How do certain individuals, like Quang Duc, develop the ability to remain calm when enduring significant nociceptive pain?

As mentioned in Can calmness happen during the fight-flight response?, with looking at the possibility of calmness during stress and trauma, you only have to look at the situation with rape victims and soldiers witnessing severe traumatic events who dissociate (Ellert, et al. 2011)(Waller, et al. 2001) during the event.

Dissociation is a psychological defence mechanism (Cardeña, 1994) which helps the person to get through the situation with as little harm as possible.  Think about it like throwing a switch on conscious awareness.

Whilst some define dissociation as a combination of 2 distinct psychological mechanisms (Brown, 2006), the psychobiological mechanism of dissociation is little understood; but, when someone is dissociated from the event, the detachment of conscious awareness from the event can make the person appear very calm.

With Thích Quảng Đức, I would hypothesise that he somehow managed to "mentally switch off from the event" by dissociating through detachment.  Quảng Đức set light to himself as a protest because he felt there was no other way to convey such a strong message. As far as he believed, he had no choice, just like rape victims and soldiers can have no choice.

The thing with the football fan at the Bradford Fire @Robin mentioned, was that he was inevitably pumped full of adrenaline from his adrenal glands to assist in the Flight/Fright response. Cortisol is also released at the same time and Cortisol is good for numbing any present pain in order for you to flee.

Fear of impending pain could activate the flight/fight response releasing the Adrenaline and Cortisol which could be what was happening in the scenario mentioned in the question.

Needless to say that once the Cortisol has lowered he will feel the pain caused.

References

Brown, R. J. (2006). Different types of “dissociation” have different psychological mechanisms. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 7(4), 7-28.DOI: 10.1300/J229v07n04_02

Cardeña, E. (1994) The domain of dissociation. In: Dissociation: Clinical and theoretical aspects, Edited by: Lynn, S. J. and Rhue, J. W. 5–31. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis PhD & Onno van der Hart PhD (2011) Dissociation in Trauma: A New Definition and Comparison with Previous Formulations, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(4), 416-445.DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2011.570592

Waller, G., Hamilton, K., Elliott, P., Lewendon, J., Stopa, L., Waters, A., ... & Hargreaves, I. (2001). Somatoform dissociation, psychological dissociation, and specific forms of trauma. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1(4), 81-98.DOI: 10.1300/J229v01n04_05


Are topics experienced later in the day more likely to be present in dreams?

The probability of what you'll dream is really dependent on a ton of factors. Stress can harm your ability to remember, and process, your memories during sleep. If you are highly stressed due to hunger later in the day, you brain may be more likely to process the memories of events before hunger set in. However, the opposite may be true for others. schizophrenics for example, have problems with how they process memories. Our brains can accidentally be configured to process memories in an atypical/unhealthy way. Also, extreme time-dilation can affect us. Personally, while in basic training, we got a lot less sleep than I was used too. I started noticing that the days seemed to blend together, and time moved quicker. My dreams, during that period, never seemed to follow any pattern based on time that I can remember, and it's likely true for most people in similar situations.

This article talks about sleep deprivation and how it affects the dreaming process/length:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-less-sleep-means-more-dreams/

This article details the effects of memory processing during sleep:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534695/

This study looked into how alcohol affects memory storage:
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm

Obviously there are many things besides alcohol which can affect your ability to form and store memories, so taken together, all of these indicate that the order of the events of our day, processed in our dreams, is affected by how you formed those memories while actually experiencing them awake.


Not really, that would be too easy!

Because there are several factors which can influence the emotion from the color. I have several in mind:

One of them is cultural background, as norms and habits, and thus cultural value, meaning, may change between people for a same color (interindividual differences).
Another one is context, as color preference may be affected by the field where it's used. For a bold example, black color would look "nice" on a luxury ad, but not so much for an health communication (intrapersonal differences). See also Bonnardel, N., Piolat, A., & Le Bigot, L. (2011). The impact of colour websites on appealing and users’ cognitive processes. Displays, 32, 2, 69-80.
And you also have physiological issues. Color perception is affected by surrounding other colors (see Johannes Itten). Therefore the emotion would change as well. As a result, it may be more relevant to elicit the emotional impact of a set of colors instead of one only. Also there are several strategies to make colors fit together.
Also in a physiological view, some people have color deficiency, and it may therefore affect their "emotional perception" (I don't have any reference on that, just a personal hypothesis).

So, what I would suggest is to test the emotions elicited by a specific set of colors, for a specific field/context, for a specific audience. You would therefore get some clues for those conditions.


Why does the the sight of gore causes nausea, vomiting and/or fainting?

TL;DR summary: gore and your examples thereof belong to even broader classes of stimuli that activate a number of different aversion and defense systems. To some extent, no one really knows why, and some of the most appealing answers may come from somewhat unfalsifiable theories.

Building on @caseyr547's answer, disgust occurs somewhat automatically when viewing blood, injury, and vomit. The basic, somewhat unconscious judgment being made here is essentially, "There but for the grace of God go I," and both the mind and body activate what defenses they have against going there, including the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), according to Jeff Gray's theory. My point in mentioning that theory isn't to focus on it; I'm mainly trying to point out that there are very large and pervasive changes in physiological and psychological function in reaction to disgusting or otherwise threatening stimuli, including the BIS, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and some largely cognitive processes like attitudes (these aren't completely distinct from one another necessarily).

Why? Here's a pseudo-evolutionary argument: prehistorically speaking, when have we most often encountered these stimuli? When something very dangerous was about! Nausea and fainting might not protect us directly from physical attack, but it certainly discourages us from cutting ourselves (or others) open...and we've always been a danger to ourselves in that regard. As for blood and vomit, they may transmit biohazards of all sorts. Purging our own contents is one way to make sure we're free of any similar biohazards, which we might've ingested too if we happen to see our friends or family suffering from food poisoning, for instance. Short of that, simply experiencing these aversive reactions is a strong motivator to avoid the causal stimuli entirely, which is also a good way to play it safe when the root threat might be something like toxic gas or airborne (or otherwise communicable) biological pathogens. One shouldn't underestimate the extent to which we may have generalized these semi-instinctual reactions unintentionally (as through evolutionary mechanisms) to control our conscious behaviors unconsciously! From an "intelligent design" perspective, wouldn't it make sense to program ourselves to break down and feel awful involuntarily when exposed to dangers like these, so long as it helps ensure that we choose to get the hell away from them?

These are just thoughts ("theories," maybe) about why, FWIW, and they're somewhat unfalsifiable. As @BenCole pointed out, a more biopsychological account of how we react and to what might be more useful, if anyone else can help flesh out that side of this discussion. However, this would answer a slightly different question than why. One can explore and thereby better understand the broader class of stimuli that activate the aversive reaction systems in question, and thereby better understand how these particular stimuli belong to that broader class...but to some extent, we may never truly know why our systems are semi-instinctually sensitive to these stimuli...and an argument that they are simply generalizations of the broader class of stimuli to which the systems inherently respond is still a non-answer as to why the systems respond to them.

As for the partly non-instinctual, developmental processes of sensitization and habituation, caseyr547 is right again to say that these learning processes operate very broadly. They are deep subjects deserving of their own questions, if you have others. Somehow, habituation even has its own Wikipedia page apart from the one caseyr547 linked! I would've understood desensitization and habituation as synonymous, but that too implies a separate question. My point is that these are known phenomena (or a known phenomenon) with a deep pool of research and theoretical literature that mostly explains itself. If you look further into it, I think you'll see that it's a rather small wonder to observe that it operates on the disgust reaction as well.

To once again offer an unfalsifiable, speculative, evolutionary perspective on why that might be, consider that some of us may choose or be otherwise predisposed to expose ourselves to these dangers more often than others, and may even profit by doing so. If you saw a profit in exposing yourself to danger of injury or infection, wouldn't you want to be able to develop a stomach for it? Prehistorically speaking, when there has been enough of a profit in overcoming instinctual aversions to justify doing so, maybe doing so has improved the selective fitness of those whose instincts are weaker, and the fitness of those who are better able to habituate to stimuli and attenuate instinctive reactions that are circumstantially, pragmatically counterproductive. Who knows? It would make enough sense if it were true, anyway.


Is it possible to convince a group of people that they master something, when they in fact don't?

Your question relates a bit to the self-efficacy literature.

Underlying ability is one cause of self-efficacy. And presumably, there are many mechanisms by which people can form an accurate opinion of their ability.

That said, there are various known ways of increasing or decreasing self-efficacy without changing actual efficacy.

For example, there is the big-fish-little-pond effect. Basically, you can increase self-efficacy by putting people in an environment with others who are less capable.

Similarly, giving people feedback that they are good or giving people tasks suited to their ability will increase a sense of self-efficacy.
Some of these strategies are considered effective teaching especially if it helps overcome obstacles related to students even trying. But it can also be problematic if people allocate resources based on an inaccurate belief about their strengths and weaknesses.


Do we have technology to ethically measure the changes of interstitial space in sleeping humans?

It is possible to extract samples of interstitial fluid in humans.
The method has been described in detail.
Is it ethically permissible to extract the entire contents of the interstitial space? No. It is vital for survival.

Technically, it seems possible to perform the procedure before and after sleep. I am not sure if this has been done though. To what extent this is an invasive procedure I do not know, but it appears to involve surgery.

