# Question
Title: Origin of group-level statistics in psychology and cognitive neuroscience
In experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience today, with the exception of a few specific subdisciplines, the consensus seems to be that an experimental study has to be performed on a group of subjects which are considered as a sample from an underlying population. Statistics is then applied in such a way as to allow an inference on *properties of the distribution in that population* of a certain psychological function or feature, most often the population mean.

My question is: When was this consensus established, with which reasoning, and on whose initiative?

In my experience, current textbooks on statistics in psychology discuss the statistical procedures in great detail, but contain only a few cursory remarks on the *psychological* (not statistical) motivation of these procedures. They do not discuss why a cognitive scientist should be interested in a population-average reaction time, a population-average event-related potential etc. – instead of e.g. effects that are present in every single individual in the population, or a specific sub-population. Or maybe I'm just looking at the wrong books?

# Answer
> 4 votes
What you are actually asking about is the debate surrounding the question:

### Can psychological quantities be measured?

Up until about 1800 psychological questions where discussed by philosophers. A separate psychological discipline did not yet exist. Answers to questions relating to perception, emotion and cognition where attempted on the basis of religious beliefs, philosophical tradition and unsystematic observation and introspection.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the body-mind dualism was slowly being resolved, which allowed first **physiologists** and then **physicists** over the course of the nineteens century to begin to apply their *methodology* of experimenting with plants and animals and *mathematical principles*, as they had been developed within the natural sciences, to psychological questions. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first psychological institutes were founded, the first by Wundt (in Leipzig, Germany), and the discipline of psychology came into existence.

Looking at the history of psychology, you will realize that while psychological questions are as old as humanity, **the academic discipline of psychology came into existence when scholars began to measure, i.e. quantify, the psyche**. This was in accordance with the rise of the natural sciences during the Enlightenment and their dominance over our whole worldview (almost?) until today.

In his classice monography, *Psychometric Methods* (1936), J. P. Guilford writes:

> The progress and maturity of a science are often judged by the extent to which it has succeeded in the use of mathematics. The “psychometric methods” are procedures for psychological measurement. Measurement means the description of data in terms of numbers and this, in turn, means taking advantage of the many benefits that operations with and mathematical thinking provide.

Thus, while psychological questions have traditionally been considered in the humanities and arts, the academic discipline of psychology has been created and finds its home within the **natural sciences** and shares their basic approach of quantitative measurement and statistical analysis. Philosophical and artistic "psychology" have continued to exist parallel to institutionalized academic psychology and have given rise to psychoanalysis (Freud), humanistic psychology (Rogers) or critical psychology (Holzkamp), among others.

The principles and standards of psychological experimentation and statistical analysis as we know them today where not discovered instantaneously but developed and refined until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1936 Guilford found that the natural sciences lacked a common theory of measurement:

> Measurement in the physical sciences has come so naturally that in that connection little thought has had to be given to what measurement really is. There are some physical scientists who maintain that what is called measurement in psychology is not measurement at all. It is true that the term measurement is sometimes defined in such a way that it does not apply to most of the operations in psychology commonly known as measurement. Definition of an abstract term such as measurement is an arbitrary matter, however, and psychologists will either define it to cover what they are doing under that concept or they will invent a new term for what they are doing with numbers and arithmetical operations. Fortunately, measurement can be defined sufficiently broadly to include the operations known as psychological measurement.

Four years before this statement, in 1932, the *British Association for the Advancement of Science* had established a committee of scientists that should consider the problem of measurement in the empricial disciplines. The committee was especially asked to resolve the question, whether a measurement of sensation was possible. The answer to this question would decide wether psychology was a natural science coequal to physics or chemistry. Psychologist S. S. Stevens (1946) writes about the committee's discussions:

> For seven years a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science debated the problem of measurement. Appointed in 1932 to represent Section A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) and Section J (Psychology), the committee was instructed to consider and report upon the possibility of “quantitative estimates of sensory events” — meaning simply: Is it possible to measure human sensation? Deliberation led only to disagreement, mainly about what is meant by the term measurement. An interim report in 1938 found one member complaining that his colleagues “came out by that same door as they went in,” and in order to have another try at agreement, the committee begged to be continued for another year. For its final report (1940) the committee chose a common bone for its contentions, directing its arguments at a concrete example of a sensory scale. This was the Sone scale of loudness (S.S. Stevens and H. Davis, *Hearing*. New York: Wiley, 1938), which purports to measure the subjective magnitude of an auditory sensation against a scale having the formal properties of other basic scales, such as those used to measure length and weight. Again the 19 members of the committee came out by the routes they entered, and their views ranged widely between two extremes. One member submitted “that any law purporting to express a quantitative relation between sensation intensity and stimulus intensity is not merely false but is in fact meaningless unless and until a meaning can be given to the concept of addition as applied to sensations.”

So, while the committee could not agree on the question wether sensation can be measured, they made it clear that **an empirical equivalent to arithmetic addition** would constitute measurement. This refers to the foundation of the measurement of physical quantities by Hermann von Helmholtz (1887) and defined axiomatically by Hölder (1901).

I don't want to go into the details of this argument, because it goes beyond the scope of this question. In short, Helmholtz sought to base measurement on the empirical comparison of so-called "extensive quantities", for example physical length or mass. He **correlated arithmetic addition to physical combination (e.g. lineal apposition of staves to measure lengths) and the equality of two numbers to a method of "physical comparison", for example the comparison of weights on a beam balance)**.

How these principles of extensive measurment can be applied in psychology, and if it should, has been heavily debated, and different "test theories" have been developed, such as classical test theory, latent trait theory, or the theory of knowledge spaces. Foundational texts for a **representational theory of measurement** are those by Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky (1971, 1989, 1990) and Robers (1979), if you are interested in this aspect. All books feature some general introduction but require mathematical understanding to follow.

## This requirement of a broad and deep understanding of mathematics is the reason why all psychology looks the same to you.

Most currently publishing psychologists have only a superficial understanding of methodology. Gigerenzer, Krauss and Vitouch (2004) explain some of the methodological shortcomings and mistakes:

> One of us once had a student who ran an experiment for his thesis. Let us call him Pogo. Pogo had an experimental group and a control group and found that the means of both groups were exactly the same. He believed it would be unscientific to simply state this result; he was anxious to do a significance test. The result of the test was that the two means did not differ significantly, which Pogo reported in his thesis.
>
> In 1962, Jacob Cohen reported that the experiments published in a major psychology journal had, on average, only a 50 : 50 chance of detecting a medium-sized effect if there was one. That is, the statistical power was as low as 50%. This result was widely cited, but did it change researchers’ practice? Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer (1989) checked the studies in the same journal, 24 years later, a time period that should allow for change. Yet only 2 out of 64 researchers mentioned power, and it was never estimated. Unnoticed, the average power had decreased (researchers now used alpha adjustment, which shrinks power). Thus, if there had been an effect of a medium size, the researchers would have had a better chance of finding it by throwing a coin rather than conducting their experiments. When we checked the years 2000 to 2002, with some 220 empirical articles, we finally found 9 researchers who computed the power of their tests. Forty years after Cohen, there is a first sign of change.
>
> Editors of major journals such as A. W. Melton (1962) made null hypothesis testing a neces- sary condition for the acceptance of papers and made small p-values the hallmark of excellent experimentation. The Skinnerians found themselves forced to start a new journal, the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, to publish their kind of experiments (Skinner, 1984, p. 138). Similarly, one reason for launching the Journal of Mathematical Psychology was to escape the edi- tors’ pressure to routinely perform null hypothesis testing. One of its founders, R. D. Luce (1988), called this practice a “wrongheaded view about what constituted scientific progress” and “mind- less hypothesis testing in lieu of doing good research: measuring effects, constructing substantive theories of some depth, and developing probability models and statistical procedures suited to these theories” (p. 582).
>
> The student, the researchers, and the editors had engaged in a statistical ritual rather than sta- tistical thinking. Pogo believed that one always ought to perform a null hypothesis test, without exception. The researchers did not notice how small their statistical power was, nor did they seem to care: Power is not part of the null ritual that dominates experimental psychology.

The articel runs on and explains what the p-value can and cannot do (read it, if you are a psychologist). I only quoted the beginning in length to show you that a methodologically savvy minority among psychologists believes that the majority of scholars publishing in their discipline **does not know what they do**. They follow a "ritual" of blindly applying the same methods to all problems, thus hampering the progress of the discipline and reducing the value of their findings.

Nevertheless, while widely ignored, progress has been made (see my brief remarks about different theories of measurement above).

If you want to learn more about the development of psychology as a natural science, grab any book on the history of psychology from a nearby university library. Make sure you pick one that starts at least in the nineteenth century, but for a better understanding it is necessary to look back until Leibnitz and his contemporaries.

If you want to learn more about measurement in psychology, books such as Joel Michell's *Measurement in Psychology: A Critical History of a Methodological Concept* provide a good introduction. I have not read any of those books and cannot recommend one. My own knowledge (and the summary given here) stems from a couse in psychometrics I took while studying psychology.

To summarize, **academic psychology uses experimentation and statistical analysis because it is a natural science and adheres to the basic principles that define these disciplines**. The belief that the universe is probabilistic (and events are distributed and these distributions can be described through arithmetic means and such) rules most of the natural sciences today and is not unique to psychology.

