Can experience alter one's preferences for beauty?

There are many reasons why men may find 'not-entirely-natural' women more attractive.

One reason, perhaps obvious, is simply based on evolutionary preferences. A rosy complexion may indicate good health, whereas larger breasts may signify fertility. Whether fake or not, women use makeup and surgery to accentuate features that men already find attractive. Though it is true that some women may accentuate features to the point of unrealism, it is worth noting that aesthetic reactions are established prior to one's cognitive appraisal for attractiveness [citation needed]. The mechanism in our brain that judges instantaneous beauty is likely not privy to information such as 'that woman in front of me has fake breasts'.

That being said, I think a better answer to your question relies on the notion of fluency--the metacognitive experience of difficulty associated with any cognitive act. Familiarity fosters high fluency, because our mind processes familiar things more quickly or easily than novel things. Several studies have shown that familiarity or fluency leads to an increased rating on any number of positively valence dimensions, including likability and attractiveness. [1][2] (As a side note, it's also interesting that the reverse is also true-- attractive faces are judged a more familiar [3]).

The media certainly plays a large part in increasing this familiarity through what we see on TV and in magazines. Different cultures develop different cultural norms for attractiveness as a result of their exposure. The same effect is frequently observed in people who are attracted to  others of the same race. This preference is shown even in young infants, as a result of increased exposure to faces of their own race. [4]

Lastly, the 'message' conveyed by media likely influences our perception of beauty as well. Ads tell us that we have to constantly use the right shampoo, or diet supplement, or facial cleanser-- pressuring us to believe we won't be beautiful if we don't use these products. The message is not cryptic-- products often reference the 'healthy' or 'attractive' effects of their use. Perhaps someone better versed in the literature on belief formation or persuasion could add some useful citation here as well, this it not my area of expertise. (I often refer people to Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice for an overview of the literature related to persuasion, which may be worth checking out if no one can provide more targeted references).

  [1] Peskin, M. & Newell, F. N. (2004). Familiarity breeds attraction:
  Effects of exposure on the attractiveness of typical and distinctive
  faces. Perception, 33, 147-157.

  [2] Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing
  fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's
  processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 364-382.

  [3] Monin, B. (2003). The warm glow heuristic: When liking leads to
  familiarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85,
  1035-1048.

  [4] Kelly, D.J. et al. (2005). Three-month-old, but not newborns,
  prefer own-race faces. Dev Sci, 8, F31-F36.


Difference between content-addressable memory and associative memory?

From Wikipedia:

  Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a special type of computer memory
  used in certain very-high-speed searching applications. It is also
  known as associative memory, associative storage, or associative array [...]
  It compares input search data (tag) against a table of stored data,
  and returns the address of matching data (or in the case of
  associative memory, the matching data)

As noted in the above question, there are many implementations of content-addressable memories in neural networks, such as the Hamming network and Hopfield networks. The Associative Memory used in SPA-based models performs the same function as these aforementioned networks and the Wikipedia description. Given a SPA vector as input, the Associative Memory outputs the corresponding vector as an output. Thus, the SPA-based Associative Memory is a content-addressable memory.


If I understand your question correctly, yes, since ERP involves averaging over similar events, very accurate time-locking to stimulus onset is critical.  The idea of an ERP is that activity relevant to the stimulus will happen at a similar timepoint after similar stimuli--if you don't have an accurate time stamp (usually to the level of single milliseconds if not better), then the activity will be "smeared" across the time course.  For a good overview of ERPs, see the article Event-related Potentials: An Overview


Why do brains prefer internal consistency?

Short answer
Cognitive dissonance arises because people want to protect their world-view or self-concept. Even people well versed in science may deny the facts in favor of false beliefs.

Background
The question spans three levels of grossly different arenas of research:

  [Why so people strive for internal consistency [] at the expense of truth?

This is a matter of Psychology and perhaps even Philosophy

  [What are the] mechanisms on the neuron-level that resist the rewiring of the brain?

This steps all the way down to cellular and molecular neurophysiology

  [What is the selective advantage] from an evolutionary perspective?

