Creativity tied to mental illness
Irrelevance can make you mad By William J. Cromie Harvard News Office Ignoring what seems irrelevant to your immediate needs may be good for your mental health but bad for creativity. Focusing on every sight, sound, and thought that enters your mind can drive a person crazy. "Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers," notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. Carson, Jordan Peterson (now at the University of Toronto), and Daniel Higgins did experiments to find out what these conditions might be. They put 182 Harvard graduate and undergraduate students through a series of tests involving listening to repeated strings of nonsense syllables, hearing background noise, and watching yellow lights on a video screen. The students also filled out questionnaires about their creative achievements on a new type of form developed by Carson, and they took standard intelligence tests. IQ and creativity
A SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: SOCIAL FACTORSSHAPING PERCEPTION AND DECISION-MAKING
Elsewhere we examined several great tensions shaping the human condition: the role of nature versus nurture in shaping humans' social fates and the tensions between the needs of individuals' and the needs of their social systems. The relative importance of these tensions--and relative potency of one force versus the other--has produced great divides in social psychological theories. Another issue generating a major schism involves the workings of the human psyche, whether individuals' decision-makings are more-or-less rational (or, perhaps are determined by some universally uniform neural brain design) or whether they are shaped by uncontrollable sociocultural (external) or emotional (internal) forces. Here, the intent is to stress the socio-cultural component of consciousness and thought. The idea that "true" reality is never truly graspable by humans' sensory and cognitive equipment goes back at least to the works of Plato. Consider the social construction of sensory distinctions.
The Power Of Introverts: A Manifesto For Quiet Brilliance
Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “Quiet : The Power of Introverts” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Cook: This may be a stupid question, but how do you define an introvert? Cain: Not a stupid question at all! It’s also important to understand that introversion is different from shyness. Cook: You argue that our culture has an extroversion bias. Cain: In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. In my book, I travel the country – from a Tony Robbins seminar to Harvard Business School to Rick Warren’s powerful Saddleback Church – shining a light on the bias against introversion. Cook: How does this cultural inclination affect introverts? Cain: Yes. Cook: Are you an introvert?
Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change
Thursday, September 29, 2011 Psilocybn A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it. Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. "Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. The research, approved by Johns Hopkins' Institutional Review Board, was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The study participants completed two to five eight-hour drug sessions, with consecutive sessions separated by at least three weeks. This press release has been viewed 1562664 time(s).
5 Psych Experiments That Sounded Fun (Until They Started) | Cracked.com - StumbleUpon
So you see an ad in the paper from a lab looking for test subjects. They say they want to study the effects of getting high, or eating too much, or having sex. Oh, and they'll pay you to do all of those things. Preposterous, right? Got to be a setup for some kind of elaborate prank. The Have Sex For Money Experiment Wanted: a healthy, sexually functional male to have sex with a woman. Yes, that happened, and yes, it was legal. No, he needed to study the humping first hand. For the subjects, it offered all of the benefits of prostitution without the constant threat of genital sores and being locked in a rape dungeon that normally goes along with it. The Harsh Reality First, you found out that these people would be watching you the whole time: That's Masters and Johnson. We'll let that sink in for a moment. We're not knocking the work Masters and Johnson did--it was absolutely revolutionary and totally changed the way the modern world thinks about sex. The NASA Bed Rest Study This won't help.
The Ten Most Revealing Psych Experiments
Psychology is the study of the human mind and mental processes in relation to human behaviors - human nature. Due to its subject matter, psychology is not considered a 'hard' science, even though psychologists do experiment and publish their findings in respected journals. Some of the experiments psychologists have conducted over the years reveal things about the way we humans think and behave that we might not want to embrace, but which can at least help keep us humble. That's something. 1. 'Lord of the Flies': Social Identity Theory The Robbers Cave Experiment is a classic social psychology experiment conducted with two groups of 11-year old boys at a state park in Oklahoma, and demonstrates just how easily an exclusive group identity is adopted and how quickly the group can degenerate into prejudice and antagonism toward outsiders. Researcher Muzafer Sherif actually conducted a series of 3 experiments. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Turns out that it's all about framing.
