It seems I misunderstood how the outputs may be viewed from an MEG.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a non-invasive test, which:

measures the magnetic fields generated by electric currents in the brain. The magnetic field measurements are in the range of femto-tesla to pico-tesla. MEG provides a very accurate resolution of the timing of neuronal activity (Singh, 2014).

A copyrighted image of an MEG recording can be viewed in Figure 3 of Singh (2014) and looks very different to a normal EEG with a typical montage, which can be viewed in Figure 1 within Louis, et al. (2016).
References
Louis, E. K. S., Frey, L. C., Britton, J. W., Hopp, J. L., Korb, P., Koubeissi, M. Z., ... & Pestana-Knight, E. M. (2016). The normal eeg. Electroencephalography (EEG): An Introductory Text and Atlas of Normal and Abnormal Findings in Adults, Children, and Infants [Internet]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK390346/
Singh S. P. (2014). Magnetoencephalography: Basic principles. Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology, 17(Suppl 1), S107–S112. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-2327.128676


Are there official guidelines to provide "mental first aid" to people attempting suicide?

This is a good question as according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. (WHO, n.d.)  Calling the emergency services via 911 (or a local equivalent) is the first thing you should do when discovering someone is about to attempt suicide.

Emotional First Aid (EFA)

The first time I heard about any kind of "mental first aid" was around 2010 when some training courses on Emotional First Aid (EFA) were made available, run for 6 three and a half hour sessions over a 6 week period.  Built on a foundation of systemic thinking and humanistic principles, EFA seeks to dispel the myth that mental health means mental illness; and so EFA was designed to help a child or young person experiencing emotional distress, before any professional help is sought.

Other Training

As members of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), there are also formal training courses run by Samaritans (UK and USA).

Psychological First Aid (PFA)

For an informal approach to learning about the subject, there is a guide for field workers written and provided in many languages by the World Health Organisation (WHO) through their Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) called Psychological first aid: Guide for field workers (WHO, 2011).  The guide is not specifically aimed at suicide prevention. It is aimed at providing guidance for Psychological First Aid for any possible reason, and therefore, the guidance can be followed whilst dealing with suicidal people.

Some Key Points (Among Others)

The prime responsibility you have is for your own personal safetyHelping the suicidal person should never endanger your own personal safety.  If you get seriously injured whilst trying to help, you are not being helpful and it could add to the list of reasons the suicidal person may carry through with it.
Psychological first aid (PFA) is is not counselling or psychotherapyso you don't need to be trained in any of the related mental health fields. Even if you are trained in any related mental health fields, you are not to treat it as counselling or psychotherapy.
Don’t force help on people, and don’t be intrusive or pushy. (WHO, 2011)One of the things which some people might think they should do is to insist that they stay with the suicidal person and force them to talk. Not only is this going against their human rights, but someone who is suicidal because they feel they are not in control of their own lives can be pushed into carrying through with their suicide attempt with this approach.
Make it clear to them that even if they refuse help now, they can still access help in the futureIf they refuse and ask you to leave them alone, you can say that you will stay nearby and if they change their mind, just call out and you will be there.  The fact that you are there can be enough support.
Be aware of and set aside your own biases and prejudices.You may have strong beliefs which may affect how you feel about that person once they tell you something.  You need to be mindful that you can inadvertently display the fact that you don't approve of something which can be detrimental to the process.
After it is over, be sure to look after yourself.Dealing with suicidal people can lead to Vicarious Trauma.  Be aware of how you are feeling and how the incident has affected you.  Seek emotional help for yourself where needed too.

If there is a strong chance you may be in the situation where you have a suicidal person you need to help, I would recommend at least reading the WHO guide for field workers, however it may be more beneficial to undertake some form of formal training in Psychological First Aid either through the Samaritans or a similar organisation.

References

WHO. (n.d.) Mental Health - Suicide Data.Retrievable from: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/

WHO. (2011). Psychological first aid: Guide for field workers. Retrievable from: http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/guide_field_workers/en/


What is a more modern interpretation of the terms egosyntonic/egodystonic?

Cognitive dissonance theory seems to be exactly what you're looking for. It seeks to explain how and why people hold incongruous or dissonant beliefs. I guess egosyntonic beliefs would be consonant with self, egodystonic would be dissonant. Anyway, I'll just link you to the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance


Methods to find patterns or correlations in MEA spike trains

This is a very broad question. There is a very large literature on studying MEA spike trains: some classic methods are probably already explained in books such as Dayan and Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience.

If you're looking for "statistical modelling", i.e. describing properties of a network's activity without caring for its actual structure and dynamics, generalised linear models (GLM) are a common tool (see articles by Liam Paninski 2004, Jonathan Pillow 2008) and maximum entropy models too (Schneidman et al. 2006, Shlens et al 2006). This literature is still quite popular, although probably not as fruitful as a decade ago.

There are certainly other things that could be mentioned in this area, but I don't know them all, and it also fundamentally depends on what you're trying to do. Hope this helps.


One common way of framing numerical cognition is in terms of a "mental number line". This mental number line is thought to have a logarithmic scale, so perceived differences are inversely proportional to their magnitude. For example, the difference between 6 and 7 is perceived as bigger than the difference between 76 and 77. This is just a variant of the Weber-Fechner Law, which applies in many perceptual domains (sound loudness, object weight, light brightness, etc.). So people don't exactly put numbers into discrete bins, but small differences begin to blur together for larger numbers.

In typical, educated adults there is also thought to be an explicit symbolic or linguistic representation of numbers that captures their exact value and allows us to do exact calculations.

For theories of numerical cognition, one good place to start is:

Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., & Spelke, E. (2004). Core systems of number. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(7), 307-314.


What is the correct scientific term of having a short-term or long-term mindset (in the field of health and healthy lifestyle)?

One search term that might be useful is temporal discounting.

Here's a relevant Psychlopedia article, and a relatively recent paper that may have some useful references for navigating the literature.


I think to use the MRIcorn is the easiest way,
You can put the AAL3v1.nii.gz and AAL3v1.nii.txt into the mricron-templates folder.

by the way which software you use to do fMRI meta-analysis?
best,
Hui Zheng
Shanghai Mental Health Center


Why do people walk in a circle when they are blindfolded and intend to walk in a straight line?

It has nothing to do with perception.

It's simply because there are infinitely many ways to go in circles, while only one way to go straight. Even a slightest bias towards one side will produce a circle. When other cues are given to correct the bias, one is able to track straight lines.

Even robots (or toy cars) that are designed to go straight lines will go in circles without sensory feedback!


Mismatch negativity vs. mismatch response

MMN/MMR refer to responses during an oddball paradigm. The typical arrangement of this sort of paradigm is to have a sequence of stimuli, for example, a sequence of tones of one frequency, followed by either the same tone (standard) or a different tone (oddball).

For EEG, they are the same thing. Mismatch negativity is a particular response in the EEG observed as the difference in response to an "oddball" compared to the same stimulus when it is a standard.

"Mismatch response" is a more general term that would include, for example, an increase (or simply a change) in neuronal firing in response to the oddball vs. standard, or a change in functional connectivity, etc.


Chunking Patterns and Enjoyment of Applying Patterns

This is an interesting question and when you said:

  when we drive to work every morning we don't sometimes remember the details because we do it so often we chunk those details.

you are talking about two different phenomena.  They are chunking and autopilot.  As for the theory that:

  pattern recognition is rewarded with a release of endorphins

I haven't been able to find anything to confirm this, however I may have found a possible source to the theory that pattern recognition can lead to the release of other reward chemicals in the brain, which can only be very loosely linked with the other two phenomena.

Chunking

Within psychology, Chunking is a method used for remembering things rather than "switching into autopilot" to carry out learned tasks automatically without conscious awareness.  Rather than chunking a recognised pattern, we are employing chunking by producing recognised patterns which can be used later on to remember something needed in the future.  We are breaking the item to be remembered into chunks and remembering the chunks with the patterns created.

  The phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism can be observed in the way individuals group numbers and information in the day-to-day life. For example, when recalling a number such as 12101946, if numbers are grouped as 12, 10 and 1946, a mnemonic is created for this number as a day, month and year. Similarly, another illustration of the limited capacity of working memory as suggested by George Miller (1956) can be seen from the following example: While recalling a mobile phone number such as 9849523450, we might break this into 98 495 234 50. Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that is beyond the "seven plus-or-minus two" memory span, we are remembering four groups of numbers.

Autopilot

This has been studied quite extensively and one study on this (Hyman Jr, et al. 2014) talked about how it is possible to drive home and have no conscious awareness during or after the trip. See also, Ira Hyman (2014)

In the introduction it was highlighted that:

  There are two broad categories of possible explanations. One possible explanation is that people were aware of the road and obstacles during the drive, but immediately forgot those features. Alternatively, driving without awareness may represent a form of inattentional blindness, in which objects that pass through the focal point of vision do not enter awareness (Neisser and Becklen, 1975; Becklen and Cervone, 1983; Mack and Rock, 1998; Simons and Chabris, 1999; Simons, 2000). People may use visual information to guide the control of actions, but may not devote attention to objects. Without attention, people may fail to bind features into objects (Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Wolfe, 2007) and thus may fail to become aware of the things they pass when driving or walking. This second possible explanation would be consistent with the theoretical claim that visual information follows two pathways after low level visual processing (Goodale and Milner, 1992; Jeannerod and Jacob, 2005; Westwood and Goodale, 2011). One pathway is the dorsal pathway which uses visual information to guide action, enabling someone to grab an object or navigate around obstacles. The other pathway is the ventral pathway leading to object recognition and conscious awareness.

