff gets closer to 50%.

Note this is all assuming that there is no kind of bias, say a participant choosing randomly will be more likely to choose A (like the first answer or something like that).

Here is an online calculator for computing some probabilities with the binomial distribution.
> 3 votes

# Answer
In many cases, we talk about threshold as being the minimum "signal" level needed to "reliably" detect the presence of the signal. This threshold level is well above the signal level for there to be a statistically significant increase in the probability of correct. The idea being that the minimum signal level to be statistically better than chance depends on the number of trials, while the signal level to be better than "threshold" is independent of the number of trials (although the precision, and possibly the accuracy, of the estimated threshold depends on the number of trials).

Historically, threshold was estimated by fitting a psychometric function to measures of the probability of correct (or hit rate). For a 2AFC task, the psychometric function goes from 50 to 100 percent correct and threshold was arbitrarily defined as the signal level needed to get 75 percent correct. This choice was mostly because it made the math easier. An alternative to defining threshold in terms of percent correct is to use d prime. Typically, a d prime of unity is chosen as threshold, which under certain conditions corresponds to 68 percent correct. Adaptive methods like Levitt (1971) track specific points on the psychometric function. For example, a 2-down 1-up procedure tracks 70.7 percent correct and a 3-down 1-up procedure tracks 79.4 percent correct and the QUEST procedure tracks 92 percent correct. All of these values (and others) have been used to define threshold.

While one might think having thresholds defined between 68 and 92 percent correct would cause problems, often the psychometric function is steep enough (the transition from 50%+$\epsilon$ to 100%-$\epsilon$ is rapid) that the differences in the definition of threshold are obscured by the measurement noise.

From a pragmatic approach, chose the definition of threshold that makes the most sense given the measurement procedure you are using.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: statistics
---


# Question
Title: What is the effect of Binaural Beats on an Autistic brain?
I understand a fare bit about autism, and Binaural Beats.

Autism is the result of synaptic pathways becoming malformed during the fetal stage of pregnancy.

A Binaural Beat is a collection of two frequencies layered on top of each other to produce a third frequency which mimics a brain wave frequency.

I know they have done experiments on people to find the effectiveness of a Binaural Beat, under controlled conditions, to perform a triple blind study. However as an Autistic person I find myself wondering if any of the participants in that study had any form of Autism.

It seems to me that if the synaptic pathways in the brain of a fetus can become so malformed that they result in things like, Learning Difficulties and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified with traits of Aspergers Syndrome, then how would the brain of an autistic person interpret a Binaural Beat in comparison to a Neurotypical person ?

Binaural Beats are essentially two similar frequencies, you play a Binaural Beat through headphones and the brain of a Neuro-Typical person interprets the two frequencies from both ears to create the actual Binaural Beat which only the brain can here.

Is this so for people with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder ?

# Answer
> 3 votes
The evidence in support of binaural beats as a therapeutic tool is sketchy: Is there scientific evidence on the benefits of binaural beats? Given our lack of understanding of if binaural beats can cause entrainment in the brain, never mind how they cause entrainment, it is not possibly to make conclusions about how the binaural beat would affect the autistic brain.

---
Tags: consciousness, neurology, unconscious, autism, binaural-beats
---


# Question
Title: Is there explanation of persistent laziness?
As we say when we feel happy there are some biological explanation of some feelings like happiness and sadness as they explain here.

So I say whatever we feel can be explained in biological way, so what about when one feel lazy? In the way that he/she is having no motivation (not due to lack of energy). Is there any biological explanation of someone being lazy like no motivation to do anything and that remain for long time say months.

---

PS: this website describes the kind of laziness I am too talking about, and I quote from this website:

> I am really tired \[...\] my entire life. Every morning when I wake up my first thought is “I wonder when I can take a nap”. Even while I’m thinking it I realize the futility in this thought; I haven’t actually taken a “nap” in months.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Low motivation can stem from a variety of different things. A lot of it boils down to low neurotransmitter activity in areas traditionally associated with motivation. The neurotransmitter 'dopamine' plays a significant role in the regulation of pleasure, reward, and motivation. The neurotransmitter 'serotonin' is thought to regulate emotional well-being and happiness. 'Norepinephrine' is considered to be responsible for vigilance in concentration, and the locus coeruleus (the principal site for norepinephrine synthesis) is said to receive input from the orbitofrontal cortex, which is an area of the brain also involved with reward, motivation, and impulse control.

With low neurotransmitter activity comes certain behaviors and mental states that are commonly associated with specific mental disorders. Low levels of serotonin (and, henceforth, dopamine and norepinephrine, insofar as they are mediated by serotonin) can result in clinical depression. Low levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are thought to be associated with disordered attention, executive functioning, and motivation disorders, such as attention deficit disorder and sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT).

Persistent laziness can also be a learned trait. Norepinephrine also seems to be closely involved with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which plays a role in the control of certain autonomic functions such as heart rate. Norepinephrine also seems to be somewhat involved with urgency (fight-or-flight), and is thought to be activated in times of physiological stress. From a social standpoint, if there is no social pressure to work, then the activation of norepinephrine needn't happen. It is also worth noting that stimulation of the ACC is thought to provide relief for those suffering from major depression.

Long-term laziness implies that any some combination of the above has been occurring for a long period of time. The best way to counteract long-term laziness would be to find a happy medium between behavioral adjustment and (in more extreme cases) medical treatment.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Laziness as well as lack of motivation can be attributed to chemical imbalances, biology, and patterns of human behavior.

