#psychology

rhysy@diaspora.glasswings.com

I started writing to-do lists during lockdown. Not because of stress, but just to make sure I kept on top of things when there wasn't anyone around to talk to. I started off with simple text documents but quickly switched to Microsoft's ToDo, which has a nice, simple structure and a satisfying "ding" sound whenever you complete a task. I'm now heavily reliant on it as an organisational tool. I never have to remember what I have to remember, which lets me get on with the stuff I'd rather be getting on with.

What I'm still pretty bad at is being disciplined at following what I set out to do. I frequently get distracted by more interesting tasks and bump the the stuff I originally put to the following days. BUT, at least by having it on a list is does eventually get done, which probably wouldn't happen at all otherwise.

In the case of the written to-do list at bedtime, you are downloading your tasks from your mind to a piece of paper (or a phone if you prefer and if you're sure you won't be lured onto social media or your emails) in a way that reduces the need for you to think about them when you're trying to get to sleep. And instead of having the tasks swirling around in your head randomly, they are put into some sort of order. They are "filed", as it were, ready to be dealt with in due course. As an added bonus you don't have to worry about forgetting them.

It is best to list every specific task, rather than to use general headings, even though it will make your list longer. Professor Scullin's study found that busy people who created lists of more than 10 tasks fell asleep an average of 15 minutes faster than people who didn't write out to-do lists. They also fell asleep six minutes faster than those who only compiled short lists. So, make it comprehensive.

I don't do lists for the stress/sleep benefits but this makes sense to me. Having a plan means you've already done some of the work so you aren't starting from scratch, and no longer have to think about if the various if-then outcomes, or at least not as much. Writing stuff down is also a good way to order your thoughts and get it out of your system - committing things to paper is better than having them spin around in your head.

#Psychology

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241111-stressed-writing-down-a-to-do-list-might-help

waynerad@diasp.org

"Time alone heightens 'threat alert' in teenagers -- even when connecting online."

"This is according to latest findings from a cognitive neuroscience experiment conducted at the University of Cambridge, which saw 40 young people aged 16-19 undergo testing before and after several hours alone -- both with and without their smartphones."

The study was done during the pandemic (April 2021). The researchers had an isolation room with an armchair, desk, office chair, desktop computer, physiological hardware (for the electrodermal activity measurement), a fridge with food and beverages, and "non-social materials": puzzles, sudoku books, digital, and analogue games. The teenagers were allowed to bring any "non-social items" (crafts, textbooks, writing materials) of their own.

They then compared isolation with and without smartphones and internet access.

"Although virtual social interactions helped our participants feel less lonely compared to total isolation, their heightened threat response remained," said Emily Towner, study lead author from Cambridge's Department of Psychology.

What the "threat response" is about is, before sending people into the isolation room, they taught them a certain shape on a computer screen was associated with a painful noise. Afterwards they tested to see people people reacted to this learned threat. People who were isolated had a heightened reaction. Isolated but with social media made people feel less lonely, but did nothing to reduce the "threat response". For that, people need to not be isolated.

So it looks like real-life interaction is different from virtual interaction. Virtual interaction reduces subjective loneliness but leaves heightened reaction to perceived threat. This is for 16-19 year olds, but they only tested 16-19 year-olds -- they did not test people of other ages so this doesn't give you a comparison with people in other ages.

Time alone heightens 'threat alert' in teenagers -- even when connecting online

#psychology

psych@diasp.org

A short take by Robert Reich, on the absurdity of "First-buddy" Musk publicly campaigning for a Treasury Secretary who will 'shake things up' in the direction of oligarchy, rather than (allegedly) keep the US on a course towards bankruptcy.

For the record, I believe Reich is brilliant on economics, but necessarily the best at #TrumpVirus #psychology.
But as all things spewing out of that cognitive cave without concepts or humanity (or altruism/public service), "We'll see..."