Pattern recognition and release of endorphins

There is a book called Your Money and Your Brain by Jason Zweig (2008) and Michael Angelucci (2011) provided some insights from the book, including:

  Dopamine is a chemical that sends energy throughout the brain and turns motivation into actions. Dopamine is so powerful that a rat will starve to death rather than turn away from dopamine. Lay an MRI scan of a cocaine addict about to get a fix next to that of a person who thinks he is about to win money and they are virtually the same. We also know this about dopamine and rewards: dopamine is strongest when a reward is unexpected. That getting what you expected does not produce dopamine, and if the expected reward does not show up then the dopamine dries up. We also know that if the reward is big enough, dopamine seems to have a memory. This last point is huge. Investors who have received a large reward will experience a dopamine release if a pattern similar to the winning pattern is observed. This may result in the investor taking actions that are not sound.

What is being said here is that with addictions comes patterns of behaviour which has rewards.  Your remember how you was rewarded by certain behaviour patterns and so you strive to gain those rewards again by repeating that behaviour.

You might see patterns within stock markets or within casino games (see Gambler's Fallacy within my answer to another question).  You might get lucky one or two times and win using the pattern, increasing dopamine levels (a reward chemical within the brain) and this enforces the fallacy that the pattern exists and you commit it to memory for later use.  But the pattern does not actually exist and therefore when employed later on it fails.

Conversely to the endorphin effect proposed in your question, in this situation, the pain of losing and the stress of trying to find out how this could have happened, will increase endorphin levels and the principal function of endorphins is to inhibit the transmission of pain signals.

References

Angelucci, M. (2011). Dopamine and Pattern Seeking and Your Investments [Online]http://awmfinancial.com/uncategorized/dopamine-and-pattern-seeking-and-your-investments/

Becklen, R., and Cervone, D. (1983). Selective looking and the noticing of unexpected events. Memory & Cognition 11(6), 601–608.DOI: 10.3758/BF03198284 PMID: 6669028

Goodale, M. A., and Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences 15(1), pp 20–25.DOI: 10.1016/0166-2236(92)90344-8 PMID: 1374953

Hyman, I. (2014). The Dangers of Going on Autopilot. Psychology Today [Online]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/201404/the-dangers-going-autopilot

Hyman Jr, I. E., Sarb, B. A., & Wise-Swanson, B. M. (2014). Failure to see money on a tree: inattentional blindness for objects that guided behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 5(1), 356.DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00356

Jeannerod, M., and Jacob, P. (2005). Visual cognition: a new look at the two-visual systems model. Neuropsychologia 43(2), pp 301–312.DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2004.11.016 PMID: 15707914

Mack, A., and Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), pp 81-97.DOI: 10.1037/h0043158Reproduced in webpage format with author's permission at: http://cogprints.org/730/1/miller.html

Neisser, U., and Becklen, R. (1975). Selective looking: attending to visually specified events. Cognitive Psychology 7(4), pp 480–494.DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(75)90019-5

Simons, D. J., and Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception 28(9), pp 1059–1074.DOI: 10.1068/p281059 PMID: 10694957

Simons, D. J. (2000). Attentional capture and inattentional blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(4), pp 147–155.DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01455-8 PMID: 10740279

Treisman, A. M., and Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12(1), pp 97–136.DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(80)90005-5 PMID: 7351125

Westwood, D. A., and Goodale, M. A. (2011). Converging evidence for diverging pathways: neuropsychology and psychophysics tell the same story. Vision Research 51(8), pp 804–811.DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2010.10.014 PMID: 20951156

Wolfe, J. M. (2007). Guided search 4.0: current progress with a model of visual search. In: Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems, ed. W. Gray (New York: Oxford University Press), pp 99–119.

Zweig, J. (2008). Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster


Which computer video games can improve intelligence, barring Medal of Honor?

This paper by Shams, Foussias, et al. (2015) gives a good meta-analysis of studies that have been conducted on the effects of video games on intelligence. Some games described as improving cognition were:

Super Mario 64:

  "Significant increase in gray matter volume in the right HC, right DLPFC, and bilateral cerebellum in the video game group compared to the control group"

Tetris:

  "Puzzle game group improved in attention and visuo-spatial ability"

Starcraft and The Sims 2 (female subjects):

  "Games that emphasize rapid switching between multiple information sources led to a significant increase in cognitive flexibility"

There's many other games covered in this paper, displaying a variety of cognitive and neuroanomatical changes in subjects who played them regularly for a somewhat extended period of time (typically 1-2 months).

Additionally:

  "A number of structural imaging studies have found that video game play can alter brain structure, especially gray matter volume. These studies have typically analyzed a particular video game or video game type. The most commonly studied category in the last few years has been complex strategy games such as Super Mario 64 or Space Fortress..." (emphasis added by me)

Reference:

Shams, T. A., Foussias, G., Zawadzki, J. A., Marshe, V. S., Siddiqui, I., Müller, D. J., & Wong, A. H. (2015). The Effects of Video Games on Cognition and Brain Structure: Potential Implications for Neuropsychiatric Disorders. Current Psychiatry Reports, 17(9). doi:10.1007/s11920-015-0609-6


Is consistent dual n-back training likely to improve the performance of analysis (mathematics) students?

I assume that the group that  spends 100% of their time studying real analysis and 0% of their time doing n-back training will do best in any subsequent real analysis course.

Cognitive skill acquisition does not generalise all that much (for a review see VanLehn, 1996). Transfer is often limited. I'm sceptical of any claims that short term training can lead to far reaching cognitive change as implied by n-back training.

The demands on working memory of problems in a domain get less as the knowledge and rules implied by a domain get better acquired. Over time students will start to recognise patterns, and will learn to apply rules specific to the domain. Domain specific practice is probably the best way to acquire that knowledge. And in general, the more time that is spent on learning that knowledge, the more knowledge that will be acquired.

Of course, much could be said about creating an optimal learning environment for real analysis. For example, consolidation of prerequisite knowledge, providing practice at the right level of difficulty, providing feedback to the learner, providing a good mix of presentation of content with problem exercises, distributing practice over time, and so on are all important components of an effective learning environment. However, these have nothing to do with n-back, and everything to do with good pedagogy. In particular, if you want to teach something other than real analysis, but your aim is effective performance in real analysis, then you should examine what are the relevant skills and prerequisites for effective performance in real analysis. And combine this with an examination of student difficulties and knowledge gaps.

Empirical Evaluations

@Ofri Raviv pointed out two references (Shipstead et al, 2012; Melby-Lervag et al, 2013) that provide reviews of working memory training and are generally critical of its utility.

Melby-Lervag and Hulme (2013) did a meta-analysis of working memory training studies:

  To be included in the review, studies had to be randomized controlled
  trials or quasi-experiments without randomization, have a treatment,
  and have either a treated group or an untreated control group.
  Twenty-three studies with 30 group comparisons met the criteria for
  inclusion. The studies included involved clinical samples and samples
  of typically developing children and adults. Meta-analyses indicated
  that the programs produced reliable short-term improvements in working
  memory skills. For verbal working memory, these near-transfer effects
  were not sustained at follow-up, whereas for visuospatial working
  memory, limited evidence suggested that such effects might be
  maintained. More importantly, there was no convincing evidence of the
  generalization of working memory training to other skills (nonverbal
  and verbal ability, inhibitory processes in attention, word decoding,
  and arithmetic). The authors conclude that memory training programs
  appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not
  generalize.

References

VanLehn, K. (1996). Cognitive skill acquisition. Annual review of psychology, 47(1), 513-539.
Shipstead, Zach; Redick, Thomas S.; Engle, Randall W. Psychological Bulletin, Vol 138(4), Jul 2012, 628-654. doi: 10.1037/a0027473
2
Melby-Lervag, M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is working memory training in children effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology, 49, 270-291. PDF


How to measure visual salience quantitatively

The duration of eye fixation has been used in  both infants and adults to measure locus of attention. This can be achieved using an eye-tracker. A more primitive and less exact way is to manually count the frames of a video recording of subjects. The frames per second (FPS) would be a limiting factor. In addition, the item that was first observed is the more salient one, provided that there is no secondary bias in the task (i.e. the objects should be an equal distance apart or the distance could be randomized).

For visual search and serial search tasks, responses are gathered and individual response curves (reciever operator characteristics, ROC) for participants and conditions can be computed using signal detection theory (SDT). The discrimination index d prime (d') can then be calculated only if two explicit responses are required exist.

Another option is to vary the presentation time systematically in order to quantify processing speed, but this requires a more computational approach.


Aspergers as a diagnosis is no more its been merged into autism spectrum disorder. Its really not that bad of a diagnosis compared to full blown Autism or something like Schizo, Bipolar or BPD.

Here are some books and resources:

ASD Me Learning Functioning Spectrum

Autism Spectrum Disorders: Foundations, Characteristics, and Effective Strategies

Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew: Updated and Expanded Edition

Asperger's From Wikipedia

I can speak from personal experience the therapies for AS listed on wiki sometimes really work; CBT and anxiety medication really helped me. My brain kinda adapted to the anti-depressant though and I haven't found or really needed anything anxiety in a few months. You'll find social skills like cooperation are this wonderful thing you can practice online with friends and if you mess it up they will be really kind and understanding. I really fail when interacting with frenemies.