Clinical Depression can cause a lack of motivation as well as laziness. Studies have shown that clinical depression can be due to an overall lack of certain neurotransmitters, or neurotransmitters not working correctly.

Humans also tend to have hormonal changes throughout life that can cause a lack of energy, and sense of overall well-being. This is just one of many answers of the biological reason for laziness.

The importance of routine, waking up when you don't want to, exercising, and eating correctly are all efficient patterns and habits that can prevent laziness, and a lack of motivation. If your pattern is to stay in bed, eat poorly, and neglect exercise, I believe that laziness can be attributed to your general pattern of behavior.

---
Tags: cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Two possibilites to increase the effect of binaural beats
I collected references, supporting the hypothesis that binaural beats have an influence in our brain (see here).

I currently see two possibilities to possibly increase the (measurable) effect of binaural beats:

1. What-ever brain wave doesn't have a fixed frequency but a range. Sweeping across the frequency band could be an improvement.
2. Sweeping the volume from left to right.

Is this already researched?

**EDIT 2**: Sometimes (white, pink, brown) noise is mentioned to increase the effect. There might be a optimal signal-to-noise ratio...

**EDIT**: The frequency of the sweep shall be low. My focus lies on hitting your personal resonance frequency to increase the effect of binaural beats. As written in the linked post: *This maximum declines as the carrier moves away from 440 Hz.*

# Answer
> 3 votes
Both of your proposed methods to increase the measureable affect of binaural beats on the brain would introduce a monaural beat. For example, sweeping the volume from left to right means the volume in at least one ear is changing over time. You would hear a beating if you listened to just this ear. Similarly, to sweep the frequency range, you would need to change the frequency in at least one ear. If you listened to just this ear, you would hear a "beat" (or more precisely frequency modulation).

I am not aware of any research on how sounds that have both monaural and binaural beats affect the brain. My guess is that people who are interested in using binaural beats to influence the brain would stay away from stimuli that have monaural beats since you can hear the monaural beat with a single ear. From my understanding of the literature on using binaural beats to influence the brain, there is something special about binaural beats since the beat is created by the brain (which is sort of true and sort of wrong).

---
Tags: brain-waves, binaural-beats
---


title: How long does a spiking signal last?

text:
# Question
Title: How long does a spiking signal last?
It is surprisingly hard to find information about the timing of neurons, in particular how long an action potential can contribute to the summation of a neuron. Is it on the order of milliseconds or seconds, i.e. for a neuron to fire, do many of the presynaptic neurons fire about at the same time?

# Answer
Many of the neurons in the auditory system have voltage-gated low threshold potassium channels which allow neurons to maintain high firing rates and high temporal acuity. This makes the auditory system a good candidate for finding "fast" neurons. McGineley and Oertel (2006) looked at temporal integration in the ventral cochlear nucleus of the auditory system and found that the integration window was as low as 1.4 ms for octopus cells and of "unlimited" duration for T stellate cells.

I think, but I do not know how to calculate an integration window, that the cells of the Medial Superior Olive are even faster. These cells need to encode differences in timing between the ears on the order of 10s of microseconds.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience
---


# Question
Title: Can someone who is never speaking of himself and present himself as very altruistic be egocentric / narcissistic?
I've tried to make some searches on egocentrism and its opposite (Allocentrism).

The definitions from Wikipedia are:

> **Egocentrism** is the inability to differentiate between self and other. More specifically, it is the inability to untangle subjective schemas from objective reality; an inability to understand or assume any perspective other than their own.
>
> Although **egocentrism** and **narcissism** appear similar, they are not the same. A person who is egocentric believes they are the center of attention, like a narcissist, but does not receive gratification by one's own admiration. An **egotist** is a person whose ego is greatly influenced by the approval of others while a narcissist is not.
>
> **Allocentrism** is a collectivistic personality attribute whereby people center their attention and actions on other people rather than themselves.

But since the **prosocial** actions are often motivated by ego needs (see Polatch effect for the extreme) can we say that among extreme idealistic people (i.e. militants in extreme organizations) we can find **Narcissists** as well?

A narcissist has absence of self-compassion, he thinks to be perfect. Is there a correlation between some form of Narcissism and altruism?

EDIT: I found this

> “(The) Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi (suggested that) (a)ltruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance and superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlach Effect ... Only a genuinely superior individual can afford to advertise the fact by means of a costly gift ... through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public spirited risk taking... (I)f Zahavi is right ... conspicuous generosity (is) a way of buying unfakeably authentic (self-)advertising.”

(any help at improving the question is very welcome)

# Answer
According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, in some circumstances, people help because they genuinely care about the welfare of the other person and not because of any other personal goal i.e. avoid distress, social norm, Self-affirmation etc.

> The empathy-altruism hypothesis basically states that psychological altruism does exist and is evoked by the empathic desire to help someone who is suffering. Feelings of empathic concern are contrasted with feelings of personal distress, which compel people to reduce their own unpleasant emotions. People with empathic concern help others in distress even when exposure to the situation could be easily avoided, whereas those lacking in empathic concern avoid helping unless it is difficult or impossible to avoid exposure to another's suffering.

...

> The social exchange theory states that altruism does not exist unless benefits to the helper outweigh the costs. C. Daniel Batson disagrees. He holds that people help others in need out of genuine concern for the well-being of the other person. The key ingredient to helping is "empathic concern". According to his 'empathy-altruism hypothesis', if you feel empathy towards another person you will help them, regardless of what you can gain from it (1991).