Beyond this unifying foundation, the different fields of psychology have quite different goals and methods. For example, general psychology (including the psychology of perception) is not interested in the distribution of a trait (such as intelligence) across a population, but in understanding, for example, the principles that govern learning in all individuals.

It is not true that experiments have to be performed on a group of subjects. In the psychology of perception, for example, which does not deal with interspecies differences but with the basic principles of human psychology, it is common to use only one single subject, because it is assumed that certain aspects of perception, such as trichromatic vision, are the same in all members of the population and can be investigated in any (healthy) individual. But of course this one test subject has to perform multiple trials, which are then analysed statistically.

Statistical analysis and the application of mathematics to reality itself goes back to ancient times. Bakker (2003) finds predecessors of contemporary statistical concepts as far back as ancient Indian texts:

> In an ancient Indian story, Rtuparna estimated the number of leaves and fruit on two great branches of a spreading tree (Hacking 1975). He estimated the number on the basis of one single twig, which he multiplied by the estimated number of twigs on the branches and found a number, which after a night of counting turned out to be very close to the real number.

Aristotle, in the *Nichomachean Ethics* calculated the mean as "a point equally distant from either extreme", and this was developed further by Ticho Brahe and others until Legendre introduced the least squares method, that we use today, in 1805.

If you want to know about the history of statistics, that is beyond the scope of this site.

**The answer to your question in detail**:

1. Why group level statistics?

Because there is no other way of measurement. As a physicist you know that every measurement is a sample from a population. If, for example, you measure weight, each measurement of the same weight will be different, if your scale is sensitive enough. You will then calculate the distribution and its characteristics (mean, slope, range etc.) to describe that distribution. If you do only one measurement, then that is because the differences are negligible for your purpose (e.g. human body weight) or measurement is too expensive and time consuming.
2. Since when group level statistics?

The ancient Indian example shows that group level statistics has been done since the dawn of time: a representative sample of leaves where drawn from a tree to understand the whole population of leaves. Of course that Indian "mathematician's" estimations where primitive, since the relevant mathematics hadn't been invented yet. The arithmetic mean was defined as late as 1805. But the basic idea and principles are identical to ours: estimate the properties of a population from a representative sample.
3. Why group level statistics in psychology?

The reason is not a psychological but a methodological one, and it is given in the quote by Guilford: It is the dominating belief of our culture that a true science must employ mathematics. So as soon as psychology was created as a separate scientific discipline, it *had to* use statistics. Otherwise it would have remained an area of speculation, in the eyes of the scientific community.
4. Since when did psychology employ group level statistics?

Building on the groundbreaking work of Ernst Heinrich Weber, **Gustav Fechner defined the *absolute threshold* as the statistical mean of all threshold values in the method of limits in his work *Elemente der Psychophysik* (1860)**. Fechner also developed the notion of the median (in 1878).

But my answer describes that the use of mathematical methods in psychology was not so much a singular event that affected the rest of the science like an explosion, but a gradual process that happened as psychology was slowly detached from philosophy and grew into a natural science from around 1800 to around 1950, when the process was largely finished (with Stevens' publication).

And again, you must understand that the theory of measurement – and even statistics itself! – was in development in all of the natural sciences at the same time. For example, the arithmetic mean was defined in 1805, Legendre published the least squares method in the same year, and Gauss defined the normal distribution and maximum-likelihood estimation in 1809. This ongoing development was why the British committee on measurement was set up in 1932: because no satisfying theory of measurement had been created until then!
5. Why the popularity of the mean?

Because most psychologists don't understand statistics well enough to do more than that.
6. Why population average instead of effects that are present in every single individual in the population, or a specific sub-population?

You obviously did not read a lot of psychological texts. The field of general psychology focusses on effects that are present in every single individual and often does experiments of one proband. Only the field of differential psychology explores the distribution of traits among the population. Other fields look at sub-populations (e.g. children or old people, psychiatric patients, workers of a certain occupation, and so on).

In the history of psychology, the first studies (all through the 1800s) explored general psychology: perception, cognitition, memory. Beginning around 1900, differential psychology began first with the measurement of intelligence, and then the study of medical psychology in psychiatric patients. Around the First World War occupational psychology began to study work behaviour and pedagogical psychology began to apply the findings to the training of future workers and soldiers. Workers and soldiers are groups, so there is also an economic and political reason for group-focussed psychology. Advertising and Human Resources are still today the largest areas of psychology beside clinical psychology, which partially explains the continuing focus on population based studies.

Finally, of course there are scholars that employ a more refined statistics and do not focus on the mean so much, and there are scholars that believe there are aspects of human psychology that are not covered by a statistical approach. If you are interested in them, go deeper into psychology or create your own alternative methodology that represents what *you* believe about the human psyche.

*All of this is of course my personal opinion. I am no historian of psychology and do not have the overview to judge the correctness of my interpretation. I used the small sample of publications that my professor for methodology provided and that I hope is representative. From this sample, I* estimated *the history of psychology, and my estimation may, of course, be wrong.*

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Sources:

* Bakker, A. (2003). The early history of average values and implications for education. *Journal of Statistics Education, 11*(1), 17-26.
* Fechner, G. Th. (1860). *Elemente der Psychophysik \[Elements of Psychophysics\]*. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
* Gigerenzer, G., Krauss, S., & Vitouch, O. (2004). The null ritual. *The Sage book of quantitative methodology for the social sciences*, 391-408.
* Guilford, J. P. (1936). *Psychometric Methods*. New York: McGraw-Hill.
* Helmholtz, H. (1887). Zählen und Messen erkenntnistheoretisch betrachtet. In *Philosophische Aufsätze Eduard Zeller zu seinem fünfzigjährigen Doctor-Jubiläum gewidmet*. Leipzig: Fues.
* Hölder, O. (1901). Die Axiome der Quantität und die Lehre vom Mass". *Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Koeniglich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Mathematisch-Physikaliche Klasse, 53*, 1–46.
* Krantz, D.H., Luce, R.D., Suppes, P. & Tversky, A. (1971). *Foundation of measurement. Vol. I. Additive and polynomial representations*. New York: Academic Press.
* Luce, R.D., Krantz, D.H., Suppes, P. & Tversky, A. (1990). *Foundation of measurement. Vol. III. Representation, axiomatization, and invariance*. New York: Academic Press.
* Roberts, F.S. (1979). *Measurement theory with applications to decisionmaking, utility, and the social sciences*. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
* Stevens, S. S. (1946). On the theory of scales of measurement. *Science, 103*, 667-680.
* Suppes, P., Krantz, D.H., Luce, R.D. & Tversky, A. (1989). *Foundation of measurement. Vol. II. Geometrical, threshold, and probabilistic representations*. New York: Academic Press.

# Answer
> 1 votes
In simplest terms, they are searching for objective, observable truth. Wikipedia seems to have quite a few references to this, see the quote/link below.

In terms of the One-Factor-at-a-time, OFAT method was first recorded to have been used by James Lind.
According to Wikipedia:
*"In 1747, while serving as surgeon on HM Bark Salisbury, James Lind carried out a controlled experiment to develop a cure for scurvy. In this study his subjects' cases "were as similar as I could have them", that is he provided strict entry requirements to reduce extraneous variation. The men were paired, which provided blocking. From a modern perspective, the main thing that is missing is randomized allocation of subjects to treatments.*

Fast forward a hundred years or so, and:
*"As is well know, statistic methods--and by "statistical methods" I mean probability-based modeling and inference--entered into psychology in 1860 in the work of Gustav Fechner (1860) in psychophysics (Boring 1961;Stigler 1986)."* A Historical View of Statistical Concepts in Psychology and Educational Research
*American Journal of Education, 101, 1992.*

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Tags: methodology, statistics
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# Question
Title: Optimal number of dimensions in multidimensional scaling
I have run an experiment on consonance-dissonance evaluation of musical intervals on 40 individuals using all the possible intervals from 3 registers (plus their inversions), and I want to apply a multidimensional scale analysis.

My problem is that the stress plot indicates the following:

>

I guess it would not be desirable to limit my analysis to 2 or 3 dimensions since the stress is high at these points, but I am not sure if adding dimensions helps either. Is there an optimal number of dimensions that I should consider, or should I follow the stress curve wherever it may take me? Thanks.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I guess it depends on your purpose. If you are doing the MDS for more heuristic purposes, then often two dimensions (or possibly three) will provide the greatest visual insight.

Also, my sense from looking at your dimension by stress plot is that the greatest gains are attained when going from one to two dimensions, that the gain from two to three dimensions is still substantial, but after that there are minimal gains.

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Tags: experimental-psychology, statistics, psychophysics, psychoacoustics
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# Question
Title: What are the negative effects of meditation?
I see lots of articles touting the benefits of meditation. But what are the bad things about it? Maybe if a person has to make quick decisions, meditation would not be a good thing? This could be similar to a paridigm of "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" by Kahneman.

# Answer
> 5 votes
The adverse effects of meditation as reported in scientific studies are as follows:

* relaxation-induced anxiety and panic
* paradoxical increases in tension
* less motivation in life
* boredom
* pain
* impaired reality testing
* confusion and disorientation
* feeling 'spaced out'
* depression
* increased negativity
* being more judgmental
* feeling addicted to meditation
* uncomfortable kinaesthetic sensations
* mild dissociation
* feelings of guilt
* psychosis-like symptoms
* grandiosity
* elation
* destructive behavior
* suicidal feelings
* defenselessness
* fear
* anger
* apprehension
* despair
* increased false-memory susceptibility

Also, anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation can worsen symptoms of some psychiatric problems.

