# Question
Title: BOLD->functional connectivity->spectral graph theory (e.g. Atasoy 2016) vs BOLD->Fourier Analysis
My read of "Human brain networks function in connectome-specific harmonic waves" (Atasoy 2016) seems to be that you can model brain activity in terms of standing waves of the connectome (functional connectivity from fMRI). But my understanding is that functional connectivity is itself inferred from brain activity. This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. What is the difference between modeling brain activity with spectral graph theory on the connectome, vs Fourier analysis of the BOLD signal directly?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Interestingly enough, I myself have been reading papers like these for some weeks. Although I think your question does not have a correct answer (since it is a little bit open) I can try to give my perspective, but please be aware that is may not be 100% accurate.

Atasoy, et al. 2016 provide a really fascinating observation which is that functional networks (i.e. Default Mode Network) can be recovered from a discrete (and rather small) set of combination of structural connections, which they refer to as the "connectome harmonics". Here I point you to Fig.3 of the paper.

Furthermore, they solve a certain (supposedly realistic) mathematical model for brain dynamics which use diffusion equations. The laplacian harmonics appear naturally in that formalism, so they conclude that functional activity derives from structural connections (and not the other way around). In my opinion, this is reasonable (and one might even say obvious), since a network without structural connections can not exhibit any kind of functional activity.

Having said this, it is true that their observation is not particularly useful in terms of methods to analize functional activity. It requires, by definition, a structural network, which normally you don't have when dealing with BOLD signals. Even more, analizing fMRI signals through spatial connections seems a bit of a painful detour. So, to really give an answer to your inquiry, I don't think it's reasonable to compare the two approaches. The findings in Atasoy, et al. 2016 fall in the "theoretical" side while directly performing Fourier Analysis on your BOLD signals should still be good and useful.

As a side note, I am not sure if by Fourier Analysis you mean analizing fMRI by means of Laplacian eigendecomposition of the graph or not. But I would say that this is the way to go instead of just doing Fast Fourier Transform on the BOLD signal if you want to do community detection. There is a rather big number of papers on this matter.

Hope I provided a reasonable point of view on this matter.

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Tags: neuroscience, computational-modeling, neuroimaging, fmri, brain-waves
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title: What causes this motion illusion?

text:
# Question
Title: What causes this motion illusion?
There are some questions here about various optical illusions. I stumbled upon this one and would like to find out where does it belong. Wikipedia has a page about illusory motion that mentions several types; peripheral drift seems to be closest, but I am not sure about it.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Peripheral drift illusions, as their name suggests, create the illusion of motion in the periphery of the visual field. Similar images that generate illusory motion in the center of the visual field have been termed central drift illusions. Both of these types of illusions use high contrast "luminance gratings" - repeating patterns of high and low brightness - to generate illusory motion.

Peripheral drift illusions can be used to generate an illusion of expansion, as demonstrated by the "Active Volcano" image (a) below (from Seno, Kitaoka, & Palmisano, 2013):

The control image (b) does not generate the illusion. The only difference between the images is their luminance grating pattern.

Many examples of expansion (and contraction) illusions can be found here. Here is a particularly powerful example called Fujiwara's black hole illusion:

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Tags: neuroscience, vision, perception
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# Question
Title: Both using a strong magnetic field, why does TMS affect the brain but not MRI?
Both TMS and MRI have strong magnetic field. Why we often assume MRI being very safe because it does not affect the brain while TMS is used to influence the brain?

# Answer
Relevant for the reaction of a physical system to an excitation is most of all the frequency spectrum of the signal. Most signals have a center frequency and a bandwidth, i.e. you can specify contained frequencies in the form "from Hz - to Hz".

TMS is typically an exponential pulse excitation with 200 to 600 microseconds half-width duration (the numbers I found on german Wikipedia). This results in a spectrum that is weighted around 0 Hz with a bandwidth between 1700 and 5000 Hz. In short, the TMS signal almost only contains frequencies between 0 Hz and 5000 Hz at most.

MRI is typically a combination of a DC (0 Hz) magnetic field (which causes nuclear spins to precess around the magnetic field axis) and an oscillating, narrow-band signal in the radio frequency range (10's of MHz, see also german Wikipedia for a quick number), which injects energy into the spin precession, simply speaking. The DC component is likely to be irrelevant for transient "stimulation" (even though there could be circular currents in the brain, whatever the result is, if at all). The oscillating component is not only a factor of 1000-10000 faster in frequency, but due to the narrow-band nature of this component, it is also very unlikely that it contains any significant amount of frequencies that dominate TMS.

This makes it about as unlikely that MRI stimulates the same states of the brain that TMS does, as you can receive a radio programme with a loudspeaker only (i.e. without a receiver).

This is not surprising, because MRI is deliberately designed to excite the nuclear spins of hydrogen and nothing else, not even the spins of other atoms. If it could excite the neural functions of the brain, the corresponding energy absorption from the original signal would disturb the incoming signal so heavily, that useful imaging of hydrogen matter distribution would not be possible.

Note, however, that this does not necessarily mean that MRI does not somehow (minutely) influence the brain's function, and that these effects could somehow be amplified by the brain to detectable levels. It only means that **what** function is influenced cannot be the same.
> 2 votes

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Tags: fmri, tms
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# Question
Title: Why did humans evolve to be traumatizable?
Why did humans evolve to be traumatizable, instead of being more resilient and treating trauma in a detached manner? Don't symptoms of trauma reduce a person's biological fitness? Is PTSD an adaptation, and if so, what is it an adaptation for? After all, the stress reaction and emotional imprinting appears to be designed rather than an accident.

# Answer
First only a percentage of people that has an exposure to trauma develop chronic PTSD. In many cases sympthoms pass after some months (source)

Acording to this article hipervigilance was an advantage in the Paleolithic, when many people experienzed PTSD because of the exposure to predators: PTSD: The evolutionary advantage

> In other words, PTSD seems to be an evolutionarily conserved response to life-threatening danger. This makes intuitive sense: being on high alert for danger makes us more likely to survive such experiences in the future. However, it changes our personality and behaviour in the process

The article specifically cites a study on Nature that says wild animals often have PTSD because of exposure to predators.

> A study recently published in Nature shows, for the first time, that exposure to predators has long-lasting effects on the brains of wild animals, demonstrating that they too, experience PTSD.

Some people experienze also phsychosis because of an expsure to a heavy trauma or potential death threat.

> Approximately 52% of people who reported having PTSD at some point in their lifetime also reported experiencing a positive psychotic symptom.

Source

Returning to animals a pshychologist told me pshychosis take a roll in wild animals migrations, where minimal changes in temperature brain due to seasonality could start the escape in some individuals.

Many people that suffer a psychotic episody get away from his home. The psychosis can precipitate a escape.

We see it in our society females killed by his partner, childs abused sexually.... In the Paleolithic when our genes evolved it should happen more. And there was no law, no police, no education and no social services to help you. The reponse of your brain was the only thing that determined if you survived and a escape was sometimes necessary.
> 1 votes

# Answer
* There are a lot of assumptions you are making here. "Being traumatizable" isn't really a trait. We evolved a brain in a certain way, with an amygdala and hippocampus that work a certain way. Those components have been critical in our ability to form knowledge + interact socially with one another. Instances of malfunction in the face of trauma/PTSD are a side-effect of an imperfect biological system, BUT that doesn't render the whole system useless/detrimental in the evolutionary sense.
* Secondly, you're assuming it does reduce biological fitness. I'm sure it makes it harder in indirect ways, but ultimately, PTSD symptoms actively mess with very few people's ability to have sex and pass on genes. PTSD does seem to have a strong, albeit complex genetic component. For as long as people with PTSD are reproducing (and most of them are) then there will be a genetic predisposition for developing PTSD in the gene pool.
* Third, how is it designed? I am confused by this one. People have a tendency to wrongly assume that almost every trait is an adaptive trait. Maybe in this case it is and we just haven't found what the beneficial feature is BUT, it is highly more likely and logical that a) as stated above, it's just a by-product of another highly adaptive trait aka, our particular brain structure and function. They come in a 2-for-1 deal and as much as PTSD sucks or might reduce biological fitness, those are completely offset by the benefits and increase in fitness due to our brain circuitry.
* OR b) it's a neutral variation that doesn't significantly increase or decrease our fitness, therefore is maintained in the population because it has no reason to be selected out. Another reminder that our own negative human experience of suffering through PTSD doesn't inherently mean much in the eyes of evolution, as long as we can reproduce.
> -2 votes

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Tags: evolutionary-psychology, ptsd, trauma
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# Question
Title: Alpha and Beta waves during BCI Training
I'm using the EPOC X EEG Headset from Emotiv. I was recording the raw EEG data while doing BCI training to "push" a cube on the EmoticBCI application. Going back to the recording after the training was done, I noticed that there were sustained levels of alpha waves during this, while almost no beta wave increase. I am very new to Neuroscience and am currently just experimenting with this device. From what I've read so far, alpha waves are supposed to increase in a relaxed state, while beta waves increase when one concentrates on something. Could someone explain to me why I am seeing increased alpha waves instead of beta waves?