In addition, local interstitual fluid pressure (IFP) can be
measured in humans under anesthesia.

Both methods pose ethical challenges and it appears that these methods are relevant in clinical settings, where the cost-to-benefit analysis would suggest a benefit to the patient.


What are the neurological similarities between humans and primates?

Primate brains are considered to be highly similar to ours. In terms of their structure, it's more appropriate to look for the differences than the similarities.

However, you're asking for cognitive skills and these are mediated by cortical structures, and especially the higher association areas. This is exactly where the similarities are starting to break down, as the cortex, and hence higher order processing has rapidly expanded in human evolution. Notably, the surface area of the cortex has greatly expanded in humanoids through a progressive increase in the number of gyri and sulci ('wrinkles') in the cortical surface. A greater cortical surface correlates with higher cognitive abilities in humans (Fig. 1). This is what sets us apart. Cognition being

  [T]he ability to interpret and connect information that is perceived in the world and to then apply this personal knowledge adaptively to future situations and problems.

While humanoids have exceptionally well-developed cognitive skills, non-humanoid primates do have been shown to exhibit quite sophisticated cognitive capabilities as well. In a review article, Hopper & Brosnan (2012) state that primates have been shown to:

Recall serial lists of images
Select purpose-specific tools and save them for later
Manufacture purpose-specific tools, demonstrating an understanding of causal relations and physical properties
Have intricate social interactions and are known to interact with and manipulate other group members

Reference
- Hopper & Brosnan. Nature Education Knowledge (2012); 5(8): 3

Fig. 1. human brain (top) and chimp brains (bottom) are very similar. Especially the cortex is larger in humans. source: Tes Teach - Brain Project


What are the mathematical models of memory?

Very many references may easily be found with a Google search for "mathematical model memory". Probably the most classic and iconic reference is Atkinson and Shiffrin (1965), which is also described on Wikipedia. Its three components and their relationships are nicely encapsulated in this figure:

Many other, lesser-known mathematical models of memory exist, including but not limited to these:

A model of recognition memory (Atkinson & Juola, 1974)
A model of the circular process in short-term memory (Min'ko & Petunin, 1981)
An application of interference theory to memory retention failures (Anninos, 1972)
A model of hippocampus activity involving affine and chaotic rules (Yamaguti, Kuroda, Fukushima, Tsukada, & Tsuda, 2011; see also Tsuda, Yamaguti, Kuroda, Fukushima, & Tsukada, 2008; Fukushima, Tsukada, Tsuda, Yamaguti, & Kuroda, 2009)
A computer simulation model of short-term learning (Anderson, 1983; see also a simpler model proposed by Hicklin, 1976, cited in a review of Anderson's article by Preece & Anderson, 1984)
A computer simulation model of operant conditioning (Bower, 1967; Mandler, 1967)
The Hopfield (1982, 1984, 2006) neural network model of associative memory (Rojas, 1996; see also Wikipedia; thanks @Memming!) describes neural activity as binary, the attributes of memories as state space locations, and the system as governed by a Lyupanov function. Much more could be said about artificial neural network models of memory in general (e.g., LSTM, Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997; ART, Carpenter & Grossberg, 1987a, 1987b).

You may also be interested in the following references:

A book chapter, "Mathematical models of human memory" (Raaijmakers, 2008)
A book, Mathematical Models in Psychology (Restle, 1971)
Rojas' (1996) entire book, Neural Networks: A Systematic Introduction seems pertinent. (And free!)

And a related question here, in which "memory" comes up twice:

https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/1391/4086

References
· Anderson, O. R. (1983). A neuromathematical model of human information processing and its application to science content acquisition. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20(7), 603–620.
· Anninos, P. A. (1972). Mathematical model of memory trace and forgetfulness. Kybernetik, 10(3), 165–167.
· Atkinson, R. C., & Juola, J. F. (1974). Search and decision processes in recognition memory. In D. H. Krantz, R. C. Atkinson, R. D. Luce, & P. Suppes (Eds.), Contemporary developments in mathematical psychology: I. Learning, memory and thinking. Oxford, England: W. H. Freeman.
· Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1965). Mathematical models for memory and learning. Technical Report No. 79: Psychological Series. Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University. Retrieved from http://www.rca.ucsd.edu/selected_papers/IMSSS_79.pdf.
· Bower, G. (1967). A multicomponent theory of the memory trace. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: I. Oxford, England: Academic Press.
· Carpenter, G. A., & Grossberg, S. (1987). ART 2: Self-organization of stable category recognition codes for analog input patterns. Applied Optics, 26(23), 4919–4930. Retrieved from http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ao/fulltext.cfm?uri=ao-26-23-4919&id=30891.
· Carpenter, G. A., & Grossberg, S. (1987). A massively parallel architecture for a self-organizing neural pattern recognition machine. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, 37(1), 54–115. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.70.9588&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
· Fukushima, Y., Tsukada, M., Tsuda, I., Yamaguti, Y., & Kuroda, S. (2009). Coding mechanisms in hippocampal networks for learning and memory. In Advances in Neuro-Information Processing (pp. 72–79). Springer: Berlin Heidelberg.
· Hicklin, W. J. (1976). A model for mastery learning based on dynamic equilibrium theory. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 13(1), 79–88.
· Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735–1780. Retrieved from http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~itamar/courses/ECE-692/Bobby_paper1.pdf.
· Hopfield, J. J. (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79(8), 2554–2558. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC346238/pdf/pnas00447-0135.pdf.
· Hopfield, J. J. (1984). Neurons with graded response have collective computational properties like those of two-state neurons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 81(10), 3088–3092. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC345226/pdf/pnas00611-0151.pdf.
· Hopfield, J. J. (2008). Searching for memories, Sudoku, implicit check bits, and the iterative use of not-always-correct rapid neural computation. Neural Computation, 20(5), 1119–1164. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/ftp/q-bio/papers/0609/0609006.pdf.
· Mandler, G. (1967). Organization and memory. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: I. Oxford, England: Academic Press.
· Min'ko, A. A., & Petunin, Y. I. (1981). Mathematical modeling of short-term memory. Cybernetics, 17(2), 287–298.
· Preece, P. F., & Anderson, O. R. (1984). Mathematical modeling of learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 21(9), 953–955. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.3660210910/pdf.
· Raaijmakers, J. G. W. (2008). Mathematical models of human memory. In Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, Vol. 2: Cognitive Psychology of Memory (pp. 445–466). Elsevier.
· Restle, F. (1971). Mathematical models in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
· Rojas, R. (1996). Neutral networks: A systematic introduction. Springer. Retrieved from http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/neuron.pdf.
· Tsuda, I., Yamaguti, Y., Kuroda, S., Fukushima, Y., & Tsukada, M. (2008). A mathematical model for the hippocampus: Towards the understanding of episodic memory and imagination. Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement, 173, 99–108.
· Yamaguti, Y., Kuroda, S., Fukushima, Y., Tsukada, M., & Tsuda, I. (2011). A mathematical model for Cantor coding in the hippocampus. Neural Networks, 24(1), 43–53.


Dopamine deficiency more frequent in the addiction prone?

It seems that genetic plays significant roles in dopamine addiction:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22350797

And also a study of "born-addicts":
http://www.addictscience.com/genetics-d2/

But also it is connected to ADHD studies. It is well known that people with ADHD are vulnerable to addiction. They think it is because reward deficiency system:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2626918/

When ADHD patients get medicine based on dopamine or amphetamine their attention improves.


Do beavers make dams purely by instinct?

It seems that running water triggers some sort of instinct:
http://juneauempire.com/stories/050408/out_275269543.shtml


What is the best short (i.e., roughly 20 item) measure of Big Five personality?

In most cases, increasing the number of items on a personality test will increase the reliability of measurement (see the Spearman-Brown formula). Thus, there is a trade-off between test length and reliability.

There are several 10 item measures of the Big 5. Notably, the TIPI and BFI-10 (Rammstedt et al, 2007). However, I would strongly discourage anyone from using a 10 item measure unless you are severely limited in time.

My feeling is that around 10 items per measure (i.e., 50 items in total) starts to give you quite good reliability and allows for breadth in item measurement. Many standard measures of the Big 5 that are not trying to measures facets within the Big 5 are around this length (e.g., NEO-FFI, IPIP 50 item, etc.), although 100 items will of course have benefits for reliability. See this answer for suggestions of additional scales.

So in some respects 20 to 25 items is a middle ground between too short and a good length. I would only use such a scale if time constraints were a major factor.
You might want to have a look at the Mini-IPIP (Donnelan et al 2006). It's a 20 item measure based on the IPIP.

References

Donnellan, M.B., Oswald, F.L., Baird, B.M., & Lucas, R.E. (2006). The mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18, 192-203.
Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B. (2003). A very brief measure of the big-five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(6), 504-528. doi: 10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00046-1
Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203–212. Available online, URL: http://www.westmont.edu/_academics/departments/psychology/documents/Rammstedt_and_John.pdf.


How does oxygen deprivation affect neural activity?