Sources:

Study from 1992: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1428622

> Adverse effects of meditation: a preliminary investigation of long-term meditators, by Shapiro DH Jr.
>
> Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, California College of Medicine, University of California, Irvine.
>
> Abstract
>
> Adverse effects of meditation were assessed in twenty-seven long term meditators (average 4.27 years) both retrospectively (time one) and prospectively at one month (time two) and six months (time three) following a meditation retreat. At both time one and time three subjects reported significantly more positive effects than negative from meditation. However, of the twenty-seven subjects, seventeen (62.9%) reported at least one adverse effect, and two (7.4%) suffered profound adverse effects. When subjects at time one were divided into three groups based on length of practice (16.7 months; 47.1 months; 105 months) there were no significant differences in adverse effects. How the data should be interpreted, and their implications both for the clinical and psychotherapeutic use of meditation as a relaxation/self-control strategy, and as a technique for facilitating personal and spiritual growth, are discussed. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are also offered.

Meta-analysis from 2000:

> Meditation: concepts, effects and uses in therapy by Alberto Perez-De-Albeniz and Jeremy Holmes
>
> International Journal of Psychotherapy, Mar2000, Vol. 5 Issue 1, p49, 10p
>
> Abstract: This article reviews 75 scientific selected articles in the field of meditation, including Transcendental Meditation among others. It summarizes definitions of meditation, psychological and physiological changes, and negative side-effects encountered by 62.9% of meditators studied. While the authors did not restrict their study to TM, the side-effects reported were similar to those found in the "German Study" of Transcendental Meditators: relaxation-induced anxiety and panic; paradoxical increases in tension; less motivation in life; boredom; pain; impaired reality testing; confusion and disorientation; feeling 'spaced out'; depression; increased negativity; being more judgmental; feeling addicted to meditation; uncomfortable kinaesthetic sensations; mild dissociation; feelings of guilt; psychosis-like symptoms; grandiosity; elation; destructive behavior; suicidal feelings; defenselessness; fear; anger; apprehension; and despair.

New study shows increase in cortisol reactivity (a biological marker of stress): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24767614

> The present study provides an initial indication that brief mindfulness meditation training buffers self-reported psychological stress reactivity, but also increases cortisol reactivity to social evaluative stress. This pattern may indicate that initially brief mindfulness meditation training fosters greater active coping efforts, resulting in reduced psychological stress appraisals and greater cortisol reactivity during social evaluative stressors.

Another new study shows increased susceptibility to false memories:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/26/10/1567

Increased False-Memory Susceptibility After Mindfulness Meditation by Brent M. Wilson, Laura Mickes, Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino, Matthew Evrard and Edmund Fantino in Psychololgical Science

> Abstract
>
> The effect of mindfulness meditation on false-memory susceptibility was examined in three experiments. Because mindfulness meditation encourages judgment-free thoughts and feelings, we predicted that participants in the mindfulness condition would be especially likely to form false memories. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness induction, in which they were instructed to focus attention on their breathing, or a mind-wandering induction, in which they were instructed to think about whatever came to mind. The overall number of words from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm that were correctly recalled did not differ between conditions. However, participants in the mindfulness condition were significantly more likely to report critical nonstudied items than participants in the control condition. In a third experiment, which tested recognition and used a reality-monitoring paradigm, participants had reduced reality-monitoring accuracy after completing the mindfulness induction. These results demonstrate a potential unintended consequence of mindfulness meditation in which memories become less reliable.

Official recommendations in the US: http://nccam.nih.gov/health/meditation/overview.htm#sideeffects

> Side Effects and Risks
>
> Meditation is considered to be safe for healthy people. There have been rare reports that meditation could cause or worsen symptoms in people who have certain psychiatric problems, but this question has not been fully researched. People with physical limitations may not be able to participate in certain meditative practices involving physical movement. Individuals with existing mental or physical health conditions should speak with their health care providers prior to starting a meditative practice and make their meditation instructor aware of their condition.

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Tags: decision-making, meditation
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# Question
Title: Is there a pictograms repository under an open-commercial license?
I'm looking for pictograms repositories for non-verbal people. I found two types:

* ones that I need to pay like PECS or SPC,
* and others that are free but they have a no-commercial license like arasaac or PiktoPlus.

My question is: Is there a pictograms repository under an open license and that I could use its pictograms with commercial purposes?

# Answer
I found one! http://straight-street.org/

Those pictos have a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
> 2 votes

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Tags: communication
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# Question
Title: Why do children sometimes not do what they are told, even though their environment supports them fully to do so?
I see many children that do (at times) not listen to their parents, or even do the complete opposite of what other people want them to do. That while the social environment supports them (with positive feedback on positive behaviour and possibly negative feedback on negative behaviour) to do what they are told.

Do we know the main drivers for why kids (at times) do not do what they are told to?

Is it their drive for freedom and autonomy? Attention? Something else?

# Answer
Children go through many phases of independence to detach from their parents. The most (in)famous is the "no" stage (around 2 years old). But they also get to a point where they actively do things that get a reaction. There are two major incentives: one, it gets them attention on demand, and two, it establishes some power for them in the relationship. Many parents reply with bribes, which validates the power struggle.

This is a good thing; by the time they are teenagers, a lot of what they do will be with their peer group and if they've gotten some practice, they'll be able to establish more favorable positions in power relationships with their peers. If they're punished for questioning authority, they might form the habit of following authority without question, and once an authority has been established in their peer group, they won't question or challenge their decisions for the group.
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, decision-making
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# Question
Title: Why do we have so many wishes and desires?
Two years ago I started to learn (as self-education) evolution theory and neurobiology for to understand - *who we are and where we came from?* Now I see clearly that we are our brains, which are the result of RNA & DNA selection and replication.

Many of the issues now resolved for me: about love and intuition, origin of religion and art etc.

But one question remains "a mystery": why are there so many wishes, desires, urges?
*What is the neurobiology base for a monstrous amount of consumer goods, objects of art etc.?*

The most primitive idea is "complexity of brain -\> intricacy of processes -\> lots of desires".
Another naive answer has to do with so called "play-explore-investigation instinct", which plays an important role when two basic instincts are "still".

But to me, human wishes and urges look like more of a Akkerman function than just "a lot of".

I belive that (sooner or later) evolution and neuroscience will give answers to all questions about our mind and behavior.
So glad to hear something about this one!

# Answer
In the context of evolution, desires and dreams (beyond the lower tier of Maslow's Hierarchy) could be seen as, not an adaptation, but a spandrel of the adaptation of consciousness.

Consciousness allows us higher cognitive skills, particularly the ability to reflect on events and predict events through modelling, which allows us to modify our behavior in a succesful way. But this extra predictive power also gives us an imagination with which we can imagine ourselves in a better position to exploit our dopamine centers (seek pleasurable activities that don't propagate the species).
> 1 votes

# Answer
Firstly, we need to draw the difference between a need and a belief.

Needs are what everybody really wants, and beliefs are the vehicles which people meet those needs. For example, everybody has a need to feel significant or unique, but the way that person goes about doing that is based on their beliefs. To some people, robbing a bank in their mind will make them significant, to others helping people will make them signifcant.

The reason this distinction is essential is because it allows you to see that humans really only have a few true desires. The basic human needs for survival: certainty, variety, connection, significance, etc. All the different desires humans have stem from the drive to meet these needs. The reason we have so many desires is because we have various needs, many of which are in conflict.
> 0 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, personality, motivation
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# Question
Title: What is the term for human beings' tendency to obey without thinking?
I'm wanting to read more about a certain human behavior, but I am not sure what the proper term for it is, so some of the things I am finding aren't what I am looking for. I'm interested in how Humans will often "follow the leader" and act as sheep, believing what they're told without applying much critical thinking. I thought this was called *Herd Mentality*, but Wikipedia describes that as:

> Herd mentality implies a fear-based reaction to peer pressure which makes individuals act in order to avoid feeling "left behind" from the group

That is *close* to what I am thinking about. However Wikipedia relates Herd Mentality to Group intelligence and Wisdom of the crowd... which is ironic as those are the exact *opposite* of what I am looking for.

Examples of the behavior I am thinking of:

* Sometimes high-rep users on Stack Exchange sites post poor questions or answers. Often these get upvotes even though they're incorrect, because people "follow the leader" and don't think about the actual answer.
* Religious leaders often influence their congregations on how to vote, and many members will vote that way *even though what they're voting for may not really be what they believe it* because they don't think about what they're voting for so they don't realize it.
* As an *extreme* example: Many good, moral people somehow shut off their ability to think logically and supported Hitler and the Holocaust.

What is the name for Human's tendency to follow a leader blindly, without thinking? Is this an actual psychological phenomenon and if so, what papers could I read to learn more about it?

# Answer
**Obedience**

The most famous paper dealing with this issue is Milgram's paper, called **Behavioral study of obedience**<sup>\[1\]</sup>. From the abstract:

> This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive subject to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment.