# Answer
Here are a few screenshots of what I observed. This is a screenshot of when I put the headset back on and purposely blinked. Noticed this particular shape in the signal repeating every time I did so.

And these are the so-called "alpha" and "theta" waves spikes I mentioned. Now I notice that it's simply due to blinking.

So basically every time I blinked, this would spike. I'm not going to pretend to understand why, but I'm guessing that it's because of the muscle movement, as I can see from the signals in the raw data, only some leads give me that output when I blink and I noticed all those leads are connected on regions of my scalp where I can feel my skin very subtly shift when I blink.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, eeg, brain-waves, concentration
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# Question
Title: Does only the time-series data of fMRI matter or does spatial distribution of the signal values also matter?
I was denoising fMRI data using GLM and had a question regarding the “data” of fMRI in general.

(For reference you can look at the “GLM” part of https://fmriprep.org/en/stable/outputs.html or https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917310972)

Below is a time series of the before/after GLM for a given voxel:

As you can see, the raw values (actually we went through a preprocessing step prior to GLM denoising) had a value of around $600\pm 50$, while the residual (i.e. denoised data) had a value around $0\pm 50$. In other words, it seems that via GLM, the raw data was somewhat “centered”. At first I thought this was OK, as I thought that only the fluctuations of the data matter (i.e. I had this assumption that mean centering doesn’t remove any information in the data). However, I realized that when we did this, the spatial distribution of signal values before and after GLM changes, as the pictures below show (the picture below is the distribution of fMRI signal for a given time point before and after GLM denoising) :

Is this OK?

In other words,

* does only the “fluctuations” (across time) of the data matter in fMRI (i.e. is adding a constant to an fMRI time series data irrelevant?).
* if so, then since adding a constant to an voxel’s time series data is irrelevant, it stands to reason that if I add different constant values to different voxels (for example as part of a detrending step), the spatial distribution of values before and after would change. Is this OK? (In other words, does the distribution of fMRI signals for a given time point meaningless?)

Thank you :)

# Answer
> 3 votes
Usually, but not always, fMRI timeseries are used to compute functional connectivity by calculating Pearson correlations among voxels or ROIs.

The equation for the Pearson correlation can be written as:

$$\rho\_{X,Y} = \frac{\mathbb{E}\left\[ (X-\mu\_X)(Y-\mu\_Y)\right\]}{\sigma\_X \sigma\_Y}$$

(screenshot)

As you can see, the numerator involves subtracting the mean of $X$ from $X$ and the mean of $Y$ from $Y$; when you're computing Pearson correlations on a large scale it's typically most computationally efficient to first $z$-score the data, so that the mean is 0 and SD is 1, which saves a couple computational steps for every pairwise comparison and turns it into just $\text{mean} \ (X \cdot Y$).

Changes in the spatial distribution caused by your denoising are different than the "centering" part of the transformation, though.

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Tags: neuroscience, neuroimaging, fmri
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# Question
Title: Is aphantasia an inability to record memories, or an inability to recall memories?
People with aphantasia are unable to *voluntarily* create or recall mental images.
This can extend to non-visual memory too (e.g. remembering *that* they heard a loud bang, but not remembering the sound of the loud bang itself).

Everything I've read talks about the overall symptoms, but not about the underlying mechanism.

Does the mind correctly record memories (which can't be recreated), or does it fail to record sensory memories in the first place? I.e. is the memory failure in the recording or in the recalling?

# Answer
It is neither:

> Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind.

How this relates to visual memory is still under investigation, as is most everything about aphantasia, a condition first described only in 2015.

The original paper coining the term by Zeman, Dewar, & Della Sala (2015) did speculate about the connection:

> The descriptions given by our participants suggest that in some visual memory is preserved even if visual imagery is absent, while others may rely entirely on non-visual representations in memory tasks ...

A few studies since (eg, Keogh, Wickena, & Pearson, 2021; Bainbridge et al, 2021; Dawes et al, 2020; Pounder et al, 2021; Zeman et al, 2020; Milton et al, 2021) indicate that visual working memory and visual spatial memory are largely unaffected by aphantasia, while autobiographical and object-specific memory may be impaired.

Researchers currently speculate that aphantasics encode visual memories using strategies that differ from those with typical mental imagery, resulting in recall that sometimes matches and other times underperforms the general population. Accordingly, a recent study by Monzel, Vetterlein, & Reuter (2021) demonstrated that memory tasks where substitute strategies are less effective, are much more challenging for aphantasics.
> 4 votes

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Tags: memory, visualization, semantic-memory, episodic-memory, aphantasia
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# Question
Title: How can the uncertainty relation be exceeded in hearing?
Majka et al. (2015) \[PDF\] shows that some trained people can discern pitch differences faster than the uncertainty relation permit. How can this be possible?

**Abstract**

> The human hearing sense is an astonishingly effective signal processor. Recent experiments \[1, 2, 3\] suggest that it is even capable of overcoming limitations implied by the time-frequency uncertainty relation. The latter, mostly known from quantum mechanics, requires that the product of uncertainties in time and frequency, Δt∙Δf , cannot be smaller than the limiting value Δt∙Δf = (1/4π), which holds when the signal is a harmonically oscillating function with a Gaussian envelope.

## References

Majka, M., Sobieszczyk, P., Gębarowski, R., & Zieliński, P. (2015). Hearing overcome uncertainty relation and measure duration of ultrashort pulses. *Europhysics News, 46*(1), 27-31. https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2015105

# Answer
> 1 votes
Let us model hearing in the frequency domain as a Bark scale with piecewise overlapping triangular frequency distribution basis functions like this one based on normal distributions  where a piece of a single overlapping in the violet box is like in the following image.  The blue and orange lines are from a small piece of the Bark scale where overlapping triangular frequency distributions exist. The black, pink and green are three type of sounds (frequency distributions), all with the same mean frequency. It is obvious from the picture that the perceived response of any of the three sounds in the image are the same. The frequency of the sound is detected by the relative difference in intensity when the blue and orange basis functions are multiplied with the sound signal. Another observation is that that frequency variance (the width of the sound in the picture) is different among the three sounds but there is no way these overlapping triangular basis functions can detect that. Thus, the nervous system can arbitrarily understand the variance to be small or wide. For a wide variance the uncertainty relation will be able to make a more narrow determination of the sound in the temporal domain. The limit of the possible variance is determined by the width of the overlap of the triangular basis functions and the sound's distance to any of these overlap edges. This model can explain how the temporal resolution can be higher than with non overlapping basis functions and how perception can differ from individuals.

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Tags: hearing, reaction-time
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# Question
Title: Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?
It seems far too spread out to me. Why do we pause mid-conversation and wait seven days?

When my car needed repair after an accident, the bodyshop spent 25 man-hours on repair. They did that over the course of one week, which is good because my car is essential for my life. I can't function without it. But if my car had needed therapy, it would've taken 25 weeks (almost six months) to get fixed. I'd have taken my dangerously broken car to them and had them start checking damage, only to say "times up" an hour later and boot me out the door to use my broken car for another week.

Mental health is more complex and also more immediately essential to a person. Why then do we work on it at such a slow pace?

I've tried researching alternatives, and other than checking into full-time inpatient care, the other option is to find a therapist who can schedule more than one appointment per week, which is very rare. The therapists that have more than one open slot in their schedule at any time are the least well-regarded online. The well-reviewed ones have wait-lists to get a single appointment.

I understand that some therapy is a 'maintenance' model, where the patient only needs to talk about what happened since last session, but what about patients who have a long history to unpack, or are in the middle of a crisis? Why do we apply the weekly appointment model to those cases?

Why have therapists adopted this model? What is the rationale and history that led to it?

# Answer
## Q1 — Your Main Question — Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?

### The studies

Two studies attempted to observe the effects of session frequency in routine practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Both relied on retrospective evaluations by patients after completing therapy, and on naturalistic data regarding session frequency and dose. Each was asked to rate his or her recovery in therapy, including decrease in symptom distress and increasein morale.

Both studies indicated a relationship between the frequency of sessions and patients’ perceptions of recovery, where patients being seen only once a week had less positive perceptions of their experience than patients being seen two times a week or more. In fact, positive perceptions of recovery were incrementally related with the frequency of sessions, with once a week indicating the least amount of recovery, twice a week somewhat more, and three times a week the most recovery in therapy (Freedman, Hoffenber, Vorus, & Frosch, 1999; Sandell et al., 2000). This provides some evidence that patients’ perceptions of their own recovery may be affected positively by increased session frequency.