Trump’s “First Buddy” is in deep shit

If you’re advising a president-elect, you don’t publicly push him to do what you want. That’s true of any president-elect. It’s even truer of Trump.

I don’t know what Trump will do but I’m sure he’s seething. The most likely outcome is Trump doesn’t offer the job to either Lutnick nor Bessent, and fires Musk.

This would be something to see, IMM, and not very likely Sir Drumpf the StableGenius will "fire" the richest person on earth, his buddy, who owns space and government budgets and the ears of the alternate-reality #media fans.

Musk’s public advocacy of Lutnick because he will “enact change” rather than “business-as-usual” also signals Musk’s and Trump’s criterion for filling high-level positions (besides unbridled fealty to Trump): The picks don’t need to know anything or share any large vision of the public good. They just have to be bomb-throwers who’ll shake things up.

The worst that can be said of any candidate is he’ll govern as usual.

[In the dangerous case of Donald Trump....]

This will produce a government of nihilism and chaos.

🎯

psych@diasp.org

Stephen King just announced he can no longer stomach X/Twitter and is gone (to Threads), many others joining the exodus.

Here's a post reacting to King, which in turn (for the #psychology - #media - #socialscience - #socialmedia of it) has a quite interesting thread of reaction, both the "patriots" celebrating the 'return' of #truth & the vanquishing of libs, w/others agreeing, or not.

#StephenKing just publicly left " #Twitter " given how #X has become a dumpster & doublespeak/ #disinformation booster, while muting 'leftists".

As a social scientist/psychologist I'm fascinated by not only the morphing of the Ministry of " #Truth " / #TrumpVirus but by the conversation there now, E.g., reaction on the thread of this post. A lot of "you libs are back in the minority" and "Twitter was a liberal pit" kind of "patriot" posts. Elon just smiles (or maybe works on his jump shot). 🤮🤒

waynerad@diasp.org

"Researchers at REMspace, a California-based startup, have achieved a historic milestone, demonstrating that lucid dreams could unlock new dimensions of communication and humanity's potential. Using specially designed equipment, two individuals successfully induced lucid dreams and exchanged a simple message."

The press release continues:

"When the server detected that the first participant entered a lucid dream, it generated a random Remmyo word and sent it to him via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in his dream, with his response captured and stored on the server. Eight minutes later, the next participant entered a lucid dream. She received the stored message from the first participant and confirmed it upon awakening, marking the first-ever 'chat' exchanged in dreams."

Impractical, but fascinating.

Breakthrough from REMspace: First ever communication between people in dreams

#neuroscience #psychology #dreams

rhysy@diaspora.glasswings.com

Personally I am :
- Extraordinarily content with a full 8 hours, which almost never happens
- Fine and dandy with 7
- Fully functional with 6
- Grumpy with 5
- Zombie-like with 4
- Barely able to keep myself upright with 3.

But, as the article says... you do you.

By using objective measures such as actigraphy, which monitors activity and rest cycles, he and other researchers have found that people from hunter-gather societies typically get between 5.7 and 7.1 hours of sleep per night – on the lower end of the scale compared to industrial societies. Their sleep is also more fragmented.

But it also doesn't bother them, says Samson. Of two groups he looked at, in Namibia and Bolivia, less than 3% of foragers said they had trouble falling, or staying, asleep – a fraction of the up to 30% reported in industrial societies. Neither group had a word for "insomnia" in their languages.

"We have this narrative in the West [that] humans have never been more sleep-deprived," he adds. It's total rubbish, he says.

"Sleep need should be regarded as dynamic, with the potential to adapt in response to environmental circumstances," the researchers write. "This means that there is not an optimal amount of sleep for an individual across situations and times. Rather, sleep is a negotiable quantity that is affected by environmental, cultural, psychological and physiological factors, which must be balanced against competing needs and opportunities for various behaviours."

#Sleep
#Psychology

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241014-need-a-good-nights-sleep-trying-changing-how-you-think-about-it

waynerad@diasp.org

Is psychology a young or mature science?