A stroke results in impaired blood flow. A lack of blood supply to the brain results in prolonged cortical hypoxia, cells die. Neuronal cells have a relatively high background metabolism, for example because of their reliance on ion pumping that costs energy. A lack of oxygen can kill a cell and therefore deplete the brain of thousands and thousands of neurons after a serious stroke. Depletion of certain areas of the brain of cells will reduce the output to other areas, and decrease the input to that area. Moreover, epileptic foci may appear, resulting in epileptic discharges in the brain, referred to as post-stroke seizures.

Upon recovery, gross rearrangements may occur in the brain, alongside gross changes in cellular activities throughout the affected areas, due to the brain's plasticity.

Having said that, if the oxygen depletion is short, I don't see any reason why there should be gross changes in neuronal behavior after recovery.


This was used to prove that all parts of brain utilize same general mechanism.

This is not quite true. While a good deal of reorganization can happen post-damage, brain function will not be re-localized to anywhere. Instead, what often happens is that, if a location on one hemisphere is damaged, the function is taken over by the corresponding location on the other hemisphere. In the extreme, some children have an entire hemisphere removed (to treat seizure disorders), and the remaining hemisphere takes over nearly all the function of the removed hemisphere. Hopefully this partially answers your second question.

To answer your first question, both genetics and environmental input shape how functions get localized in brain tissue. We know environmental input is important because people that are deprived of some kind of input (e.g., vision or sound) will re-assign the brain tissue to processing input that is received (so for a Deaf person, auditory regions in temporal lobe may be repurposed for processing visual input). I can't, off the top of my head, think of concrete cases to illustrate how genes influence function localization, but hopefully it's obvious enough that this is the case / how this might work.

Re: your last question about the brain being self-aware...well, in one sense the brain is self-aware since you are self-aware and you are your brain. But we must be careful about what exactly we mean by "self-aware". It can be easy to fallaciously invoke the homunculus.


Name for awareness of the probability of an event increasing the probability of it happening

I believe what you are describing is known as self-fulfilling prophecy and has been well-studied.

  Self-fulfilling prophecy are effects in behavioral confirmation effect, in which behavior, influenced by expectations, causes those expectations to come true. It is complementary to the self-defeating prophecy.

It is due to an uncontrolled, positive feedback loop between the expectations of a group of people and their behavior.  It applies to a wide variety of situations, such as market panics and bank runs, to expectations of an individual's position in society.

In fact, your example describes a self-defeating prophecy.

  A self-defeating prophecy can be the result of rebellion to the prediction. If the audience of a prediction has an interest in seeing it falsified, and its fulfillment depends on their actions or inaction, their actions upon hearing it will make the prediction less plausible.

In essence, the people in your example didn't want the speed limit buffer to go away (in effect, making the speed limit lower) so the theory states that they purposely (if subconsciously) increased the rate at which they crashed to disprove the government's theory that lower speed would prevent crashes.


Are the lobes of the brain anatomically distinct, or is the distinction between them not as well-defined?

There are anatomical features that make lobe demarcations fairly non-arbitrary. From Wikipedia:

by Sebastian023

There are some borders here that may be more arbitrary than others:

The border between the occipital and parietal lobe between the preoccipital notch and parieto-occipital sulcus
The border between the parietal and temporal lobes between the preoccipital notch and the lateral fissure
The little space between the central sulcus and the lateral fissure that separates the parietal and frontal lobes

These lines seem to be anchored on non-arbitrary points, but their flatness (lack of curves/bumps) may be somewhat arbitrary. An analogy would be the southern border of my home state, Minnesota. It's a flat east-to-west line between two rivers that form the eastern and western borders. The rivers aren't arbitrary, but the southern border didn't have to be a straight line. (Why not a sine wave? That surely would've made things more interesting!) If there's more to these borders of the brain than just their anchor points at either end, it's not apparent to me from this image or any other sources I know offhand, but it would be nice to see another answer from anyone who might know better than I.


Do people low on agreeableness swear more?

There are a number of findings showing that people who are low in agreeableness swear more often. Apologies for the long full quote, but the relevant literature has just recently been nicely reviewed in a chapter about "Natural language use as a marker of personality" by Ireland and Mehl (2014). They cite the study you based your question on (Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006), which is very nice because it uses a relatively unobtrusive recording device (the Electronically Activated Recorder, EAR) to collect data about naturally occurring conversation. However, they also cite additional evidence that is in line with this finding:

  Another face valid linguistic correlate of agreeableness is swearing. Unsurprisingly, people swear less to the degree that they report being more agreeable (Holtgraves, 2010; Mehl et al., 2006; Yarkoni, 2010; see Jay, 2009).

Is swearing a reliable indicator of low agreeableness?

  Indeed, the five words that best discriminate between individuals ranking high and low in agreeableness in Facebook status updates are all swear words (Schwartz et al., 2013). The negative correlation between agreeableness and swearing fits with lay theories of personality as well and is correctly interpreted by outside observers of students’ EAR recordings (Mehl et al., 2006). Given the low overall incidence of swearing – making up about 1/3 of a percent of spoken conversation and 1/10 of a percent of emotional writing – these results essentially mean that highly agreeable people are unlikely to swear even once in a given sample, whereas a highly disagreeable person might swear only a few times. Nevertheless, swearing, like negative emotion words, another low-frequency category, is a potent and reliable indicator of agreeableness and other key psychological variables (e.g., Robbins, Focella, Kasle, Weihs, Lopez, & Mehl, 2011).

References

Ireland, M. E., & Mehl, M. R. (2014). Natural language use as a marker of personality. In T. M. Holtgraves & T. M. (Ed) Holtgraves (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology., Oxford library of psychology (pp. 201–218). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.


What regulates the strength of motor signals?

Short answer
Muscles are controlled by motor neurons in the spinal cord. The number of motor neurons that fire, as well as their individual firing rates govern the control of muscle force.

Background
Muscles consist of contractile elements: the muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are under direct control of the motor neurons in the spinal cord (Purves et al., 2001), as shown in Fig. 1. The motor neurons in the spinal cord are under direct control of the motor cortex in the brain. When the motor neurons fire, they release acetylcholine, which in turn makes the muscle fibers contract. The force in which a muscle contracts is basically governed by how strong a single muscle contracts, and the number of muscle fibers that are recruited.

Firstly, there is the rate code that allow motor neurons to regulate muscle force. An increase in the rate of action potentials fired by the motor neuron causes an increase in the amount of force that the associated motor unit (i.e., one or more muscle fibers) generates. When the motor neuron fires a single action potential, the muscle may only slightly twitch. If the motor neuron fires at high rates, however, the second action potential may arrive at the muscle unit before the muscle has had time to recover from the first twitch, and that second action potential will produce a greater amount of force than the first. This is due to an increase in strength of muscle contraction through action potential summation. This process has a limit. When the successive action potentials no longer produce a summation of muscle contraction (because the muscle is at its maximum state of contraction), the muscle is in a state called tetanus and is pushed to its limit (source: Neuroscience Online).

Secondly, there the recruitment of motor neurons (size principle). When a signal is sent to the motor neurons to execute a movement, motor neurons are not all recruited at the same time, or at random. The motor neuron size principle states that, with increasing strength of input onto the motor neurons from the higher brain centers, smaller motor neurons are recruited first, while the larger motor neurons are recruited only when the motor signal increases. Why does this orderly recruitment occur? Because of Ohm’s Law, a small amount of synaptic current will be sufficient to cause the membrane potential of a small motor neuron to reach firing threshold, while the large motor neuron stays below threshold. As the amount of current increases, the membrane potential of the larger motor neuron also increases, until it also reaches firing threshold. This process is called recruitment and results in more motor neurons to be activated when the brain signals for the need for a high contractile force. More motor neurons will recruit more muscle fibers (source: Neuroscience Online).

Fig. 1. Motor neurons from the spinal cord innervate the muscles. source: SE Veterinary Neurology

References
- Purves et al. (eds), Neuroscience, 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates. Motor Neuron-Muscle Relationships
- University of Texas, Houston Health Science Center. Neuroscience Online


What was creativity called before the 1950s, i.e. before Guilford coined the term?

Let me open this by saying that it's not clear to me that Guilford coined the term, as the Google n-gram viewer shows use well before 1950:

Freud wrote an essay on creative writers (and day-dreaming) in 1908 but he does not talk of creativity as a noun/concept in itself at least in the English translation. Likewise Jung wrote a fair bit about the "creative impulse", but like in the case of Freud he doesn't seem much concerned how comes people are creative but just why they start to manifest it outwards as art. Another similar term Jung used was the "creative fire". At my level of understanding, the reason for this lack of concern in the psychoanalytic tradition is that they explained (away) the source of the creative process as the unconscious. And once they get to the unconscious as the ultimate explanation, all effort for further understanding what goes under that seems to stop, and the their efforts are directed at understanding the manifestations of the unconscious. It's a bit like saying that you can't understand God, but you can study his works. I'm probably exaggerating that, but part of the issue surely is methodological; Jung and Freud did not apply (or even outright rejected) a systematic scientific method.

The stated motivation of Guilford's work on creativity was that he thought the IQ tests were only good at discriminating elementary school performance, but not good for discriminating what he called "creative potential". In "Creativity: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow" Guilford credits Catharine Patrick with the first experimental studies of creativity; she wrote several papers from 1935 to 1941 with "Creative thought" in their title. Guilford says Patrick attempted to systematically test the anecdotal evidence of Graham Wallas (1926) related in his book titled "The art of thought". There doesn't seem to be an on-line record of Patrick's earliest (1935) paper on the topic. Her 1937 "Creative thought in Artists" and 1941 paper "Whole and Part Relationship in Creative Thought" are available on-line. Neither paper uses "creativity" as a term in their text, so in this narrow sense Guilford was the first to use the term in the nascent field.