A follow-up study to Sandell et al. (2000) found an interaction effect in long-term follow-up (i.e., 3 years, with measures taken each year) between duration and frequency, where outcome was better among the low frequency/low duration group and among the high frequency/high duration group (Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar, 2002). These findings illustrate the potentially complex relationship between session frequency and other parameters, including the number of sessions and duration of the course of treatment; ultimately, they indicate that session frequency seems to be related not only to immediate perception of therapy, but to long-term outcome.

### So what is this telling us?

Twice weekly or more sessions may gain quicker results in perception, but in the long term, it is doing the client a disservice.

The frequency of sessions helps balance cost, intensity, and emotional containment (Seeman, n.d.). Therapy can be emotionally intense and someone may learn many things (about themselves and what they are dealing with) in session. More time in session can raise an amount of information which can be difficult to absorb mentally and emotionally, and this is what Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar (2002) was starting to realise.

High frequency/high duration therapy as indicated by Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar would be very costly, and, from my experience as a therapist who as part of training has had to undergo therapy too, would not be as beneficial as low frequency/low duration therapy. With high frequency/high duration therapy, the client is not necessarily fully assimilating the information at their own pace, and, the chances are, the therapist is guiding too much on how to interpret the information raised in session. Low frequency/low duration therapy is about pacing your therapy, and the fact that therapy does not just happen in the room.

The time outside the room enables the client to assimilate the information which has been discussed in session at their own pace. Depending on the form of therapy, the therapist may even set some "homework tasks" outside of the session **which are optional, but may help with assimilation processes**.

Being weekly, it will be recent enough that session continuity will be maintained. Any longer in duration between sessions runs the risk of continuity problems as what was discussed can be hard to remember to a certain degree, and the flow of conversation and therapy can be upset slightly, affecting rapport. There may be times when you may wish to cancel a scheduled appointment with your therapist because you are finding things too difficult. That is fine as long as you give the pre-agreed notice to your therapist. Late cancellations can incur cancellation charges with most therapists.

It is part of therapy in some cases to want to skip a session once in a while, and as long as there are not too many cancellations, your therapist will understand and can pick things up when you return, whilst examining with you what made things difficult. If there are a lot of cancellations, questions will be raised as to whether you are ready for therapy. **in order for therapy to work, the client needs to be ready for it**

> Clients immersed in intense emotional or life changes may see their therapist twice a week or more often to help keep them be emotionally centered and assist them in activating coping skills (Seeman, n.d.)

however, once things have reached a certain point, it is better for the client to revert to once-weekly sessions for reasons already pointed out.

## Q2 — Why do we pause mid-conversation and wait seven days?

With the idea of conversations being cut mid-way because of the end of session, a good therapist will manage the session and enable as smooth an ending as possible. Although sessions booked will be an hour long, the typical “therapy hour” is 45 to 50 minutes. In some situations a therapist may offer longer sessions. For instance, a couple in therapy may find themselves just getting into a long-needed conversation. Added time may help them maintain the momentum.

The 10 to 15 minute difference with the "therapy hour" enables therapy to be closed as smoothly as possible giving time for the client to transition from therapy session to life outside the room. When you are approaching the end of the therapy hour, your therapist should be mindful of that and work towards a smooth closure of the session in order for the client not to be "left dangling with no support" after just talking about something very emotional without some kind of closure for the time being.

## Further Reading

For tips on how to get the most out of Psychotherapy, see the webpage by Gary Seeman, PhD

For more information about what makes therapy work, see:

Duncan, B. L., Miller, S. D., Wampold, B. E., & Hubble, M. A. (2010). *The heart and soul of change: Delivering what works in therapy*. American Psychological Association.
DOI: 10.1037/12075-000

## References

Freedman, N., Hoffenberg, J. D., Vorus, N., & Frosch, A. (1999). The effectiveness of psychoanalytic psychotherapy: The role of treatment duration, frequency of sessions, and the therapeutic relationship. *Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association*, 47(3), 741-772.
DOI: 10.1177/00030651990470031001

Sandell, R., Blomberg, J., Lazar, A., Carlsson, J., Broberg, J., & Schubert, J. (2000). Varieties of long-term outcome among patients in psychoanalysis and long-term psychotherapy: A review of findings in the Stockholm outcome of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy project (STOPP). *The International Journal of Psychoanalysis*, 81(5), 921-942.
**No working DOI available**
\[**Free PDF** available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12217712\_Varieties\_of\_long-term\_outcome\_among\_patients\_in\_psychoanalysis\_and\_long-term\_psychotherapy\_-\_A\_review\_of\_findings\_in\_the\_Stockholm\_Outcome\_of\_Psychoanalysis\_and\_Psychotherapy\_Project\_STOPPP\]

Sandell, R., Blomberg, J., & Lazar, A. (2002). Time matters: On temporal interactions in long-term follow-up of long-term psychotherapies. *Psychotherapy Research*, 12(1), 39-58.
DOI: 10.1080/713869616

Seeman, G. (n.d.). *Getting the Most Out of Psychotherapy* \[Online\]
Available at: https://drgaryseeman.com/getting-the-most-out-of-psychotherapy
> 16 votes

# Answer
# 50 min

"The 50-minute hour was introduced by Freud for pragmatic reasons." (Will, 2015)

Try organizing your work day in 67 minute segments. You'll have a hard time understanding where you are within a given segment when you look at a watch. If you organize your work day in 60 minute segments, the hand of the clock immediately shows you how much time you have left with your current patient.

A therapy session does not last a full hour to give the patient time to leave and the therapist time to answer calls, visit the restroom, and prepare himself mentally for the next patient.

More recent therapy forms have introduced 45 minute sessions (to give the therapist more time for documentation), 90 minute sessions (for group therapy), 30 minute sessions (in hospital contexts), and open sessions without a fixed time span, but all irregular session lengths only work in contexts where the therapist does not treat one patient after another for the whole day each day, as a therapist does in a private practice.

One hour sessions are the most practical in a world where clocks are divided into hours and people think of time in hourly divisions.

# weekly

Try to make appointments with patients every four days. You'll find that they will have huge organisational difficulties, because their workplace and their pivate lives are organized in weeks. Try to tell your boss that you need to leave an hour early every four days. It'll be much easier to convince him to leave one hour earlier every Friday.

But the truth is that psychoanalysis requires a frequency of around four sessions per week, and even behavioural therapies often begin with two sessions per week and later reduce the frequency to as far as quarterly visits. Weekly sessions are common, but not in fact the only practice. Frequency is always attuned to the needs of the patient (or should be). In a psychiatric ward patients may have different kinds of psychotherapy multiple times every day.

# pace

Behavioral change takes time. Habits – and most problematic behaviour are a kind of "bad" habit – are stored as neuronal structures, and forcing your brain to disconnect a few thousand synapses and connect your neurons differently cannot be done in 25 consecutive hours, especially if the behaviour change is opposed by beliefs (many patients firmly believe that they cannot change), fears (many psychological disorders are in fact easy solutions to difficult problems), and the environment (often the people in the patient's life "support" their psychological problems through their behavior). It's much easier to stop smoking than to stop being depressed because you were sexually abused as a child – and most smokers who want to stop don't even manage that.
> 0 votes

# Answer
Not close enough to the research here to post references to articles for or against it but there is research showing both pros and cons of either side. Once weekly CBT is popular now but this may not always be the case in the future. What I will say is there are a number of therapy types which are designed to be done more than once per week and many many people find these incredibly beneficial for some of the reasons you post in your original question.

Not sure where you live but you could contact the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. Psychoanalysis (what Freud himself created) and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy are both done multiple times per week.

As an aside I'm quite surprised by the level of bias in the responses on this post against multiple time per week therapy as there is a wealth of research showing its benefits. My understanding is therapy originally was given multiple times per week (can't quote sources here but I think this is what Freud did) but has been modernised to be once per week. Maybe (my opinion) partly to make it more accessible.
> -1 votes

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Tags: therapy
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# Question
Title: What is the mechanism behind "gut feelings"?
I'm thinking of a phenomenon that I've first observed in myself when taking an IQ test. Upon looking at the question, I selected an answer, but got this **"gut feeling" or a hint that something was wrong with my response**. Upon seeing the answers, the question was indeed answered incorrectly. I've observed this phenomenon several more times in different situations and can define it as a very quick flash of awareness or feeling that quickly subsides.

**What is the neuroscience behind such "gut feelings" or "intuitions"?**

I'm particularly interested if such "almost" answers are some form of cognitive process, where some neurons fire, but not enough to produce a fully formed insight/idea/judgement.

Because the question that I was originally trying to answer was not lexical, but involved some rational thinking, I do not believe that this is exactly the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.

# Answer
> 7 votes
### Intuition and implicit learning

I recommend you have a read through Lieberman's (2000) review and theory article on intuition.

Lieberman argues that intuition is a cognitive and behavioural consequence of implicit learning processes. Intuition is contrasted with more deliberate thought processes. It also reflects situations where it is often not possible to articulate the reasons for a decision or belief.