There is a lot of debate about the empathy-altruism hypothesis theory, but I tend to agree with it.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: social-psychology, abnormal-psychology, personality, social
---


title: Component naming of MEG vs. EEG

text:
# Question
Title: Component naming of MEG vs. EEG
My question is why we use P and N for naming positive and negative EEG component(for instance N170 or P100) but for MEG data we use M in both case, I mean M170 and M100 in this example?

# Answer
> 4 votes
EEG and MEG measure two different but related signals. While EEG records the electric activity from the scalp, MEG records changes in the magnetic field induced by electric activity in the brain. Because of this, MEG is largely insensitive to sources oriented radially, but can pick up sources oriented tangentially to the cortex. Moreover, EEG is sensitive to volume currents (i.e., the spread of currents across the brain), while MEG less so \[1\].

Because of this distinction, while two components can have the same latency — let's say the face-specific N170 and the M170 — the sources originating them might be different. Naming the components differently stresses this important distinction.

For reference, I recommend the following articles and books

1. Baillet, S., Mosher, J. C., & Leahy, R. M. (2001). Electromagnetic brain mapping. Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE, 18(6), 14–30.
2. Hansen, P., Kringelbach, M., & Salmelin, R. (2010). MEG:An Introduction to Methods. Oxford University Press, USA.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Apart from making the distinction between recording techniques (talking about N170 and you refer to ERP), here is an explanation:

**Naming convention refers more to neurophysiology than waveform (component) directions.**

The standard tool modeling the EEG/MEG activity is a **dipole**. A dipole consists of a pair of a negative and positive charges and it **generates both an electric and a magnetic field** (see figure). You can see in the electric field panel that the positive activity is ahead of the positive charge, here the head of the arrow (on the contrary, the magnetic field is oriented on the side of the dipole). Therefore, a positivity in an ERP signal (P300 for example) corresponds to an increase of the dipole activity measured ahead of the positive charge (resp. negative for N400).

Here, we can say the electrical positive P300 component (or waveform) is neurophysiologicaly a positive electrical activity.

On the contrary, the magnetic main activity does not follow the main direction of the dipole but its perpendicular one. Therefore, we can't relate an increase in a magnetic field to the positive/negative direction of the dipole.

Here, a magnetic N170 would not be grounded on neurophysiological basis, but just in the fact that N only refers to a negative on-going measure.

---
Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, measurement, eeg, meg
---


title: Can music be addictive?

text:
# Question
Title: Can music be addictive?
As playing games for a prolonged period, tend to develop a addictive behavior in humans, Is there any possibility for addiction to music?

*I.e.*, when a person listens to certain list of songs and gets addicted to it, without which the person finds the day boring (or emotionally disturbed)?

# Answer
According to the article "Addiction to Music Has Biochemical Basis" on Softpedia News by Tudor Vieru, which reports on findings by Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor (Salimpoor & Zatorre, 2013), who both hold appointments as neuroscientists at the McGill University:

1. "listening to music you like also triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in underlying pleasurable reactions caused by food, drugs and arousal before intercourse"
2. "The chemical has been linked in a variety of studies with mechanisms underlying addiction in humans, and it would appear that it also plays a role in the way people feel when listening to their favorite tunes."
3. "Dopamine is important because it makes us want to repeat behaviors. It’s the reason why addictions exist, whether positive or negative,”
4. "the euphoric ‘highs’ from music are neurochemically reinforced by our brain so we keep coming back to them. It’s like drugs. It works on the same system as cocaine,"
5. "It’s working on the same systems of addiction, which explain why we’re willing to spend so much time and money trying to achieve musical experiences,"

## References

Salimpoor, V. N., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Neural interactions that give rise to musical pleasure. *Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7*(1), 62–75. 10.1037/a0031819 Free PDF available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f818/f3a9db17e3defb250a0c00ff64b4c4631376.pdf
> 9 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, music, addiction
---


# Question
Title: Can authority urge person to commit suicide?
I'm interested in the influence of authority. I would like to know if it is possible for authority to urge someone to commit suicide.

By urge, I mean not using any negative force, so affected person feels that suicide is 'right thing to do', and doesn't feel (consciously) forced to do it.

# Answer
I believe that this has been proven by history and is also happening in the present world. During World War 2, there were (1)kamikaze pilots. In today's world, there are (2)suicide bombers.

(1) Kamikaze - This was a direct order to Japanese pilots from their authorities to kill themselves and take out as many of the enemy as they could.

(2) Suicide bombing - This too is a direct order from religious authorities.

It can also be argued that culture is an "authority". Culture is passed down from elders who are authority figures. In Japan, there was Seppuku. Samurai who were captured would disembowel themselves, because their culture dictated that this was the honorable thing to do.

I hope I understood your question correctly and was able to answer it.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Absolutely! First and foremost most people commit suicide on their own authority. I discovered that suicide can seem convincingly rational and sound. Suicides are with ease driven by the thoughts and feelings that it is the best that can happen to ones loved ones and society if you die, solves all their problems, good riddance. So yes, it is fully possible to give strong enough incentive over time if it is the subjects whole environment that pushes the same self image onto the person, that image should include diffuse feelings of being a problem, not quite living up to standards anywhere(shifting goalposts on what the standards are) making the subject aware of it causing disappointment repeatedly.
> 0 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Is it established that personal success or happiness is primarily determined by personality and is largely independent of social identities?
In a discussion about choices about occupation, I shared the image of this tweet. The following was one of the replies:

> Of course you can sit and complain about it, but it tells you about your own shortcomings be it laziness, cowardice, fears of all kinds lack of initiative etc.