This ramps the question to an evolutionary time scale

I'll take a bash at this question from a more Psychological approach, mainly because the other two angles do not seem fruitful to me as

Rewiring (Neurophysiology) is a term often used in terms of gross plastic changes in the brain, such as that occur during intensive training (e.g. when folks learn to juggle), or after a stroke.
Evolutionary reasons seem far-fetched. The development of higher cognitive processes may have aided in our rise to domination. For example, the forging of social structures and accompanying cultural development may have be the foundation to the cross-generational transfer of intelligent tool-making and so forth. Such complex behaviors spanning millions of years may have led to other behaviors like the denial of facts. Such behavior may not be evolutionary beneficial, but a collateral development. You have to realize not every feature is perfect. On the contrary. The regenerative power of many a cell in the body allows for wound healing, but also gives rise to cancer. Aggressive immune systems defends us during our life against countless enemies, including cancer cells, but when going haywire it leads to devastating auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis. Likewise, intelligent behaviors may result in aberrant thought processes, like believing and holding on to something as to be true it, while the facts challenge that idea. Now why does that happen?
The Psychological approach seems most feasible. Denial of scientific facts to support ones own aberrant world views has been in the news a lot of late, sadly - Trumping the truth! (Shermer, 2018). Shermer says

  [A]ntiscience attitudes are formed in very narrow cognitive windows—those in which science appears to oppose certain political or religious views.

and

  For Republicans, the more knowledge they have about climate science the less likely they are to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming []. People with more knowledge only accept science when it doesn't conflict with their preexisting beliefs and values [].

In another of his excellent columns, Shermer (2017) names a list of more examples:

Creationists [] dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith.
Antivaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud.
The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order.
Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country.

The term here was launched after the description of a UFO cult that predicted the arrival of the mother ship Shermer (2017).

  When that failed to arrive at the appointed time, instead of admitting
  error, members of the group sought frantically to convince the world
  of their beliefs, and they made “a series of desperate attempts to
  erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction
  in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive
  dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two
  conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

Cognitive dissonance is:

  [T]he mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves.

Cognitive dissonance - why (Shermer, 2017)?

  Because [the facts] threaten[] their worldview or self-concept.

Science denial, for example is not typically rooted in blanket anti-science attitudes. Instead, people's denial of scientific evidence is based on motivations other than finding truth, such as protecting their social identity. It appears that the more science-literate people are, the more strongly they hold to their beliefs — even if those beliefs are incorrect. So it hasn't anything to do with education. It's about ones owns beliefs and holding on to them (source: Live Science).

Referencess
- Shermer, Sci Am, January 2017
-  Shermer, Sci Am, January 2018


What are the psychological differences in camelCase and underscore_case programming conventions?

As the author of the blog post you refer to, I can state that at the time of writing (early 2011) there were not too many studies reporting on this specific topic, which is why I reported on the single study I found at the time (Binkley et al. 2009). However, I advise you to read a follow-up study by a different group of researchers (Sharif and Maletic 2010). They address some of the shortcomings in the earlier study.

The common finding for both studies is that camelCasing is slower to read, which I summarized in a follow-up post:

  No difference in accuracy was reported (as opposed to Binkley et al.),
  but on average, camel-cased identifiers took 932ms (20%) longer than
  underscored identifiers, in line with the 13,5% longer as reported by
  Binkley et al. The eye tracking results also give some insight into
  visual effort. Camel-cased identifiers require a higher average
  duration of fixations.

Based on more general studies in cognitive science (Epelboim et al. 2009) (as I mentioned in the summary of the first study) this was to be expected:

  Natural language research in psychology found that replacing spaces
  with Latin letters, Greek letters or digits had a negative impact on
  reading. However, shaded boxes (similar to underscores) have
  essentially no effect on reading times or on recognition of individual
  words. Removing spaces altogether slows down reading 10-20%.

However, I haven't done any follow-up research on this, thus it would definitely be worthwhile to dig into more recent citations. The ones listed below should provide a suitable starting point to this end.

Binkley, D., Davis, M., Lawrie, D., & Morrell, C. (2009, May). To camelcase or under_score. In Program Comprehension, 2009. ICPC'09. IEEE 17th International Conference on (pp. 158-167). IEEE. [PDF]
Sharif, B., & Maletic, J. I. (2010, June). An eye tracking study on camelcase and under_score identifier styles. In Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on (pp. 196-205). IEEE. [PDF]
Epelboim, J., Booth, J. R., Ashkenazy, R., Taleghani, A., & Steinman, R. M. (1997). Fillers and spaces in text: The importance of word recognition during reading. Vision Research, 37(20), 2899-2914.