I have fun talking to people at Wrong Planet (an autism community) as well. Some people there are less functioning than AS so you have to have compassion and understanding. Others still are higher functioning than me which of course makes me a little jealous but I've learned that I'm not alone and neither are you.


relationship between mood and working memory

Welcome to the community Dalek!
Emotional states can guide the actions and decisions we make in our everyday life through their influence on cognitive processes such as working memory.
I would like to share with you couple of sources (Figueira et al., 2017 and Baddeley, 2012) which can be quite helpful for you.
People over here tried to figure out emperically how our moods are affecting cognition processes.
References
Baddeley, A. (2012). Working memory: theories, models, and controversies. Annual review of psychology, 63, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100422
Figueira, J. S., Oliveira, L., Pereira, M. G., Pacheco, L. B., Lobo, I., Motta-Ribeiro, G. C., & David, I. A. (2017). An unpleasant emotional state reduces working memory capacity: electrophysiological evidence. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(6), 984-992. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx030


The term I was looking for is "concurrent activities". Some research in the domain of hierarchical learning has been done in this domain by Rohanimanesh and Mahadevan.

According to this literature review on hierarchical learning, basically what they did was determine how multiple tasks can be managed without interfering with one another and how they should be scheduled.

I couldn't find any cognitive models of this concurrency, so there appears to be quite a bit of work done on the idea of multi-tasking, which might be synonymous. Unfortunately, most of this seems to be quite firmly in the camp of the Classical Cognitive Science Paradigm (such as the work by Niels Taatgen which interestingly rejects hierarchy) with not a lot of thought put into neurobiological plausibility. Additional answers pointing to fMRI experimental data similar to the one found here for hierarchical learning would be greatly appreciated.


Timing mental arithmetic training for specific event

Firstly, I think you’re thinking too much tbh. But still, I would totally answer this question- I think both are good approaches. But at different period of time. Suppose it’s after a month. So for the first 20 days you work on different time period. It’s better you work longer- what I mean is you start by giving one sample test in one hour then take a 15 minutes break. Then again you do it for 3-4 hours. Take a good nap for 1-2 hours. Then again do it.
In the last 10 days. You practise hard at 12PM  for sure. But you also practise in the remaining time. Because you need the brain to work. Simple example- if a car is switched off for 30 days it will take time to start. But if it switched off 39 minutes back it will start asap. Think about it.

I hope it helps.


What does scientific research say about the relationship between penis size and attractiveness?

If you are interested in scientific research, you may want to read Lever, Frederick, and Peplau (2006). From their abstract

  Views about penis size were assessed in an Internet survey of 52,031
  heterosexual men and women... Whereas 85% of women were satisﬁed with their partner’s penis size, only 55% of men were satisﬁed with their penis size, 45% wanted to be
  larger, and 0.2% wanted to be smaller. Satisfaction did not vary
  across age groups from 18 to 65. Men reporting a larger-than-average
  penis rated their appearance most favorably, suggesting a possible
  confidence effect of perceived large penis size.

They also summarise research on actual penis size (p.130):

  Combining the means and standard deviations reported by these
  researchers, we calculated that the mean erect penis length was 5.3
  in. (13.5 cm), with 68% of men measuring between 4.6 and 6.0 in. (11.7
  cm and 15.2 cm), 13.5% between 3.8 and 4.5 in. (9.7 cm and 11.4 cm),
  and 13.5% between 6.1 and 6.8 in. (15.5 cm and 17.3 cm); only about
  2.5% of men possessed a penis over 6.9 in. (17.5 cm) long, and 2.5% were under 3.7 in. (9.4 cm) long.

They then go on to discuss:

  Why are so many men dissatisﬁed with their penis size when the vast
  majority of women are satisﬁed with their partner’s penis size? Past
  research has suggested that one reason men overestimate the importance
  of a trait to women is that media marketed to men give greater
  emphasis to the importance of this trait than do media marketed to
  women (Frederick, Fessler, & Haselton, 2005). For example, media
  marketed to men (pornography, popular magazines) may emphasize the
  importance of supersized penises, whereas media marketed to women may
  not. If individuals use media as a source of information about what
  physical features are important, than gender-differentiated media may
  mislead men about women’s actual preferences. Future research should
  examine in greater detail the degree to which men overestimate the
  importance of penis size to women and the reasons for this
  misperception.

Drummon and Filiault (2007) presents qualitative data in relation to penis size in the gay community.

Francken et al (2002) surveyed 170 sexually active women.
They found that 20% of women found the length of the penis to be important and 1% very important. 55% and 22% found length to be unimportant or very unimportant. The pattern of results for penis girth were similar but girth was slightly more important. The correlation between importance of girth and width was very large (r=0.71) suggesting that there may be some underlying individual difference in women about the important of penis size in general.

References

Lever, J., Frederick, D. A., & Peplau, L. A. (2006). Does size matter? Men's and women's views on penis size across the lifespan. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 7(3), 129. PDF
Drummond, M. J., & Filiault, S. M. (2007). The long and the short of it: Gay men’s perceptions of penis size. Gay and lesbian issues and psychology review, 3(2), 121-129.
Francken, A. B., Van de Wiel, H. B. M., Van Driel, M. F., & Weijmar Schultz, W. C. M. (2002). What importance do women attribute to the size of the penis?. European urology, 42(5), 426-431. PDF


Does thinking out loud negatively affect one's ability to think internally?

Yes, anti-correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic brain networks may be altered by different practice. I give an example of how meditation affects anti-correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic brain networks.

  "Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external
  and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that
  are internal and self-related."

  "Anti-correlation between extrinsic vs. intrinsic systems was stronger
  during FA (focused attention) meditation and weaker during NDA (non
  dual awareness) meditation in comparison to fixation (without
  mediation). However, correlation between areas within each system did
  not change across conditions. These results suggest that the
  anti-correlation found between extrinsic and intrinsic systems is not
  an immutable property of brain organization and that practicing
  different forms of meditation can modulate this gross functional
  organization in profoundly different ways."

Given these findings, your practice of speaking out loud may favor extrinsic brain network paths which could explain your loss of clarity when you suppress "thinking out loud" while among other people.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250078/


Importance of Neural Synchrony to Cognition

As you have already hinted at, the issue is controversial. I could leave it at that and say "no, there is no consensus", and it would be a true answer, but it wouldn't be satisfying, wouldn't it? Instead, I'll briefly define the topic, give a few examples, and then a few recent criticisms. My answer will be weighted somewhat towards "cognition" instead of "computation", however different you consider them. It's more of a safari than a good answer I fear, I hope you're getting something out of this.

Neural synchrony is usually used to refer to oscillatory alignment; that means, some sort of oscillation occurs in a population of neurons, for example, an alpha rhythm as a ~10 Hz pulse; and neuronal synchrony is both, on the individual level, the degree to which individual neurons either take part in this oscillations, and/or align their spiking behaviour to certain parts of this oscillation, and on the population level, how other neuronal populations are aligned with this oscillation.

What is doubtlessly true is that the brain is full of oscillations. We know that at the very least since Hans Berger discovered the alpha wave back in the 1920s. When someone closes their eyes, we quickly see the 10 Hz rhythm. But once they open the eyes, or are disturbed in any way, it quickly disappears. Are these oscillations important per se, or just an epiphenomenon? Berger himself assume them to be the direct manifestation of unified brain state. But Berger was a bit of a crank. The well-respected British researcher and Nobel price laureate Lord Adrian who first replicated this finding assumed the 10 Hz rhythm was simply the "idling of the brain", the very absence of computation.

One contemporary researcher who assigns a functional and active role to the alpha rhythm is VanRullen, and I think much of his work is very interesting.

Let's look at some of the rather basic ways how oscillations and timing are relevant in the brain. First, timing in general. Our original understanding of neural communication (in part unveiled by aforementioned Lord Adrian!) focuses on the concept of rate coding and population coding; the net amount of spiking activity in a neuron, or in a population, is what matters. This is for example what happens in the peripheral nerve cells; when heat or pressure or pain are applied to the skin, the responding neurons directly communicate the degree of heat or pressure or pain by how much they ramp up their firing (at least at first, before Spike Frequency Adaption sets in).

Initially, this was seen as fully consistent with Hebbian learning - the more one neuron fires, the stronger the synapses with its targets become. But then Bi & Poo discovered Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP), and now everything is a bit more complicated. Remember Hebb's Law says

  When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

Hebb's Law goes beyond saying A has to fire lots. It says, A's firing has to cause B's firing. And one component of causation is temporal precedence; so A's firing has to occur before B's firing for increasing synaptic strength. And this is just what Bi & Poo observed; only when A's spikes arrive in a short temporal window before B's own spike does Long-Term Potentation occur. If however B's spikes happen a bit before A's spikes, Long-Term Depression occurs.

So the temporal order of spikes matters. Neurons causing others to spike gain more influence over them, and neurons who're followers, not leaders are demoted.