These links with implicit learning are extensive. Much of skilled performance is performed automatically without conscious effort. We also build extensive associations between stimuli and decision relevant information. Furthermore, processes of learning can lead us to forget the reasons why something is true or why something is good, while retaining the fact that it is true or that it is good.

Lieberman suggests various neural components important to intuition:

> It is concluded that the caudate and putamen, in the basal ganglia, are central components of both intuition and implicit learning, supporting the proposed relationship.

### Answering multiple choice questions

Your specific question concerns answering multiple choice questions.

One explanation of the phenomena you describe is that you may retrospectively analyse your feeling of doubt once you know the correct answer. You may dwell more on your feelings of doubt when you get an answer wrong, but presumably are less likely to do so on the questions where you had doubt but ultimately got the question right.

More generally, partial knowledge is not unusual when answering multiple choice questions. And presumably that feeling of uncertainty regarding the correct answer could come about by either deliberate reasoning or some intuitive unarticulated reason.

### References

* Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological bulletin, 126(1), 109. PDF

# Answer
> 3 votes
Our research and clinical studies with hundreds of people over a 40 year period as educators and counselors revealed to us that people have gut feelings that relate to two specific instinctual needs and gut responses of acceptance (attention) and freedom (control of one;s one responses). Our gut feelings of emptiness and fullness (not to be confused with hunger) reveal how well these needs are being met and how well they are in balance. Our experience with people indicated that intuitive intelligence is dependent upon our awareness of these gut feelings. We invite you to explore our work in our book "What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct" and come peruse our blog on the subject of gut feeling: http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com

Martha Love and Robert Sterling

# Answer
> 2 votes
The book **The Power of Habit** brought up a tale in the first chapter about a man who lost the capability of storing long term memory because of brain damage. He could not remember conversations or TV shows he watched just 10 minutes ago. He could still walk and have normal conversations, just that he would repeat the same questions.

However, his man was able to learn new things because a part of his brain (the basal ganglia) stored habits. He kept his old habits, like cooking bacon for himself every morning. He developed new habits like walking outside and coming back, even though he could not remember the road back to his house.

They did a basic memory test by joining objects to different colored cardboard rectangles. Under some of the rectangles the word "correct" was written. Most people can easily memorize which objects are "correct" within a few minutes. As this man had brain damage, he could not remember it no matter how hard he tried.

After a few days of repeating the same tests, he got up to 85% success, then 95% success. He did not remember any of this. To him, he had never seen the objects before and had a *gut feeling* of which objects were "correct". The inference here is that they were stored in the part of the mind that stores routines/habits. (Duhigg, 2012)

I would assume that a "gut feeling" works in a similar manner. You see have seen certain patterns repeated several times, and it develops into a routine in your brain. Long after these patterns have been removed from your conscious memory, you still have them stored somewhere in the form of a routine. They're especially noticeable with trivia knowledge. People who work in the fire department develop a 'sixth sense' for dangerous situations because they've observed the same cues that occur before a dangerous situation multiple times.

To summarize, a gut feeling is likely a recollection of certain micropatterns that you've seen several times before.

Source: Duhigg, C. (2012). The Habit Loop: How Habits Work, *The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business*.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Extraction of data from the environment. Put against experience, possibility...

I explained to someone who does not believe in intuition that one could think of intuition as a glass sitting close to the edge of a table during a family gathering. Kids are running around, people are talking, not paying attention or idly nudging their children away from the 'danger areas.' Each time they pass back, there is a chance something could happen, intuition is the realization of these; you can even put odds on it. It's important to use intuition to completely rule out catastrophic possibilities (the glass is grandma's 300 year old vase, for instance.) You can just see it in your mind, it falling and breaking, and it's hard to understand without intervention, how it would not happen eventually.

The more experience you have with those situations (could be someone lying, could be an red flag that you don't want to get in a car with someone) .... general life experience, allows for more 'intuition' or 'gut feelings.' It's not magical.

I have always been an intuitive thinker, even as a child, and people made me go back and 'show my work,' so I have also learned how to explain my intuitions by working backwards and explaining what is leading me there.

It's, at its simplistic form, probability, a kind of formula you plug data into and once the probability of something reaches a certain threshold, you say, "I got a bad feeling!" Or, it can also be used on the other end, as well. "This is money in the bank." It's also, obviously, not 100%, but it's important to note, there is very little you can look at and predict with 100% certainty. Some people have better luck than others; I'd say they have a better formula or can extract more data.

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Tags: decision-making, attention
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# Question
Title: What work has been done studying methodological reforms in psychology after the replication crisis?
Can anyone point me to academic work that systematically studies how standards and methods have changed in psychology as a response to the replication crisis? Thanks.

# Answer
Ok, I came across "Open science and reform practices in organizational behavior research over time (2011 to 2019)" (Tenney et al. 2021), a paper which studies some Organization Behaviour journals over the last decade and concludes that there hasn't been widespread adoption of research practice reforms. This paper isn't as comprehensive as I was hoping, but it does help to partially answer my question.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.10.015
> 2 votes

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Tags: methodology, statistics, psychology, reproducible-research, replication
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# Question
Title: What makes a behaviour or substance highly addictive?
Why are some things addictive, while others that are also "fun" are not?

For example gambling is addictive, but player football obviously less so. Ive never come across somebody that had to excuse themselves at a dinner table to kick a ball outside but have seen that behaviour with gambling.

Im just wondering why one of those things is highly addictive, while the other is less so?

# Answer
> 0 votes
As suggested in the comments, behavior and substance abuse might not be (easily) interchangable, although certainly related. Also, you should start by looking at the rewarding system in the brain and how it links to behavior and learning. Of course this is a broad topic and you may consider it from different perspective. I would suggest digging into the computational/theoretical side of it. Again, a lot of references to check here, but big names on the field who have written wonderful reviews and works include Gershman, Botvinick, Niv, Uchida, Dayan, Romo, Daw, Schultz, Schoenbaum ... And a lot more that should be mentioned here as well.

I can try to give you my perspective on this. You may already know that certain stimuli get linked to certain rewards even if these are delivered some time in the future. These "linking" occurs mainly due to dopaminergic neurons. These neurons located in the midbrain region (VTA, Substantia Nigra, ...) have long projections to several areas of the brain and have the capability of modifyin synapses in cortical and sub-cortical brain areas responsible for motor, efforful and probably even cognitive actions.

An interesting fact is that if a reward is given after a lot of time of performing a certain action, the value of this reward will be diminished at the precise moment of decising whether or not to perform the action that will lead to it. Also, if the action requieres some kind of energetic expenditure, cognitive effort, or implies difficulty the value of the (future) reward will also be diminshed.

I am quite sure that for some behavior to become addictive, the consequences of such behavior need to fall in the "easy" side of the table. What I mean is that short-term rewards that do not require any kind of expenditure are great candidates of causing addictive behaviors such as gambling. Futbol in contrast is far from short-term (training, 90 minute games, tiring, ...). I think that it is also worth mentioning that for any behavior to become addictive it needs to be repeated a sufficient amount of times in order for it to "suppress" or "overcome" all the others when faced with a dilema. Once this happens, this behavior becomes habitual and it is done without even being conscious about it. Similarly to what happens with social networks.

This answer is of course incomplete, but might be useful.

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Tags: addiction
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title: World Value Survey, trust, and China

text:
# Question
Title: World Value Survey, trust, and China
The World Values Survey includes information on trust. My question is thus: how the heck is China measured that high? Experts on China view China as a low-trust society, people are always suspicious of one another, and people in general trust each other very little in China. I've questioned a few friends, and they agree that it is very odd to see China ranking so high on this scale of trust.

Extra context: I encountered this in the paper The Organization of Firms Across Countries, by Bloom, Sadun, and Van Reenen. The general argument of the paper is that higher trust allows a company to be more decentralized which allows it to grow larger. The picture is a screenshot from the paper.

The full information on the paper is here:

> Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, The Organization of Firms Across Countries\*, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 127, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 1663–1705, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qje029

# Answer
The data for the World Values Survey appears to be collected by simple asking people "Do you or do you not agree that most people can be trusted" (as explained here: https://ourworldindata.org/trust)

Thus, I have a few theories that might help to explain why China is ranked so high on trust in the World Values Survey.