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\[1\] Behavioral Study of obedience, Milgram, S. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963. doi: 10.1037/h0040525 PDF link
> 13 votes

# Answer
Could you be talking about conformity:

e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity

and/or

groupthink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink ?

In addition to the famous Milgram studies which you may have already heard about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram\_experiment

There's quite a lengthy literature on these issues but those links should get you started.
> 10 votes

# Answer
I would say 'Herd mentality' or 'Conformity' comes close.

Yet, I think it is important to note that 'thinking logical' is a pretty ambiguous term in itself. Everybody has their own image of what is logical and what is not, but that image is mainly formed by what others tell you what's 'normal'. People's opinions and actions are much less based on logic than you might think.

For example, Solomon Asch's experiments found that 74% of their tested individuals would choose an obviously incorrect answer if a group (3 or more people) would choose that incorrect answer as well. And this was the case in something simple like matching the length of some sticks. Imagine what could happen when we are confronted with more complex choices.

So befóre you take any action, you look around to see what others think or do, and it might very well be that you will do what they do because it seems more 'logical' that yóu make an error in reasoning than that áll the others made a mistake in their reasoning.

Second, áfter the fact, people have a great tendency to justify everything they have done as if it was a good thing. This is caused by what we call 'cognitive dissonance' (Festinger, 1957), or the tendency to preserve a stable, positive self-image.

E.g. once somebody has murdered somebody he has two choices: regret or justify himself by saying the person deserved it etc. Justifying yourself is often a lot easier than feeling regret, even more so when your social environment (e.g. the Nazi party) steers you towards justification rather than towards regret. And that again paves the road for identical actions in the future.

As for the answers on SE, I'm not sure if that has to do with Conformity (it is not as if other people see that you upvote or downvote an answer), but it might be based on wanting to stimulate the pro users into keep giving great answers (even though that one particular answer might be worse than usual) or wanting to stimulate the pro user into improving his answer, because you know he can produce great answers, because you know he did that in the past.
> 3 votes

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Tags: terminology, social-psychology, decision-making, motivation, leadership
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# Question
Title: What sort of things are considered as "data" in cognitive science?
I understand that the field is very broad, but I'm trying to arrive at a better idea of how different disciplines use the word "data". For example, for computers it is:

> the quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media.

However, the same cannot be always so for data in the cognitive sciences. Can you give some examples of data in your research?

# Answer
In *The Personality Puzzle* (2012), David Funder describes a taxonomy of four different kinds of data that I've always found useful. *The Personality Puzzle* is a textbook in personality psychology, so its take on psychology is somewhat more as a social than biological science (though biology has its place too).

Briefly, here are the four kinds of data as described therein:

* **Self-reports:** information provided by oneself about oneself, especially subjective info to which no one would otherwise have access; e.g., attitudes, beliefs, emotions, opinions, preferences, etc. This is often the domain of the Likert scale, though that's only one of very many assessment methods.
* **Informant reports:** info provided about one person by others that is intended to describe the first person (not project info of interest about those reporting on that person). This info may also be subjective or socially constructed, but may be best operationalized as descriptions or judgments polled from people in a manner that welcomes this subjectivity. For example, a person's reputation or other characteristics may be assessed through the perspectives of others who may (or may not) know that person. Methods are otherwise similar to self-report in general.
* **Behavioral data:** strictly objective and often observed in controlled environments or otherwise collected with a repeatable, classically empirical sampling method. This includes counts, measurements, or categorizations of behaviors like lever presses, choices or performance in a game or test, reaction time, stimulus discrimination accuracy, etc. These also include observations about autonomically regulated biological processes such as results from f/MRI, PET, CAT, EEGs, EKGs, heart rate or blood pressure readings, GSR, pupil dilation, etc., even enlargement of erectile genital organs (those studies are always interesting).
* **Life outcomes:** also strictly objective, but generally less available to experimental manipulation, naturalistic, and often historical (i.e., already recorded or otherwise resolved to the state of interest). Examples include info about birth, graduation, employment, marriage, childbirth, divorce, death, etc., such as age at the time, location, partner, etc.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Really, there's two kinds of data in cognitive science, **information** (the data used by the cognitive systems we're interested in), and **experimental data** (and similar, such as correlational data), which we collect and analyse to try and better understand cognition.

It sounds like your question is about information, so I'll focus on that, but please correct me if that's not what you meant.

## The Computational Approach

Most cognitive scientists, from the 1960s onwards, explicitly or implicitly accept what's referred to as the "computational theory of mind", which says the purpose of a brain, or any other cognitive system, is to processes information, in much the same way as a computer does. From this point of view your "data" are **neural representations** of just what you talk about in computer science, with patterns of neural activation representing logical symbolic states, which are manipulated.

## Alternative Approaches

### Connectionism

An extremely influential counterpart to this "brain as computer" approach is the the Connectionist, or "parallel distributed processing" approach. Here, the brain still represents information in patterns of neural activation, but rather than using "symbols" as you would in a digital computer, sub-symbollic features of the world around us are represented by various overlapping patterns across nodes of neurons, in a way first proposed by McCulloch and Pits (1943), but developed hugely since then, and "data" constitutes various **combinations of these different feature node**.

### Dynamical, Embodied, Situated (and beyond) approaches

As a final note, a completely different approach to cognitive science, the "**dynamical approach**", argues that the brain is best seen as a complex, non-linear dynamical system, with a state (pattern of firing neurons) that is constantly evolving through exposure to the environment, and complex recurrent feedback loops (Spivey and Dale, 2004 give a good introduction to this).

When looked at this way, the brain doesn't deal with discrete "data" (which, remember, is the plural of "datum"), but rather represents the world as continuous patterns of neural activation, connections between neurons and patterns. Extending this notion, it has been argued, and shown experimentally, that information defined this way goes beyond what's in the brain: we can store and manipulate data using our bodies ("**embodied cognition**"), and even our immediate environment (**situated cognition**, see Hutchins, 1995, for an excellent discussion of this in the context of flying a plane). Finally, although I can't remember where, I have seen studies that claim that the same can be said for our clothes, giving rise to "**enclothed cognition**".
> 4 votes

# Answer
Data could be defined like: **Information stored and obtained by a method**. The information could be a way to measure the status of a system in a moment or across the time. Why I used the terms "stored" and "methods", because the information could be under the influence of the technology used to save it and the measure method also affect to the reality. **This stuff made data a representation of the reality.**

In Cognitive Science data could be any representation of the reality (Mainly behaviors and brain-derived information) that help us to understand the animal cognition.
> 0 votes

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Tags: terminology, data
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# Question
Title: Where is knowledge of how the brain works stored?
If we are our brains, and our brains know how they work, this means that this information is stored somewhere in the brain, like the inferior temporal cortex is the part of the brain that recognizes numbers. **Where is knowledge of how the brain works stored?**

# Answer
I think that you focus this question in the wrong way. There is no place in the brain where the "instructions" are stored. The brain don't need "know" how it works to work. The way in that the brain works is an emergence from the structure and the biological dynamics. All of this is based in all the layers of biological computation (genetic/molecular/cellular/organ/...) and the interaction with the environment. So there is no a particular place, if you want to discover how the brain works you must to study all the system.

Actually we can built iterative process that show complex behaviors but the laws that control this behavior is implicit and is not stored in the result. See The game of the life.
> 2 votes

# Answer
This type of knowledge is known as "semantic memory"; a type of "declarative memory". We don't yet know where semantic memory is stored in the brain, although there is evidence that hippocampal and/or parahippocampal structures are required to store semantic memory.

The fine details of exactly what a "memory" is in terms of neurobiology, where and how it is stored, and how it is retrieved is an area of neuroscience that is currently under very active research. However, our knowledge is very rudimentary at present.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Generally speaking, Kato's answer is good. I'd like to add that there is a fascinating way in which the brain understands other brains - also called mindreading or theory of mind (the basis for empathy). This process is heavily reliant on the sensory modalities. When you put yourself in someone else's shoes, your brain attempts to imagine their experiences (including their emotions). This consists of a reactivation of various aspects of your own previous sensory experiences, in an attempt to simulate their state of mind. The brain does this all the time, but especially when it is trying to understand other brains. Of course, this isn't the only mechanism at work - more logical modes of thought probably also play a role. For a discussion of this, see http://www.ianapperly.eclipse.co.uk/Apperly%20ST%20TT%20Final%20version.pdf.
> 2 votes

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Tags: learning, memory, cognitive-neuroscience, neuroanatomy, semantic-memory
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# Question
Title: Phenomena where group truly feels a certain way, but each member says that they feel the other way to avoid being the odd one out
I forgot the name, but I remember reading about it in lifehacker or i09 some time ago.

When the group feels a certain way, but say that they feel the other way to avoid being the only one to agree. Despite all of them feeling the same way.

For example, a group goes to a restaurant. All of them hate the food. But no one wants to be the one to say it, so they all unwittingly say it's great and that they are enjoying.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I finally found it - It was group polarization.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I believe the name you are searching for is **conformity**.

One of the most well-known examples: Asch Conformity Experiments.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I think the title and the example given described 2 slightly different situations,

Answering strictly from the title:

I also believe that conformity is what you are looking for, or more specifically normative conformity, in relation to the "odd one out" feeling that you mentioned.

Closely related to conformity, Groupthink may also explains the phenomenon, which stated that an individual might suppresses a dissenting/opposing opinion to keep the peace & harmony of a group, though it's more commonly explained in group decision-making situations.