Another bound for plasticity is of a neurochemical nature. Levels of catecholamines (neuromodulators) regulate if the hippocampus will encode an incoming stimulus, depending, for example, on its novelty. So only if neuromodulator levels are up does incoming information lead to lasting adaptations. During sleep, were we assume reconsolidating to happen, we observe that the brain stem sources of catecholamines (like the neurotransmitter norepinephrin and dopamine) are temporally correlated with the slow wave occurring during sleep. Specifically, Locus Coeruleus neurons spike right at the onset of the transition to the Up state. It seems the cortical oscillation is timed so that active states co-occur with high catecholamine levels.
This is a form of temporal coding called phase coding. The phase of the ongoing oscillation matters with respect to the incoming spike. It is also observed, for example, in the theta oscillation in the hippocampus. A range of theories exist for a possible function of theta phase locking; examples are that certain theta phases again indicate more receptive states (so that incoming information has a higher chance of being encoded during certain parts of the theta oscillations), or that the part of a theta phase a neuron spikes at indicates how important the information this neuron is encoding is.

Beyond phase coding, we find Singer's very popular binding by synchrony. How do to parts of the brain communicate to each other that they are "talking" about the same thing? Well, by alignment in the gamma band, that is, by phase locking of the two populations to the same ~40 Hz rhythm.

But how believable is all this?

There are many theoretical objections to specifically high-frequency binding by synchrony. For example, the power of oscillations fall of over distance as a function of its frequency; that means, slow oscillations travel far, but synchrony in fast oscillations cannot be sustained over long distances. (Slow oscillations are simply too slow for binding by synchrony.)

Another question is if there are even any gamma oscillations at all, if they are truly clock-like wave patterns or if they are simply a methodological artefact - traces of the sensitivity of the Fourier transformation to asynchronous activity, or filtered noise.

At least for humans, gamma band synchrony findings have become strongly suspect as it was shown that these patterns are better explained as the EEG traces of small eye movements or micro-saccades.

But this must not spell the death of all theories for a functional role of timing and oscillations, of all temporal codes and phase codes. In STDP, we have clear, anatomically sound evidence for the importance of temporal order in spiking, and simple evolutionary principles suggest neuronal populations will exploit such phenomena. However, the field is diverse and controversial. There is no universally accepted phenomenology, methodology, or theory. We have tidbits and fascinating findings, but nothing coherent. Cortical oscillations are sill mostly a riddle.

I think most recent contribution is the discovery of Cross-Frequency Phase Coupling by Canolty et al. They observe that the amplitude of the fast (gamma) oscillations depends on the phase of the slower theta or delta rhythms. The basic finding is quite similar to the observation of LC spike/cortical state phase coupling noted earlier, but now we observe this in the awake animal. And a clear proposal for a functional role of this mechanism has been made, too; I can simply quote the abstract of Lakatos et al.:

  Whereas gamma-band neuronal oscillations clearly appear integral to visual attention, the role of lower-frequency oscillations is still being debated. Mounting evidence indicates that a key functional property of these oscillations is the rhythmic shifting of excitability in local neuronal ensembles. Here, we show that when attended stimuli are in a rhythmic stream, delta-band oscillations in the primary visual cortex entrain to the rhythm of the stream, resulting in increased response gain for task-relevant events and decreased reaction times. Because of hierarchical cross-frequency coupling, delta phase also determines momentary power in higher-frequency activity. These instrumental functions of low-frequency oscillations support a conceptual framework that integrates numerous earlier findings.

Here is a video presentation on the topic.


Low crystalized intelligence- failure to transfer skill from Hippocampus to cortex?

First we need to establish the link between crystallized intelligence and the types of memory. Long term memory can be divided in two parts: Procedural and declarative.

Episodic memory is recollection of events, semantic memory is recollection of learned facts, and procedural memory includes priming, classical conditioning, skill based learning etc and does not require intentional or conscious recollection of an experience (1).

Among these types, Howard and Kahana's model of temporal context theory is only applicable to the declarative branch (2).

The answer to the question depends on which type of problem solving we are talking about. All three types of memories get used during learning. Problem solving requires skill based learning. But we must also remember a lot of facts in order to solve certain real world problems. Practical experiences also come in handy. However, if we can recall all the related facts but still fail to solve a problem, that indicates poor skill-building. According to Cattell‘s (1971, 1987) Gf-Gc theory, fluid intelligence causes crystallized intelligence (5). therefore, low fluid intelligence might be a reason behind poor skill based learning.

"failure to transfer skill from Hippocampus to cortex" is not likely to happen because skills do not seem to have any short-term and long-term phases. Excerpts from a recent study (6):

  We have shown that when people adapt to successive and opposing sensorimotor transformations, they fail to consolidate learning of the first even when the two transformations or tasks are separated by 24 hr.

From a meta-analysis (4):

  This implies that a procedural memory may never become fully stable and instead remains vulnerable to interference. When exposed to task B, participants may have retrieved the procedural memory associated with task A and modified it, ‘overwriting’ the memory for task A with information relevant to task B............ It implies that learning a new skill leads to the automatic destruction of another skill. It would never be possible to have skill in more than one task! Our ability to acquire multiple skills may depend upon having contextual cues available to signal the switch from one task to another.

This theory proposes that our procedural memory has a completely different type of contextual cue system, one that cannot differentiate between multiple skills as efficiently as episodic memory can. This theory also explains why ADHD is such a barrier in learning.

Now we can guess what type of memory is involved in skill learning: When a new skill is being formed by Gf, it is likely utilizing the info available in short term memory to do so. When a skill is being recalled, It goes to working memory for utilization.

In conclusion: Forgetfulness indicates inefficiency in declarative memory, while poor skills might indicate low Gf and/or poor attention span.

Questions remaining:

What causes inefficiency in declarative memory?
How to strengthen our procedural memory? Can practice help?
Why do people who find it easier to learn through practical and struggle to grasp abstract concepts?

But these questions deserve new topics.

Sources:

Green REA, Kopelman MD. Neural organization of memory andmemory impairments. In: Trimble MR and Cummings JL, eds. Contemporary behavioural neurology. Boston: ButterworthHeinenman, 1997; 139–152.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5b83/58754a92cf648f3c5ccea7f34df62bba1e74.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-neuropsychological-society/article/interdependence-of-episodic-and-semantic-memory-evidence-from-neuropsychology/1A97EFA24F2CDED16D12964AD5EE67F9
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(04)00937-6.pdf
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2639&context=etd
http://www.cns.atr.jp/~kawato/Ppdf/CaithJNS04.pdf


Could any kind of learning be framed as learning a language?

It appears that the language and learning new skills would often (depending on the skill) be managed by different parts of the brain. It is, therefore, unlikely to be similar.

A good description of how the learning process works from neuroscience's point of view can be found here: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter07.html.

This same course also describes how the language is managed in the brain in this chapter: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter08.html.

Based on the above, it doesn't seem to be the case that the mentioned skills are similar to language, at least not in terms of how the brain processes them.


Is sluggishly progressing schizophrenia recognized outside of Russia?

The idea that schizo type disorders may onset slowly is commonly accepted in the West. We do not have a separate diagnosis for this type of onset in the DSM. Psychotic episodes may happen to individuals before they experience all the symptoms of bipolar or schizo type disorders.

It is common that a patient may begin to hear voices during isolated instances without the trouble with emotions. Then develop trouble with emotions. Then progress into hallucinations. The individual may cope with the isolated psychosis until the psychosis becomes so severe that they are unable to do without medical attention. This progression sometimes takes years.

It is possible that any diagnosis of mental illness can be used for political reasons though.


Wikipedia: cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

So yes it is an example of Cognitive Dissonance.

Belief number 1. "I trust my girlfriend."

Belief number 2. "My girlfriend is not trustworthy"

Belief number 1. "I like my girlfriend and I don't want to break up with her."

Belief number 2. "My girlfriend cheated on me, THEREFORE I should break up with her."

The first set is based on the individual's comfort with his girlfriend being monogamous. His girlfriend has displayed capability and desire to not be monogamous. Loving relationships are usually based on openness and trust-  e.g. that both know the conditions and stick to them and discuss any changes. It looks like this initial understanding is missing and the preconceptions of monogamy have now be called into question.

The second set is based on a cognitive framework of how relationships should work that logically says that cheating means breaking up.


Does taking antidepressants, anxiolytics and sleep pills significantly affect a person's intelligence?

About intelligence: The subject of intelligence is broadly addressed in research in psychology, one of the most supportive theories is Spearman's bifactorial theory of intelligence, in this theory the factor g is a huge stable factor that explains the common variance (in scores) to all the different cognitive tasks that can be put to a person. Although intelligence would approach a series of constructs that explain the abilities in the resolution of cognitive problems, other factors that modulate these intelligence factors, such as motivation (volition or will) and attention (concentration), should always be taken into account. Among others (tiredness, stress, activation, etc). External factors exert their influence in early stages of information processing, can be identified with physical characteristics (light conditions, letter size, presence of the public, the person requires lenses, etc.). In conclusion, what we call intelligence, which we consider to be very stable, does not explain everything at all in cognitive tasks, there are many other causes that can influence, for example, and as mentioned, the level of activation (sleep, fatigue) or motivation and will.

Before considering an adverse drug effect, a period of adaptation should also be considered, based on factors such as: affinity (ability of the drug to match the receptor), intrinsic activity (ability to activate the receptor after its use ) And effective dose which is the amount of drug that produces the desired effect in 50% of users. In summary there is a period in which the person is adapting to the effects of the drug and even if the dose is adequate the person may experience a great change.