It maybe the joke was the dream-equivalent of a MacGuffin, a fuzzy, unimportant placeholder that wasn’t materialized into actual language, and that the point of the scene was to experience awkwardness, embarrassment, inferiority or exclusion that others had the upper-hand with in-group knowledge unavailable to the subject?

It would fit that what seems real in a dream isn’t necessarily real... that the idea of certainty came from the dream while waking up, but the actual content of that certainty likely never existed.


Why does repeating one word over and over again sound weird to us after some time?

This is called semantic saturation, or semantic satiation; studies of event-related potentials (brain waves) suggest that it is negatively correlated with N400 amplitude (the subjective experience of satiation increases as the N400 amplitude decreases) without any change to upstream sensory components.  As N400 amplitude indexes initial lexical integration--that is, understanding the word at hand in relation to the words that preceded it--this sugggests that semantic satiation is in fact due to some kind of habituation in the semantic processes, and not in upstream sensory processing.

Citations:
Wikipedia on Semantic saturation

Kounios, J., Kotz, S. A., & Holcomb, P. J. (2000). On the locus of the semantic satiation effect: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Memory & cognition, 28(8), 1366-1377.


Is there a term to describe an inability to express emotion or feelings?

It is alexithymia if you're looking for a diagnostic term. It is not a case of "you either have it or you don't—alexithymia is a continuum.

There even exists a scale, which is a professional scale so to get it you need to pay for it and be a researcher. It's called Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20).


Is there any strong empirical support that "casual" (10-20 minutes per day) mindfulness meditation leads to lasting cognitive improvements?

The following is the empirical support I can find

Beauchemin, J., Hutchins, T. L., & Patterson, F. (2008). Mindfulness meditation may lessen anxiety, promote social skills, and improve academic performance among adolescents with learning disabilities. Complementary Health Practice Review, 13(1), 34-45. DOI: 10.1177/1533210107311624
Free PDF
All outcome measures showed significant improvement, with participants who completed the program demonstrating decreased state and trait anxiety, enhanced social skills, and improved academic performance. Although not directly assessed, the outcomes are consistent with a cognitive-interference model of learning disability and suggest that mindfulness meditation decreases anxiety and detrimental self-focus of attention, which, in turn, promotes social skills and academic outcomes.

Moore, A., & Malinowski, P. (2009). Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. Consciousness and cognition, 18(1), 176-186. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2008.12.008
Free PDF
Overall the results suggest that attentional performance and cognitive flexibility are positively related to meditation practice and levels of mindfulness. Meditators performed significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention. Furthermore, self-reported mindfulness was higher in meditators than non-meditators and correlations with all attention measures were of moderate to high strength. This pattern of results suggests that mindfulness is intimately linked to improvements of attentional functions and cognitive flexibility. The relevance of these findings for mental balance and well-being are discussed.

Zeidan, F., Johnson, S. K., Diamond, B. J., David, Z., & Goolkasian, P. (2010). Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and cognition, 19(2), 597-605. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014
Free PDF
Our findings, with naïve participants learning mindfulness techniques by means of a brief training format, are consistent with those that have been reported for adept meditators. Four days (20 min/day) of MM training was effective in signifi- cantly increasing mindfulness scores in comparison to an active control group. Our brief MM training protocol promoted sig- nificant effects on several cognitive tasks that require sustained attention and executive processing efficiency (Symbol Digit Modalities Test, verbal fluency, and the hit runs on n-back task). However, no specific benefits from MM training were found with many of the mood scales, the forward and backward digit span or speed on the n-back task. It is important to note that the groups did not differ at baseline on any of the measures and had no prior meditative experience.

Chiesa, A., Calati, R., & Serretti, A. (2011). Does mindfulness training improve cognitive abilities? A systematic review of neuropsychological findings. Clinical psychology review, 31(3), 449-464. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2010.11.003
Free PDF
[T]he results of the present review provide preliminary support for the notion that MMPs could provide significant benefits on several measures of cognition which seem specific for the phase of meditation training under investigation. However, further higher quality studies focusing on more standardized MMPs are needed to replicate available findings, to more deeply explore the effects of mindfulness training on further domains of cognition and to reduce discrepancies of findings deriving from systematic differences in mindfulness protocols.


