The idea of love and the feelings it generates has been the subject of art, literature, philosophy, and psychological research for decades. True, some may argue that something as ambiguous and seemingly ethereal as love cannot be the subject of scientific inquiry. That said, however, love has been investigated and considered as a serious research […]
Prior to the invention of brain scanning technology such as the MRI machine, studying the brain was left to the speculations of philosophers. It wasn’t until recent decades when disciplines within psychology and cognitive scientists began to understand the various regions of the brain and what they do. Now, a wealth of information and understand […]
As the school year kicks off, it may be worth taking a moment to ask yourself a simple question: Do believe intelligence is flexible or fixed? The way you answer that question could actually influence your learning success, according to a study published by a group of researchers. The study, titled, “Why Do Beliefs about […]
Of all the phenomena in the observable universe, human consciousness, something that is so familiar yet so difficult to understand, remains one of the last true enigmas, one of the last standing mysteries that science, at present, appears unable to crack. To put this in larger historical perspective, in the past one hundred years, humans have walked […]
When we talk about human nature, we often say that we’re “hardwired” to be a certain way, that we’re “programmed” to behave in a particular manner. With the way that people so often speak about human psychology, one starts to conceptualize of the brain as a rigid structure laid out from birth, something unmalleable that […]
“Although many people want to believe that their positions on moral, religious, and political issues are the product of rational, conscious thought, the reality is that subthreshold, biologically instantiated predispositions shape all human attitudes…” So writes Hibbing et al in their 2014 article, “The deeper sources of political conflict: evidence from the psychological, cognitive, and […]
The classic Carlson text on the physiology of behavior does an excellent job providing a review of the literature concerning the pharmacology, neurology and epidemiology of schizophrenia. I was a bit disappointed, however, with a distinct lack of treatment concerning the (possible) relationship between schizophrenia and substance abuse. More specifically, I was interested in any […]