Further the commenter pointed out that

> Personal success or happiness after (everything else being equal) is determined by your personality.

He claims this using the theory of delayed gratification. His point being \[from the wiki link\]:

> In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

Actually he might be right. I have no idea of modern cognitive science results. So I want to know the following:

**Are there results in cognitive sciences that show personal success or happiness is determined by one's personality? And that any occupation failure is determined mostly by personal shortcomings and is largely independent of social identities?**

# Answer
There is a growing body of work around social emotional learning that states that factors such as, self-control, grit, and mindset can have a huge impact on long-term success.

But, these are often coined character strengths, not personality. And as such, these strengths can be trained. The Marshmallow Tests may have given evidence that self-control positively correlates with success, but much more importantly that self-control can be trained and is not wholly innate. In his latest book, Walter Mischel (author of The Marshmallow Test, study and book) goes to say that what we grow to become is neither wholly nature or nurture, but a conglomerate.

Angela Duckworth (grit) and Carol Dweck (mindset) have similar views about how we can train our character strengths to better help us succeed.

So, "is determined by?" Probably not. Too much goes into what makes a human human and even personality changes over time.

Independent of social identities? Definitely not. All of the above authors have had their work criticized for letting their work be distributed as, "just the harder and you'll be fine" regardless of social standing (race, sex, income)
> 1 votes

# Answer
This seems to me the old nature versus nurture debate and there is no real answer to this. However, I highly doubt that it is personality (as an inherent trait of you - nature) that's the most important factor for personal success. The question is what shapes your personality.

Family matters a lot, so building your personality over the right type of Childhood experiences seems to have strong effects on personal performance.

Yet, even such mundane things like names can have a huge impact on personal success regarding job oppurtunities.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I don't think you can separate personality from social identity (?) With the marshmallow test, for example, the children who have learned not to trust adults or who live in chaotic environments have more motivation to grab the first marshmallow rather than wait. Their outcomes in life are therefore as likely to be a result of their relationships and environment as they are to be related to unchanging aspects of their personality. I'm sure they've done the experiments controlling for socioeconomic circumstances, etc., but there's no way of controlling for the quality of relationships.

So the answer for me is no, I don't think it's possible to prove such a thing.
> 0 votes

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Tags: personality
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# Question
Title: How does robot-assisted autism therapy compare to traditional autism therapy?
There have been many applications of robots for treatment of autism, for example ASK Aldeberan therapy. However, how do the results from these therapies compare to traditional therapies such as Floortime DIR and Hanen - More Than Words?

# Answer
Robot-assisted therapy doesn't automatically mean that it is separate kind of therapy. You may for example teach an imitation by ABA principles with the robot. In other words, you are following traditional therapies but also using a robot.

Kids may benefit from robot-assisted therapy primarily because robots are usually reinforcement for them, i.e. kids are motivated to interact with them and of course they will learn more. For kids who prefer rules and restrictive environment and behavior, robots are "friendly" because they don't change a lot- they always follow the same program in a same way.

On the other side, it is complicate to do a program for every child individually. Therapist should know how to handle with a robot and a child in a same time and it may be hard. And most important, robot isn't a human so child will probably have more issues with generalization of the skill than (s)he would have with just a human therapist.

Shortly it is hard to give you one answer on this matter because we have different robot-assisted therapies, we have different skills to teach, different children (e.g low/ high functioning autism, or to use proper terminology- different disorders in Autism Spectrum Disorders), etc. If we want to compare benefits of robots then, for example, we should have experimental and control groups, teaching the same skills in the same way with the only difference- presence and absence of a robot.

**Update**

Some of references:

***1)*** *doi: 10.1109/ROBOT.2010.5509327 **2)** DOI: 10.1075/pc.12.1.03dau **3)** doi: 10.1146/annurev-bioeng-071811-150036 **4)** Pop, C., Petrule, A., Pintea. S., Peca, A., Simut, R., Vanderborght, B., & David, D. (2013). Imitation and social behaviors of children with ASD in interaction with Robonova. A series of single case experiments, Transylvanian Journal of Psychology, 14(1), 71–91. **5)** DOI: 10.1007/s10803-012-1645-2 **6)** doi: 10.1016/j.rasd.2011.05.006*
> 2 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, autism
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# Question
Title: Can somebody provide a standard test to measure ones working memory & short term memory
I suffer from memory problem but find it difficult to undrstand whether it is more belief based or real, need a standard test to confirm.

# Answer
It might be difficult to distinguish between belief-based and actual memory difficulties, especially in a self-administered test. The most objective measure would be a computerised assessment, e.g. the Automatic Working Memory Assessment, which contains measures of short-term and working memory in the verbal and spatial domain \[1\]. Some commonly used assessments of these constructs are \[2\]:

**Verbal short-term memory**: digit span, running span
**Verbal working memory**: backward digit span, n-back span
**Spatial short-term memory**: dot matrix, forward Corsi block task
**Spatial working memory**: backward Corsi block task

\[1\] http://doi.org/10.1080/01443410802243828
\[2\] http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1201
> 0 votes

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Tags: memory, test
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# Question
Title: How important is eye contact for attraction between a man and woman?
How important is eye contact for creating/inducing attraction & showing showing "confidence" towards them?

