Brains are complicated, and no matter how much we think we know, there always seems to be more.
Do we know what we want in a romantic partner - No more than a random stranger would, study says
Jul 2020, phys.org
This is similar to the horoscope joke where a sneaky professor distributes a customized personality profile to each student based on their birthdays (which he looked up and printed out in advance of this class), and then asks the students to score the profiles based on their accuracy. But then it turns out that he passed out the same profile to everyone, and it was written in a way that was ambiguous enough to apply to everyone (and also flattering enough to disarm your bullshit detector), so everyone scores the profile really high, like, "wow, this totally describes me perfectly!"
It's called the Barnum effect, and it was named after the circus director, by a psychologist, to describe the "pseudo-successful" effects of certain psychological tests.
Here's some examples, called Barnum statements ,and taken from Bertram Forer, the guy who made this famous. Maybe you can start your own horoscope column, or use them on your next date:
- You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
- You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
- You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
- While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
- Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
- Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
- At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
- You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
- You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
- You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
- At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
- Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
- Security is one of your major goals in life.
-From Bertram Forer
Human brain replays new memories at 20 times the speed during waking rest
Jun 2021, phys.org
The fact that we can see "neural replays" is nuts, no?
Also note that this 20x replay speed happens as an essential part of learning, and takes place particularly during breaks from learning.
via National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: Cell Reports, Buch et al.: "Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay" DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193
A redundant modular network supports proper brain communication
Jul 2021, phys.org
The truth about how memory works keeps getting more and more complicated: "Li and his colleagues were able to see that each hemisphere of the brain has a separate representation of a memory."
And because this is the phrase I'm looking for every day as I read these news briefs: "What they found was unexpected." (see these two other recent examples, one where they found a bacteria that eats metal, and which was accidentally left lying around during the first wave lockdown, and this other one where they found out that electromagnetic waves cure cancer and diabetes because one scientist borrowed another scientist's mice, and he was working on EMF exposure, and she was working on blood sugar.)
via Baylor College of Medicine: Guang Chen et al, Modularity and robustness of frontal cortical networks, Cell (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.05.026
Image credit: Holocene - Paul Griffitts Fractal Forums - 2017
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