Relation of serotonin level and mood/depression

You say that

Antidepressants [a]rise [the] amount of serotonin in blood in short period of time. However, you should take antidepressants for quite a long period of time so that it took effect. Up to 1-4 months.
As I heard there is no explanation about this fact. On the one hand we know that serotonin affects our mood, on the other hand for some reason we cannot fix our mood by just increasing its level straight away.

There are some studies which suggest effect after the first week. E.g. Early Onset of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressant Action: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (2006):

Pooled estimates of treatment effect on depressive symptom rating scales were calculated for weeks 1 through 6 of treatment. In the primary analysis, the pattern of response seen was tested against alternative models of onset of response. The primary analysis incorporated data from 28 randomized controlled trials (n=5872). A model of early treatment response best fit the experimental data. Treatment with SSRIs rather than placebo was associated with clinical improvement by the end of the first week of use. A secondary analysis indicated an increased chance of achieving a 50% reduction in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores by 1 week (relative risk, 1.64; 95% confidence interval, 1.2-2.25) with SSRI treatment compared with placebo.

They actually suggest a logarithmically increasing treatment response:

Also a very similar study a year before: "Is there a delay in the antidepressant effect? A meta-analysis." (2005):

The time course of improvement on active medication and placebo was nearly identical, as 60.2% and 61.6% of the improvement that occurred on active medication and placebo, respectively, took place during the first 2 weeks of treatment. Drug-placebo differences were not only present but were most pronounced during the first 2 weeks of treatment and diminished in a stepwise fashion thereafter. A series of subanalyses confirmed that this early drug-placebo separation was clinically observable and represented a true drug effect.

I think there are some practical difficulties with collecting data more than weekly in large trials. Also, a small increase is not likely to be noticed in everyday clinical practice (non-trial).
SSRI effectiveness has been mired in some controversy though, with a lot of the trials being (obviously) sponsored to some extent by drug companies.

And eating sweets will increase your serotonin, as will smoking (nicotine) for instance. The problem with using these as anti-depressants is how much you'd have to consume and for how long to get the same effect as from a SSRI. Quoting "Brain serotonin, carbohydrate-craving, obesity and depression":

Serotonin-releasing brain neurons are unique in that the amount of neurotransmitter they release is normally controlled by food intake: Carbohydrate consumption--acting via insulin secretion and the "plasma tryptophan ratio"--increases serotonin release; protein intake lacks this effect. This ability of neurons to couple neuronal signaling properties to food consumption is a link in the feedback mechanism that normally keeps carbohydrate and protein intakes more or less constant. However, serotonin release is also involved in such functions as sleep onset, pain sensitivity, blood pressure regulation, and control of the mood. Hence many patients learn to overeat carbohydrates (particularly snack foods, like potato chips or pastries, which are rich in carbohydrates and fats) to make themselves feel better. This tendency to use certain foods as though they were drugs is a frequent cause of weight gain, and can also be seen in patients who become fat when exposed to stress, or in women with premenstrual syndrome, or in patients with "winter depression," or in people who are attempting to give up smoking. (Nicotine, like dietary carbohydrates, increases brain serotonin secretion; nicotine withdrawal has the opposite effect.)

WebMD has fairly accessible article on the latter, which says among other things:

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that carb cravers who have a mildly depressed mood seem to be self-medicating. They studied women who were overweight and had a history of carb cravings. They gave them a choice between a protein-rich beverage or a carb-rich one. They found that when the women reported being in the worst moods, they picked the carb beverage more often than the protein one. In addition, the carb drink improved their mood better.


How is at called when a person can't feel the sense of recognition?

There are several conditions associated with a disconnect between the feeling of recognizing something, the ability to name something, the ability to react to something appropriately, etc. called agnosias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosia

EDIT: See also "capgras delusion", which is possibly a more extreme version of what you're describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion


How to frame survey questions to get honest response?

In my opinion, test-retest method would be suitable to your request.

This procedure is quite simple: individuals are asked to take the test and then take the same test again at a later date. The scores are then compared. The closer the scores are, the more reliable the test.

This methodology is appropriate for instruments such as IQ tests and surveys because there is little chance of people experiencing a sudden jump in IQ or suddenly changing their opinions.

I wish i have been helpful.

REFERENCES

PICONE L., Pezzuti L., Ribaudo F.,  (2013), "Teorie e tecniche dei test", Roma: Carocci.