What is the optimal eye locking duration between 2 persons for inducing this attraction?

# Answer
> How important is eye contact for creating/inducing attraction & showing showing "confidence" towards them?

It's very important, and a good way to show/build confidence as well. If you've ever looked at two crazy people fighting you can see how intensely they look at each other - they're trying to show off how confident they are and intimidate one another.

Here's the thing though, you want to keep and hold eye contact when it's normal or "feels right," but not do it to an excessive amount to where she would be able to feel like you're consciously trying to control your eye contact in order to seem differently than you feel in your mind - females are very good at picking up subtleties like that - however, they are very bad at explaining them usually.

For instance, if you just walked up to them and started talking to them and stared at them like a zombie they wouldn't break down why they didn't like that...or even most of the time know logically why they didn't like that...they would just be able to pick up on the fact that something is off and then label such person as "creepy." That's mostly for the stereotypical blondes though. :) It's like a feeling they'd get or perceive that has been developed over thousands and thousands of years of evolution.

So, the right advice is if it's for a man, would be to hold eye contact a bit moreso than you usually feel like is proper but, don't be a zombie either. Eventually the more you push it, the more you'll realize what the proper timing is for each and every situation.

It's also one of many, many, many "microbehaviors" that women pick up on which can influence whether they like you or not. Like, you could get a girl to like you by not having eye contact with her too. In fact, there are so many of these "microbehaviors" you can't really consciously control all of them (in the ideal scenario they are controlled subconsciously because you genuinely feel that way), but at least try to practice a few of them, if you're asking for yourself.

> What is the optimal eye locking duration between 2 persons for inducing this attraction?

There is none. It's all about what feels the most natural and pushing yourself farther each time to essentially try everything til you figure out, subconsciously what the right amount of time each where. This process cannot really be done consciously.

If you want to know more about all this and go really, really deep with it, post a comment with @Taal in it and I'll point you towards a website.
> 4 votes

# Answer
While eye contact is certainly important in social interaction I think you should beware pseudoscientific dating advice based on manufacturing "attraction" between men and women. Since this site is about science, let me point to a couple of areas of empirical research looking at eye contact.

First, there are quite a few experimental papers showing that (pictures of) faces with direct gaze (looking towards you) capture and hold attention, are remembered better, and that they are rated as more attractive. For details see this pdf. There are other similar papers.

Second, there is a long tradition of looking at gaze in non-verbal behaviour. Basically, although this shows that people are sensitive to direct gaze it is only one of many cues related to conversation etc. A classic review is here. Interestingly, the timing of direct gaze (when you look and when you look away) is very important in conversation.

This suggests to me that both looking at someone too long, and not looking at them enough or at awkward times, can cause interactions to suffer. Atypical eye contact is a diagnostic criterion for autism, which is normally associated with difficulties in socialising.
> 5 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, sexuality, eye-movement, physical-attraction
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# Question
Title: are statistic results of these two questions equal?
I am trying to make the better user experience for my poll application and one of the ideas I have for this is breaking multi choices polls into binary polls.

Is the statistical result of a question with these 4 options (a or b or c or d) equal with sum of statistical results of these 6 binary questions?:

(a or b), (a or c), (a or d), (b or c), (b or d), (c or d)

assume I ask these questions from separate people and I ask these questions equally

for example: assume we have a society with 1000 members if we ask all of them the first question, people will answer it with this distribution: a:60%, d:20%, b:15%, c:5%

now assume if we ask those six binary questions from all members of that society and then we sum each vote of winners of each of those questions.

we ask 1000 times a or b and the answer is a:600,b:400

we ask 1000 times a or c and the answer is a:500,c:500

we ask 1000 times a or d and the answer is a:100,d:900 ....)

we sum number of votes on a and it is 1300 =600+500+100

we do a similar thing with b,c, and d, is this result similar to the result of the first question? (a:60%, d:20%, b:15%, c:5% ) and is the meaning of this result similar to the first one?

===update-1===

@Bruno mention to the inconsistency of the result of this approach and I think it can be solved if we do not show all combinations to all voters. If voter1 chooses "a" between "a" and "b" we do not show questions with any combination of "b".

===update-2===

In fact, what I wish to know from this community is: "Does anybody do statistical research on how results of these two types of questionnaires are different?" The problem with this research is that when you ask any of these question types from someone it affects the result of the second one (people want to show themselves rationally. and if we do not ask questions with the same items for example (a or b), (a or c) (a or b or c) from the same person we do not certain about the complete answer of this particular person and the data is insufficient for comparing) On the second chance if there is not any already done research on this I want to know what is the proper (psychologically proper) way to do this research?

# Answer
It slightly depends on what you are asking and you might want to post on one of the mathematical stack exchanges instead.

If you are asking "Do I get the same information by asking binary comparisons as by asking the four-option choice?" Then my answer is that you actually get ***more*** information, both about the pattern in the group and about a particular individual. Imagine if person X chooses A in the four option case, all you know is that they prefer A the best. If they then complete all 6 binary options, you will still find this out, but you will also know how they feel about B vs. C etc, so you will be able to find the complete ranking for each person. For the whole group, you would certainly be able to find the overall ranking, but I don't think you'd be able to sum the choices in the way you state.

If you are asking "will people respond in the same way?", then the answer is probably "No" because, as Bruno notes, people are not always rational and will be affected by the number of choices. Even if you imagine there is some random "noise" in their decision, then making six independent choices will produce some conflicts and potentially amplify this "error".