1. Reference group effect. As described in What's wrong with cross-cultural comparisons of subjective Likert scales?: The reference-group effect., people tend to compare themselves to a reference group that they are familiar with. Thus, people in China might view "most people can be trusted" very differently than a Swede or a German might.
2. Social desirability bias. If there is literally just and interviewer asking a person a question, then the respondent will likely alter their answers based on what they think the interviewer wants/likes. Conformity tends to be high in China, so social desirability bias might have an stronger effect there compared to more individualistic cultures (like the USA).
3. Living under a dictatorship. People in China are aware that any information they give to other people can be used against them, and people generally don't share negative opinions/perspectives openly when the answers are being recorded. I suspect that this is a result both of the particular social upheavals of how Chinese people behaved during the cultural revolution, and that this is related to self-censorship of unpopular/unapproved opinions.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, cross-cultural-psychology, trust
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# Question
Title: In technologically advanced countries, do most autistic adults not know they are autistic?
I understand this is not an easy question to address. There are differences between the terms autism and Aspergers both in public perception and in the professional world, and it's a continuum or spectrum or constellation of characteristics (syndromal); there's no simple binary yes/no pass/fail, positive/negative test that I know of. There is of course the Autism-Spectrum Quotient or AQ test (examples: , ) which provides a score, but the score must then be interpreted; there's still no fixed threshold.

There are however both genetic and neurological markers that correlate with aspects of autism, refer for example to the videos

Presumably Baron-Cohen put "the male brain" in the title to emphasize how much less is known about autism in females, perhaps due to some combination of lower frequency and different presentation *especially in adults.*

So while the question is simple to ask, there will not be a simple answer like "Yes" or "No" followed by a percentage of those that don't know.

But as this is an important question, I'm hoping that at least some work has been done to assess the fraction of the adult autistic population who are as yet unaware of it and remain uninformed of it by medical and mental health professionals who may not be looking for it.

Have any studies along this line been done? Is there at least some estimate?

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Different but potentially related and/or helpful:

# Answer
Short answer: Yes.

Modern estimates of global prevalence for autism are around 1-2% (for systematic reviews, see Baxter et al, 2015; Chiarotti & Venerosi, 2020). Prevalence rates appear stable across countries, age groups, and probably time, though there is a great deal of variability between individual studies. Virtually all data is from countries in the "technologically advanced" category, as data for lower-income countries is lacking.

To figure out the proportion of autistic adults who don't know that they are autistic, we just need the number who already have an autism diagnosis, known as the "administrative prevalence" rate. While population prevalence is thought to be stable, administrative prevalence has been on the rise for over 20 years. Determining the administrative prevalence for adults has turned out to be a significant challenge, as the number of different agencies (medical, support, assistance, insurance, education, etc) under which adults may be registered as autistic is both vast and uncoordinated, and there is a paucity of studies looking at adults at all.

One study that I was able to find that both managed the Herculean effort of coordinating these independent agencies, and also specifically looked at adults, is the Pennsylvania Autism Census Project (2009):

> In 2005, we counted 1,421 adults with ASD who were 21 years of age or older, just 7.1% of the total ASD population in Pennsylvania. ... By 2020, the adult ASD population will be roughly equal to Pennsylvania’s entire ASD population, children and adults, in 2005.

That is, this study estimated that **in 2005, only 7.1% of autistic adults knew that they had autism**, based on current diagnosis rates for children expected to become autistic adults by 2020.

The 2011 Scotland census, reported in Rydzewska et al (2018), provides a more direct approach, asking respondents directly to self-report on their autism status. In this census, comprising 94% of Scotland's population, 0.2% of adults 25+ reported knowing that they were autistic. Compared to the estimated prevalence of 1-2%, this suggests that **about 10-20% of autistic adults in 2011 knew of their condition**.

Another study of Northern California by Croen et al (2015) found autism in 1507 out of 1,578,657 insured adults, an administrative prevalence rate of \<0.1%. Given a population prevalence rate for the same region and time period, from Windham et al (2011), of 0.47%, this suggests that **about 20% of adults with autism knew about it at the time** (using a more recent prevalence of 1-2%, it would be more like 5-10%).

A primer on autism by Lord et al (2020) also says:

> ... in high-income countries with strong ASD public health policies, there is evidence that ASD in adults goes largely unrecognized ... most people in the world who are autistic are adults , and ... many of these individuals have not received a diagnosis of autism ...

Finally, population prevalence estimates generally source data from epidemiological "population studies" that sample directly from the general population (rather than a known patient community or population subset). A population study of adults in England by Brugha et al (2011) found a number of autistic individuals in its sample, and asked them if they knew that they were autistic:

> None of the cases found in this study had previously been given a formal autism assessment or diagnosis.

An extension of this study found a significant number of autistic individuals living in communal care, or registered with learning disabilities. This brings up the final point that I'd like to make.

The above studies seem to suggest that the majority of autistic adults are unaware of their condition, and are therefore unsupported. However, this is unlikely the case, due to diagnostic substitution: Essentially, prior to increased awareness and broadening definitions of autism, most autistic children were instead diagnosed with other conditions, such as intellectual disability, language disorders, learning difficulties, and so on. The phenomenon of diagnostic substitution in autism is well illustrated by this graph (source):

|  |
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|  |

So while most autistic adults are unaware of their autism, many of them are receiving support and care under different labels. And, as the increasing number of children being diagnosed with autism over the past 20 years become adults, the number of adults unaware of their condition will decline accordingly.
> 3 votes

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Tags: autism, neurology, survey, genetics, aspergers
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# Question
Title: Is there a name for the gap between speaker's intention and listener's interpretation?
I apologise if this as been asked before, but I couldn't find anything online.

Whenever there is an exchange of information from one person to another - such as if someone is speaking to someone else in a conversation, or if someone is reading a book from an author - the chain of events goes like this:

1. Person A has a thought inside their mind.
2. Person A tries to map their thought to something physical to use to communicate (e.g. English speech, French writing, a drawing).
3. Person B tries to interpret the physical communication by mapping it to thought inside their own mind.

However the initial thought inside Person A's mind is not necessarily the same thought that Person B ends up thinking it is. Is there a term to describe this?

The reason the initial thought and final thought can be different is because of accumulated errors in steps 2 and 3. I would call error generated by step 2 **miscommunication** and error generated by step 3 **misinterpretation**, but I'm not sure if I'm using this terms correctly. If I am, then another way to ask my question is whether there is a word to describe the combined effect of miscommunication and misinterpretation?

# Answer
> 3 votes
*Note: this is not a psychology-based answer*

I think your question is one of the central questions of various fields. For regular communications, they are communication studies, media studies, semiotics, journalism. For "intellectual" texts, they are hermeneutics and reception theory. The difference between the last two may be in the kind of books. Hermeneutics is more about biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts, while reception theory is more about literature texts. In the Stack Exchange network we have these dedicated sites for those fields: Biblical Hermeneutics, Literature.

In semiotics, the gap you are mentioning is called aberrant decoding. In literature theory, the set of expectations of a person is called horizon of expectation. I believe the gap between the author and the reader is called fusion of horizons.

# Answer
> 1 votes
**Short answer**
From a clinical audiological perspective, we talk about impaired speech understanding/recognition/discrimination.

**Background**
From a psychophysical point of view, and specifically in the realm of clinical audiology where we deal with speech testing for people with impaired hearing, there are a number of speech tests available that measure slightly different things. These speech tests can be performed in silence where words may be misunderstood due to the presentation of background noise, or because of hearing impairments.

**Speech understanding** can be loosely defined as knowing the meaning of what was said by the target speaker. This involves listening, recognizing speech and interpreting it at a higher level using associative thinking. An example sentence of a simple listening test would be 'The students are protesting against nuclear weapons'. The sentence is meaningful and the relation between the elements of the sentence can help the listener to understand the sentence, even when parts of the sentence are not heard due to for instance background noise, or hearing loss. For instance, if you know it's about a protest of students and you hear 'nuclear', but the weapons is not heard, it can still be interpreted from the context.

However, more is up to this when you change the task from simply repeating the sentence, to asking :'Why do the students protest'? The answer should be that nuclear weapons are a danger for mankind (for instance), but if for some reason the test subject is unaware of that, or doesn't know what nuclear weapons are, there is **impaired speech understanding.**

If it is not the understanding being tested, but the listener simply has to repeat back what was heard, we talk about **speech recognition** testing. When a word in the sentence was simply not heard due to noise for instance, and can't be deduced from the sentence, say in a digit-in-noise test (Smits *et al*, 2013) where only random numbers are being used without context ('two -nine-eight) there is **impaired speech recognition**.

If a closed set of words is used to generate sentences that is beknown to the listener, *e.g.*, the Matrix test (Houben *et al.*, 2014), then it is not speech understanding or recognition being tested, but strictly spoken it is **word discrimination** being measured instead. Errors are now, well no wonder, called **impaired speech discrimination**.

<sub>**References**
**-** Smits *et al.*, *JASA* (2013); **133**: 1693
**-** Houben *et al.*, *Int J Audiol* (2014); **53**(10)</sub>

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Tags: perception, intelligence, communication
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# Question
Title: Mirrors/optics and physical adaptation of the eye
Is it possible to use a clever combination of lenses and mirrors placed between your eye and a screen 1m away from you to make the eye react to the screen as if it were 20m away from you?

What I'm asking is whether it's possible to, using lenses, modify the light emanating from a screen physically placed 1 m away from the eyes so that the eyes behave as if the screen were 20m away. This isn't a pure physics/engineering question, nor is it a claim that video games cause myopia.

