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Perhaps you're referring to Naomi Eisenberger's work on the neural basis of social pain. Her seminal paper found that the neural correlates of distress from social rejection overlapped with those of physical pain, i.e., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula.
She's recently published a literature review on social pain in the brain (...
15
I think the answer is a qualified yes, humans can think without language. Ultimately though it depends on what you mean by "think."
There is a remarkably large number of deaf people who are not exposed either to a signed or spoken language even in developed countries. These people often invent their own gesture systems, referred to as home sign systems. ...
14
My hypothesis: The world accidentally stumbled upon the first (to my knowledge) bi-stable color illusion
Here is an example of bistable illusion:
This bistable illusion involves the perception of motion. Is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? The deal is that the image is actually ambiguous. But you can't possible perceive both clockwise or ...
13
I basically agree with @Nick Stauner, but I want to add another important aspect, namely the gradient of photoreceptor densities in the human retina: In the fovea there is a sharp peak in cone density compared to more eccentric regions, as described in Curcio et al. (1990) and see the following graph obtained from Web Vision:
The cones have a different ...
13
A study by Rainer et al. (2011) has shown that words are skipped and apparently filled in mentally quite often (in the order of 8 to 30% of times).
Two important factors that increased skipping rates were the length of the word and the predictability of the word due to contextual constraints. Both cases apply on the word 'the', because it is short and ...
12
No, inner speech does not follow the same neural pathway as speech coming in from outside.
Rather, inner speech uses the same neural mechanism as outer speech - that is, speech going out. The neural mechanisms of inner speech can be studied using recently developed technologies such as fMRI imaging of subjects instructed to or prevented from engaging in ...
11
Here is a study that creates and manipulates the "song stuck in your head" phenomenon. In particular, it is a myth that only "bad" songs are stuck in your head. These songs can be categorized as intrusive thoughts. Also the obvious finding was that recently heard music was more likely to be stuck in your head.
The authors comes up with a term called the "...
11
Basically, the retina contains two different kinds of receptors: rods and cones. Cones are concentrated in the fovea and activate ganglion cells more discretely than rods. Rods are more interconnected by horizontal cells (if I'm not mistaken...), so multiple rods can often activate the same ganglion cell, whereas each cone is more likely to have its own ...
11
Short answer
Yes, there is a difference between hearing and understanding sound.
Background
Acoustic information is processed in different neural centers along the auditory pathway. The auditory system runs from the peripheral end organ in the inner ear (the cochlea) to the cortex. Along the way various processing steps are carried out. For ...
11
The source I have quoted below gives an example of the following stenographic image:-
Is this perception a particular trick that my eye performs or is it processing the visual data in an alternative way?
Stereograms can be viewed as three-dimensional images by providing two
side-by-side views of a three-dimensional scene, rendered from
slightly ...
10
Yes, there are benefits, but I don't think it requires long-term switches. Studies have used this as a manipulation to try and increase self control and have found that it decrease aggression. Based on this, once one has mastered using the non-dominant hand, it seems like the benefit of continuing to use that hand might be over (as it no longer requires ...
10
The images you've linked are composites, and so probably don't contain the characteristics by which raters were able to judge IQ accurately. The original article (Kleisner, Chvátalová, & Flegr, 2014) is freely available and appears to answer your question in its abstract:
Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a ...
9
There is no true frame rate of the eyes, but there are limitations. The brain uses blurring to simulate continuity. Films are shot at 24 frames per second; if you go too much lower than that, the film will seem choppy. This is because the motion blurring process is too fast and it finishes "blurring" before the frame changes, so you just see choppy frames....
9
First I have to say that the wavelengths of light are on a totally different order of magnitude than sound. So the parallel drawn in your question "do light waves, for example one with the same wave length as a mid-C and another with a mid-F wave, look nicely together?" may seem logical, but is on closer inspection not easily maintained. Instead, one way to ...
9
Bach-y-Rita's Tactile Vision Substitution System (TVSS) project was initiated in 1963 and he has since been regarded as the founding father of sensory substitution. The concept of sensory substitution refers to the process of obtaining information about the world from a functional sensory system (e.g. touch) that would normally be obtained from a lost ...
9
Part of the difficulty in studying time perception is that memory is known to be biased by numerous factors including arousal and salience. So while people commonly report time slowing down during specific events, it is difficult to differentiate the effects of retroactive memory bias in encoding and recall from actual increased resolution in the perception ...
9
The Lateral Preference Inventory
Coren (1993) developed an inventory for lateral preference (The Lateral Preference Inventory). Several items concerned ear preference.
I found the choice of items to be quite interesting. See below for the items concerned with ear preference.
Based on a large adult normative sample, a total score was created for the four ...
8
Jens' answer is pretty much spot on, but misses the fact, remembered from my undergraduate lectures, that your ears actually partially 'turn off' when you speak (or chew), in what's called the stapedius reflex (wikipedia).
The most common reference I've seen for this is Møller (2000), which unfortunately is a book, but I'm sure more information could be ...
8
Well for one, the first neurons to decode this symbol are orientation neurons, in V1 of the primary visual cortex. So some neurons have enhanced firing for say a 45 degree angle, and neighboring neurons for a 46 degree angle, and so on. Higher up the processing stream groups of neurons respond to shapes, that are a conglomerate of the orientation lines. Then ...
8
Seems this is a newly discovered phenomenon! Tangen, Murphy, and Thompson (2011) describe this as a result of their method of presentation: alignment of the pupils and fast cycling through faces with different proportions. It is also important that the cycle of new images remain uninterrupted. They say "relative encoding seems to drive the effect," and list ...
8
The first one is a test if a child has understood conservation of matter. It is an example of a conservation task. These belong to the tests used in the framework of Piaget to test what stage of development a child is in.
Here is a video demonstration of the cookie task. Here is another question on this site pertaining to a different conservation task.
The ...
8
There's quite a bit of research related to this topic:
Male CEOs with deeper voices make more money and manage larger companies (Mayew et al., 2013).
People are more likely to say they would vote for a political candidate with a deeper voice (Klofstad et al., 2012; Tigue et al., 2011).
People rate lower-pitched voices as more persuasive than higher-pitched ...
8
First of all, interesting question, and thanks for sharing the video!
Secondly, you write:
There seem to be no doubts that she has the same perception of music than any other great musician...
I have to disagree. She may be able to sense vibrations, but it can never match normal hearing. This, because the human ear is better equipped to analyze ...
8
Placebo effect is not the only explanation, although it can be a large component.
To be clear: Neither of the explanations below are reasons to use antibiotics for infections not due to bacteria. They do illustrate anchoring. Just because we call a drug an antibiotic and first note its effects to be killing bacteria does not forbid that drug from having ...
7
Certainly.
It depends on the type of learning process of a person. One can be better at remembering images, so he might access the images first when trying to define an object/event/etc. This can be thought of as having a photographic memory.
The main reason why most people think with words is because it is a much more sophisticated and structured ...
7
It's from fear sprung out of the inability to clearly identify and interpret something and from that know how to react to it.
There's something skewed with what you see, something deviating from your mental model of what a face (in this example) looks like. That makes us perceive it as something unknown, and what's unknown is also perceived as unpredictable ...
7
There cannot be a single answer to this question which would be entirely correct. Different theoretical approaches to psychology will yield different explanations. This is evident from the other answers in this question (some which you provided) which all stem from different theoretical accounts:
Evolutionary Psychology: Species evolving around water
...
7
This is partially an aspect of the binding problem.
Sensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneous hints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partly modular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. The result is an urgent case of what has been labelled the binding problem. We must collect the hints, ...
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