At any rate, it doesn't seem like this is going to make the user experience more comfortable! This is not my area, but you could read something about "rational choice theory" to get some background about the math/assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational\_choice\_theory
> 2 votes

# Answer
That's a good question, but... No way, man, they're not equal!! When you ask someone to choose between 4 options, their answer just means about their pick for the 4 options. And this, and only this, is the way to know the preference of people for those 4 options!

The way you're purposing could even generate an inconsistency... Suppose that one person prefer A over B and C, but not over D. It doesn't means that they would necessarily prefer D over B and C, nor means that A or D would be the choice among all. Our choices are not rational, so, if just the order you offer the 4 (or 2) options could induce people to prefer one of the options, asking all vs all could generate a lot of noise!

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, depends on the purpose of your question, of course, and on what you want to know!

I don't know what's your objective, exactly, but maybe you want to ask people to put them in order of importance! e.g., you might be wanting to ask people: "Classify these options in order of importance". This is what does it looks like, by your question, but it's just a guess at all.

It all will depend on what you want to know and the evolved specificity. In some cases, it would be a good idea, in others not.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, decision-making, statistics
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# Question
Title: Is low self esteem pushing person toward maximizing (instead of being easily satisfied)
See the answer to this question: Is there a term that describes the personality trait of always desiring more?

> Schwartz and colleagues (2002) have proposed that people fall into two groups: those who seek to maximize their decision by finding the very best option out of choices presented (maximizers), and those who have an idea in mind of what would be an "acceptable" option and settle for the first choice that surpasses their expectations (satisficers). Maximizers are always on the look out for "the best," are less satisfied with their choices, more likely to "socially compare" their options to others, and more likely to experience regret (Ma & Roese, 2014). Another recent publication proposed that when individuals experience "choice closure," and stop re-evaluating the non-selected alternative options, satisfaction with choice can increase (Gu, Botti, & Farro, 2013).

Is it possible to state that looking for challenges and being a maximizer can be correlated to a low selfesteem?

# Answer
> 1 votes
There seems to be indeed some correlation between maximization and self-esteem (as can be seen even in the wikipedia page). However it doesn't necessarily predicts low self-esteem.

Quoted from wikipedia:

> Initial research on maximizing showed uniformly negative outcomes associated with chronic maximizing tendencies. Such tendencies were associated with lower happiness, self-esteem, and life satisfaction; with greater depression and regret; with lower satisfaction with choices;\[8\]\[9\] with greater perfectionism;\[10\] and with greater decision-making confusion, commitment anxiety, and rumination ... However, as disagreement over the definition of maximizing grew, research began to show diverging effects: some negative, some neutral, and some positive

Interestingly, those results closely resembles studies regarding correlation between "perfectionism" and "self-esteem" (perfectionism being a similar concept to maximization which you described).

There have been many studies, but in general, perfectionism can be detrimental only when it's maladaptive/ neurotic. On the other hand, positive/adaptive perfectionism tend to correlate with positive emotions, which can factors in a more positive self-esteem.

Some studies further classified that perfectionism coming from one-self is associated with adaptive aspect of perfectionism, and thus more related to positive emotions. While perfectionism that comes form social environment (imposed/prescribed by others), is more associated to the maladaptive aspect. As discussed in this article.

It somewhat make senses considering the definition of "self-esteem". In general, self-esteem is defined as how we evaluate our own worth, which starts early in infancy. It affected by many factors which may changes across lifetime (for example in childhood and teens), but in general it's largely affected by social factors.

So in summary, it's possible that being a maximizer (or being perfectionist in general) correlated to low-self esteem. But it depends on how exactly the maximizing is.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, personality
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# Question
Title: Can forgetting labor pain be an evolutionary advantage as animals don't know how to avoid labor?
I've often heard the claim that women are forgetting, or remembering labour and birth pain as being less severe. Some people say that this mechanism has an evolutionary advantage, as if it didn't exist women would avoid having more babies...

Is this explanation possible? I'm assuming most animals don't know the relation between contraception and labor, so they won't be able to avoid labor even if they wanted...

How long have humans been aware of this relation, and is it possible that evolution has been able to work in that time-span?

# Answer
> 2 votes
I agree. The connection between having sex and the pain of labor is so distant, it seems unlikely that it could be selected against. In theory though, there could be enough time in human history for it to have happened, especially early on when child mortality was much higher than now. If every mother who remembered extreme pain in labor never gave birth again, and a large proportion of those babies died, the attribute could disappear within a generation or two.

However, there is evidence that mothers don't always forget the pain of labor. Even if they do forget to some extent, I'm not sure how that compares to other kinds of pain. For example, marathon runners forget the pain of their last race.

Some advantages of remembering the pain of labor could be preparation for subsequent births and arranging support in advance.

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Tags: evolution, evolutionary-psychology
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# Question
Title: How does one explain the irrational fear of approaching problems?
There is a particular problem I've had since as long as I can remember , but I always managed to shove it to the back of my head and ignore, albeit acknowledging its existence.

I'll provide a bit of relevant background regarding the particular areas in which this issue has profoundly affected me. I'm quite fond of different areas of mathematics and I dare say I'm proficient in at least one of those.

But I've always encountered this shortcoming. Any time I'm supposed to attack a new problem or teach myself a new concept, I feel like a wall rises right in front of me. If I don't see the solution right away I get terrified, especially when I'm in public. Even when I'm by myself at home I find it incredibly hard to just lay some thoughts on the paper if I'm not completely sure of the next logical step in the process of finding a solution.