On the other hand, Group Polarization mainly refers to group phenomenon where a group tend to take a more extreme decisions than the initial inclinations of its members. Meaning that such decisions are less likely to be taken in individual situations.

Now, answering from the given example is a little bit harder because it depends on what made them not wanting to voice their opinion (that they hated the food).

If it's purely because none of them wanted to go against the others opinions, then it's conformity/groupthink as stated above. But how can one go against others opinion when their opinion is one and the same? I would argue that they don't necessarily know that all of them have the same opinion, instead it's very plausible that a few misreading of body-language, or some misunderstood comments would make someone thinks that everyone enjoyed the food, and thus acted accordingly, which in turn would reinforce the others to act the same way.

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: What's the functional difference between the NEF and normal ANNs?
Aside from obvious biological plausibility, from a computational standpoint, what's the motivation of using the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF) instead of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for computing functions? From what I can tell, they both approximate functions, have the ability to learn new functions and the ability to create self-organizing networks. What makes the NEF different?

# Answer
First, let's take a look at the basic principles of NEF.

The first two principles (Representation and Computation) do seem analogous to trained ANN models. Additionally, with the hPES learning rule that I've described here, they seem to have the same learning (gradient-descent) capabilities.

Where the NEF differentiates itself the most from ANNs is when it starts to describe dynamics (oscillators, attractors). For a description on how it does this and what it accomplishes, check out Terry Stewart's course notes found here.

Describing dynamics is important in the brain, since simple oscillators and integrators seem to be the foundation of many different cognitive abilities such as working memory and motor control.
> 5 votes

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, neural-network, nef
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# Question
Title: What's the term for people who deny others' achievements?
I know a bunch of people that are always in deep denial (at least trying to appear so) of other people achievements. It can be another country or another group or another religion.

For example, when you tell them, "Did you hear about Mike? He just bought a Lamborghini," they have several type of answers ready for this situation, like: "Who cares? Lamborghini was never good, you need to go to gas station every 15 minutes," or like, "But don't you know how terrible his wife is?" or, "He might have stolen someone's money," etc.

They know they are wrong, but they say these types of things to ease their deep internal pain. You would call them some sort of jealous people, but it's not only jealousy. Sometimes when you tell them things like, "Did you see the recent car Germany just built? It just runs on salt water!" They come back with sentences like, "Whatever, I would die rather than living for a second in Germany." Everyone would be like, "WHAT?" But yes, they say these sort of things.

So what do you call these people? What's their problem? Do you have any advice to offer these people?

# Answer
Regarding "What's their problem?" Question,

**Long answer:** Social Psychology recognizes the concept of construals, which are how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them, particularly the behavior or action of others towards themselves.

Two of the basic source/motive of construal in human beings is the need to feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate. These two needs, however, doesn't always coincide one-another; and when they don't, it builds-up anxiety inside oneself. Leon Festinger further explained those situations as Cognitive Dissonance, an uncomfortable feeling that arose from having two conflicting beliefs/ideas/values at the same time.

As stated in the linked wikipedia article, to reduce dissonance, someone may do one of these 4 things:

> 1. Change behavior/cognition
> 2. Justify behavior/cognition by changing the conflicting cognition
> 3. Justify behavior/cognition by adding new cognition
> 4. Ignore/Deny any information that conflicts with existing beliefs

In your case, your information most likely triggered a cognitive dissonance for him.

Caused by either an upward social-comparison process, which has been proved to be able to happen both subliminally and automatically in a study; and may resulted in negative-affect, especially for someone with low self-esteem and negative mood. i.e "That makes Mike better than me" or "That shows how great Germans are, but I'm not German!" An existing contradicting beliefs. i.e "I hate Mike/Germany" or "I'm far richer than Mike/My country is better than Germany." Having done or still doing something which conflicted with the new information. i.e he just bragged about his brand new car, just explained how Germany is not good, just turned down an offer to live in Germany, etc. Or a combination of all three.

Then, to reduce the dissonance, they just changed their cognition to justify themselves (Lamborghini is not that good anyway), create a new cognition (but his wife is terrible), or simply deny (he must have stolen someone's money) or ignore (whatever, not going to live in German anyway) the information. All those strategies would be easier to employ than actually changing their own behavior (buy a better car than Lamborghini, make an even better invention) or cognition (motivate themselves to earn more money or study more)

**Short Answer:** You indirectly arouse his anxiety, either by lowering their self-esteem by presenting a concrete and unavoidable better social comparison target; or by presenting an information which conflicts with his beliefs/ideas/values. In order to reduce that anxiety, and so making them feels good about themselves again, people will either change their behavior/cognition, make justifications, or simply ignore/deny the conflicting information/stimuli.

**Really Short Answer:** They are most likely trying to reduces the anxiety which was caused by your information
> 1 votes

# Answer
If you were just looking for a noun (my initial interpretation of the question), the most usual to my knowledge is "detractor". "Disparager", "vilifier", "belittler", "deprecator", "discreditor", "nay-sayer" are all lexically acceptable and self-explaining, though obviously they imply different senses of the word "deny" (e.g. "refuse to give due credit" vs "actively contest" vs "attack" vs "prohibit" )
> 0 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, personality, attitudes
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title: Neurological basis of selfishness?

text:
# Question
Title: Neurological basis of selfishness?
Is there a neurological component to selfishness?

Awhile back, I witnessed a mentally retarded person who was severely possessive of a water fountain, claiming it was "his".
I've also seen toddlers exhibit this same behavior.
Is this a form of arrested development?

# Answer
> 2 votes
I'm not sure how constructive it is to think of it in terms of "components", because there are so many that contribute to selfishness: for example, you only feel your body's pain. Food and sex only feel good to you when you're the one experiencing them.

Instead, it might be more constructive to look for components of selflessness and altruism, them being the exception. And that, according to some, lies in kin selection.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Improving your self-image (having more posessions, looking better, and all the other components of selfishness) probably engages various subcortical emotional circuits involving the amygdala, hypothalamus, and so on. This is where basic drives are also implemented. This is by far not a disorder, nor necessarily a subject for neurology! Selfishness, in moderation, helps you improve yourself (and the genes of your successors, by picking good mates!) whilst giving you an advantage through the posessions you collect. It can also help society - some great inventions of mankind were developed because scientists wanted a discovery to be "theirs". However, assuming somebody incessantly steals from others, this could be a neurological symptom where the "selfishness" has gone wrong - when everyone hates you it's generally maladaptive, I guess. When you constantly cling to the same object, it's probably also a sign of something gone wrong - although it might be solvable by a psychotherapist, not necessarily requiring a neurological explanation...

# Answer
> -1 votes
Hypothalamus (mediating the four F's) septal area and amygdala (hedonic states); orbito-frontal cortex, mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway (incentive orientation), for some contributory possibilities.

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Tags: social-psychology, personality, cognitive-neuroscience, developmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Body Language: Why do we act differently around someone we're attracted to?
Many professionals have said that when you're attracted to someone, you tend to fidget, run your hands through your hair, sit with your legs facing them, and that our faces light up around them, which are all actions that happen involuntarily. Why does this happen?

# Answer
Generally speaking, romantic love can be considered an emotional process. From an embodied perspective, emotions are to a large extent interactions with sensorimotor processes (connected to the body). http://www.iep.utm.edu/emotion/ provides a good overview of the various emotional theories, of which the feedback theories are my favorite. The feedback theories essentially state that body states cause valenced (positive or negative) feelings in a bottom-up manner, and that cognitions (higher-order thought on a 'symbolic' level, such as appreciating someone's qualities) cause embodied reactions in a top-down manner (these are the quirky love-induced reactions you speak of). This goes on in a feedback loop. In this process, neurotransmitter systems are highly important. One of the most popular theorists out there in this area is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio - his somatic marker hypothesis is a really interesting theory: http://www.iee.unibe.ch/unibe/philnat/biology/zoologie/content/e7493/e7854/e8920/e8926/DamasioPhilTransRSocB96.pdf. (He applies it to decision making in the end, but the basic principles are all there) If you're interested, you could also read his book "The Feeling of What Happens".

I would say that these quirky little habits we have when we are nervous around someone we care about in that special way are mostly unintended side effects of a significant release of neurotransmitters (like dopamine, serotonin, etc.). These neurotransmitter systems are connected to several brain areas, but especially also to our action systems, causing us to fidget, smile, shiver, or otherwise display exceptional behavior. Of course, some of these behaviors are socially adaptive - smiling is useful to communicate that you appreciate the other person, for instance, whereas fidgeting is probably not socially useful. The reason there is such a strong release of these is that romantic attraction is a mixture of a emotions/desires which are very important to reproduction. For a light (not too academic) read about the biological basis of love, I recommend http://www.amazon.de/Why-We-Love-Chemistry-Romantic/dp/0805077960. For a condensed version in a TED talk, see http://www.ted.com/talks/helen\_fisher\_studies\_the\_brain\_in\_love.
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, sexuality, physical-attraction
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# Question
Title: How do certain frequencies of sound induce psychological states?
As one example, a specific low frequency beyond our hearing perception can make people feel nauseous and even vomit.

I'm sure there are more documented studies surrounding the correlation of auditory induced states, but how and/or why does this occur?