# Answer
> -1 votes
Yes, but you would have to modify the optic array in 2 ways:

(1) Accommodation: if your eye accommodates for 20m (top row), an object at 1m will be out of focus (middle row). Thus for accommodation to be identical to that of an object at 20m, you need to add a lens in front of the eye (bottom row).

(2) Vergence: if you look at the object binocularly, your eyes will cross (vergence angle) at 20m. If the object is at 1m that angle will be different. Therefore you need to place prisms such that the resulting vergence angle will match that of an object at 20m. This is essentially a stereoscope.

So in order to correctly simulate an object at 20m, you need to add both a spherical lens to change the accomodation, and prisms to change vergence. Of course if the observer sees the object monocularly you do not need the prisms. Finally if your observer moves then the parallax of the object also needs to match that of an object at 20m, so you'll need to physically move the object accordingly.

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Tags: perception, sensory-perception, optical-illusion
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# Question
Title: How do scientists/psychologists deal with conflicting experiment results?
I'm currently writing a paper and one of the points is about how overprotective parenting can cause anxiety in children.

The results seem pretty clear cut in favour of the assertion (1). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5007197/

However, there are individual studies (far fewer than those suggesting a link) that argue the relationship between overprotective parenting and child anxiety isn't really there (2).

> The relationship between overprotective parenting and child anxiety has been examined repeatedly because theories emphasize its role in the maintenance of child anxiety. No study has yet tested whether this relationship is unique to child anxiety, by controlling for commonly co-occurring behavior problems within the same children. The current study examined 190 children (age 7-13, 118 \[corrected\] boys) referred to mental health clinics and their parents. Results revealed that significant correlations between overprotective parenting and child anxiety symptoms disappear after controlling for co-occurring child behavior symptoms. It appears that overprotection is not uniquely related to child anxiety. Furthermore, overprotective parenting was significantly and uniquely related to child behavior symptoms. Researchers and practitioners need to consider co-occurring child behavior problems when working with the parents of anxious children. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22659077/

Given all these studies are valid, how would a scientist deal with this? Would the assumption be that there's mixed results and therefore its inconclusive? Or would the assumption be that because the majority is pro, we can view the link as existing?

# Answer
Meta-analysis is the statistical practice of combining results across studies in a principled way. Meta-analyses weight the relative strength of evidence from different studies to generate an overall conclusion.

However, there is a bit of art to it, as well, as it's rare that studies are truly fully compatible with one another. They may be in different study populations (for example, sampling from different countries or using different inclusion/exclusion criteria), use different outcome measures, etc. Generally, individual studies also talk about their limitations, for example in the second paper you reference, the authors write about their sample:

> The sample was recruited for a treatment trial for anxiety disorders... Compared to a ... representative sample ... the average score on Internalizing problems was significantly higher for the children in the current study. ...recruitment strategies might also have caused the number of children with separation anxiety disorder, social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder to be especially high in our sample...

And about their outcome measure:

> In past research, overprotective parenting has been assessed using different methods and overprotection is only one of several parenting dimensions that have been considered. The results of the current study need to be replicated using different measurements of overprotective parenting and include other parenting dimensions.

Papers presenting meta analyses often include a qualitative review of the literature, as well, and others may also write review articles that summarize a research field without doing a formal meta analysis. These papers will consider various explanations for differences in study results, which can include random statistical variation as well as systematic methodological differences. For example, in the second article you quote from, emphasis mine:

> Results revealed that significant correlations between overprotective parenting and child anxiety symptoms **disappear after controlling for co-occurring child behavior symptoms**

The authors here are describing a departure in their research from what others have done: they've adjusted for "child behavior symptoms". However, I think they are not really concluding what you think: it isn't that they are saying that there is no link between overprotective parenting and child anxiety, they are saying that overprotective parenting is associated with a wider range of behavioral problems than just anxiety; anxiety isn't unique or special. Because these are all correlational studies (and it isn't really ethical or practically possible to run a randomized experiment where children are assigned to "overprotective" or "not-overprotective" parenting), it's not really possible to establish causality, so the causality could be in the opposite direction: that children with behavior problems lead their parents to be overprotective.

If you're looking at a research question that has been studied in multiple separate research papers, I would recommend looking for a recent meta analysis or review paper for further guidance in interpreting the literature.
> 4 votes

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Tags: statistics
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title: Psychological analysis of diary data

text:
# Question
Title: Psychological analysis of diary data
I am using the app Daylio and I have already get 160 days and over 300 records. App itself has the ability to analyze data, very simple and weak. E.g, what activities take place together; how the mood differs with and without given activity.

I am well in statistics and data visualization, but I am missing *possible questions to ask* about this data. And get interesting results about my psychology, conscious activity and unconscious inclinations.

I would be grateful for possible advice and suggestions!

# Answer
> 1 votes
The questions to ask would be limited on the data set you have. From what i understand, the app allows you to track

* Time
* Mood
* Activity

These data points might give a direction on how to make your mood better, if you're in a crappy mood it can show what to do to get in the good mood. But that is not as powerful as you answering for yourself why does this activity give me a better mood.

Here's the question you might need to ask , not on the data but on the possible correlations that come up from the data.

```
 What should i have to believe, if an activity A gives, mood A.

```

Few interesting data points :

1. A data point where you get both desirable and undesirable mood from same activity.
2. A data point where your mood improved over time doing the same activity
3. A data point where you mood decreased over time doing the same activity

The above three data points should let you know that mood is not directly influenced by doing something, but by the subconscious meaning you derive from doing it.

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Tags: emotion, measurement, experimental-psychology, mood
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# Question
Title: Is abstract knowledge incompatible with literal memorization?
Let me describe 2 interesting cases :

* Solomon Shereshevsky (Luria, 1968) had an almost perfect literal memory. He remembers strings of hundreds of digits for years after only having read them once. I would like to explain this by his awesome synesthesia: everything is encoded in so many ways that everything is considered as new, and so a new memory trace is formed to remember it (we know that "first time" experiences are well remembered (Robinson, 1993), as are distinctive features (Hunt & Worthen, 2006)). Shereshevsky's gift was compensated by big difficulties recognizing (visages, which he considered extremely changing) and had basically no understanding of abstraction: metaphor, figurative language.
* Kim Peek, the "real Rainman", had a rote knowledge of 6000 books, yet was unable to extract abstract information from this knowledge (his memory was like a computer's, basically). He was also unable to understand metaphors.

So, it seems to me that abstraction is incompatible with literal memory: we have to forget some concrete features to get the abstract essence. Is there any scientific literature about an incompatibility between abstraction and rote memorization?

**References**

Hunt, R. R., & Worthen, J. B. (Eds.). (2006). Distinctiveness and memory. Oxford University Press.

Luria, A. R. (1968). *The mind of a mnemonist: A little book about a vast memory*. Harvard University Press.

Robinson, J. A., & Swanson, K. L. (1993). *Field and observer modes of remembering. Memory*, 1(3), 169-184.

# Answer
Building on the comment by @LPenguin I think John von Neumann is a great counterexample:

Apart from him being a math genius here are two quotes about his rote memorization skills:

He could, it is said, memorize the names, addresses, and telephone numbers in a column of the telephone book on sight. The legend of John von Neumann p. 383

Herman Goldstine wrote about him: "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation." The computer- From Pascal to Neumann p. 167\`
> 1 votes

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Tags: learning, memory
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# Question
Title: How do we know that neurons are the only cells involved in cognitive computation?
I am an undergraduate studying pure mathematics taking a class on computational neuroscience. My default lens for looking at the brain is in terms of universal computation (in the Turing machine sense) and algorithms for this being implemented in a neural substrate (the cortex). In this class, and in the literature in general, we seem to assume that neurons are "enough" for the brain to compute everything that it does. That is to say, in focusing on studying neural networks as a way to understand brain function, we are implicitly saying that no other neural structures are central to neural computation (ie. memory, association). For instance, we are presuming that eg. astrocytes, or even the chemical composition of extra-neuronal brain tissue, do not play a role in neural computation. Why is this justified?

I understand that we know neural networks can compute any function, and so in theory they are \`\`enough", but how do we know that there is not some physiological/biochemical mechanism involved in other types of cells that is critical to actual neural computation in the brain? How confident are we that neurons are the **only** important cells to study in terms of understanding human cognition, for instance?