I get a terrible mixed feeling, one one side itching to solve the problem, on the other side this damned blockage that prevents from going all in.

This made me ask myself ? How is it that I got good with calculus ? And now I realize...what I've been doing all along was looking for solutions of my problems online before trying to even attempt solving a problem and . I haven't told anyone about this because I feel so, so awfully ashamed by it.. But now I'm desperate for help.

By some mysterious process, this made me one of the best mathematics students in my university (CS undergrad). Even though I've absorbed and emulated others' way of thinking I manage to see simple and elegant solutions to a larger number of problems than my peers who've worked so much harder.

At this point, I feel like this irrational fear or mental obstruction suffocates me and stands in my way of truly becoming as good as I hope to become.

This all boils down to :

---

Why am I so afraid of simply trying ?

What can I do?

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It would mean the world to me if you could help, I didn't know where else to go. If you need any clarifications, please feel free to ask. Also, if you can't formulate any advise, I would also appreciate suggestions to materials/papers that might encapsulate my issue.

Thank you!

# Answer
> 2 votes
Fear of failure (Atychiphobia) is a form of specific phobia that may **to some degree** explains your situation.

However, please **DO NOT** instantly think/feel that you're experiencing a mental disorder or something similar. I cannot stress this enough, sharing some characteristics or experiencing some signs/symptoms of a disorder does not immediately means that you have that disorder.

I stated "to some degree" because features of "fear of failure" matched what you described, but only partly so. Note that in the linked explanation, on most cases, this fear will make a person avoid distinguishing him/herself and instead strive for mediocrity. However you have had achievements that clearly distinguishes yourself.

Instead, I would argue that you have such expectations of yourself, and the thought of failing to fulfill them are so great that you rather not try unless you're sure you will succeed. And when you did succeed, you tend to undermine/ brush-aside your own capabilities; since having such capabilities would mean that you're expected to achieve even more things in the future.

There are many articles discussing about this, and many offers ways/strategy to overcome this particular fear. For example this article. However I'm sorry that I couldn't find related books, papers, or scientific publications. All in all, I would personally advise you to stop thinking about results, and try to just "jump" the problem.

Hope this answer helps in any way!

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Tags: fear
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title: When does the brain 'switch on'?

text:
# Question
Title: When does the brain 'switch on'?
I am pursuing Computational Neuro-Science and learning about human Brain. After some reading I got this doubt that when does the brain actually gets switched on? Does it happen right in the mother's womb or when the baby comes out? or Is it wrong on my part to assume that the brain gets switched on one particular moment?

# Answer
I love this question. While I don't have a definitive answer, I can help with some known factors of child development.

There are studies suggesting that the parents' voices and repeated music is heard in the womb by the fetus and responded to after birth.

Specific studies (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/08/babies-learn-recognize-words-womb) classify the **third trimester** (last three months) of development in the womb to be the key point at which sensory hearing and brain function/classification is active, thus suggesting the brain is "turned on" during or prior to the last trimester.

I would love to hear further studies from others that clarify this point.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I suspect that a boolean thinking is somewhat a mismatch to the biological processes that govern fetus development - it's all much more of a gradient than light switches.

What is to become the brain starts forming around 16 days after conception. By around week 6, neurons start to communicate and we can detect fetus movements.

It is around week 15 that the sense of touch starts to develop, shortly followed by an extremely crude hearing sense.

It is around week 30 that the actual global network which is a prerequisite for consciousness is sufficiently formed and shows synchrony. But as far as consciousness goes, many other aspects of it cannot be observed (not conclusively at least). What we do know is that at birth processes that could carry the hallmarks of consciousness are extremely slow compared to those of adults.

Perhaps another important milestone is placed two months after birth, where there's strong evidence showing a capacity to hold information for a few seconds, ie, short-term memory.

So as initially suggested, the whole thing doesn't quite switch itself on - it is rather progressive in nature.
> 3 votes

# Answer
auditory and sensory systems if you will are 'on' from within womb visual stimuli confirms all those sounds with visual feedback after birth while sensory information starts to form memories along with those new images.
> -1 votes

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: What is the easiest way to memorize big amounts of information (a.k.a. learning for exams)?
I consider myself a person with above average intelligence, that is, I am able to understand complex systems with relative ease. My weak point however is that I've always struggled with memorizing. Back in school I excelled in math and physics, but struggled with e.g. history, not because I wasn't interested in it, but simply because I had a hard time memorizing what was necessary.

Is there a good method for memorizing?

Context: I am planning to go back to university this fall. I am learning now for the entrance exam. That is something I will manage, but I anticipate university exams themselves being harder than that, and I will attend to uni while still having a day job. That is, I have no time to waste on improper/suboptimal learning methods. I aim for BA first, then MA. I am 31 years old now.

# Answer
Thanks for everyone for your answers.

I've found this book and it seems to be what I was looking for: Make It Stick - The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown et al. The basic premise is that retrieving things from memory makes them actually stick. The more effort to retrieve it the better. Therefore you shouldn't mass learn because it's more or less a waste of time, rather embed waits and do something else, interleave subjects, and most importantly test yourself by retrieving from memory instead of rereading, and so on.

Also, there is an other book that looks great, with a seemingly great deal of overlap with the former: How We Learn by Benedict Carey.