Also, does this phenomenon happen to deaf people as well?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Auditory information is conveyed to the brain from the cochlea via the VIII cranial nerve (aka vestibulocochlear nerve). Under standard conditions the vestibular system gets activated when we move our heads. If we spin around rapidly this can obviously make us feel dizzy and nauseous. The vestibular system can also be activated do to other causes. For example, positional alcohol nystagmus (aka the drunk spins) occurs due to alcohol changing the densities of the endolymph and the cupula (part of the sensory organ in the semicircular canals). It turns out that low frequency pressure waves at high enough levels can activate the sensory cells in the vestibular system.

In some causes of deafness and hearing loss the vestibular system remains normal, or near normal. These individuals are therefore susceptible to these feelings. Other causes of deafness destroy the vestibular system making individuals immune to these feelings.

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Tags: perception, hearing, auditory-discrimination
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# Question
Title: How effective are high audio frequencies in commercials in getting audience attention?
Does anyone know of a peer reviewed article that describes how commercials will often contain high audio frequencies in order to attract the viewer's attention?

Referrals to commercials using any audio based method to command attention would also be welcome.

I believe this will come under the field of psychoacoustics.

# Answer
I am not aware of any use in using "high audio frequencies" in commercials, but there is a history of making commercials louder (presumably to attract attention). There are laws prohibiting increasing the loudness of commercials (e.g., CALM Act). Increasing the loudness, without remotely adjusting the volume on the TV is not a trivial thing and potentially involves careful mixing of the audio signals as well as allowing acceptable levels of distortion.
> 2 votes

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Tags: perception, consumer-psychology, attention, hearing
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# Question
Title: Is there any scientific literature on the "shower principle" (i.e., taking a break from a task leads to unexpected insights)?
Folk cognitive psychology has it that doing activities that remove you from your intellectual work (such as taking a shower or, like Einstein is reported to have done when it a rut, playing the violin) increases your chances of having unexpected insights. Is there a name for this phenomenon and a dedicated scientific literature for it?

# Answer
> 4 votes
That moment is often called the "aha moment", the Eureka effect, or more generally, insight. There is literature on it, but as you might expect, it is a pretty difficult thing to produce in a lab.

Some references: The AHA! experience: Creativity through emergent binding in neural networks. Thagard, Paul; Stewart, Terrence C.. Cognitive Science35.1 (Jan-Feb 2011): 1-33.

Gaining insight into the "aha" experience. Topolinski, Sascha Reber, Rolf. Current Directions in Psychological Science19.6(Dec 2010): 402-405.

The aha! Moment: The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Kounios, John; Beeman, Mark. Current Directions in Psychological Science18.4(Aug 2009): 210-216.

Neural correlates of the “aha” experiences: Evidence from an fMRI study of insight problem solving. Qiu, JiangView Profile; Li, Hong; Jou, JerwenView Profile; Liu, Jia; Luo, Yuejia; et al. Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior46.3 (Mar 2010): 397-403.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, reference-request
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# Question
Title: Are there any models of human cognition that do not depend on physicalism or materialism?
Are there any models of Human Cognition that do not depend on Physicalism or materialism? Could Cognition models that say 'mind' states are actually 'brain states' and that we are therefore neuro-chemical mechanisms ; could these models miss important factors like how 'behavioral algorithms' of the 'mind-brain' are organised and how they interact and how the mind-brain 'makes new 'behavioral algorithms'. What I call Behavioral Algorithms could be called 'mental programs' or 'mental software'. So are there models of Cognition that do not focus on Physicalism ( the philosophy that everything that exist has a physical basis and nothing else like emergent qualities or something 'intangible')?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Algorithms can be seen as rules defined on various states of the system. Thus, there must be a mapping of the physical states to the abstract states, as well as a mapping of the physical rules/transitions to the abstract rules. David Chalmers is one of the most popular philosophers who discusses the notion of when a physical system implements an abstract computational system. \[1\] It seems like you are asking for theories of cognition that are truly emergent, however. These do exist - for an overview, see \[2\]. *"Models governed by simple laws, especially models that learn, can give rise to emergent patterns that were not predicted in advance and that, even after they have been observed, may not be fully comprehended by the modeler. To what extent such patterns can or ever will be fully understood remains an open question."* This vision of the cognitive sciences falls under the epistemological framework of explanatory pluralism - the view that properties exist on many levels, but their physical basis is the same. However, this is still physicalism - everything supervenes on the physical. \[3\] Furthermore, we are often required to simulate the basic rules in order to even see the emergent properties in the first place. \[4\] **I think the take home message of this situation is that we can't have science without physicalism.**

\[1\] Chalmers, David J. "A computational foundation for the study of cognition." (1993).

\[2\] McClelland, James L. "Emergence in cognitive science." Topics in cognitive science 2.4 (2010): 751-770.

\[3\] http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/physicalism/

\[4\] Baker, Alan. "Simulation-based definitions of emergence." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 13.1 (2010): 9.

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Tags: cognitive-modeling, philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: Number of presynaptic inputs per cell in primary visual cortex
I have been digging in the literature lately, but I haven't found a nice answer with clear cut numbers (avg +- std) to this question:

How many presynaptic inputs receives a pyramidal cell in primary visual cortex (preferably in cat)?

To be a bit more precise here I also would like to know the following details:

Number of inputs in terms of synapses as well as number of presynaptic cells

1. Depending on the layer the postsynaptic cell resides in
2. Depending from where the inputs originate (afferent, horizontally recurrent, vertically recurrent etc.)
3. How many total synapses vs from how many presynaptic cells these originate, i.e. average number of synapses per pre/post cell pair
4. Depending on distance of presynaptic cells to the postsynaptic one
5. Depending on type of input, excitatory vs. inhibitory

I highly appreciate if you can direct me to literature listing actual numbers :-)

# Answer
Very detailed estimates for almost all of your points, for cat, can be found in Binzegger, T., Douglas, R. J., & Martin, K. A. C. (2004). A quantitative map of the circuit of cat primary cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 24(39), 8441-8453.
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, vision, connectionism
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title: Inducing Auditory-to-Visual Synesthesia

text:
# Question
Title: Inducing Auditory-to-Visual Synesthesia
I recently watched an interesting video that was discussing conveying color to the blind through language. It implied that there may be a way to insert the sensation of color into a person's mind via a series of sounds.

I have looked for articles on this and haven't been able to find much. I was just curious:

* Is it possible to induce a kind of auditory-to-visual synesthesia?
* Are there any articles on this?

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08

Yes I know :)

# Answer
> 2 votes
First, a definition: "Synaesthesia is a curious condition in which an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated." \[1\] There are two basic explanations for this phenomenon: the hyperconnectivity hypothesis and the disinhibition-unmasking hypothesis \[2\]. The former says that the condition results from excessive neural connections between two modalities, and the latter says that it results from a lack of inhibition of signals. A quick search reveals that it is indeed possible to induce this condition (with drugs, for example), and it isn't necessary to rewire any neural connections \[2,3,4\]. This is an example of how the brain transmits/filters information by many mechanisms, connectivity being just one of them.

\[1\] Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. "Synaesthesia--a window into perception, thought and language." Journal of consciousness studies 8.12 (2001): 3-34.

\[2\] Kadosh, Roi Cohen, et al. "Induced cross-modal synaesthetic experience without abnormal neuronal connections." Psychological Science 20.2 (2009): 258-265.

\[3\] Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran. "Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 263.1369 (1996): 377-386.

\[4\] Luke, David P., and Devin B. Terhune. "The induction of synaesthesia with chemical agents: a systematic review." Frontiers in psychology 4 (2013).

# Answer
> 1 votes
I think the only documented case of this is Neil Harbisson. From my understanding he has a camera attached to an implanted bone vibrator and a processor unit that converts color to audible frequencies. I believe, although cannot find any references, that the implanted portion of the device is similar to a bone anchored hearing aid.

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Tags: perception, vision, hearing, synesthesia
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# Question
Title: What hardware setup is commonly used for low-latency audio stimulation?
I need to carefully control the latency and timing of auditory stimulation in an upcoming experiment. Some of this depends on software, but my question is specifically relating to **hardware**, **drivers** and **OS kernel**. In other words, I'm not looking for advice on programming languages; I have that part covered.

# Driver & OS

I'm somewhat familiar with the ASIO4ALL driver suite in Windows, but I was weighing this against the option of using a Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) with a real-time kernel installed. My concern is that sound is notoriously problematic in Linux. I seem to recall real-time audio being all but impossible if you're working with ALSA. Is the same true of Pulseaudio? Has anybody successfully set up low-latency audio output in Linux?

# Hardware

What sound cards are commonly used? Can anybody suggest some specialized hardware? Ideally, I'd like to stick with a PCI card of some sort and not have to resort to bulky external sound cards, but I could be swayed if these cards offer significant advantages.

Thanks!

# Answer
It generally helps to provide some sort of specification as to how well you want to control the timing. There are 4 orders of magnitude difference between the 100 ms timing accuracy required for auditory and visual stimuli to be judged simultaneous (Zampini et al. 2005) and the 0.1 ms timing accuracy required for binaural stimuli to be judged simultaneous (Hershkowitz and Durlach 1969). There are two types of latency when it comes to audio stimulation, what I will refer to as the ongoing and onset latencies.