# Answer
> 3 votes
For what it's worth, I don't think the biologists are making this assumption; the biology clearly shows it is not correct to exclude, say, astrocytes from "computation" in the broadest sense. Here are just some non-comprehensive examples when I searched "astrocyte computation":

*Volman, V., Ben-Jacob, E., & Levine, H. (2007). The astrocyte as a gatekeeper of synaptic information transfer. Neural computation, 19(2), 303-326.*

*De Pittà, M., Volman, V., Berry, H., & Ben-Jacob, E. (2011). A tale of two stories: astrocyte regulation of synaptic depression and facilitation. PLoS computational biology, 7(12), e1002293.*

*Patrushev, I., Gavrilov, N., Turlapov, V., & Semyanov, A. (2013). Subcellular location of astrocytic calcium stores favors extrasynaptic neuron–astrocyte communication. Cell calcium, 54(5), 343-349.*

*Mederos, S., & Perea, G. (2019). GABAergic‐astrocyte signaling: a refinement of inhibitory brain networks. Glia, 67(10), 1842-1851.*

For a reduced model, though? Consider George Box:

> “All models are wrong, but some are useful”

It may be reasonable to exclude glia from a model of neural function where their role is abstracted out. Glia tend to be *slow* relative to neurons, so if you're talking about the specific moments leading up to a specific action potential, they can be reasonably excluded. If you're abstracting away all the other biology that happens at a synapse: metabolism of neurotransmitters, stochasticity of different parts of release machinery, spatial distributions of contacts between cells, etc, excluding glia seems to be pretty far down the chain of things to worry about.

Be wary a bit of: https://xkcd.com/793/ \- I think there is sometimes an assumption among people approaching biology from a more quantitative/algorithmic direction to think that the simplifications they encounter are representative of the whole world, and they forget that biologists are focused just as much on the details.

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, brain, neural-network, artificial-intelligence
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# Question
Title: Possibility for immersive experiences to effect into disorder
Is there a mental condition characterized by losing touch with reality (or either a short period of time or permanently), while believing you are a part of a virtual reality that you had been exposed to (“virtual reality” in the broadest sense – e.g. cinema, VR (using a headset) or even a dream or a book)?

You may have felt a sensation of being still “inside the plot” of a movie, for some seconds after it has just ended or the bizarre feeling of being awake and still dreaming at the same time, if something suddenly woke you up during an REM phase of your sleep. Or the state of “limbo” in the “Inception” movie.

Now imagine the same sensation taking much longer, to the extent of counting as a disorder. Has such kind of disorder been observed in clinical psychology/psychiatry?

# Answer
> 2 votes
The experience of being inside a film, a game or something similar is quite common in patients with psychotic disorders. This experience is frequently intense enough to be fully delusional, but in less severe cases it might take the form of an "as if"-experince, i.e. the person has the experience "as if" being in a film but knows rationally that this is not the case. This phenomenon is sometimes called Truman show syndrome after the movie, and in my experience as a psychiatrist, many patients actually reference precisely this film to describe their experience.

In an interesting line of research, a Danish research group has been studying near-psychotic phenomena of being out of touch with reality, experiencing that you're not really existing as a whole in this world etc. They have shown that these phenomena occur quite selectively in patients with schizophrenia, schizotypal disorder and healthy relatives to people with those disorders. They call this "self-disorders" and they view it as a central aspect of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Reference:

Disordered Selfhood in Schizophrenia and the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience: Accumulated Evidence and Experience. Nordgaard J, Henriksen MG, Jansson L, Handest P, Møller P, Rasmussen AR, Sandsten KE, Nilsson LS, Zandersen M, Zahavi D, Parnas J. Psychopathology. 2021;54(6):275-281.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, disorder
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# Question
Title: Does the placebo effect diminish with time? Or is it consistent?
I am wondering if an experiment - if run long enough - would automatically rule out the placebo effect.

Or do we know that the placebo effect can successfully last, say, years? Or does it tend to only last a set period of time and then fizzle out (such as a few weeks at most)?

Is it possible to say whether or not something is *likely* not a placebo effect, provided the researchers are unable to introduce a placebo to try to control for it? If your only options are "do the treatment" and "not do the treatment" is there some point where one would feel statistically confident that it is not the placebo effect? By this, I am trying to give a thought experiment of "suppose you have a drug where you cannot replicate something to have the same shape and texture, so all you have is 'consume' or 'not consume' as options."

Because if the placebo effect reliably will last forever in test subjects, then the answer is no, we can never be statistically confident. However, maybe it tends to diminish over time, and after some period of time (like 3 months?) we begin to be able to say "this is likely not the placebo effect from the real thing" despite being unable to administer a placebo.

Are there any studies on this?

# Answer
I think that depends on the condition or symptom that the placebo is supposed to ameliorate. For instance, any pain that is diminished by a placebo pill is likely to return, but the same is true after taking a medication for the pain because it has limited duration. So clearly, the fact that that the placebo effect, after a single administration of placebo, has a time-limited effect isn't very useful if the active treatment also has a time-limited effect.

The situation might be different with, for instance, treatment with antidepressants or placebo for depression. Here, the treatment is typically given every day for a period and depressive symptoms are measured. In this case, the usual pattern is not that the placebo group have lower scores on the depression symptoms scales initially and then having rising scores again after a while, so this is contrary to your hypothesis.

However, a problem in placebo research is the effect of regression toward the mean. An expression of this effect is that in a medical setting, people tend to seek medical care when their symptoms are at their worst. Because many disorders and diseases have fluctuating symptomatology over time, this means that many of the patients that seek medical attention (and thus might be enrolled in a treatment study) are at their worst and will improve regardless of treatment. So in many treatment studies, all patients whether they get active treatment, placebo or no treatment at all actually improve. This poses a problem in regards to the placebo effect because much of the placebo effect is probably due to regression toward the mean and no "true" placebo effect.

So no, I wouldn't say that there are any hard evidence that I'm aware of that shows that the placebo effect diminishes over time any more than any active treatment effects diminish over time.

I think your question would benefit from a concrete example, as it's difficult to know what kind of scenario you have in mind.
> 3 votes

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Tags: placebo
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# Question
Title: How to care less about other people's income?
If we know that our colleagues earn more money, we feel worse (see also A study about preference for making relatively vs. absolute more money?). We would be unhappy to get a higher salary if other people's raise is even higher.

Similarly, our emotion is controlled by the framing effect (see How higher/lower taxes can affect reward system and overall satisfaction of someone).

Is there a way out? What can we tell people who suffer from this effect? What would make them feel better?

# Answer
> -1 votes
To "*make them feel better*" would be to treat a symptom, not a cause.

In this case, the problem results from holding one or both of these underlying beliefs:

* Life is *fair*.
* I personally *deserve* a better life.

Neither belief is true.

You might be able to disabuse them, but don't expect that they will necessarily feel better.

# Answer
> -1 votes
Why does it hurt that others have more than we do? Buddhism states that unsatisfactoriness (dukkah) is the cause of suffering and while I think this is truly insightful, it is also of course not a scientific observation. Evolutionary, since money signifies status we will suffer a loss in status when the relative gap to those that we compare ourselves to get a higher salary increase even if we also get a (smaller) increase. I think it's basically the same driving force that makes apes want to become the alpha male etc, so having a disposition that makes us strive for a climb on the social ladder has had a great adaptive value in the evolutionary process.

So that's some sort of explanation why this might be the case, but the more interesting question to me is how to counter this when we suffer in our own lives, because it's not always that the best thing for us is to invest even more in our careers in order to climb on the social ladder, and it might not always be possible. So how to deal with this?

Buddhism offers meditation as a part of the solution. In modern times, this has been developed into mindfulness practice which can arguably help with accepting issues such as this. I think that the basic idea here would be to train yourself to note any thoughts and feelings about this issue, and then letting them go so you're not affected by them as strongly.

Another solution comes from the stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome, which can be said to reconfigure our thoughts about such issues in order to achieve equanimity and tranquility. Personally, I've had some success in this regard with techniques from stoicism. Cognitive behavioural therapy (especially the cognitive part) can be said to be a modern adaptation of ancient stoicism, and also aims to change the way we think by questioning our underlying assumptions. I think this is where Ray Butterworth in the other answer is coming from.

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Tags: emotion, economics, happiness
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title: Calculating d-prime

text:
# Question
Title: Calculating d-prime
I'm currently working on a research that has to use and calculate D Prime values for a task where subjects are presented an image at different speeds and they have to report if they saw the image or not. I've read different basic articles on D Prime and it's formulas but I still don't quite get it and I'm not sure of which values use for it's formula. For example: sometimes the formula says to use the mean and I'm not sure if I should use the mean of the subject's score or the mean of the entire sample.

# Answer
To calculate $d'$ you need to know two things: the hit rate and the false alarm rate. The hit rate is the proportion of trials where the stimulus was present and the subject responded that the stimulus was present. The false alarm rate is the proportion of trials where the stimulus was not present, and the subject responded that the stimulus was present. Sometimes it will be shown like this:

* Hit rate is the probability of a yes response given the target is present: $H = P( yes | present)$
* False alarm rate is the probability of a yes response given the target is absent: $FA = P( yes | absent)$

Once you have those two numbers the calculation is $d' = z(H) - z(FA)$.