I am also mentioning that I've stumbled upon a book asserting that everyone has to find about what their "learning style" is, like visual/auditory/etc... and left vs right hemisphere, but concluded that it is unfounded at best (the word pseudoscience comes to my mind), so I returned it. See Criticism at Wikipedia.
> -1 votes

# Answer
If you want to learn something then investigating how the brain encodes memory, and looking at methods of enhancing these tasks is the way to go. Pop psychology books do the field little credit and are often riddled with academic inaccuracies. However if you are going to use a book I highly recommend Human Memory by the brilliant Alan Braddeley.

Memory is largely split between three according Atkinson and Schiffrin's (1986) model: sensory store-\>short term store(STM)-\> long term store (LTM). Although this can then be sub-split into explicit and implicit memory, and the sensory store is what we would now call attentional processing. Broadly speaking we have little control of attentional processes than STM. So lets look at how you many enhance the encoding between STM and LTM. Much of what I'm about to mention comes developed out of the Levels of Encoding theory which essentially suggests that information is processed at different levels depending upon the complexity and relationships, the greater the depth of the encoding and associations the easier something is to remember. Many Mnemonic (memory) techniques are based on this. For instance, "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain"= the colours of the rainbow. technically this is shallow encoding because its only the first letter or each word relating to the colour in the order they occur in light refraction. But this is are easier than remember the colours based upon there discrete and unconnected names. The more associations you make the easier something is to remember as it makes more associations heres an deeper example remember this list and hide it once you have read it and try to recall after the maths test: Carrot, Monkey, Telephone, Guitar, School, Bottle, Newspaper, Mansion, Henry, Catastrophe, Worms, canopy, Hairspray.

Answer the following: 2x3.5=?, (7/2)x3=?, square root of 27?, A car accretes from 0-50 m/sec in over a distance of 34 meters how long did it take?

Recall the list?

If instead you tried to recall the list as a story it would be easier to remember all the items...

A Monkey was eating a Carrot when the Selephone rang offering Guitar lessons at a School, he/she decided to go and packed a Bottle and Newspaper. Upon leaving the Mansion he/she walked past Henry who was having a Catastrophically collecting worms under his fishing Canopy with a Hairspray can.

This is a deeper level of encoding that should be easier to remember because it has more detail applying the words in an episodic and semantic style. This activates more brain regions providing more cues for how associations for the information that one wishes to store. I literally can't write enough about neural encoding of memory there is a plethora of research, and I strongly suggest a google scholar search if you are interested. But the over riding suggestion is increase associations, for instance when I was studying for my exams I would write notes and cue cards which were highlighted, I would also create stories and words made of the items I wanted to remember. In addition I would drink a particular flavour of squash while doing my learning and revising. The reason being is that these all create associations, and if you can take a cue with you into an exam, such as apple juice, it well help you to remember. Visualisation a lot too, imagining the place you were when you learnt something and the smells and related tastes.

Finally it cannot be understated the role that affective (emotional) processing plays, information is often affectively encoded. Trying to remember how you felt or giving data affective significance can aid recall or being in the same state of affect helps.

Essentially a large part of memory can be understood in terms of Pavolivan and operant conditioning, coupled with motivational and affective relevance. In other words learnt associations and reinforcement may act as cues and learning mechanisms that strengthen memory. The relevance of these cues one can give both motivational and affective significance, and these may also be used to help recall. In addition the level of detail and information relative to the encoding process strengthens or deepens the learning process.

This is a REDUCTIONIST explanation of memory there is a lot more on it and the precise mechanisms related to what is being learnt, there is also a lot i haven't mentioned. Sorry for the lack of references I have a job to do, but you can google a lot of these topics and you will encounter most while learning about cognitive neuroscience. Memory research is probably one of the best understood areas of cognitive neuroscience along with perception.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Barbara Oakley, author of *A Mind for Numbers*, gave a talk about her findings on effective ways of learning and thinking. Some of what she said were things we've all heard before: eat right, exercise, sleep well, etc.

What was more interesting to me was the research on having the right *schedule* for learning. How everything added up to your highest level of retainment. According to their findings, the easiest way to retain new information (aka study for an exam), was having an effective daily routine:

```
 - Eat breakfast
 - Study/learn new material
 - Take breaks for your mind to think on it subconsciously (called diffused learning)
 - Go for a walk or bonus if you exercise regularly
 - Get a full night's sleep

```

All for the highest level of retainment of the information learned from the day before.

Starting this kind of routine early is also a great recipe for avoiding procrastination and cramming! Not to mention even more beneficial to you, since you will also be working while attending university.

The only other shortcuts I know of come from personal experience of flashcards, writing things over and over again, and cramming techniques. I'd recommend the other thing if you can swing it.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Since you excelled in math and physics, I'm going to guess that deriving information from first principles is fun, easy, and rewarding for you. And memorizing just feels wrong. Memorizing doesn't feel like "learning" because you're not deriving from first principles. You don't understand WHY the answer is correct.

I can relate 100%. At least for me, the only answer was (1) mnemonics and (2) repetition. When you're memorizing a lot of information for exams, just coming up with a clever mnemonic isn't enough. You need to practice the mnemonics, so when asked a question, the mnemonic comes to mind right away. I personally found flash cards helpful for this.

Take heart. This memorizing (in my opinion) is an artifact of certain teaching styles. When you're out of school and working in a field, those things that you use all the time you memorize out of sheer repetition without even trying (like a phone number you dial often). Those things you don't use all the time--even if you did have them memorized--you forget them anway. So you look them up as needed.
> 3 votes

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Tags: learning
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