Adverse effects of drugs: Adverse effects are defined as an unwanted reaction that can be sometimes harmful and permanent, (not considered adverse effect inappropriate use) a high number of people report adverse effects, it is estimated that around 10 % of people experience effects but for most benefits obtained are greater than undesirable effects.

There are different types of adverse effects (cutaneous, gastrointestinal, respiratory system, cardiovascular system), if a drug produced damage to intelligence, it would be a late cognitive adverse effect, ie it would manifest after a high time consuming drug (sometimes long after withdrawal of the drug).
In relation to adverse effects in the central nervous system, the most common are: tiredness, dizziness, confusion, tremors, headache and seizures. The increase in fatigue occurs in almost all drugs that have a suppressive effect of the central nervous system (analgesics, antipsychotics, antidepressants, hypnotics, sedatives and anticonvulsants)

Depending on the country of residence, there are agencies that freely disclose information regarding the trade names with which the medicines are distributed in the state, these agencies also collect and study information about adverse effects recorded in other countries.

Duloxetine (R) (Duloxetine hydrochloride): Inhibitor of serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake. It weakly inhibits dopamine reuptake without significant affinity for histaminergic, dopaminergic, cholinergic and adrenergic receptors. Adverse effects: Headache, drowsiness, dizziness, lethargy, tremors, paraesthesia; Decreased appetite; Insomnia, agitation, decreased libido, anxiety, abnormal orgasms, abnormal dreams; blurry vision; Tinnitus; Increased blood pressure, flushing; Yawning; Nausea, dry mouth, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, vomiting, dyspepsia, flatulence; Increased sweating, rash; Musculoskeletal pain, muscle spasm; Dysuria; Erectile dysfunction, ejaculation disorder, delayed ejaculation; Falls, fatigue; weightloss.

Xanax (R) (Alprazolam): It is believed to exert its effect by binding to the ester-specific receptors located in SCN. It has anxiolytic, hypnotic muscle relaxant and anticonvulsive properties, as well as a specific activity in distress crisis. Adverse effects: Depression, sedation, somnolence, ataxia, memory impairment, dysarthria, dizziness, headache; Constipation, dry mouth; Fatigue, irritability.

Zolpiden (R) (Zolpidem hemitartrate): hypnotic type non benzodiazepine. Group of Imidazopyrines. Specific agonist of central receptors belonging to the GABA-omega macromolecular receptor complex that modulates the opening of the chlorine ion channel. Adverse effects: bitterness and dry mouth, upset stomach, drowsiness, dizziness and paradoxical reaction that usually disappear with a dose adjustment.

In summary, it seems that they are drugs that, in their phase of adjustment or adaptation, may well cause a temporary reduction in cognitive performance, but this effect should be reduced and temporary, that is to say, very brief, in case the Problem persists or in case of doubt can always be accessed to make consultations to pharmacists or general medicine (even for second opinions beyond the professional who has prescribed these drugs).

Sources:

Stephen M. Stahl. (2000). Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stephen M. Stahl. (2005). Prescriber's Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Public domain scientific intelligence test available for use in research

PEBL is a free open source programming language to help construct psychological experiments. A wiki and developer community provide some documentation and support.

PEBL has a Psychological Test Battery of many common or simple psychological tests so you may be able to use it out of the box without constructing your own test. PEBL includes free versions of many accredited and popular psychometric tests.

  Many of them represent the only Free version of proprietory tests available anywhere. They include a free Iowa Gambling Task, a free version of the TOVA®, a free Wisconsin Card Sort Test®, a free version of Conners Continuous Performance task, and a number of other useful tasks, with more to come.

If one of the included tests does not suit your needs, you or a programmer can create your own tests with PEBL's programming language which is customized specifically to create psychometric tests.


Mapping Sustained Attention on the brain (EEG)

You should consider using subject-specific alpha channels and frequency ranges. There are differences between individuals in alpha peak frequency. Also the placement of the EEG cap as well as small differences in orientations of cortex can affect which channels pick up perceptual activity.

One way to do this would be to record data from the subject with their eyes open and then their eyes closed, say for 60 seconds each. Then you can find the channels where there is a significant difference in power around the alpha range between these two conditions. You can also use this data to determine the peak frequency of each subject's alpha.


What is input resistance and how to interpret its values?

Ohm's law famously states V=IR, the voltage change (V) across a resistor generated by a current (I) equals the current multiplied by the resistance (R).

The resistor in this case is the cell membrane.  When an experimenter injects a known amount of current through an electrode, the voltage change that occurs is related to that current by the resistance of the cell membrane.  A high value indicates that the cell membrane does not let current pass easily so a given amount of current requires a large voltage changes.

The size of the cell and the number of open ion channels affect the input resistance.  Larger size means lower resistance (more surface area for current to flow through) and more open ion channels means lower resistance (the conductance g=1/R increases when you open ion channels so the resistance decreases).

As for relevance to neural computation, higher input resistance means that less synaptic input (current injection) can lead to larger voltage changes.  Manipulating input resistance (say by opening Cl- channels, which don't change the voltage of the cell much but do decrease the resistance) can change the responsiveness of the neuron to other inputs.  This phenomenon is called shunting inhibition.


How many synapses in the average human brain?

The human neocortex contains approximately 1.5x10^14 synapses, connecting its 19–23 billion neurons.

Source: Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner, L., Bundgaard, M. J., Gundersen, H. J. G., Nyengaard, J. R., & Regeur, L. (2003). Aging and the human neocortex. Experimental Gerontology, 38(1-2), 95-99. doi:10.1016/S0531-5565(02)00151-1


How to confirm that a more frequently labelled object is a better instance of the label

You could possibly use a two-proportion z-test to test against the null hypothesis that $(x_{1}/n_{1}-x_{2}/n_{2})==0$, though there may be better methods that consider the overall distribution of words chosen and accounting for differences in raters in terms of how many words they choose (your situation does not fit the assumptions of the test but may be 'close enough' for certain purposes).


How does appreciation for music change over time for the same person?

Following the comments you've received, I'll add my own subjective answer in the affirmative to your first question. I think we've already compiled enough votes and comments here that support @JoshGitlin's unscientific answer to say that there is some empirical basis for theorizing the existence of a "taste" acquisition process in music. Nonetheless, here's another somewhat unscientific (and inadvertent) contribution from Wikipedia:

Acquiring the Taste was the second album of English progressive rock band Gentle Giant...This was a departure from the blues and soul styles found on their self titled debut. It was more experimental, more discordant, and with more varied instrumentation. In the sleeve text, the band made this famous declaration:
"...It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with the one thought - that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating. It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this. From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts of blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling. All you need to do is sit back, and acquire the taste."

So there you have it: a fairly sophisticated band of musicians appealing to some common intuition about the very process in question, acquiring a taste for certain music. At the risk of being flagged for spamming, I'd even recommend that anyone curious enough to try out the process for oneself should give the album a listen; it's likely to be quite different from the music you're used to, but it's also likely to grow on you somewhat (it's certainly grown on me since I first heard it)!
As for your second question, generally speaking, aesthetic appreciation of a given, enjoyable stimulus (including, but not limited to discrete musical compositions) changes in at least two ways over repeated exposures.

Hedonic adaptation often occurs to some extent, such that as novelty wears off, so does enjoyment.
Nostalgia plays a somewhat opposite role under certain circumstances, such as those that associate the stimulus with a desirable memory.

There's probably plenty more to it than just these two influences though. How it all actually plays out would be very interesting to see, so here's an upvote for any references others might be able to offer in their own answers!


Why do many people not use tabbed navigation (e.g. in an internet browser)?

Because a majority of the people are just too plain stupid.

In an international study by the OECD on adult competencies (PIAAC) that evaluated literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments, it was found that only every third adult (in Germany: 36%) between 16 and 64 was able "to master more complex tasks such as navigating the internet".

Read that again. A more complex task such as navigating the internet. Only one third manages that. In an educated country like Germany where 77% of the population 14 and older use the internet.

This means that more than half the internet users don't know how to navigate the internet.

The study also found that

every eighth person does not know how to use a computer mouse
every fifth person only knows basic arithmetics or less
every sixth adult (!) has the reading ability of a ten year old child

I think tabbed browsing is a minor problem. The study makes me doubt the principles of democracy. How can people be allowed to vote, if about 15% of the adult (!) population "can at best read short texts with simple words and extract from these only very limited information"?

Source: http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/


In NEURON simulator, how can I save the values of a graph to a file?

Not intuitive, but to save the value of a curve plotted in a graph:

Right click the graph window, and choose "Pick Vector"
Click on the desired curve (it should change color i.e. to red)
In the NEURON Main Menu > Vector > Save to File
Type in the file name > Save
File will have two columns, first one for X-axis values (i.e. time) and second for the Y-axis (i.e. voltage)


Does Asperger's syndrome exist in other animal species?

It is difficult to identify autism definitively in other species, especially since autism encompasses a very diverse group of people who have different experiences.

However, because there is so much interest in studying autism, researchers have developed models for autism in model organisms, specifically in mice, which share some of the diagnostic features of autism.

Therefore, it is at least plausible that any social animal could have some individuals that share traits associated with autism, although it is going to be a matter of opinion whether these traits are autism or just something similar (at least until the mechanisms are better understood). Likely a repetitive behavior alone is not sufficient as a diagnostic criteria, but it could be one out of several.