Extending a 5 point ordinal scale to 9 points while maintaining comparability

See this question on comparing scales with different response scales. In short, you have to do it with care. A good option for ensuring comparability is to get a sample of participants to provide responses on both response scales in order to see how they relate. This could then be used to create a conversion scale.

More generally, there is a large debate about the optimal number of response options on traditional survey items. In particular, if you are more interested in means of groups rather than individual-level measurement or if you have multiple items that are aggregated, then the move from a 5 to a 7 or 9-point scale is not going result in much more differentiation. It can be good to think about how well and how consistently your participants interpret the meaning of the scale. Adding points would increase the variance, but a question remains about whether it reflects variance in the true score of interest, or whether it reflects rating bias or something else.

Personally, if comparison with previous research is important, I'd generally leave the rating options as they were.


What explains variability in the mean firing rate across biological neurons?

I am not sure whether the three assumptions on which your question is based are really valid.

(1) Why should a high transformation transfer be linked to a high firing rate? Depending on the role of a single neuron within a group, not firing might carry as much as information as firing.

(2) Energy conservation might not be linked to the behavior of a single neuron, but rather to the organism as a whole. For instance, if the constant firing of a neuron stops your legs from constant (dis-functional) shaking, the energy "wasted" on the firing neuron can lower the energy consumption of the system as a whole.

(3) Although not explicitly stated, your question might suggest that the mean firing rate of a given neuron is relatively constant over time. This is not necessarily the case, as the firing characteristics of neurons are "tuned" over time, depending on its activity. This process is called homeostatic synaptic plasticity and has received much attention recently.

For a review see:
Turrigiano GG. (2008) The self-tuning neuron: synaptic scaling of excitatory synapses. Cell. 422-35.


What is the equivalent of a Hamming network in the NEF?

An Associative Memory is a classifier and is equivalent to a Hamming Network.

For documentation on the NEF Associative Memory, see this practical Nengo documentation and the paper "A biologically realistic cleanup memory: Autoassociation in spiking neurons". Basically, each ensemble of an associative memory computes the similarity measure of the input firing pattern to a given firing pattern. Mutual inhibition is then used between the nodes to find the most similar input so that only the ensemble with the most similar input outputs a signal. In an associative, this output similarity signal is used to map the input pattern to a new output pattern.

A Hamming Network is a classifier that receives patterns with input nodes also detecting similarity. However, unlike the Associative Memory it has a binary output using mutual inhibition. That being said, it would be easy to add a thresholding ensemble to the output of the Associative Memory to accomplish this.

In conclusion, an Associative Memory is basically a Hamming Network implemented using the NEF.


Why are people better at distinguishing people of their own racial group and why are animals better at recognising animals of their own species?

The ability of people to better recognise and distinguish faces of their own race has been well studied.

For a general discussion, see Cross-race effect where a range of hypotheses have been proposed.


Do people feel emotions less strongly as they grow older?

Deconstructing your question

There is a difference between the ability to experience an emotion and tendency to experience an emotion.
There is a difference between proportion of time that an individual experiences an emotion and the intensity of that emotion.
Obviously, you could take many approaches to answering this question. Emotions can be viewed from various perspectives including physiological, psychological, and behavioural.

Some empirical evidence

I did a quick search on Google Scholar for 'panas longitudinal study'

PANAS (see Crawford and Henry 2004,
PDF for a a review) is a commonly used self-report questionnaire that aims to measure the frequency with which various positive and negative emotions have been experienced over a given time frame.

I found this interesting article by Kunzmann, Little, and Smith 2000, PDF called
"Is age-related stability of subjective well-being a paradox? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from the Berlin Aging Study".

The opening section of the article reviews the empirical literature regarding stability and age related trends in self-reported positive and negative affect.
The following are a few interesting points from the article:

Costa et al. 1987 found correlations over 10 years for positive and negative affect of r =.42 and r=.43 respectively. I.e., there is fair amount of stability in individual differences in the experience of emotions.
When Kunzmann et al's review of the literature they cite several large scale studies that showed at the group-level no age effect on negative affect, although a couple of studies suggested their might be a small decline in negative affect with age. These studies varied in the years of life that were of interest, but typically looked at differences between early, middle and older adulthood.
Kunzmann et al also review the evidence for positive affect. The story sounds a little complicated with some studies suggesting a decline in positive affect and others not.
As I've seen before, it seems like cross sectional studies sometimes show bigger effects than longitudinal studies.