How far can we train mental calculation?

Yes the brain is plastic and expands certain areas while shrinking other areas. The more intense the training regiment the more likely it is to destroy the person's normality. Essentially increasing the power, overclocking and short circuiting the brain are possible through mental illness or the correction of mental illnesses. In America many professionals and college students go to psychiatrist to improve their performance. Commonly prescribed performance enhancing drugs are SSRI's which induce hypomania, ADHD drugs which increase dopamine as well as anti-anxiety drugs like the benzodiazepines.

OCD with the ritual of mathematics will cause further specialization at the cost of ability to control responses to anxiety. Psychosis can cause people to be extremely focused on a single topic and their brain the work abnormally fast at the cost of their attachment to reality (It also can diminish intelligence over time). Hypergraphia will allow them to communicate the inspirations of psychosis in great detail. Finally Mania will endow the person with the ability to sleep a minimal amount and give an abundance of energy at the expense of impulse management.

Examples of mental illness induced greatness are very numerous. Many advances in science and art happen because most geniuses in addition to having an high IQ are also mentally ill. Extreme creativity and productivity are linked to mental illness. Such greats include Einstein, Darwin, John Forbes Nash, Jr. Michelangelo and Vincent van Gogh. Many great works of literature especially religious writings are caused by compulsions to share ie Hypergraphia. OCD can lead to perfectionism and questioning of validity of that which is known. Hypomania allows a person to be more productive than when they have full blown mania. Inducing hypomania (with caffeine and the like) is extremely common in academia as a means of studying or "cramming". Students often go long periods of time with very little sleep and high energy qualify for manic disorder. Psychosis can be slow onset beginning with isolated episodes and developing into a major psychotic break. A sick person may cope with extreme levels of dopamine in their system without anti-psychotics. It is common to be psychotic (having special revelations, hallucinations, hearing voices and bizarre in behaviour) and be a religious important person. Not all spiritual/religious people are psychotic of course.


How is intelligence in children measured?

There are specific intelligence tests developed for children in different age ranges, e.g. from 4 to 8+11 months years, and 9-16 years. The site mentions that their test

  ...is a culture fair testing method. Test takers are equally assessed regardless of cultures, languages, backgrounds or education level.
  Also, the test duration is 30 minutes, which is well designed to not only suit children’s attention span but also generate precise results.

Note that I am not familiair with this website and cannot verify their claim that

  Our Phd-certified test was established in 2008. Nearly ten years since, the test has received approximately 16 million sittings.


What's the psychological basis for "Look at me when I'm talking to you"?

This article may help Basically if you look anywhere but at the speaker you can seem less attentive and looking at them shows you are paying attention to what they have to say

It is also one of a few primary elements in building rapport in those who you have just met and also to maintain rapport especially when listening to a problem the speaker has in a therapeutic or even business relationship.


What is a "psychological evaluation" for kids?

First, they must assess whether intervention is necessary in a episode of acute crisis.

http://psychiatryonline.org/pb/assets/raw/sitewide/practice_guidelines/guidelines/suicide.pdf

Subsequently, the evaluation that must be carried out by an expert aims to determine the psychological impact in the present, if it is advisable to follow up and that possible implications would take place in the future.

http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/assessment.aspx


Are there any applications of choice modelling to romantic relationships?

Speed dating seems to provide an ideal setting for the type of study you seek. There are several relevant papers (see References below and Google search human mate preferences speed dating).

There is no consensus among researchers, but here's a sampling of some of the supposed findings:

Buston & Emlen claim that people choose mates from their league, i.e., those they think have comparable traits, which lie in four categories: "wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, and sexual ﬁdelity".
Todd et al. claim support for parental investment theory because "men chose women based on their physical attractiveness, whereas women ... chose men whose overall desirability as a mate matched the women's self-perceived physical attractiveness"

  References

  Buston, P. M. & Emlen, S. T. (2003) Cognitive processes underlying human mate choice: the relationship between self-perception and mate preference in Western society. PNAS 100: 8805-8810. [pdf]
  Todd, P. M., Penke, L., Fasolo, B., & Lenton, A. P. (2007) Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences. PNAS 104: 15011-15016. [pdf]


How does one explain the irrational fear of approaching problems?

Fear of failure (Atychiphobia) is a form of specific phobia that may to some degree explains your situation.

However, please DO NOT instantly think/feel that you're experiencing a mental disorder or something similar. I cannot stress this enough, sharing some characteristics or experiencing some signs/symptoms of a disorder does not immediately means that you have that disorder.

I stated "to some degree" because features of "fear of failure" matched what you described, but only partly so. Note that in the linked explanation, on most cases, this fear will make a person avoid distinguishing him/herself and instead strive for mediocrity. However you have had achievements that clearly distinguishes yourself.

Instead, I would argue that you have such expectations of yourself, and the thought of failing to fulfill them are so great that you rather not try unless you're sure you will succeed. And when you did succeed, you tend to undermine/ brush-aside your own capabilities; since having such capabilities would mean that you're expected to achieve even more things in the future.

There are many articles discussing about this, and many offers ways/strategy to overcome this particular fear. For example this article. However I'm sorry that I couldn't find related books, papers, or scientific publications. All in all, I would personally advise you to stop thinking about results, and try to just "jump" the problem.

Hope this answer helps in any way!


Why humans like to rank things, make lists etc.?

Taxonomic classification seeks to identify similarities and differences between entities to assist in conceptualizing and communicating (Bailey, 1994).

Rouse (2004) discusses Motivational Systems Theory which seeks to explain why we strive to perform, a component of which is learning, understanding and communicating.

Bailey, K. D. (1994) Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences: Typologies and taxonomies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412986397

Rouse, K. A. G. (2004) Beyond Maslow’s hierarchy of needs what do people strive for? Performance Improvement, 43(10), 27–31. doi:10.1002/pfi.4140431008


Which paper or book from cognitive science do you think everyone should read or know about, and why?

Ok, I will start. I don't necessarily know if these are definitely the best three books I have read, but they are three of the best. If I think of better ones then I will add them.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Predictably Irrational
Influence: Science and practice

My interest in cognitive science is about i) understanding my own irrationality and ii) understanding how to change behaviour (e.g., persuasion, influence etc) to help people to have better lives. My three choices reflect this.

As related to this, I think that these books would be valuable for anyone to read as they could help you to better understand how to i)  make better decisions, ii) help other people to make better decisions.


Reading and understanding difficult material

Definetly yes! Even if you feel frustrated at the beginning, thinking and learning about a topic has an impact on your brain. See for example Robert Greenes book "Mastery" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_(book)), where he describes the lives of various geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin. They all spent a lot of time becoming masters of their field.
Theoretical Computer Science is a very abstrct topic. I would recomend you to participate in some online class. See https://www.coursera.org/courses?languages=en&query=computer+science for example. There you can do excercises that get peer reviewed by others. So you know if you did well or not.
Increase you motivation by:

Learning in groups like on Coursera.
Setting clear goals. What do you want to achieve? Get a better job? Write it down. Hang it on the wall.
Taking small steps. If you take steps that are too big, you might feel overwhelmed.


About the Turing test and a Robot's psychology

Mental disorders, which are fundamentally undesirable phenomena, can be both environmentally and innately caused.  There are both neurological components as well as environmental components almost exclusively sourcing from childhood.

In the same way, a "thinking machine" can have the same undesirable problems.  I imagine the "neurological problems" would be tantamount to bugs in the original software and hardware malfunctions.  Much more common would be the environmental causes, similarly in the AI's "childhood".

Human childhood is a very impressionable time.  Love and proper care leads to healthy growth, proper perspectives of safety and danger, proper priorities leading to healthy adult human lives.  Abuse and neglect lead to psychological malformations such as unhealthy concepts of danger, of self, of the meaning of love and family, etc.

Similarly, AI "childhood" will be the beginning period of discovery and learning (which may happen in R&D labs, rather than the real world, depending on the circumstances).  While it's difficult to say what might cause malformations, it's safe to assume that improper training of the AI, just like improper raising of a human child, will result in odd, unpredictable, and undesired behavior.

As a note, this is all technically true for AI less sophisticated than "thinking", but the simpler it is, the easier it is to properly train and prevent hardware and fundamental software errors.  For example, an AI that identifies pictures would show unpredictable and undesirable behavior if, for some reason, it was trained randomly (say, by using crowd-sourced training and being the victim of trolling).  A 'thinking' AI would likewise have undesirable results if it were "abused" or never taught the value of, say, life.  One, in that case, might easily end up with a "sociopathic" AI.


What is this stratagem called when someone talks to you like you're a slow-witted kid?

There are a few terms which can be used for this.  The answer from @AlwaysConfused could describe the situation if you are actually talking to them like a child as stipulated in the title, but therapists should not sound patronising or condescending so I wonder if you may be referring to a form of "circumnavigation".

The use of circumnavigation may not necessarily be a case of being sly. Therapists may do this to build a complete picture of a situation as you suggest, but it can also get their client to look at things from a different angle too.