The z-transform is based on the standard normal distribution, and you can look up the z-value for a given probability in a table, or use a function like `NORMSINV` in Excel or `qnorm` in R.

For most applications, you will want to calculate $d'$ for each individual subject, i.e., $H$ and $FA$ are based only on the data from a single subject. Then you can look at how experimental manipulations affect the distribution of $d'$ values.
> 9 votes

# Answer
The index of sensitivity $d'$ is typically defined in terms of two equal variance normally distributed random variables with means $\mu\_s$ and $\mu\_n$ and standard deviation $\sigma$:

$$d'=\frac{\mu\_s-\mu\_n}{\sigma}$$

In behavioural experiments, the probability that the subjects responded correctly (either saying 'yes' when the signal was present or saying 'no' when the signal was absent) is often reported. The problem is that probability of responding correctly depends on the bias of the subjects (how often they respond 'yes'). The advantage of using $d'$ is that it is a bias free measure of performance. While we cannot measure $\mu\_s$, $\mu\_n$, and $\sigma$ directly in typical behavioural experiments, $d'$ can be estimated from the hit rate $H$ (the probability of responding 'yes' given the signal was present) and the false alarm rate $FA$ (the probability of responding 'yes' given the signal was absent):

$$d'=z(H)-z(FA)$$

where $z(\cdot)$ is the z-transform.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Even after reading other answers here, it took me a while to figure out how, so I leave my answer here.

Calculation of d-prime is pretty straight forward:

MATLAB: norminv

```
d_prime = norminv(hit_rate) - norminv(falsealarm_rate)

```

Python: scipy.stats.norm.pdf

```
import scipy.stats as st
d_prime = st.norm.ppf(hit_rate) - st.norm.ppf(falsealarm_rate)

```

Excel: NORM.S.INV

```
d_prime = NORM.S.INV(hit_rate) - NORM.S.INV(falsealarm_rate)

```

My confusion came from the name **z-transform**. Here we are talking about the conversion of a probability to a **z-score**, i.e. expressed as a signed multiple of standard deviation (SD, sigma) from the mean value (mu), using a standard normal distribution (mu = 0, sigma = 1).

This is not to be confused with another z-transform for conversion of a discrete-time signal, which is a sequence of real or complex numbers, into a complex frequency-domain (z-domain or z-plane) representation.

## Confirmation

An example on this page says:

> So the hit rate H is 20/25, or .8
>
> the false alarm rate is 10/25, or .4
>
> z(H) = 0.842 and z(F) = -0.253
>
> d' = 0.824-(-0.253) = 1. 095

The MATLAB code below gave the same number.

```
norminv(0.8) - norminv(0.4)

```

ans = 1.0950

## Distribution

Using the code above, I plotted the relationshio between Hit rate and False alarm rate.

As this article is talking about, d'prime looks odd when hit rate or false alarm rate is 0% or 100%.

```
n = 100;

hit_rate = linspace(0,1,n);
falsealarm_rate = linspace(0,1,n);

d_prime = NaN(n,n);
for i = 1:n
    for j = 1:n
        d_prime(j,i) = norminv(hit_rate(i)) - norminv(falsealarm_rate(j));
    end
end

figure

imagesc(hit_rate, falsealarm_rate, d_prime)
axis square
axis equal
axis tight

ax = gca;
ax.YDir = 'normal';
ax.YTick = 0:0.2:1;

xlabel('Hit rate')
ylabel('False alam rate')
tickdir out # custom function
box off
colormap (redblue)

cb = colorbar
ylabel(cb,'d-prime')
tickdir(cb,'out') # custom function

```
> 1 votes

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Tags: methodology, statistics, mathematical-psychology
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# Question
Title: Right Attitude toward Reality is Way of Concrete Sexuality
I am reading an old pdf copy of The Theory of Psychoanalysis, By C. G. JUNG and trying to understand the following:

> This is the misunderstanding fallen into by so many neurotic people, who believe that **a right attitude toward reality** is only to be found **by way of concrete sexuality**.
>
> -THE ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSFERENCE, page 107, The Theory of Psychoanalysis, By C. G. JUNG (NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE MONOGRAPH SERIES, No. 19, Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., New York, 1915).

I can not find anything related to this statement in the book, but English is not primary-language, so it might be phrased differently in the book.

So if you have read the book, would you plz point where it is explained in the book?

Or, if you know the explanation of the line or the source, post an answer (with appropriate reference if possible).

Thank you very much.

**PS:**

1. Let add the text prior to that line:

THE ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSFERENCE.

We have already seen that the transference brings about difficulties, because the personality of the physician is assimilated with the image of the patient's parents. The first part of the analysis, the investigation of the patient's complexes, is rather easy, chiefly because a man is relieved by ridding himself of his secrets, difficulties and pains. In the second place, he experiences a peculiar satisfaction from at last finding some one who shows interest in all those things to which nobody hitherto would listen. It is very agreeable to find a person, who tries to understand him, and does not shrink back. In the third place, the expressed intention of the physician, to understand him and to follow him through all his erring ways, pathetically affects the patient. The feeling of being understood is especially sweet to the solitary souls who are forever longing for " understanding." In this they are insatiable. The beginning of the analysis is for these reasons fairly easy and simple. The improvement so easily gained, and the sometimes striking change in the patient's condition of health are a great temptation to the psychoanalytic beginner to slip into a therapeutic optimism and an analytical superficiality, neither of which would correspond to the seriousness and the difficulties of the situation. The trumpeting of therapeutic successes is nowhere more contemptible than in psychoanalysis, for no one is better able to understand than a psychoanalyst how the so-called result of the therapy depends on the cooperation of nature and the patient himself. The psychoanalyst may rest content with possessing an advanced scientific insight. The prevailing psychoanalytic literature cannot be spared reproach that some of its works do give a false impression as to its real nature. There are therapeutical publications from which the uninitiated receive the impression that psychoanalysis is more or less a clever trick, with astonishing effects. The first part of analysis, where we try to understand, and which, as we have seen before, offers much relief to the patient's feelings, is responsible for these illusions. These incidental benefits help the phenomenon of transference. The patient has long felt the need of help to free him from his inward isolation and his lack of self-understanding. So he gives way to his transference, after first struggling against it. For a neurotic person, the transference is an ideal situation. He himself makes no effort, and nevertheless another person meets him halfway, with an apparent affectionate understanding; does not even get annoyed or leave off his patient endeavors, although he himself is sometimes stubborn and makes childish resistances. By this means the strongest resistances are melted away, for the interest of the physician meets the need of a better adaptation to -i extra-familial reality. The patient obtains, through the transference, not only his parents, who used to bestow great attention upon him, but in addition he gets a relationship outside the family, and thus fulfils a necessary duty of life. The therapeutical success so often to be seen at the same time fortifies the patient's belief that this new-gained situation is an excellent one. Here we can easily understand that the patient is not in the least inclined to abandon this newly- found advantage. If it depended upon him, he would be forever associated with his physician. In consequence, he begins to produce all kinds of phantasies, in order to find possible ways of maintaining the association with his physician. He makes the greatest resistances towards his physician, when the latter tries to dissolve the transference. At the same time, we must not forget that for our patients the acquisition of a relationship outside the family is one of the most important duties of life, and one, moreover, which up to this moment they had failed or but very imperfectly succeeded in accomplishing. I must oppose myself energetically to the view that we always mean by this relationship outside the family, a sexual relation in its popular sense. This is the misunderstanding fallen into by so many neurotic people, who believe that **a right attitude toward reality is only to be found by way of concrete sexuality.**

# Answer
Jung is writing about the concept of "transference" in psychoanalysis, in this context specifically the issue of a patient directing feelings towards their therapist that they have for someone else. These feelings could be feelings of mistrust or hate, dependence (like on a parent), etc, but often discussed as a sexual/romantic relationship.

In the lines before your quote, see:

> At the same time, we must not forget that for our patients the acquisition of a relationship outside the family is one of the most important duties of life, and one, moreover, which up to this moment they had failed or but very imperfectly succeeded in accomplishing. I must oppose myself energetically to the view that we always mean by this relationship outside the family, a sexual relation in its popular sense.

Jung says that relationships are important, so it's natural for a patient to have some relationship with their therapist. However, Jung is against ("oppose myself energetically") to the idea that this must be a sexual/romantic relationship ("a sexual relation in its popular sense").

In your quote:

> This is the misunderstanding fallen into by so many neurotic people, who believe that a right attitude toward reality is only to be found by way of concrete sexuality.

The "misunderstanding" referred to ("by so many neurotic people, who believe") is that the patient/therapist relationship is necessarily sexual ("concrete sexuality").

One might re-write his sentence: *"People who think the patient-therapist relationship is always sexual are foolish."*

Note that Jung, while influential, was not scientific in his work, and many of his theories have either been debunked or merely have no support.
> 1 votes

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Tags: developmental-psychology, sexuality, psychoanalysis, jung
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