Silverman, J. L., Yang, M., Lord, C., & Crawley, J. N. (2010). Behavioural phenotyping assays for mouse models of autism. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(7), 490.


To what extent is control over when a substance is used relevant to addiction?

This is a tough question to answer definitively. I won't address heroin specifically but rather drugs of abuse more generally since a lot of the addictive patterns are the same and heroin is less often studied in the lab.

I am not aware of studies that specifically use the protocol you are describing in human subjects; although you might be able to make some inference based on drug seeking behavior after hospital administration of opiates, for example.

However, in animal studies, drug sensitization protocols have been used where animals are given injections of some drug, and later are allowed to self-administer the drug. Typically, animals who were previously given injections of the drug are quick to develop self-administration habits compared to unexposed animals. It's hard to ask an animal what they "feel" and this may not be the same as "feeling addicted/dependent" but at least when they have an opportunity to self-administer they are more prone to take the opportunity.

This effect is sensitive to the particulars of the experiment, though: Higher self-administration doses don't show the effect (because undosed animals also quickly develop a habit). Limited exposure tends to create less or absent sensitization. Sensitization effects tend to be easier to detect when animals have to work harder for subsequent doses in a progressive ratio paradigm; on a fixed ratio paradigm the differences are minor or non-existent.

A great experiment to most directly address your question would be to dose one animal according to the self-administration patterns of another and compare them on addictive behaviors; however, one difficulty in such a comparison is that the animals that haven't been dosing themselves still need to learn how to dose themselves. I am not aware of a study that has done this but I hope if it has been done someone else can point it out!

Ferrario, C. R., Gorny, G., Crombag, H. S., Li, Y., Kolb, B., & Robinson, T. E. (2005). Neural and behavioral plasticity associated with the transition from controlled to escalated cocaine use. Biological psychiatry, 58(9), 751-759.

Lett, B. T. (1989). Repeated exposures intensify rather than diminish the rewarding effects of amphetamine, morphine, and cocaine. Psychopharmacology, 98(3), 357-362.

Lorrain, D. S., Arnold, G. M., & Vezina, P. (2000). Previous exposure to amphetamine increases incentive to obtain the drug: long-lasting effects revealed by the progressive ratio schedule. Behavioural brain research, 107(1-2), 9-19.

Mendrek, A., Blaha, C. D., & Phillips, A. G. (1998). Pre-exposure of rats to amphetamine sensitizes self-administration of this drug under a progressive ratio schedule. Psychopharmacology, 135(4), 416-422.


Anorexia nervosa as an anxiety management tool

If I'm understanding your question, you're wondering if anorexia nervosa is a symptom of other underlying problems in a person's life.

This is a current theory being supported by "Mental disorders as complex networks: An introduction and overview of a network approach to psychopathology" written by Nuijten et. al. The paper describes how instead of seeing a disorder as a single "latent variable" connecting all the symptoms, all the symptoms should just be considered as a network reinforcing themselves. This is demonstrated in the figure below taken from the paper:

For a discussion of the paper, see "Mental Disorders As Networks" by SlateStarCodex.


What are effective strategies for increasing concentration and motivation when doing seemingly passive activities such as reading journal articles?

Increasing Concentration

A method that is geared espeacially towards reading scientific texts is SQ3R. SQ3R is short for survey, question, read, recite and review. So instead of "just reading" a text, one is supposed to

survey it first to grasp the basic outline by reading the abstract, introduction or table of contents
formulate questions as to what it is that one learns from the text

After these two steps you start "really reading" the text, which is the 3R- part of the method. After reading a passage, pause and summarize what you have learned. You can be critical and evaluate the things with respect to a certain criteria (e.g.: how much evidence does the author provide?).

Maybe you don't even have to take this method too literally. You might want to switch the order of the steps a little, or only do some of the things mentioned. Thinking about my way of reading papers, I often do some of the things, but not all of them. But that is of course just my personal experience.

Increasing Motivation

This is maybe the harder part of your question. Goal Setting Theory (Locke & Latham, 2002) might work. According to the theory, setting a specific and challenging goal leads to better performance than a vage and easy goal. In addition, setting a proximal learning goals is recommended, when "the knowledge or skill for attaining a goal is unknown" (Latham & Locke, 2007, p.293). This could be appropriate for a student reading papers, as he is probably not already familiar with the material. Setting a proximal goal also goes well with the notion of reading only a small protion of the text and then summarizing it (the 3R- part from above) as opposed to a more distal goal like: "I want to understand this paper". Using Goal Setting Theory amounts to a form of extrinisc motivation. It does not necessarily get you into a flow. So maybe this is not what you wanted when you asked the question. But after all, having to read a lot of papers as a student is an externally prescribed task.

References:

Latham, G. P., & Locke, E. A. (2007). New developments in and directions for goal-setting research. European Psychologist, 12(4), 290-300. PDF
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American psychologist, 57(9), 705. HTML


Psychopathy and the MacDonald triad

Just keep in mind that psychopathy is often used as a more popular term for the characteristics of Anti-Social Personality Disorder (Davey, 2014). The three behaviors described by the website were indeed studied in the scientific community (see MacDonald). First of all, this research was retrospective and descriptive which in no way provides a causal link between the three factors and psychopathy. In other words, those three factors (or even two of them) are by no means the cause of psychopathy. In order to establish a true causal link between those three factors and psychopathy an experiment would be necessary (Passer, 2019) which is virtually impossible in this case.

Subsequent research has also criticized the validity of the MacDonald triad, suggesting that it likely has low predictive power for Psychopathy (Parfitt & Alleyne, 2018; Ryan, 2009). People who show all three factors of the MacDonald triad may very well not be psychopaths.

Treatment of psychopathy

As for treatment of psychopathy, clinicians have experienced that treatment of psychopathy is very difficult if not impossible. When psychopaths are caught after a crime they often have to participate in rehabilitation programs but these are general ineffective (Butcher, Mineka & Hooley, 2017). Some studies show that treatments which are effective for other criminal offenders actually lead to higher reoffending in psychopaths (Harris & Rice, 2006). Especially treatment focused on social skills and empathy seem to have counterproductive results because it makes the psychopath even more charming and socially cunning (Vitale & Newman, 2008).

Biological treatments such as drug therapies have not been systematically studied but so far show modest changes at best, leading scientist wondering whether these are worth studying more systematically. Overall these biological treatments seem to have little impact on the indivudal with psychopathy. Also, even if these treatments could help, psychopaths are still likely to be unmotivated to take medicines for example (Butcher et al., 2017).

Lastly, cognitive behavioral therapies seem to be most promising. These therapies often focus on a few specific factors, as can be read in Butcher et al. (2014):

  Common targets of cognitive-behavioral interventions include the following: (1) increasing self-control, self-critical thinking, and social perspective taking; (2) increasing victim awareness; (3) teaching anger management; (4) changing antisocial attitudes; and (5) curing drug addiction.

However, even CBT is relatively (to other disorders) not very effective for psychopathy, as Butcher et al. (2017) write:

  Even the best of these multifaceted, cognitive- behaviorally oriented treatment programs generally produce only modest changes, although they are somewhat more effective in treating young offenders (teenagers) than older offenders, who are often hard-core, lifelong psychopaths

For further reading about treatment see chapter 10 of Butcher et al. about personality disorders.

I personally believe psychopathy is one of the more serious disorders (do not get me wrong, all disorders negatively affect people), mainly because hatred and incomprehension for these individuals is very high even though in most cases there is hardly anything they can do about it.

References

Butcher, J. N., Mineka, S., & Hooley, J. M. (2017). Abnormal psychology (17th ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Davey G. (2014). Psychopathology: Research, Assessment & Treatment in Clinical Psychology (2nd ed). British Psychological Association and John Wiley & Sons LTD.

Harris, G. T., & Rice, M. E. (2006). Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of the psychopathy (pp. 555–72). New York: Guilford Press.

Parfitt, C., & Alleyne, E. (2018). Not the sum of its parts: A critical review of the macdonald triad. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, (2018). doi:10.1177/1524838018764164

Passer, M. (2019). RESEARCH METHODS: Concepts and connections. S.l.: WORTH PUB.

Ryan, K. (2009). The Macdonald triad: Predictor of violence or urban myth?.

Vitale, J. E., & Newman, J. P. (2008). Psychopathy
as psychopathology: Key developments in etiology, assessment, and treatment. In W. E. Craighead, D. J. Miklowitz, & L. W. Craighead (Eds.), Psychopathology: History, diagnosis, and empirical foundations (pp. 565–97). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.


What brain skill does Nonogram (Picross) games develop?

Psychological video game research began in earnest in the early 1980s "as a reaction to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s provoking statements about the adverse effects of video games." (Mulligan, 2008) From then on, video game research tried to understand wether playing violent video games increased aggressive behavior. For 20 years, violence was the only focus for psychological science, and understanding this became even more urgent in the public mind, when it became known after the Columbine High School massacre, that the assailants had "trained" for their attack by playing Doom.

In 2003 a paper by Green and Bavelier published in Nature had a revolutionary impact on computer game research. Green an Bavelier found that playing action video games increases visual attention capacities. Since their article, a multitude of papers has been published, documenting research into the effect of computer game play on cognitive abilities.

