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POPSDéjà vu: Where fact meets fantasy "Déjà vu can happen to anyone, and anyone who has had it will recognise the description immediately. It is more than just a sense that you have seen or done something before; it is a startling, inappropriate and often disturbing sense that history is repeating, and impossibly so. You can't place where the earlier encounter happened, and it can feel like a premonition or a dream. Subjective, strange and fleeting, not to mention tainted by paranormal explanations, the phenomenon has been a difficult and unpopular one to study. Now that is changing...."
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POPSCan We Increase Our Intelligence? "It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it’s known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime"
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POPSThe Paradox of Temptation "There is a saying in many addiction recovery programs that goes like this: “If you keep going to the barber shop, eventually you’ll get a haircut.” Translated that means, stay away from temptation. Hanging around saloons or chocolatiers or raves or racetracks—name your poison—just increases the odds that your self-control will fail you someday. But is this true? Does the mere availability of something tempting weaken the will to resist?"
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POPSAre you conscious? 17 Criteria for Consciousness "Conclusions Seth et al have provided an interesting set of criteria for evaluating consciousness - the implication is that later criteria build on the earlier ones. It has applications to even the most controversial cases (for example, Terri Schiavo) and could be useful as a benchmark in the evaluation of animal intelligence and animal consciousness. That said, there are lurking problems with this account. For one, there could be alternative forms of consciousness which satisfy the later criteria without satisfying the earlier ones - we just don't know. The entire approach reeks of human-centeredness, though of course that's a necessary evil: we don't really know that any other species is conscious (and furthermore, we're merely giving our fellow humans the benefit of the doubt)."
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POPSParadox of Choice A journey to understand how emotion and logic interact to guide us through our options, we ponder how we get through the million choices and decisions we make every day
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POPSThe dance of consciousness "Experience is something that is temporarily extended and active. Perceptual consciousness is a style of access to the world around us. I can touch something, and when I touch something I make use of an understanding of the way in which my own movements help me secure access to that which is before me. The point is not that merely that I learn about or achieve access to the world by touching. The point is that the thing shows up for me as something in a space of movement-oriented possibilities".
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POPS Does Time really Slow Down in a Crisis? Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by." And though the results of this study can lead towards disorders linked with timing, such as schizophrenia, Eagleman believes "it's really about understanding the virtual reality machinery that we're trapped in,"Our brain constructs this reality for us that, if we look closely, we can find all these strange illusions in. The fact that we're now seeing this with how we perceive time is new."
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POPSConscientious people live longer Conscientiousness, said Friedman in a news release, "seems to be as important as most commonly assessed medical risk factors, few of which are psychological ... Not only do conscientious individuals have better health habits and less risk-taking, but they also travel life pathways toward healthier psychosocial environments -- such as more stable jobs and marriages -- and may even have a biological predisposition toward good health."
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