What is the effect of merely expecting an interruption on performance?

Fortin and Masse (2000) explored the effect of expecting an interruption on the ability to accurately produce a timing interval (e.g., producing a 2000 millisecond timing interval):

From the abstract:

  The interference from nontemporal processing on concurrent time
  estimation is usually attributed to disruption in timing caused by
  artentional requirements of nontemporal processing. Here, we examined
  interruption in timing without concurrent nontemporal processing.
  Empty breaks of various durations, during time-interval production,
  lengthened produced intervals. Moreover, an effect of break location
  was observed: Intervals lengthened proportionally to prebreak
  duration. When cued and uncued uninterrupted trials were introduced,
  the lengthening was proportional to the duration for which a break was
  expected. It was concluded that attentional time-sharing between time
  estimation and expectation of its interruption contributed to the
  interference effect in time-estimation research, independently of any
  concurrent processing requirements during time estimation.

So, I suppose you could use this as evidence to support the idea that if an individual is anticipating an interruption, this might consume some attentional  resources, especially if he or she is tuned into a signal that might communicate the commencement of the interruption.

References

Fortin, C. and Masse, N. (2000). Expecting a break in time estimation: Attentional time-sharing without concurrent processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1788. PUBLISHER PAGE


I need good introductory texts/publications on brain networks and functional integration/segregation

A good introductory book is "Networks of the Brain" by Olaf Sporns. It will give you a general overview of the ideas and theories in the field. For more details consult the bibliography or read some of the journal articles by Dr. Sporns.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/networks-brain

http://www.indiana.edu/~cortex/index.html


Where can I find the connectivity matrix of the connectome of C. Elegans?

The full connectome of C. elegans (Fig. 1.) is described by Farber (2012) and as far as I know, the most complete data on C. elegans, including its connectome is available from the OpenWorm Project found here.

Fig. 1. C. elegans connectome. image source: Farber (2012)

Reference
- Farber, Sci Am February 2012

Further reading
- Are there organisms with fewer than 1000 neurons?


What's the major difference between mind and brain?

Wikipedia is often a good place to start for basic questions like these. Wikipedia has separate pages devoted to the mind, the brain, and even the mind–body problem, which is one example of the many theoretical challenges implied by the distinctions between "mind" and "brain". Simply stated:

The brain is a physical organ. It's entirely possible that much of its structure has relatively little bearing on the nature of the mind. For instance, glial cells are more numerous than neuronal cells. Glial cells play a relatively more supportive function than neurons, the direct functions of which may be more closely related than glial cells' to the functions of what we consider to constitute the mind.
Wikipedia describes the mind as, "The set of cognitive faculties that enables consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory." Google offers this primary definition: "The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought." Neither of these definitions directly necessitate a physical substrate such as the brain. However, The Free Dictionary's primary definition includes the phrase, "Originates in the brain." These differences belie the controversiality of the term itself, as does @KeeganKeplinger's helpful answer.
Wikipedia's mind page has a section dedicated to its relation to the brain. This section mentions the mind–brain problem, as well as three philosophical stances on the problem:

Materialism: briefly, that there is no valid distinction, and all mental activities have neural bases
Idealism: essentially that all physical objects and processes are truly mental in nature
Dualism: that the mind exists somewhat independently of the brain and body, possibly as an aspect or property of the spirit or soul

Thus a simple answer would be that "mind" does imply "brain" for many if not most audiences, but some may opine that these are different (though probably not totally different) entities. Arguably the best approach would be to tailor your word choice to suit whichever entity your computer concept proposes to read most directly.


Why are we generating wrong ideas in the first place?

I suspect we adopt irrational positions when we have an implicit choice available and our frame of mind, owing to biological factors such as stress hormone levels, favors rapid choices over thoughtful reflection on the circumstances we face. Dual process theory provides a decent framework for thinking about this.

There is a remarkable body of literature examining paranoid ideation and social anxiety produced by D. Freeman which examines something along these lines experimentally. Attributional styles seem to be learned, then reinforced by exposure to stressful situations. Sort of a "feedback loop" of distorted cognition.


What is a effective and interactive exercise to demonstrate cognition to a class

I would recommend something like the Invisible Gorilla! This is a classic demonstration from Simons & Chabris (1999) that demonstrates the selectivity of attention. Demonstrating "cognition" is a bit broad, but this is a famous example of the ways in which cognitive processes select, omit, and process information.