A research paper title illustrating this new trend in computer game research is "Mom, let me play more computer games: they improve my mental rotation skills" (Cherney, 2008). It has been suggested, that playing action computer games would benefit women (Spence, Yu, Feng & Marshman, 2009) or older people (Kato, 2010)  to increase their performance in certain cognitive skills and, for women, counter the cultural gender bias in learning these skills (which favors men), or, for older people, to counter the effects of aging. Spence and Feng (2010) emphasize the positive effect computer games can have on those skills (see the list below) that are important for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics:

  From an educational perspective, spatial cognition is essential for successful problem solving in science, technology, engineer- ing, and mathematics (STEM) education and occupations (Terrell, 2007). Spatial abilities are necessary for a wide range of job- related skills, such as solving mathematical problems (especially those involving geometry); visualizing the consequences of actions in surgery; designing structures such as bridges, buildings, and aircraft; constructing flowcharts and other representations of com- puter programs; creating and interpreting charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and engineering drawings; and so on. Excellence in STEM fields is strongly correlated with spatial ability (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009), and spatial skills are associated with performance in mathematics and science courses (Delgado & Prieto, 2004) and standardized tests (Casey, Nuttall, Pezaris, & Benbow, 1995), as well as the choice of mathematics and science courses in college (Casey et al., 1995).

A summary of the research is given in this meta analysis by Spence and Feng (2010). They give a table that details which games train which skills. I'll not give the complete table here, but in summary:

Action Games train:

sensory detection
attention (capture, selection, switching, etc.)
visuomotor coordination
processing speed
working memory
spatial cognition

Maze and Puzzle Games train:

long term memory
spatial cognition
analytical thinking

I don't know Picross, but if it is a puzzle game (as your link suggests), it should increase mostly the three cognitive abilities mentioned above, and, to a lesser degree, sensory detection, attention (specifically capture and divided attention), and working memory. The article by Spence and Feng (2010) provides a good overview and is a great starting point for further research.

Literature:

Cherney, I. D. (2008). Mom, let me play more computer games: They improve my mental rotation skills. Sex Roles, 59, 776-786. doi:10.1007/s11199-008-9498-z
Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 42(6939), 534-537. doi: 10.1038/nature01647
Kato, P. M. (2010). Video games in health care: Closing the gap. Review of General Psychology, 14, 113-121. doi:10.1037/a0019441
Mulligan, M. (2008). Exploring mood management via exposure to a massively multi-player online game (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from the Florida State University Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations database. (ETD No. etd-04112008-154329) [http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04112008-154329/]
Spence, I., & Feng, J. (2010). Video games and spatial cognition. Review of General Psychology, 14(2), 92-104. doi:10.1037/a0019491
Spence, I., Yu, J. J., Feng, J., & Marshman, J. (2009). Women match men when learning a spatial skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology,: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1097-1103. doi:10.1037/a0015641

Edit re Jeromy's comments below (post doi to the interface at http://www.doi.org to find the articles):

There have been a few studies showing increased performance in a non-game task after training with a computer game designed specifically for this ability (so called "serious games"). Examples are games improving treatment adherence in medical patients, surgical skill in doctors etc. (overview in Kato, 2010, see above; or doi:10.1542/peds.2007-3134), training multitasking in a supermarket with stroke patients (doi:10.5014/ajot.63.5.535). But you have asked for transfer from a generic (action or puzzle) computer game to a non-related real-world task.

(doi:10.1080/001401300184378) have shown that the treatment group (trained with a computer game) was "less affected by concurrently performed interference tasks", which the authors attribute to an increased ability to perform under high cognitive load. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2006.00593.x) found that "gameplaying was more effective than drills in promoting maths performance, and cooperative [vs competitive] gameplaying was most effective for promoting positive maths attitudes".

As always, I have methodological objections agains both studies, and I believe you will have, too. (doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00226) gives an overview of transfer studies and their results -- and methodological shortcomings.


Do the feelings related to Transference always originate from parents?

Short answer
Transference is often related to feelings felt toward parents, but not always.

Background
Transference (Hughes & Kerr, 2000) is

  the phenomenon whereby we unconsciously transfer feelings and
  attitudes from a person or situation in the past on to a person or
  situation in the present. The process is at least partly inappropriate
  to the present

According to (Ladson et al., 2007), transference are

  unconscious feelings that are transposed onto another significant individual.

These feelings can be beneficial for therapeutic purposes, but intense, sexualized transference can be disadvantageous. Sexualized transference is

  any transference in which the patient's fantasies about the analyst
  contain elements that are primarily reverential, romantic, intimate,
  sensual, or sexual.

The authors give an example of projections of sexual feelings experienced during early childhood relationships.

So although transference per se is often described in relation to parental feelings of submission, vulnerability and openness in a relation between therapist and client, transference can take other shapes.

References
- Hughes & Kerr, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (2000); 6(1) 57-64
- Ladson et al., Psychiatry (Edgmont) (2007); 4(3): 47–50


Is there a name for the idea that completing a simple task increases the likelihood of completing further tasks?

It would be nice if more systematic sources were found on this topic, but since you mainly inquire about terminology here, I think the closest term is "small win":

Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform. [...]
Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.

Whether making your bed in the morning counts or not as a "small win" depends however on what interests you in life, personality factors, and so forth, so while making your bed may be a motivating "small win" for the army types, I wouldn't bet it's like that for everyone (although other things may be). I suspect that many routine chores that can be "outsourced" if you have enough money (like cooking food, driving etc.) many not be that motivating for a number of people.
Amusingly enough I found a survey about bed making:

In a survey of 68,000 people by Hunch.com, 59 percent of people don’t make their beds. 27 percent do, while 12 percent pay a housekeeper to make it for them. Here’s what disturbed me: 71 percent of bed makers consider themselves happy; while 62 percent of non-bed-makers admit to being unhappy. Bed makers are also more likely to like their jobs, own a home, exercise regularly, and feel well rested, whereas non-bed-makers hate their jobs, rent apartments, avoid the gym, and wake up tired. All in all, bed makers are happier and more successful than their rumple-sheeted peers.
Since these factors show correlation but not causation, this does not mean that non-bed-makers can’t be happy and successful, but the odds are stacked against them. And it makes sense, since an organized environment can positively impact our mental state—and given it only takes 30 seconds, it could lend a small sense of accomplishment at the very start of the day.


Where do spatial dimensions enter in single compartment neuronal models?

In a single-compartment model, you do not have spatial dimensions. Sometimes this is not a problem, for example in the stomatogastric ganglion of C. borealis, in which the neurons have a mechanism to scale the signal with distance by modifying the "effective reversal potential" (Otopalik et al., 2017). In the case of one of these models, it would be sensible to either make an approximation of the cell surface area (Liu et al., 1998 for example) or to use parameters which are normalized by the surface area, to whose explicit numerical value we remain agnostic. One would do this by using a membrane capacitance in microfarads per centimeter squared for instance (typically about unity) and then use maximal conductances in millisiemens per centimeter squared.

This way, the natural units for current divided by capacitance are mV * mS/cm^2 * cm^2/uF, or equivalent to mV/ms.

If you wanted to model multiple neurons with a decay factor, you could either use the cable equation and explicitly input the current into the descending neuron following that, or make a neuron with multiple compartments.


If I have ADHD, how can I focus on programming task for hours?

If you don't focus, then your efficiency easily drops to 50% of other people. But if the task is truly engaging you, you work 200% compared to other people and you forget everything else.

This has a name: Hyperfocus!

  Like distractibility, hyperfocus is thought to result from abnormally low levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is particularly active in the brain's frontal lobes. This dopamine deficiency makes it hard to "shift gears" to take up boring-but-necessary tasks.

  "Children and adults with ADD have difficulty shifting attention from one thing to another," says Russell Barkley, Ph.D., a research professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. "If they're doing something they enjoy or find psychologically rewarding, they'll tend to persist in this behavior after others would normally move on to other things. The brains of people with ADD are drawn to activities that give instant feedback." http://www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/612.html

  Hyperfocus is an intense form of mental concentration or visualization that focuses consciousness on a subject, topic, or task. In some individuals, some subjects or topics may also tend toward including daydreams, concepts, fiction, the imagination, and other objects of the mind. Hyperfocus on a certain subject can cause side-tracking away from assigned or important tasks.

  Hyperfocus may bear a relationship to the concept of flow.[1] In some circumstances both flow and hyperfocus can be an aid to achievement, but in other circumstance or situations, the same focus and behavior could be a liability, distracting from the task at hand. However, unlike hyperfocus, "flow" is often described in more glowing terms, suggesting they are not two sides of the same condition under contrasting circumstance or intellect.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus

On a more personal note:

I've been doing programming since I was about 16 y.o, I was diagnosed with ADHD at about 24, and I have now been working as an in-house hired developer for a year.

I personally experience that when I work on a topic that honestly interests me and engages me, I will be more focused and have more energy than everyone around me. I've been told by friends etc several times "God, how do you have time for all that? How are you able to do all that?"
At the same time I can be incredibly inefficient with my time on less interesting tasks. Often I don't even understand what I've spent all my time on, because I haven't really done anything.


How to explain utility function from personality, beliefs and ongoing emotions?