**Ongoing Latency**

Imagine a study on virtual reality where the subjects head orientation is being tracked in real time presented sound depends on the orientation. In this type of study it is not possible to load the sound in advance onto the sound device. If the audio device requires 1000 ms of sound in advance so as to not drop samples, there will be a noticeable lag between moving the head and the sound position updating. Scarpaci et al. (2005) found that an for these types of studies an overall latency of under 32 ms is desirable. This overall latency needs to include the time required to read the current position as well as generate the sound and then buffer the sound. Depending on the speed of other devices and the amount of required processing time, this may only leave 5-10 ms for sound buffering. Head movements are relatively slow and our sensitivity to the location of a sound is relatively poor, and other experiments may require much lower latencies.

A perfect sound device would have an ongoing latency less than a sample. With a sample rate of 10 kHz, the sound hardware has 0.1 ms per sample, but at 100 kHz it only has 0.01 ms per sample so when choosing a sound device it is important to consider the sample rate. Off the shelf systems with PortAudio can provide ongoing latencies on the order of 10 ms. The PsychToolbox patches PortAudio and can achieve lower ongoing latencies. Scarpaci et al. (2005) achieved subsample ongoing latency with a 44.1 kHz sample rate by using a real time Linux kernel and a dedicated DA board. Custom systems by TDT can provide subsample ongoing latency with a 200 kHz sample rate.

**Onset Latency**

Imagine an EEG study in which one wants to start recording from the EEG electrodes at the same time as the sound starts playing. Unlike ongoing latency, it is possible to load the stimulus onto the sound device in advance. The goal is then to have the sound device start as quickly as possible. In my opinion, it is more important to minimize the variability in this latency rather than minimize the latency itself. If it takes between 99 and 101 ms (high latency, low variability) to start the sound, then if the EEG recordings are delayed by 100 ms, the onset of the sound and recordings will be within +/-1 ms. If however, it takes between 0 and 20 ms (low latency, high variability) and the EEG recordings are delayed by 10 ms, then the onset asynchrony can be as large as 10 ms. The case where the onset latency really matters is when the start of the sound is externally triggered. For example if a subject presses a button to start the sound, having a "long" delay would be problematic.

Similar to ongoing latencies off the shelf systems can provide onset latencies on the order of 10 ms and PsychToolbox can get down to about 5 ms (maybe less). Scarpaci et al. (2005) did not measure onset latency and performance is likely poor since the system was not optimized for that aspect of sound delivery. The TDT systems provide an external trigger and can provide onset latencies down to levels that make it difficult to measure (sub microsecond). CRS provides custom hardware that can be externally triggered so should provide extremely low onset latencies, but the system requires the stimulus to be loaded in advanced so it essentially has an infinite ongoing latency.
> 4 votes

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Tags: experimental-psychology, psychophysics, hearing, stimulation
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# Question
Title: Spiking Neural Network Simulation: Measuring and Classifying Bump Attractor States
I am currently working with Spiking Neural Networks and multi-(meta)-stable attractor states.

What I observe in my simulations are 'bump' attractors that appear, disappear, and may wander around. Here is a screen shot from a simulation:

Dark blue dots represent excitatory neurons' spikes (fading into white to leave a trace), and dark red triangles representing inhibitory neurons' spikes.

If neurons are currently part of a 'bump' cluster, they exhibit a high firing rate, otherwise the rate is much lower.

The neurons are arranged on a 2D torus map (periodic boundary conditions). Thus, for every neuron I have its respective x and y coordinate plus the timing of the spikes.

What I want and need is a algorithm that

1. can detect and distinguish neurons within the bump state from non-bump states
2. measure the average size of a bump
3. the average number of bumps per unit time and unit map size
4. the average lifetime of bump (as I said they are meta-stable)
5. In case the bumps are "wandering" the average speed or drift of a bump

What might be a suitable clustering algorithm in order to perform these steps? Would it be more useful to convolve the spike times with a filter in order to get some rate representation?

# Answer
> 1 votes
* 0: As you suggested, use a temporal filter to get a smoothed rate representation
* 1.a: Clean up each frame by using (e.g.) a morphological opening then closing step
* 1.b: Locate the centres of bumps, perhaps using non-maximum suppression.
* 1.c: Choose a reasonable activity threshold for neurons to still be "inside" the bump: Maybe 80% of the distance between zero and the activity at the bump-centre.
* 1.d: Assign neurons to bumps by finding connected regions around the bump centres.
* 2, 2: Once you have the neurons assigned to bumps, this is just simple stats
* 4: Track bumps between frames by assigning nearest bump centres across frames. Apply some uniqueness criterion to detect bumps appearing and disappearing.
* 5: This is also easy once you have the bumps tracked.

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Tags: computational-modeling, neural-network, dynamic-systems
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# Question
Title: Where in the brain is meaning extracted from visual information?
I am looking into several systems for improving learning speeds and ran into a question I seem unable to answer on my own:

When we read a word, it somehow gets converted into it's abstract meaning. To be clear in my further descriptions, I will encapsulate written information into " and abstract information into +

For example, a person fluent in English and Japanese (or Chinese for this particular example) could look at the letters

```
"Tree"

```

and

```
"木"

```

and in both cases convert this information into the internal representation of +tree+.

My questions are

1. Is my understanding of the reading process accurate?
2. If yes, what zone(s) of the brain would handle this conversion?
3. Where in the brain on the 10-20 System would these zones be located?

# Answer
The short answer is we don't know for sure. Look up "alexia" and "agraphia"; pinpointing the regions of the brain that, if damaged, interfere with reading might give some indication of the cortical regions involved.

Visual cortex (back of the brain) is obviously necessary for the general population, but it's clearly possible for blind people to learn to read without vision. I'm not aware if blind people require an intact visual cortex or not.

There is a nice study showing that semantic information is present in a very compact form in the hippocampus: Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. Quian Quiroga R, Reddy L, Kreiman G, Koch C and Fried I Nature, 435: 1102-1107; 2005. PDF
> 5 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, reading
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# Question
Title: How does the brain compute sound localisation without the equations?
What sort of computations are used for localising sound with the ears, and how does the brain compute the time difference between sounds reaching each ear? I am interested in the specific mechanisms rather than a general account.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Some neuroscience **papers** on sound localization:

1. Joris Philip X, Smith Philip H, and Yin Tom C.T Coincidence Detection in the Auditory System // Neuron (1998)
2. Agmon-Snir Hagai, Carr Catherine E. and Rinzel John The role of dendrites in auditory coincidence detection // Nature (1998)
3. Trussell Laurence O. Synaptic mechanisms for coding timing in auditory neurons // Annual Review of Physiology (1999)
4. Grothe B., Pecka M., & McAlpine D. Mechanisms of Sound Localization in Mammals // Physiological Reviews (2010)
5. Chen X, Leischner U, Rochefort NL, Nelken I, Konnerth A. Functional mapping of single spines in cortical neurons in vivo // Nature (2011)

**Books**

1. Blauert, J.: Spatial hearing: the psychophysics of human sound localization; MIT Press (1983)
2. Schnupp, Nelken and King: Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound, MIT Press, 2011

# Answer
> 4 votes
The location of a sound is defined on three dimensions: distance, elevation, and azimuth. When the distance between a listener and a sound source is changed there is a change in the overall level as well as the relative levels of direct and reverberant sound energy. When the elevation is changed the overall level and the direct to reverberant ratio say roughly constant. The pinna, and to some extent the head and body, shape the spectrum of the sound in an elevation dependent way. This so called pinna filtering is typically talked about as introducing a notch in the spectrum, at around 8 kHz, and that the frequency of this notch varies with elevation. Changing the azimuth of a sound changes the relative levels at the two ears and the relative timing between the ears. The interaural level difference (ILD) arises from the head shadow effect, basically the head blocks some of the sound from reaching the "far" ear. The interaural time difference (ITD) is a result of differences in the distance the sound needs to travel; a sound coming from the side needs to travel about 0.5 ft further, which takes about 0.6 ms, to get to the "far" ear.

All the information the brain has about a sound comes from the auditory nerve. The firing rate of auditory neurons depend on the spectrum of the sound and the sound level. In addition to firing rate, auditory neurons have the remarkable ability to "phase lock" to a stimulus up to 1-2 kHz. How the brain decodes the pattern of firing rate and timing information across the neuron is not fully understood.

The lateral superior olive (LSO) has neurons that are responsible for extracting ILD cues. The neurons receive excitatory inputs from the ipsilateral ear and inhibatory inputs from the contralateral ear. This excitatory-inhibitory (EI) layout means the firing rate is essentially invariant to overall level, but changes with the ILD.

The medial superior olive (MSO) has neurons that are responsible for extracting ITD cues. The neruons receive excitatory inputs from both the ipsilateral and contralateral ears. The is specialized anatomy that preserves the timing of the neural firings such that these excitatory-excitatory (EE) neurons can act as a coincidence detector and only fire if they receive both ipsilateral and contralateral input at the same time. In some species there are intricate axonal "delay lines" that change the relative time of arrivals of the contralateral and ipsilateral inputs such that each MSO neuron is tuned to a particular ITD. Brand et al. (2002) argue that fast inhibitory inputs are required for ITD tuning.

The dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) has neurons that are thought to be responsible for detecting spectral notches due to the convergence of both narrow band and wide band inhibitory inputs.