Maybe looking directly at the situation is going to be too psychologically painful right now so circumnavigating the direct path can help.

Other than this, when a therapist "wants to fish out certain information from you", there can be certain protocols which need to be followed, for example, if therapy is being given due to a situation which may lead to a court case.

A therapist in this situation cannot be seen to be leading a potential witness in a court case, so they must ask open and indirect questions.

Again, this can be see as circumnavigation of a sort, but it is more a case of open and indirect questioning.


Can I use Mechanical Turk for a longitudinal study?

The best way to set up a Mechanical Turk longitudinal study is with TurkPrime.com. You can follow-up with users and invite them to take a new survey. As long as they are properly incentivized they will come.

I recommend that you inform them at the start that you are running a 10 part study and that those who perform well on each of the 4 minute studies will also receive a significant bonus, say $5-$10.

See here for some more instructions on setting this up.


Can drugs cause a psychosis, or only unlock it?

Can drugs cause a psychosis or only unlock it

Drugs can cause acute psychosis, but are not associated with a precipitation of a chronic psychotic state. Animal studies have shown that various drugs (including LSD, ketamine and amphetamine) can induce acute psychosis in genetically non-disposed animals (Ham et al., 2017). However, in general, drugs do not induce a state of chronic psychosis associated with for example schizophrenia. Chronic amphetamine use by non-psychotic individuals sometimes do develop a paranoid state resembling a psychosis, but it usually dissipates upon withdrawal from the drug. Former amphetamine addicts do remain hypersensitive to the psychotomimetic effects of AMPH, even after years of abstinence. There are also anecdotal reports that ‘physical or psychological stress’ can precipitate a psychotic episode in a portion of former addicts. This suggests that chronic amphetamine use produces a long-lasting change in some neural system(s) involved in the psychotomimetic effects of AMPH (Robinson & Becker, 1986).

  Is there any difference between "unlocking" and "causing" a psychosis?

I would say that in genetically predisposed people (Owet et al., 2007) you could call it unlocking, but I think that everyone has a certain chance of getting it. Some people need more extreme environmental factors (low genetic disposition) and others with a high predisposition are at higher risk of developing psychosis.

  Is it true, that you can have a "sleeping psychosis", which is just waiting for a disturbance to present itself?

As said, when people are genetically predisposed, environmental factors, such as childhood trauma (Morgan & Fisher) may relatively easily trigger a psychosis. You could call that a 'sleeping psychosis', but as with the term 'unlocking' you could just as well label it genetic predisposition I think. It's a matter of semantics I guess.

  Is it simply a case of genetic predisposition, which people wrongly equate with having "sleeping psychosis"?

So yes, I think so. I don't, however, would call it 'wrongly'. It's more popular scientific language to call it sleeping or latent. But at the same time it also charges it with something 'inevitable' or a 'looming (sleeping) creature in the dark'. That's why I would definitely prefer to call it genetic predisposition, but in certain environments that term may also cause fear ('oh no, it's embedded in my genes!).

References
- Ham et al., Exp Neurobiol (2017); 26(1): 11–24
- Morgan & Fisher, Schizophrenia Bulletin (2007); 33(1): 3-10
- Owen et al., Schizophrenia Bulletin (2007); 33(4): 905–11
- Robinson & Becker, Brain Res Rev (1986); 11(2): 157-98


How to answer questions that don't seem to be possible to be answered on a Strongly disagree - Strongly agree scale and what's their point?

Really good question - I've had this exact conversation with a student.

It's important to understand that mature scales are validated:

  In the fields of psychological testing and educational testing,
  "validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support
  the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of
  tests".

An interesting example is predictive validity:

  ... the extent to which a score on a scale or test predicts scores on
  some criterion measure. ... predictive validity provides somewhat more
  useful data about test validity because it has greater fidelity to the
  real situation in which the test will be used. After all, most tests
  are administered to find out something about future behavior.

From the point of view of the developer of a psychometric test, what a subject might think of a question, how they interpret (or misinterpret) it, or what ambiguity it contains, is not as important as whether or not answers to the question contribute to the validity (especially predictive validity) of the test.  A question that seems meaningless to you, might actually be highly predictive (at least in general) of the criterion measure.

It is not always necessary for the developer to know why a question is predictive, only that it is predictive (provided other validation criteria are also met).  Scales in general are developed using the scientific method - a survey you take that contains say, 20 questions, might originally have contained over 100 questions.  After testing the scale on an experimental group, researchers may discover that 20 of those questions provide 80-90% of the predictive power of the full test, and decide to shorten it.  Researchers cannot really know in advance which questions work best - that's what testing is for!

Another interesting factor in psychometric testing is demand characteristics:

  In research—particularly psychology—demand characteristics refers to
  an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation of
  the experiment's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to
  fit that interpretation. ... A possible reason for demand
  characteristics is the participant's expectation that he or she will
  somehow be evaluated and thus figures out a way to 'beat' the
  experiment to attain good scores in the alleged evaluation.

In other words, if you feel like your test score forms some evaluation of your character, then you might try to provide answers that you think will form a desirable evaluation, rather than an accurate one.

However, it is difficult to ascertain the value or purpose of a question in a test - some scales contain questions added for testing internal validity, specifically for detecting demand characteristics and other biases that may affect results.  For example, a test may contain 2 identical questions worded differently.  Different responses to these questions could indicate dishonesty, misinterpretation, inconsistency, or inattentiveness.  Bottom line: I wouldn't worry about what the point of a question is - don't over-think it.


What is it called to think without language? Are there studies around it?

Well, obviously it's called non-verbal thought, and its most researched sub-topic appears to be visual thinking.

In general, questions like are there papers about X are frowned upon when the choice of answers is large, as it happens to be in this case, but I'll still point out one recent paper, Amit et al. (2017), using neroimmaging which has an interesting (even if somewhat obvious) hypothesis  at the end of its abstract:

  Humans rely on at least two modes of thought: verbal (inner speech) and visual (imagery). Are these modes
  independent, or does engaging in one entail engaging in the other? [...]
  An asymmetry was observed between inner speech and visual imagery. In particular, inner speech
  was engaged to a greater extent during verbal than visual thought, but visual imagery was engaged to a similar
  extent during both modes of thought. Thus, it appears that people generate more robust verbal representations
  during deliberate inner speech compared to when their intent is to visualize. However, they generate visual
  images regardless of whether their intent is to visualize or to think verbally. One possible interpretation of these
  results is that visual thinking is somehow primary, given the relatively late emergence of verbal abilities during
  human development and in the evolution of our species.

Some linguists, particulary those who support the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (which posists that language determines thought) will probably be livid after reading this paper... I for one am a little skeptical of the generalizability of Amit's findings because of the limited set of experiments his group performed. I'm quite curious what neuroimaging has to say about the brain activation of mathematicians who work in really abstract areas of mathematics; do they also have visual aids popping in their head all the time during their work? And what about the congenitally blind? It's known they have a capacity for mental imagery, but that it is more limited than that of the non-blind. What's the brain activation pattern when the congenitally blind think?

And if the above sounds too abstract, Laura Otis has a blog entry with some vignettes of how some people self-describe their visual thinking process. She also cites some published studies supporting the idea that there is not just one mode of visual thinking, i.e. there is heterogeneity in "visual thinking styles"; this claim is mostly based on the work of Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues e.g. 2005, 2010a, 2010b.

And I'm not sure to what extent producing music counts as thought, but a neuroimaging study of musicians who improvise interactively as form of musical dialogue (Donnay et al. 2104) found activation in syntactic but not in semantic areas of the brain regions responsible for processing language.


What is the term for "What has been seen cannot be unseen" in cognitive sciences?

The most relevant term would be Ironic Processing.

  Ironic processing is the psychological process whereby an individual's deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts (thought suppression) render those thoughts more persistent.

This is a result of a failure of Thought Suppression or more generally Motivated Forgetting. It appears Thought Suppression doesn't work well and generally the attempt to not think about X results in a sudden increase of thoughts about X.

Since you have a sudden increase of thoughts about the "suppressed" thought, you're strengthening retrieval of it, and you might even be conditioning that thought with the reason you don't want to remember it.


Does heritability define the person in terms of the population?

Heritability is the proportion of differences in some observable trait (the phenotype; e.g., intelligence, height, love for pizza) in a population that corresponds to differences in the genotype.

Heritability is estimated by comparing people who differ in terms of their genetic similarity and the non-genetic influences they are exposed to. For example, we know that monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes, whereas dizygotic twins share only 50% of their genes on average. If we compare twins that were raised in different homes (adopted twins) and monozygotic twins are more similar to each other than dizygotic twins we conclude that this difference overlaps with genetic differences, as expressed in a high heritability index.

Importantly, heritability does not describe the extent to which a person's individual characteristics were formed by genes or the environment, which is a frequent misconception. Heritability only describes the variance of a trait within a given population that corresponds to genetic differences in that population.

As described in Griffiths et al. (2000):

  It must be stressed that this measure of “genetic influence” tells us what part of the population’s variation in phenotype can be assigned to variation in genotype. It does not tell us what parts of an individual’s phenotype can be ascribed to its heredity and to its environment. This latter distinction is not a reasonable one. An individual’s phenotype is a consequence of the interaction between its genes and its sequence of environments. It clearly would be silly to say that you owe 60 inches of your height to genes and 10 inches to environment. All measures of the “importance” of genes are framed in terms of the proportion of variance ascribable to their variation.