How to integrate realistic cognitive models of human behaviour and ecomonic models is an open research question, however to tackle it, it might be helpful to break it into a few more easily answerable sub-questions:

What models of human planning with emotional influence exist? There are a number of models in existence that try to capture emotion and personality. However, I don't know any that apply to planning specifically, given that modelling long-term planning is an extremely hard problem in it's own right! My lab-mate Peter Blouw made a rudimentary model of planning with Bryan Tripp that just got accepted to the CogSci2016 Conference. I will update this answer with the link once it is public ally available.
What models of human social interactions integrate personality? Human social interactions are really hard to model, especially at a large scale, consequently most models that currently exist are rudimentary at best.
What is the most detailed cognitive model of human behaviour used in economics? I don't know the answer to this off the top of my head, by I remember this being discussed in Khaneman's "Think Fast, Thinking Slow", where he talks about the diminishing returns that come with including more complicated cognitive factors in economic models.

To get more complete answers to these questions, feel free to ask them as separate questions on this site. I will happily upvote them!


How does the brain physically get tired?

The first rule of Neuroscience Club is to check your Kandel.

The second rule of Neuroscience Club is to check your Kandel.

Joking aside, the gold standard of neuroscience is Kandel et al.'s Principles of Neural Science, currently in its fifth edition. It's an extremely (and in the cognitive sciences, I would say uniquely) comprehensive and authoritative work, and you can certainly use it to find an explanation for your questions about how the brain stores and uses energy, or virtually anything else. It's that rare kind of book which successfully distills a massive subject down to something as simple as possible, and no simpler than that.

  Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M., Siegelbaum, S. A., Hudspeth, A. J. (Eds.). (2013). Principles of neural science (Vol. 5). New York: McGraw-Hill.

It does not really make sense to talk about "how to use the brain as an organ most effectively." The brain is only metaphorically similar to muscles, and only in certain respects. One of the relevant differences is that neurons do many things and often exhibit nonlinear behavior, whereas muscles more or less only stretch and contract. This currently makes it very difficult to scientifically define what optimizing brain function means, exactly, compared to defining what optimizing muscle function means.

I will not deconstruct the question further since it is primarily a reference request, and this will all be more than clear from Principles of Neural Science.


Which is more likely to cause a person to devalue some other person?

According with the description of Mary, I think that she would devalue her best friend.

Explanation:
Elen and Mary have been friends for more time than John and Mary have been dating; this means that Mary could feel more betrayed because she trusted a lot in her friend, and respected her boyfriend. She's more likely to think that John does not like her because she's not enough good for him (because of her self-esteem), and that would generate more dependence (she would try to fix this problem because a part of her identity is at stake).
Hope this help you.


Why does optogenetics not mean that perfect brain-computer interfaces are possible?

has made it possible to have perfect input/output to the brain from a computer

Perfect? Definitely not: the complexities of optogenetics of a single mm square of cortex, of a mouse lets say, are extremely complex. As Chuck mentions, many neurons/synapses may be activated by a single LASER and current technologies allow only a few different LASER frequencies to be used simultaneously. For 'perfect  input/output' it is easy to imagine a system whereby one would need thousands of different LASER operating at different frequencies to individually control/read thousands of neurons. (This blog post by Mark Baxter is a nice summary of the issue of hype with optogenetics.)

Furthermore, this assumption completely ignores synapses, glial cells, dendritic branchs etc. which may be important for computation in the brain and might therefore need to be considered for any I/O system.

  Why does having the ability to fire and read the firing information off of individual neurons not imply that a seamless human-computer interface is possible?

You are assuming that everything the brain does is encoded in the firing rate of individual neurons. This is a massive assumption to which a lot of evidence is in the contrary. For example, there is evidence suggesting that the visual system does not have time to encode information in firing rates and it is postulated that the 'time to first spike' is important in this domain (first paragraph of the introduction has a nice summary of the reasoning/evidence behind this hypothesis). Furthermore, as I mentioned above, firing rates are an extremely small part of the brain, and just one of many many different ways the brain may encode/decode information (we do not know which, see sections 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 for different methods the brain may employ).

To finish, one point which comes to mind currently limiting optogenetics is 'depth'. Light transmission falls off quickly through neural tissue: reduced by 50% after 100 $\mu$m, and by 90% after 1mm. If one wanted an input/output system connected to a computer to control/read a part of a brain 1cm below the surface one would (currently) have to chop out the neural tissue in the way -- this is a big problem!

(Edited with some references.)


Skin conductance responses to emotional stimuli

Electrodermal activity is an index of sympathetic activation and a skin conductance response can occur in many situations. It is therefore a very general response and can arise as a result of stimulus novelty or “significance” (whether you want to call this an affective response is up to you but it seems very different from common sense notions of what an emotion is).
You can however measure phasic responses specific to a stimulus in the sense that even a single presentation can be followed by a skin conductance “spike”. The shape of the response will however not be specific to a class of stimulus or narrowly defined content (there is no obvious characteristic “fear” or “happiness” signature, no “audio” or “visual” skin conductance response).
There are some attempts to discriminate positive from negative emotions based on skin conductance and also quite a lot of research using machine learning techniques to classify emotional responses based on physiological measurement but usually not on a single signal, and without much success for electrodermal activity alone.
Skin conductance is often interpreted as some sort of physiological arousal but that's a notion Wolfram Boucsein would probably have considered too simplistic. I don't think you need to over-analyze a single sentence to find an answer to your question, it should be quite clear from the whole book and, implicitly, from the fact that Boucsein did not discuss patterns of skin conductance responses associated with discrete emotions (which he would have if well-established results on this existed).
If you dig into the psycholophysiological literature, you will find that sophisticated approaches try to disentangle the activation of various part of the autonomic nervous system and deal with things like the defense or orientation response, preparedness to conditioning, fight-or-flight, etc. None of this maps neatly to subjective/expressive emotion categories like “fear” or “anger”.
Regarding the Q-Sensor, I have never actually used it but I have read a few papers and seen work from Rosalind Picard's lab at conferences and the like and I was under the impression that a big part of this research was concerned with skin conductance level, not responses (i.e. tonic responses, things like being relaxed or excited by an activity over a period of several minutes, but not phasic responses to a single picture or audio clip). If you follow Boucsein, it's not even clear you could get a clean measure of phasic responses with a sensor that's not firmly attached to the body on one of the spots with many sweat glands (palm of the hand or foot).
Some other references:

Cacioppo, J. T., Klein, D. J., Berntson, G. G., & Hatfield, E. (1993). The Psychophysiology of Emotion. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland (Eds.) Handbook of Emotions (pp. 119-142). New York: The Guilford Press.
There is a chapter on the topic in every edition of the Handbook with a slightly different constellation of authors each time but I don't have the references at hand. The one from the second edition (2000) contains a meta-analysis of studies on the discrimination between discrete emotions through physiology.

Dawson, M. E., Schell, A. M., & Filion, D. L. (1990). The Electrodermal System. In J. T. Cacioppo, L. G. Tassinary (Eds.) Principles of psychophysiology: Physical, social, and inferential elements (pp. 295-324). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Again, the chapter has been updated in later editions of the book (published under the title Handbook of psychophysiology starting with the second edition) and is worth checking out.


The study you are looking for is

  Leventhal, H., Singer, R., & Jones, S. (1965). Effects of fear and
  specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. Journal of
  Personality and Social Psychology, 2(1), pp. 20-29. doi:
  10.1037/h0022089

The study is mostly how you remember (though it was tetanus instead of the flu). Critically, the manipulation was intended to increase the the availability of receiving a tetanus shot by having rehearsed the steps needed to get one. Students were given a map of the campus with the health center circled, and were asked to review their schedule and find a time they might be able to go--however, they did not make an appointment. Thus, the commitment was only to themselves.

There are, of course, a wide variety of ways to increase consumer compliance, including  the foot-in-the-door strategy, door-in-the-face strategy, and framing effects to name a few.

There is a wide body of literature in social psychology on the idea of influence. I highly recommend two books on the topic, both of which are leisure reads:

1) Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (which mentions the Leventhal study!)

2) Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. There is a chapter specifically on Commitment (ch 3) which also talks about the classic foot-in-the-door paper (below), more in line with the commitment strategy you suggest.

  Freedman, J.L., & Fraser, S.C. (1966). Compliance without pressure:
  The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social
  Psychology, 4, 195-202.


Is speech perceived as set of phonemes by human?

Phonemes are the smallest units of speech sound, usually about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each language (1). They are what letter are to words, actually  alphabetic writing systems are derived from phonemes (2). A group of phonemes together form a chunk, that represent a word. These chunks are arbitrary and are created by culture, and are learned by humans from very early age. Furthermore these chunks point to specific concepts that are stored in our semantic memory.

  Concepts arise as abstractions or generalisations from experience;
  from the result of a transformation of existing ideas; or from innate
  properties. A concept is instantiated by all of its
  actual or potential instances, whether these are things in the real
  world or other ideas.

  Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that we have
  accumulated throughout our lives. This general knowledge (facts,
  ideas, meaning and concepts) is intertwined in experience and
  dependent on culture.


How do people visually recognize their own reflection?

The brain does map different parts of the visual image to different neurons. It's called topography and is a fundamental feature of all sensory neurons.

The next part of your bolded questions jumps upstream. Some fMRI studies found "Jennifer Anniston" cells- cells that only respond to the image of Jennifon Anniston. Italian researchers found neurons in awake primates that increased firing in response to another monkey doing something. The researchers called these mirror neurons.

So, there may be single neurons in humans that bind visual perception and recognition. However, it is more likely, that interacting groups of neurons change their activity relative to each other or the omnipresent local field oscillations. This mechanism appears in other places in the brain and, theoretically, it is also more robust to injuries.