Sensitivity to changes in overall level is generally well predicted by the rate level (and to some extent timing) behaviour of the auditory nerve.

Not much work has looked at the neural processing of the direct to reverberant ratio.

# Answer
> 1 votes
From the physics(acoustics) perspective, the sensory input changes depending upon pitch. When you hear a sound that is high-pitched, your head blocks the sound wave, creating a sound shadow for the ear on the opposite side of your head from the sound source. This sound shadow means that your ears hear the sound at two different volumes, which the brain then uses to calculate direction.

For low-pitched sound, the distance between your ears creates a phase difference between the sound perceived in each ear. And that phase difference indicates sound direction. If I understand your question, it centered upon the brain's processing of this phase difference information.

For mixed-pitch sounds, you utilize both, which makes complex sounds even easier to locate.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, computational-modeling, theoretical-neuroscience, auditory-discrimination, hearing
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# Question
Title: Does learning too much useless information weaken my memory?
From what I understand, since we receive a lot of information every day, our brains are tasked with remembering the few important bits and ignoring (or forgetting) everything else. I also know of habituation, how we become ignorant of stimuli that repeat often and are irrelevant. I also know of the "learning pyramid". This is what I'm interested in: the internet, especially some parts (reddit, facebook, 9gag and so on), constantly bombards us with various "facts" - generally useless information. Is it possible that our brains, as a reaction to extensive internet usage, learn to ignore information that is only heard or read (we go two/three steps up on the learning pyramid)?

I ask this because I think it was a lot easier for me to remember things a few years back (I'm 17 now), when I wasn't using the internet as much, or at all. I know you learn easier when you are younger, but I don't think I'm that old yet.

# Answer
> 13 votes
Current evidence suggests that internet access is not weakening memory, but changing what information is prioritized. This study referenced below suggests that when people expect to have future access to information, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where or how that information can be found.

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner Science 5 August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 776-778.

DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745

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Tags: memory, internet
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# Question
Title: Can an extravert suffer from social anxiety disorder?
Extraversion is a personality trait that, as the Wikipedia article describes, causes people "to enjoy human interactions", to be sociable, outgoing and love crowds.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD), on the other hand, causes people to fear being judged and often makes them avoid social situations, either in general or at least those aspects that would lead to the person to "stand in the spotlight".

From their definitions, extraversion and SAD seem to exclude each other. It seems impossible that they can co-occur in the same person.

**Is it possible that an extraverted person suffers from social anxiety disorder?**

# Answer
> 5 votes
It's pretty difficult to imagine a person with Social Anxiety Disorder being an extrovert. The symptoms of SAD include \[1\]:

> * Intense fear of interacting with strangers and of being judged
> * Worrying about embarrassing or humiliating yourself or that others think that you look anxious
> * Anxiety that disrupts your daily routine, work, school or other activities
> * Avoiding doing things or speaking to people out of fear of embarrassment
> * Avoiding situations where you might be the center of attention
> * Difficulty making eye contact or talking

Signs and symptoms include blushing, sweating, trembling or shaking, fast heartbeat, upset stomach, nausea, shaky voice, muscle tension, confusion, diarrhea, and cold, clammy hands.

Extroverts, on the other hand, usually don't have any problems with the above situations.

Introversion and extroversion are not either/or, but exist on a continuum. One can have attributes of both, and empathy with both. SAD is not on this continuum.

\[1\] Mayo Clinic

# Answer
> 4 votes
On the surface, it does seem like social anxiety disorder and extroversion shouldn't both exist in the same person. On the other hand, anongoodnurse has already touched upon a point which leads us to a different conclusion - these traits are on different dimensions. When one takes a closer look at what the two dimensions actually mean, (especially as confirmed in latest psychological research) it seems like they can co-exist just fine, and most people probably have one or two (or many more) aquaitances with both traits (to some degree or other). anongoodnurse has already described SAD. Unlike it is traditionally assumed by the layman, the introversion-extroversion scale does not measure a social property, however. Rather, it describes to what extent a person derives rewards from stimuli - extraverts simply derive more pleasure from environmental stimuli (of any kind). \[1\] Recent neuroscientific research has confirmed this: modifying the neurotransmitter systems of reward/punishment (i.e. dopamine) modifies introversion/extraversion. \[2\] Of course, an arbitratily chosen person who derives pleasure from the environment probably also usually derives pleasure from social environments. However, this is surely not always the case - there are plenty of people in academia, for instance, who love exploring environments - just not social ones ;).

\[1\] Gray, Jeffrey A. "The psychophysiological basis of introversion-extraversion." Behaviour research and therapy 8.3 (1970): 249-266.

\[2\] Depue, Richard A., and Yu Fu. "On the nature of extraversion: variation in conditioned contextual activation of dopamine-facilitated affective, cognitive, and motor processes." Frontiers in human neuroscience 7 (2013).

# Answer
> 1 votes
There is a big difference between *being* X and *showing signs* of X.

In particular, given reasonable incentives (that are quite abundant in society), people can fake appearances of extroversion and empathy, and some people can do it quite successfully. Some disorders may make it hard\[er\] to accomplish, but people with a severe lack of empathy (psychopathy) often are able appear more empathetic than the average.

Similarly, a highly introverted person (though probably not with Social Anxiety Disorder) could plausibly behave as very extroverted; it could be unpleasant and stressful for them, but they can do it if they choose, and have focused on the relevant skills that might have come naturally for the more extroverted people simply by more exposure and practice.

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Tags: emotion, personality, anxiety, extraversion
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# Question
Title: Two different values for criterion in signal detection theory?
I'm a signal detection theory newbie. I have data with a classical SDT design: the participants can answer YES or NO to a question where the correct answer is YES or NO, depending on the presence or absence of a stimulus feature. I looked online for a script to calculate d', and found one which is confusing me.

What's confusing is that the criterion is calculated in two different ways. Does anybody have an idea why this is the case? These are the relevant lines of (matlab) code:

`% Convert to Z scores
 zHit = norminv(proportion_of_hits) ;
 zFA = norminv(proportion_of_false_alarms) ;
% Calculate d-prime
 dPrime = zHit - zFA ;
% calculate BETA
 beta = exp((zFA^2 - zHit^2)/2);
% calculate C
 C = -.5 * (zHit + zFA);`

I'm interested in beta and C - how one interprets them, how they differ from each other, what a high/low score in each of the two means. And also, which is the one that is more likely to be understandable to a reader who knows SDT.

# Answer
> 5 votes
For these types of questions I really like *Detection Theory: A User's Guide* by Macmillan and Creelman. They consider 3 types of bias. The criterion location $c$ is calculated relative to the zero-bias point and expressed in units of standard deviations, such that a $c$ of 1 means the criterion is 1 standard deviation to the right of the zero-bias location and a $c$ of -2 means the criterion is 2 standard deviations to the left of the zero-bias location. Since $c$ is relative to the zero-bias location, if $c$ is held constant, then as $d'$ changes the distance of $c$ to the mean of the distribution changes. Arguably, this means that there is a change in response bias, but the measure of $c$ does not reflect that (after all, the distance to the zero-bias location, which is $c$, does not change with changes in $d'$). The response bias metric $c'=c/d'$ avoids this issue by taking sensitivity ($d'$) into account. The third measure of bias $\beta$ is defined as $\beta = e^{cd'}$ (which if you do the math is what your code calculates). This measure of bias is based on the likelihood ratio of the two distributions. Because of the mathematical relationship between the measures, they tell you the same thing. There isn't a correct measure and it is easy to switch between the measures, so it does not matter which you report.

For further reading, see also Stanislaw & Todorov (1999), *Calculation of Signal Detection Theory Measures*

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Tags: signal-detection, psychophysics
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# Question
Title: Analysis according to Jung's Psychological Types
Recently I read Jung's Psychological Types out of self-questioning. I would like to analyze myself in such a fashion more "professionally", however I do not profess to be able to do that myself, having no prior education and training in psychology. I have already done the MBTI test, but after reading Jung's book, I realize that the test is not exhaustive.

My question is - which types of therapists or specialists normally perform these analyses? Do some psychologists base their analysis on Jung's theory? Is it possible to ask "just" for a personality analysis based on Jung's Psychological Types? Or is this theory just an auxiliary method, and does not play as an approach per se?

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you are simply interested in how your personality would be construed within this specific psychoanalytic framework out of pure curiosity, I'm sure one of those Jungian psychanalists Chuck Sherrington mentioned would be tell you something about it (they get paid for it, after all). However, I think they would use the MBTI - that seems to be the only real implementation of a test of Jung's psychologcal types. Furthermore, I feel compelled to caution against personality type tests such as the MBTI from a scientific point of view, because they seem to have little to no empirical basis \[1\]. There are better personality tests out there. In fact, I would caution against psychoanalytic approaches in general, because they are hardly scientific. \[2\] So, *in my personal opinion*, if you are just curious, go for it. If, however, your purpose is anything more than entertainment, steer clear.

\[1\] Pittenger, David J. "Measuring the MBTI… and coming up short." Journal of Career Planning and Employment 54.1 (1993): 48-52.

\[2\] de Maat, Saskia, et al. "The current state of the empirical evidence for psychoanalysis: a meta-analytic approach." Harvard review of psychiatry 21.3 (2013): 107-137.

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Tags: personality, psychoanalysis, jung
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