How this restricts the interpretation of heritability becomes clearer if we imagine cases in which there is no genetic variation (everybody has the same gene) or there is no variation in the environment (everybody is raised in the same way). In the first case, every variation would correspond to environmental differences, in the second case every variation would correspond to genetic differences.

A nice example is described here:

  One example is hair color among Eskimos (N. Carlson & W Buskirt, 1997). The whole Eskimo population appears to have the same alleles for hair color, so for Eskimos, the heritability for hair color is 0.00, even though the color is under strong genetic control! It's 0.00 because there is no genetic variation for hair color.

Furthermore, it is important to point out that there can be considerable overlap between genes and environment. People with certain genes can search specific environments that others with different genes would not. These environments can then have a high impact on them. Nevertheless, because of the way in which heritability is defined, these environmental differences are ascribed to genetic differences. Furthermore, they depend on the possibility of seeking certain environments in a society. An example is described by Neisser and colleagues (1996):

  A high heritability does not mean that the environment has no impact on the development of a trait, or that learning is not involved. Vocabulary size, for example, is very substantially heritable (and highly correlated with
  general psychometric intelligence) although every word in an individual’s vocabulary is learned. In a society in which plenty of words are available in everyone’s environment-especially for individuals who are motivated
  to seek them out-the number of words that individuals actually learn depends to a considerable extent on their genetic predispositions.

For these reasons, heritability is a population construct, it hinges on the genetic and environmental variability within the population it describes.

References

Griffiths, A. J., et al. (2000). An Introduction to Genetic Analysis (7th ed.). New York: W. H. Freeman. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21766/

Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard Jr., T. J., Wade, A., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., Halpern, D. F., et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51, 77–101. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.2.77


How can motivation be increased by improving brain chemistry with nutrition and activities?

The best thing you can do is avoid nutritional deficiencies and exercise.  In general, it's the same as for the rest of the body.  Many people have subtle nutritional deficiencies that they may never know about their whole life just based on eating habits.  As Chuck Sherrington said, neurotransmitter-based treatments are subject to homeostatic compensation, but if you have a deficiency, it may be more complicated.

Nutrition

Particularly, the same things that increase pulmonary/circulatory health are going to increase brain health[1,2].  A large contribution to health in the developing fetal brain comes from the mother's diet.  There are lots of diseases associated with maternal nutrtional defecits[3,4].

Exercise

Running and other physical activities increases neurogenesis [5,6].  But does it do it "intelligently"?  I don't know.  More neurons isn't automatically more motivation or intelligence.  But it is a stress-relief technique, and too much stress can certainly kill motivation.

Behavior

You didn't ask, but behavioral practice is probably another strong factor.  For example, breaking jobs into smaller tasks: getting the first small task done can give a motivational boost towards getting the second done (and so on).  They've actually found a correlation between paying smaller loans off first (even though not mathematically more efficient in terms of costs) is more likely to lead to loans being paid off all the way because of the human element[9]


Why do we use 3 channel R,G,B to represent color?

After researching this a bit more, I believe this is actually a biology question, not a physics one.

The specific term I believe you're searching for is Trichromacy, which Wikipedia defines as:

  Trichromacy or trichromaticism is the condition of possessing three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three different cone types.1 Organisms with trichromacy are called trichromats.

Reading the Wikipedia article, it appears that the cone cells  Humans (and other trichromats) come in three different variations; the different variations are sensitive to red, green, and blue light, as depicted in this image (again from Wikipedia)1:

  Normalized responsivity spectra of human cone cells, S, M, and L types

We've evolved these three cone types because red, green and blue are additive primaries, meaning most of the whole range of visible light can be represented by combinations of these colors. Quoting Wikipedia again:

  Even the four-primary technology does not yet reach the range of colors the human eye is theoretically capable of perceiving (as defined by the sample-based estimate called the Pointer Gamut[17]), with 4-primary LED prototypes providing typically about 87% and 5-primary prototypes about 95%. Several firms, including Samsung and Mitsubishi, have demonstrated LED displays with five or six "primaries", or color LED point light sources per pixel.[18] A recent academic literature review claims a gamut of 99% can be achieved with 5-primary LED technology.

I'm not sure what the experiment you're referring to was, but I doubt it would translate nearly as nicely into sound, as RGB is based on the biology of the eye specifically.

1: Attribution: Vanessaezekowitz at en.wikipedia


What exactly is an astroglial calcium wave?

I'll try and answer this:

An astroglial calcium wave is the phenomena in which astrocytes express a variety of ion channels and membrane receptors, which enable them to respond on a millisecond time scale to neuronal activity with changes in membrane potential and/or increases in intracellular Ca2+ levels.

  Astrocytes were not only able to respond to external stimulation with increases in intracellular calcium elevations but, most importantly, they were be able to transmit these calcium signals to adjacent non-stimulated astrocytes, as intercellular Ca2+ waves (ICWs). The presence of such phenomenon of propagating waves of calcium lead to the proposition that “networks of astrocytes constitute an extraneuronal pathway for rapid long-distance signal transmission within the CNS.”

Are they solitons?

No as they are followed by similar events and a soliton is neither preceded nor followed by another such disturbance.

  A calcium wave is defined as a localized increase in cytosolic Ca2+
  that is followed by a succession of similar events in a wave-like
  fashion.

Do they propagate intercellularly?

I think so yes or if not propagate then communicate -

  They were be able to transmit these calcium signals to adjacent
  non-stimulated astrocytes.

Are they independent of neuronal input?

  There is a reciprocal communication between neurons and astrocytes.
  Hippocampal neuronal activity was shown to trigger calcium waves in
  astrocyte networks (Dani et al., 1992) and astrocyte calcium waves
  were shown to modulate neuronal activity (Dani et al., 1992; Kang et
  al., 1998; Nedergaard, 1994; Parpura et al., 1994; Parri et al.,
  2001).

Can the astroglial mesh be viewed as an astroglial field (obviously more speculative)?

This one I couldn't find any discussion on - nor could I form a conclusion on other than I suppose it could?

Reference:

Scemes, E., & Giaume, C. (2006). Astrocyte calcium waves: what they are and what they do. Glia, 54(7), 716-725.


What's the relationship between priming and availability heuristic?

Psychological Priming and Availability Heuritic are both concepts within Social Psychology and Behavioural Psychology.  Although I can see where you are trying to make a link here, and there could be times where both are at play, Psychological Priming is different to Availability Heuristic.

Psychological Priming

  Priming is a nonconscious form of human memory concerned with perceptual identification of words and objects. It refers to activating particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task. For example, a person who sees the word "yellow" will be slightly faster to recognize the word "banana." This happens because yellow and banana are closely associated in memory. Additionally, priming can also refer to a technique in psychology used to train a person's memory in both positive and negative ways.(Psychology Today, n.d.)

Doing some research on the history, the idea first took hold in 1932 with a book called Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Bartlett, 1932) and the first demonstration of Priming was in 1971 within experiments by E. F. Loftus, J. F. Juola and R. C. Atkinson's (Colins & Loftus, 1975) [See also - The History of Priming (Vogel, 2014)]

A couple of other good examples of Psychological Priming, different to the yellow banana above, was provided in an article by Jesse Marczyk Ph.D. in Psychology Today (Marczyk, 2013)

Priming can affect perceptions about the world

  [H]olding a warm drink (instead of a cold one) can lead you judge other people as more caring and generous; a finding that falls under the umbrella of embodied cognition. Why would such a finding arise? If I understand correctly, the line of thought is that holding a warm drink activates some part of your brain that holds the concept "warm;" as that concept is tied indirectly to personality (e.g., "He's a really warm and friendly person"), you end up thinking the person is nicer than you otherwise would. Warm drinks prime the concept of emotional warmth.

[See also: This article in Johnny Holland for more examples]

Priming on a behavioural level instead of a perceptual one

  [R]esearch on stereotype threat suggests that if you remind women of their gender before a math test (in other words, you're priming gender), they will tend to perform worse than women who were not primed because the concept of "woman" is related to stereotypes of "being worse at math."

[See also: Power Poses and Elderly Prime Effects on Walking Speed
]

Availability Heuristic

This is a cognitive bias

  The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be

One good example for this can be found in an article by Jamie Madigan Ph.D. in Psychology Today (Madigan, 2013)

In this example, with people who have always lived in areas where their internet connection is reliable, the availability heuristic influences their decision-making, belief, and behavioral bias with regard to internet connection in other areas.

  Orthy's estimation of the number of people who have stable Internet connections and who should thus "#dealwithit" is probably influenced by the availability heuristic. Or rather, the UNavailability heuristic.

Madigan went on to say,

  The availability heuristic is an old mental foible that I've written about before, and the short version is that the easier it is to remember of examples of something, the more prevalent, frequent, or large we think it is. But interestingly, the opposite is also true: will tend to think something is less prevalent or less frequent when it's harder to remember examples of it. Various things make an event or a condition easier to remember, but they often include experiencing it ourselves, having seen it recently, or knowing someone who has.

