Posts tagged Psychology
Strange sights in Stephenville
Jan 22nd
I don’t know what this thing in Stephenville, TX, is. Ergo it’s a Mystery. Photo (cc) Broken Piggy Bank.
If you haven’t been following the press reports, there’s been a UFO flap in Stephenville. The best write-up of it I’ve seen is by Astroprof, who’s put up a couple of entries on it. He’s of the opinion that first it’s unidentified. He also argues that the witness statements don’t add up. For instance can anyone see the problem of a UFO one mile long, half a mile wide, flying just a few hundred yards above a town of 17,000 people and only 30 people noticing? I think there’s a few difficulties in saying that people saw a UFO like that. At the same time that doesn’t mean that the people who did see something were delusional or lying.
Newsweek opens its article on the flap by placing the event in the context of evolutionary history. Humans are social animals and for most of the past we’ve also been hunted animals. We’ve needed to learn to spot intent. The psychology behind that doesn’t have to be perfect. There’s a compromise between speed and quality of judgement. Spotting intent where there isn’t may have More >
Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
Jan 10th
Richard Dawkins might say that religion prevents reasoned decision making and progress. Sam Harris would tell you how religion is a threat to society. For Derren Brown in Tricks of the Mind, religion is one of those things that humans do because they’re prone to cognitive illusions, and there’s many other ways of exploiting these same illusions for fun and profit.
If you’ve not heard of him Derren Brown is a magician based in the UK whose act is based on “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”. It’s this last word in particular that is important. David Blaine had the idea that sitting around in a box doing nothing would be entertaining, which says a lot about the standard of American entertainment. Derren Brown, in constrast appears to play Russian Roulette live. It wasn’t, but nonetheless, from a British perspective, it was much more interesting than watching someone stay still for record-breaking lengths of time.
He also has a healthy view of magic as entertainment. In the book on page 19 and 20 he talks about how magic is showing off “Look I can do something you can’t” and how it leads to problems.
Magic, I feel, more than most performance types, requires More >
Suicide is ageless
Jul 10th
Base image: Suicide © iStockPhoto.com.
A press release from the Royal Society of Psychiatrists. Reproduced because I’ve only seen snippets of it the Scottish press.
“Death is by my sight today, like a well trodden way… Death is by my sight today, like the longing of a man to see home… I am laden with misery…”
Analysis of an ancient Egyptian poem by a psychiatrist and an Egyptologist shows that it describes the psychopathology of suicide with great accuracy.
Dispute over Suicide was a poem written by an unnamed Egyptian writer between 2000 and 1740 BC on papyrus in hieroglyphics.
The writer is known as ‘The Eloquent Peasant’, and was commissioned by King Meri-ka-re to write a poem in order to dissuade people from committing suicide. (more…)