"There's a thought that's haunted me for years: we're doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and...then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?"

"I've got this picture in my head: we're all on a bus that's supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don't have a GPS, so we have no idea if we're going in the right direction. We can't measure our progress by how much gas we're burning, or whether we've upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can't just look out the window and go, 'I dunno, kinda feels like we're headed toward Arkansas,' which, I realize now, is what I've been doing so far."

"Instead, you first gotta ask: how could we know we're getting closer to Cincinnati?"

"In my estimation, there are five ways to measure psychology's progress, and we are succeeding in exactly one of them."

The 5 are:

  1. Overturning intuitions,

  2. Pitting people armed with the psychological literature and against people armed only with their own intuitions,

  3. Helping people make better decisions,

  4. Producing useful technology, and

  5. Seeing old ideas become nonsensical after paradigm shifts.

"The philosopher Michael Strevens says that doing science requires an 'alien mindset' where you entertain ridiculous thoughts like 'perhaps Aristotle needs some updating' or 'maybe we should toss balls of varying weights off a tower and see which one hits the ground first.' Those thoughts don't seem alien anymore, of course, because they worked out. But going full alien-brain today means you will have to entertain thoughts that incur reputational risk, like 'maybe you don't have to pay attention to the literature' and 'maybe we should ask people how their toothbrush could be different'. Once you get into the alien mindset, the best thing to think about is mysteries. What are the self-evident phenomena: things that definitely happen, but that we cannot explain?"

Is psychology going to Cincinnati? - by Adam Mastroianni

#discoveries #psychology

bliter@diaspora-fr.org

Notre #génération a un sérieux #problème - #HEKIMA

top

Chaque génération se croit plus intelligente que la précédente et plus sage que la suivante. Cette citation venant de #GeorgeOrwell, vous l’avez probablement déjà entendu. Elle exprime 1 #observation sur la #perception que les #générations ont d'elles-mêmes et des autres. Elle révèle 1 tendance #humaine à se considérer comme supérieure par rapport aux autres générations, à la fois en termes d' #intelligence et de #sagesse.
Du coup sommes nous plus intelligents que les gens d'il y a 100 ans ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7-Yhxg0SAg
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=t7-Yhxg0SAg
#psychology #relationship #motivation

rhysy@diaspora.glasswings.com

Time flies when you're having fun / very busy / mentally ill but not necessarily until after the fact, or maybe later on it seems to have taken forever. But that doesn't make for a great proverb.

An action-packed cops-and-robbers clip and a comparatively uneventful video of people rowing on a river were shown to three age groups before they were asked to rate the duration using hand gestures. The outcome was the same. "The four- to five-year-olds found the action-packed video longer and the boring one shorter. For the majority of grown-ups it was the opposite."

"The biggest source of input to our brain is through vision, from the retina to the brain," says Bejan. "Through the optical nerve the brain receives snapshots, like the frames of a movie. The brain develops in infancy and is used to receiving lots of these screenshots. In adulthood the body is much bigger. The travel distance between the retina and the brain has doubled in size, the pathways of transmission have become more complex with more branches. And in addition with age, we experience degradation."

This, he says, means the rate at which we receive "mental images" from the stimuli of our sensory organs decreases with age. This creates the sensation of compressed time in our minds as we are receiving few mental images in one unit of clock time as adults compared with when we are children.

What you are doing in the present is unsurprisingly paramount to our understanding of time, no matter our age. As our mental workload increases, for example, we tend to experience a shortening of time as we underestimate the duration of a task the more demanding it is.

Take a fun-filled two-week summer camp – it may be more memorable than your entire school year. Nádasdy explains that it is highly likely that those summer camp memories would occupy a much larger piece of brain tissue, because of the sheer number of adventures that took place during that short period.

#Science
#Psychology

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240906-does-time-go-slower-for-children