  My favorite example of this (un)availability heuristic is a hack created by University of California Los Angeles professor Craig Fox (2006) to boost his student class evaluations. Before completing the evaluation forms, Fox asked half the students to suggest 2 ways to improve the class (an easy task), then asked the other half to suggest 10 ways to improve it (a much harder task). Those who go quickly got stumped on the road to coming up with 10 improvements gave Fox higher course evaluation ratings than the others. Why? Because they misinterpreted the difficulty of recalling so many flaws as evidence that there were few flaws at all.

References

Bartlett, F. C. (1935). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82(6), pp. 407—428.
DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.82.6.407

Fox, C. (2006). The availability heuristic in the classroom: How soliciting more criticism can boost your course ratings. Judgment and Decision Making, 1(1), pp. 86—90.Free PDF available at:
Society for Judgment and Decision Making and
ResearchGate
Cannot find DOI

Madigan, J. (2013). The Availability Heuristic Is Always On [Online]
Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-games/201304/the-availability-heuristic-is-always

Marczyk, J. (2017). The Adaptive Significance of Priming [Online]
Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pop-psych/201701/the-adaptive-significance-priming

Psychology Today (n.d.). Priming [Online]
Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/priming

Vogel, R. (2014). The History of Priming [Online]
Available at: https://prezi.com/ep5dwcwbq2dl/the-history-of-priming


What skills are required to build simulations of the human brain?

Schroedingers Cat nailed a couple of important points and I need to expand it further.

I believe the important roadblock in the creation of an absolutely intelligent machine is the fact that human brain is still not decrypted. There isn't a holistic cognitive model that describes how the brain functions, reacts or take decisions. Even in case such a model is inferred, it still cannot be put into real use since human decision is based on knowledge and the environment (popularly called culture). So a machine being rational is hard to prove since human themselves cannot prove their rationality.

Technically, there are three problems

Language - Almost all programs use one or the other form of Context Free Grammar. Humans always use context while speaking.
Computationally it isn't feasible to do a simulation model similar to brain. Just assume a choice of 2 items among a set of 10 items. You have a possible 2^10 combinations. Think of 100 conditions and your computer would go into limbo.
Most of the AI engines built today are a far cry from those proposed by their forefathers. You must have read the AI: A modern approach. They are mostly built for a particular domain and aren't absolutely intelligent

And regarding your robot searching Google for the answers, its already possible by using the Google API's to search for answers but it won't fulfill your requirement. Google uses the PageRank technology for its results, which is more of a machine learning technique and is still far from true semantic search.

There's hope though. I am just in the same situation (coincidentally I have subscribed for both machine learning and natural language processing, though all courses are indefinitely postponed). I could suggest learning the following

Artificial Neural Networks
Natural Language Processing
Probabilistic Models
Unsupervised machine learning techniques
Advanced pattern discovery

I also suggest a change in your original model. Instead of searching Google to find the answers, it would be better you download the stack exchange data dump and start analyzing the patterns since those answers are given by true humans.

Feel free to ask more questions. There are more things to be questioned than to be answered in this field.


Negative emotions in individuals spreading to others

I have found that there is a term which encompasses the phenomenon of both positive and negative emotions spreading from person to person and that is Emotional Contagion.

Hatfield et al. (1993) points out that emotions can be "caught" in several different ways and outlines 3 propositions.

Mimicry

  In conversation, people automatically and continually mimic and synchronise their movements with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements and instrumental behaviours of other people.

Feedback

  Subjective emotional experience is affected, moment to moment, by the activation of and feedback from facial, vocal, postrural and movement mimicry.

Contagion

  Consequently, people tend, from moment, to "catch" other people's emotions.

Apparently, Gerald Schoenewolf said in Emotional contagion: Behavioral induction in individuals and groups. Modern Psychoanalysis; 15, 49-61, that Emotional Contagion is

  a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behaviour of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.

I don't have access to this article so I cannot confirm this.

Emotional contagion and empathy have an interesting relationship, in that they share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In The Art of Loving, social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy (self-regulation) is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.

  “The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.

  I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”  ― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving


Does white noise impair studying, reading, recall/memory or learning?

There are recent studies that suggest that unstructured background noise, including white noise, may actually improve studying and recall. The benefits are unclear and likely person-dependent, but there is at least no obvious bad effect.

Bottom line: sounds like a safe strategy for you to try.


Metacognitive strategy in terms of cognitive science

I don't think there's a single meaning for this term, mainly because "cognitive science" is pretty broad and inclusive. So people working in different sub-fields of cognition use it to refer to different things, depending on what they're working on. A couple examples outside of learning and teaching might be confidence judgements (how likely is it that your last response was correct? etc) in memory or categorization studies, or things like 'planning to plan' in resource-rational accounts of behavior, where you might want to work out how much time you can afford to spend making a decision. These are pretty different areas, but they are all legit ways to use the word 'metacognition', as are the learning and teaching examples you mention. They're all 'thinking about thinking' in some sense.
Actually if it comes to that I don't think there's a single clean and universally accepted definition for 'cognition' either. You recognize it when you see it, it's just a vibe sort of thing. Or, to put it more scientifically, 'cognitive' is a fuzzy category ala Rosch.
Confidence/error tracking example:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2011.0416
resource-rational example:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.09848.pdf


Does nlp have a dependency on a subject having strong visualisation skills?

NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) is a pseudoscience at worst, and not a science, but "an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy" at best. There is little scientific research, and no reliable scientific findings, supporting the effectiveness of NLP, and the evidence is probably best interpreted as speaking against the effectiveness and veracity of NLP 1, 2, 3.

In non-scientific venues, there are indeed sometimes claims that NLP can help with visualisation as understood by NLP, e.g. here. In contrast, a recent experimental finding that is actually scientific disconfirmed NLP claims about the nature of visualization as conceptualized by NLP.

It should be noted that there seems to be little overlap between visualization - if assumed to refer to the same concept as mental imagery - as employed by vision researchers and cognitive scientists studying vision, and the NLP concept of visualization. The latter instead vaguely resembles some concepts in cognitive linguistics (e.g. research into metaphors such as those by George Lakoff).

I also want to emphasize that Neurolinguistic Programming is not neurolinguistics, which is a legitimate subfield of cognitive science: the study of how the brain implements language. In contrast, NLP can most likely justifiably called quackery.


Is there a way to test brain activity/aptitude on a measurable scale in order to identify a suitable occupational aptitude?

According to the United States Armed Forces, it is possible. They do something similar to what you propose with the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. However, according to the section "Test Validity" of the linked Wikipedia article, there is some debate about whether it only measures literacy or IQ.


What heuristic or bias is at play when drawing conclusions from headlines only?

If the headline confirms a strongly held prior belief, or is antithetical to prior beliefs, then no need to read.
Consider an article titled, 'the world is round' ... no need to read it as I already believe that.
An alternate title 'the world is flat' ... no need to read that either.
An article 'the world is changing' may pique my interest and cause me to read further.
I wonder whether any heuristic or bias is at play, or whether an evaluation mechanism that judges the perceived benefit of reading the article versus the time opportunity cost of engaging with it.


Can machines really create anything new?

This is actual a pretty old and often debated question. It is called "Lady Lovelace's Objection" and first appeared in Alan Turing's seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

Below is my response to Lovelace's Objection, as well as Alan Turing's response which I wrote for a philosophy course in 2015. Perhaps it will be of interest to you?

  Turing created the imitation game as a way to talk about cognition in
  machines without being bogged down by the philosophical history of the
  word “think” and “machine”. In his discussion of the imitation game,
  he addresses Ada Lovelace's objection and refutes one aspect of it,
  however he does not cover all aspects. Namely, his rebuttal to
  Lovelace's objection seems to assume the universe is deterministic and
  by rephrasing Lovelace's argument, he may be missing some of it's more
  subtle implications.

  Turing's imitation game has the objective of causing a human judge to
  be unable to correctly guess which amongst two players is a computer.
  The only tool at the judge's disposal is textual communication that
  can be directed to each of the players individually, similar to an
  Internet chat room or an e-mail exchange. If the machine can confuse
  the judge, given a certain time or question limit, the machine is said
  to have won the imitation game and to have passed the Turing test.

  Lovelace's argument against a machine passing the Turing test and thus
  being able to “think”, is that a machine (specifically referring to
  the Analytical Machine) “has no pretences to originate anything. It
  can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” (Turing 1950,
  450). Turing faces this argument by first rephrasing it into
  questioning whether a machine “can never do anything 'new'” (Turing
  1950, 450). He refutes this reformulated objection by questioning
  whether human beings have ever done anything new. In other words, he
  claims that there is no verifiable proof that any creation from a
  human being was not the product of their education; whether formally
  studied or learned from the environment.

  Turing's claim is a reasonable one, but he risks getting caught up in
  the debate of free will versus determinism, since he seems to be
  claiming that a human being is purely a function of this environment.
  He assumes that all that is necessary to imitate a human being is to
  determine the function that maps the external environment to human
  reasoning. The belief of the existence of this function is known as
  determinism within philosophy and is a matter of much debate.
  Alternatively, to avoid this philosophical quagmire, instead of
  appealing to determinism, we could instead look at what is required
  for a computer to create something “new”. Creating something “new”
  could be interpreted as synthesizing new information. The proof that a
  computer can accomplish this task can be proven by examining a
  rule-based system.

