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POPSsmart kids vs popular kids
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<< Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.
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POPSNeurophysiology and Buddhism <<<It is undeniable, however, that the false reification of that which we identify spuriously as 'self' — now acquiring the weighty imprimatur of modern science — has devastating implications for all brands of Theism. Buddhism alone not merely encompasses this late-revealed truism, it makes it the basis of a new moral order that sees the annihilation of the self as the inelutable first step in our mastery of the existential predicament that doggedly besets us in this sorry world. A few concluding words — there remains a metaphysical (and theological) hiatus in dealing with 'being' without a reference to that other great existential puzzle — the transformative aspect of life that is generally subsumed under the title 'becoming'.>>>
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POPSEmotional Pollution and the Cult of Feelings <<<No matter how many self-help books and experts on talk shows insist that your feelings are "valid" and "appropriate," they cannot feel authentically like your own so long as they are mere reactions to someone else. If we allow the meaning of our lives to be subject to the vagaries of our reactions to the subtle emotional displays of others, we cannot help but fall into the present day quagmire of emotional pollution. To feel genuine and empowered, like a person of substance, folks need to know more than whether their emotions are "appropriate." They need to know what they mean about the self. The meaning of our emotions cannot lie in how they feel, but in what they tell us about the current fidelity to your deepest values.>>>
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POPSA Breeze of Eastern Epistemology:Knowing What Exists Here we stand in this proverbial and pre-verbal here-and-now, in the middle of Nothingness... This is all there is... And to ignore this "Now" would be the ignorance of un-awareness. To ignore what's outside of this "Now" would be the ignorance of bliss...
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POPSWhat is a Confessing Sam? Researchers ironically note that it is often just as difficult to know whether or not someone is telling the truth when they plead against themselves as when they plead for themselves. Dr S M Kassin and two colleagues from the Department of Psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts report in the April, 2005 Law and Human Behaviour that when college students and police investigators judged 10 prison inmates confessing to crimes (half the confessions were true, half were false as they were concocted for the study), the students were more accurate than the police in determining who told the truth. -More than 50 people confessed to having committed the famous and still unsolved Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1947. -At least six people have confessed to being the Zodiac Killer. -At last count, 20 individuals have confessed to the 1996 murder of child beauty queen Jon Benet Ramsey.
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POPSThe name-letter effect “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen. “Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. There are more prosaic reasons that people may feel connected to their Googlegängers, though. They may share a name because they belong to the same ethnic group, or their families may have had similar aspirations for them.
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POPSPolitical Junkies: Why it Feels Good to Be an Extremist In The Political Brain , psychologist Drew Western summarizes fMRI experiments exploring the neuro-psychology of systematic bias and rationalization in the brains of political extremists. Finding ways to dismiss contradictory evidence triggers pleasant emotional releases in partisans' brains, eventually becoming a pleasurable, learned behavior. Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased "reasoning." These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their "fix," giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
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POPSAnimal hoarding:An expert illuminates the psychology behind this behavior Hoarders often have major dysfunction in work, social and daily activities, reduced awareness of surroundings, and impaired ability to form close relationships with people. Contrary to what we originally thought, animal hoarding does not seem to be strongly associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and it is not yet defined as an independent psychological condition. Clinical evaluations indicate that it is often associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders, including borderline personality disorder.
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POPSThe Fantastic in Art & Fiction >>Images were selected for their intrinsic relationship to the topic, because they illuminated an important dynamic, or quite simply because they were unusually striking.Though, inevitably, some familiar pieces will be found in these pages, we have attempted to favor rare or unusual works that, to our knowledge, have not been reproduced before. Hence the concomitant emphasis on book illustration, and on a wealth of images that have remained more or less invisible in canonical art histories. Because of its rich and varied modes of representation the Fantastic also lends itself quite easily to interdisciplinary approaches. Psychology and sociology, art and literary history, anthropology and folklore among other disciplines, can provide avenues of investigation useful in the study of such basic critical or analytical concepts for the Fantastic as repression, the uncanny, indeterminacy, or the postmodern.<<
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POPSCan You Predict Happiness? Take the simple act of eating a potato chip. In a series of experiments, Gilbert invited Harvard undergraduates to a lab stocked with potato chips, along with either sardines or chocolate. To compare expected versus actual enjoyment of the experience, one group of students was asked to predict how much they would enjoy the chips compared to the relatively better food (chocolate) or the worse food (sardines); this forecasting group was asked to imagine eating the chips before, after or instead of the alternatives. Students in another "experience" group were instructed to eat the chips and the other foods. Turns out that the other foods had no impact on the actual enjoyment of eating chips. "People who are simply imagining how much they're going to like chips imagine they're going to like them much more if they're eaten after sardines, than if they're eaten after chocolate," Gilbert says. "That's wrong."
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POPSColor Psychology Color psychology is concerned with the effects of color on mood, emotion, behavior.Colors are not only used for decorations or adding beauty to an object, but they can be used to determine personality traits to affect people’s mood and to effect on other people around you. Each colour is connected to various areas of our body and will affect us differently emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Several ancient cultures, including the Egyptians and Chinese, practiced chromotherapy, or using colors to heal. Chromotherapy is sometimes referred to as light therapy or colourology and is still used today as a holistic or alternative treatment. In this treatment: * Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation. * Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body. * Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels. * Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain. I'll take red :-)
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POPSTheory of Sexual Selection:The Human Mind and the Peacock's Tale "There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards . . . Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity. Likewise, deep in the mind of modern woman is the same hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they both be the same man . . . Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth and genes."
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POPSThe reality of married lovemaking "The challenge for couples is balancing a sense of intimacy and safety and security with a sense of unpredictability and creativity and eroticism," says Barry McCarthy, Ph.D., a psychology professor at American University in Washington, D.C. "When sexual intimacy is strong, making love plays a healthy 15 to 20 percent role in energizing your marriage. The paradox is that when sex is problematic, it plays an inordinately powerful, negative role in new marriages."
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POPSImaginary friends While it's generally perfectly fine to humor your child and go along with her claims about the existence of an imaginary friend, there are a few ground rules: -Don't let the "friend" be your child's only companion. -Don't let your child shift responsibility for everything bad to the friend. -Treat the friend with respect. -Don't use the friend to manipulate your child. Most kids lose their imaginary friends between their third and fifth birthdays. Sometimes the friends are forgotten, sometimes they're sent on a distant and permanent trip, and other times they "die" in a horrible accident. (from familyresource.com) Pretend friends rarely are a sign of emotional problems.If a child claims a friend is controlling her and making her do things she doesn't want to do, parents should seek psychological help.But if a child isn't depressed and has real-life friends too, pretend pals shouldn't cause concern. In fact, parents should look for day care and preschool programs that
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POPSSchizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing
A recent study may have found what kind of process goes awry in schizophrenic brains. Researchers found that DISC1 regulates the migration of new neurons in the adult brain. When the levels of DISC1 were reduced in mice during adult neurogenesis, the newborn neurons sped up and overshot their intended targets within the hippocampus, When the neurons finally reached their destinations, they forged an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells, a series of events that might give rise to the abnormal—and quite crippling—brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song, a Johns Hopkins neurologist who also worked on the study. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug that treats schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. So what evolutionary advantage could schizophrenia-related genes bring to people who have some of the genes but not the disease? For now, this remains one of the many open questions.
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POPSComplete List of PsychTests and quizzes There are 4 categories, career,I.Q.,personality,and relationships. There are the free tests, and of course many more available to members. I'm not sure of the conditions behind the membership tests, but so far I'm having enough fun with the free ones.
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