  A rule-based system is based on the idea that most of human knowledge
  can be represented by rules and human reasoning can be approximated by
  the manipulation of these rules in a logical manner. For example, to
  represent a navigation plan, you can know a series of logical steps or
  rules describing routes, such as “Lester street connects my house to
  highway 69” and “highway 69 leads to Sudbury”. It is possible to
  program a computer using to search through these steps and come to a
  conclusion, in this case the route from Sudbury to Lester street
  (Thagard 2005, 47). You can then synthesize new rules by combining
  them using a process known as “chunking” or “composition”, and saving
  them so that the search doesn't need to be executed every time this
  objective (getting from Sudbury to Lester) needs to be accomplished
  (Thagard 2005, 49). Additionally, rules can be used to generate
  explanations or hypotheses by abductive inference (Thagard 2005, 50).
  Both the plan, the explanation and the summary did not exist until the
  computer sought them out and discovered them. This can be seen as the
  equivalent of a machine producing something “new” and acquiring “new”
  knowledge. Using mathematical terminology, it can be said that the
  system is non-monotonic.

  There are many flaws to this simplistic rule-based system. It is
  computationally inefficient and does grasp all of the psychological
  complexity of a human being. Consequently, it could be argued that
  this model could never evolve to successfully imitate a human being.
  However these are superficial concerns. It would be a mistake to
  broaden this specific rule-based system's inability to evolve to all
  computational models. Instead, what should be retained from the
  example of the rule-based system is that it is possible to contain
  aspects of human reasoning and ingenuity within a computational model.
  Additionally, the flaws of computational inefficiency and
  psychological incompleteness can be and have been addressed by newer,
  more complete models. For example, ACT-R has been shown to be able to
  imitate certain attributes of a human being, such as natural language
  processing, in the form of language acquisition (Anderson 2002, 1).

References:

Alan Turing (1950), Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Paul Thaghard (2005), Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science, 2nd Edition. MIT Press.
Taatgen, N.A. & Anderson, J.R. (2002). Why do children learn to say "broke"? A model of learning the past tense without feedback. Cognition, 86(2), 123–155.


Is there a clinical definition for the psychological disorder/personality disorder for people who like to get under people’s skin?

Taking joy in irritating others is unlikely to be classifiable as a personality disorder, however, the Dark Triad describes individuals with disagreeable habits. In combination with other extremely adverse behaviours, it is perhaps classifiable as Conduct disorder or Narcissistic personality disorder.


Cognitive dissonance is often a problem when trying to convince someone of your position.  Depending on the subject matter and how closely the position is held for the opposing party it can be very difficult to follow even logical well reasoned arguments.  The opposing party often has a framework of reality in which they make sense of various situations or concepts.  If a new concept doesn't fit within that framework there is often underlying reasons as to why the argument is unable to land. So until the deeper views are addressed you are arguing in vein.

For example in order for something you postulate to be true, it may require the opposite party to reconcile other beliefs that are deeply held in a way that they are potentially unwilling to address, or see no reason to address due to unwanted stress or emotional distress in addressing the beliefs.

Alternatively there are neurological deficits or disabilities that could make getting your point across more difficult, but at least from my experience it is often a case of Cognitive Dissonance.


Relation between L-glutamine supplementation and risk of schizophrenia

Glutamate availability in the brain is strictly dependent on de novo synthesis of glutamine in astrocytes. This process  requires the enzymes pyruvate carboxylase and glutamine synthetase to form glutamine, which is then converted into glutamate by deamidation via phosphate-activated glutaminase in a reaction that also yields ammonia (Schousboe et al., 2014).

In other words, whatever you ingest in terms of glutamate or glutamine via your food doesn't reach the brain and won't play a role in psychosis.

This is good news, as glutamate is an abundant, naturally occurring amino acid and is found in tomatoes, grapes, cheese, mushrooms and other foods. It is also widely used as a flavor enhancer with an umami taste that intensifies the meaty, savory flavor of food. It's commonly used in stock, soups, ramen, savoury snacks etc. (source: wikipedia).

Reference
- Schousboe et al., Adv Neurobiol (2014); 11:13-30


What causes people to feel depressed without there being a problem?

"Their lives are perfectly fine" is a hard to test thing. Hard to compare. How people feel and respond is deeply contextual.

However there are several potential reasons:

They may be 'wired' to feel stress or respond emotionally (i.e. Due to the way their brain has developed).
A feeling of not being in control (This is often hard to perceive from outside and removed from concrete factors). The causes and triggers of this are varied and complex.
A physical response. e.g. Things like a sensitivity to Gluten can cause incredible changes to our emotions and physiology. Often this manifests in good and bad periods.
Negativity can be a reflection of the context or surroundings. Those same people may appear positive in a different context.
Mental illness can manifest in uneven patterns. This spans from mild (common) to severe symptoms.


Where can I find online interactive versions of classic experiments in psychology for the purposes of teaching?

List presented alphabetically

Cambridge Brain Sciences (cambridgebrainsciences.com)

Several "brain-training" type experiments including span tasks, mental rotation, and paired associate memory. Some tests require free registration on the site to complete. Data from the tests may be used for research purposes. Created by Adam Hampshire and Adrian Owen at University of Western Ontario.

Cognitive fun! (cognitivefun.net)

Several n-back variants, basic response time tests (e.g. go/no-go), subitizing demo, flanker task, working memory span. Creator/source unclear.

Dual-Task (dualtask.org)

Demonstrations of multi-tasking limitations. Experiments are Java applets. Site created by Hal Pashler at UCSD.

Go Cognitive (gocognitive.net)

Several cognitive experiments, including change blindness, visual search, implicit memory test, working memory capactiy, and selective attention. Experiments are Flash based. Site created by team at the University of Idaho.

Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)

Many variations on the implicit association test. Data is collected for research purposes. Created by team at Harvard University.

Simons Lab (simonslab.com)

Several videos of classic selective attention / inattentional blindness studies, including the famous gorilla study. Students can do the gorilla study by watching a YouTube video. Videos of other experiments are more descriptive and less interactive. Site created by Daniel Simons at the University of Illinois.

Stroop demos

http://ezyang.com/stroop/ - sequential presentation of words, press key to respond.
https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html - simultaneous presentation of whole list. read aloud and hit button to indicate that reading is complete.
http://www.math.unt.edu/~tam/selftests/stroopeffects.html - simultaneous presentation of whole list. read aloud and hit button to indicate that reading is complete.

Swarthmore Cognitive Psychology Demos (http://cogscidemos.swarthmore.edu/)

Three experiments: Visual search, Sternberg working memory task, & reverse Stroop. Implemented in JavaScript. Some parameters of trials can be adjusted. Data is nicely summarized at the end of the experiment, e.g. search functions are fit for the visual search task. Created at Swarthmore under the direction of Frank Durgin.


I've been reading a book called The Way of The Shaman by Michael Harner. In it, I found three quotes on page 24 which describe how people perceive the world in different ways based on what could be cognitive biases. In the one quote Harner writes,

  “In engaging in shamanic practice, one moves between what I term an
  Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and a Shamanic State of
  Consciousness (SSC). These states of consciousness are the keys to
  understanding, for example, how Carlos Castaneda can speak of an
  ‘ordinary reality’ and a ‘nonordinary reality.’”

In another quote he writes,

  "To understand the deep-seated, emotional hostility that greeted the
  works of Castaneda in some quarters, one needs to keep in mind that
  this kind of prejudice is often involved. It is the counterpart of
  ethnocentrism between cultures. But in this case it is not the
  narrowness of someone’s cultural experience that is the fundamental
  issue, but the narrowness of someone’s conscious experience. The
  persons most prejudiced against a concept of nonordinary reality are
  those who have never experienced it. This might be termed
  cognicentrism, the analogue in consciousness of ethnocentrism."

In the third quote Harner writes,

  "Anthropologists teach others to try to avoid the pitfalls of
  ethnocentrism by learning to understand a culture in terms of its own
  assumptions about reality. Western shamans can do a similar service
  with regard to cognicentrism. The anthropologists’ lesson is called
  cultural relativism. What Western shamans can try to create, to some
  degree, is cognitive relativism. Later, when an empirical knowledge of
  the experiences of the SSC is achieved, there may be a respect for its
  own assumptions. Then the time will perhaps be ripe for unprejudiced
  analysis of SSC experiences scientifically in OSC terms.”

I'm not sure if these quotes answer your question well enough since they attempt to explain the mind more than the brain but I thought they were somewhat related to what you've asked.


What are the highest ranked neuroscience journals that use double-blind review process?

Nature Neuroscience offers such a possibility.

http://www.nature.com/news/nature-journals-offer-double-blind-review-1.16931

See also

Does anyone know of any clinical psychology journals that use a double-blind review process?


In ACT-R difference between declarative and working memory

This article explains the difference :

  Declarative memory takes the form of a semantic net linking
  propositions, images, and sequences by associations.

  The nodes of long-term memory all have some degree of activation and
  working memory is that part of long-term memory that is most highly
  activated.

The declarative memory is all knowledge that can be retrieved in consciousness. Working memory activates only the declarative memory needed for the current task.

When a different task is given, the activation changes to match the needs of the new task. The non-relevant active knowledge is deactivated, and new relevant knowledge is retrieved.