Video of the illusion (with instructions) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&feature=youtu.be

NPR story discussing the experiment/illusion in simple terms: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126977945


Can drugs cause positive reinforcement for undesirable tasks?

Short answer
Aversive stimuli can drive drug seeking.

Background
Central to your question is the dopamine circuit of the limbic system (Fig. 1), being crucial to the reward circuitry in the brain. One notorious way of powerfully activating the reward system is through intake of highly addictive dopaminergic drugs like cocaine, heroin and amphetamines, but also alcohol, albeit less potently. They are so addictive because they evoke strong euphoric, hedonic feelings and the notorious 'crash' when their effects wear off. The euphoric state is a powerful positive reinforcer, the crash a potent negative reinforcer.

Stressors negatively impact emotional state and can drive drug seeking by modulating the activity of the mesolimbic dopamine system. In rats this was tested by stressing them with the administration of the bitter compound quinine. Rats stressed in this way had a decreased dopamine tone in their limbic system. This was accompanied by an increased tendency to seek and use cocaine. This increased cocaine-seeking behavior resulted in increased dopamine levels in the limbic system, at least partially counteracting the stressful quinine shots (Twining et al., 2016).

Admittedly these findings do not directly answer your question

  [When] performing unpleasant tasks [can drugs] confuse the brain into
  associating those tasks with positive feelings [?]

My answer shows that

  Unpleasant tasks can lower dopamine in the brain and drive drug seeking behavior [and cause addiction] when drug intake is associated with [more] positive feelings

Fig. 1. Dopamine pathways in the reward center of the brain. source:
 Lieff J.

Reference
- Twining et al., Addiction (2007); 102(12): 1863–70


Can anxiety cause a heart attack, black-out or insanity?

Recently we had and interesting symposium on stres, anxiety and psychoimunology.
Guest were psychologists from UCLA stresslab
In this website: http://www.uclastresslab.org/
you can find a bunch of researches which conect various human mental conditions (including anxiety) with interkulin 6 and cortisol. Those two supstances are conected to hearth attack and other diseases.
I hope this helps.


How is a young child able to learn language so easily?

It's theorized that there is a Critical Period of language development in children below the age of five (roughly, as age ranges always are in Developmental Psychology).

Probably the most significant and readily verifiable finding is that a critical period exists for the learning of Phonemes. Research has suggested children readily differentiate phonemes from all human languages at very early ages; less than 5 years old. There is much debate in Linguistics on this matter and many articles covering the discussion .

After this Critical Period most children and adults can only accurately differentiate and produce phonemes present in their native languages and have difficulty producing and differentiating phonemes from other languages. This is why when learning a language late in life learners often struggle with pronunciation.

A classic example of this is the difficulty native Japanese speakers have with English L and R sounds. As L2, late-in-life second language learners they struggle differentiating the actual sounds and thus producing the different sounds.

There are some interesting theories in what can overcome this deficiency in learning "late" (L2) second languages, see Age and Ultimate Attainment in the Pronunciation of Foreign Languages and Teaching Second-Language Phonetics to Adults.

In addition Noam Chomsky has some interesting interviews and publications about language development in children, such as his interview with Lillian R. Putnam.

Note that Chomsky's opinions and theories are controversial, particularly his concept of a "Language Acquisition Device", which is Nativist to an extreme. There is much material on Chomsky's Theories of Language Acquisition but I would take his theories with a grain of salt.

The Critical Period has been found to apply even to children learning sign language. A good overview on this situation is The critical period for language acquisition and the deaf child's language comprehension : a psycholinguistic approach by Rachel I. Mayberry.

  The critical period hypothesis for language acquisition (CP) proposes that the outcome of
  language acquisition is not uniform over the lifespan but rather is best during early childhood.
  The CP hypothesis was originally proposed for spoken language but recent research has shown
  that it applies equally to sign language


Using IT to quickly make a simulated brain

This is an incredibly broad question, but I admire your spark of curiosity so I'm going to give you a quick answer anyways.

Firstly, there is no defined steps for modelling parts of the brain. The laboratory I was a member of created Spaun. Spaun is the world's largest functioning brain model and uses biologically plausible neurons as the foundation for it's computation. The methodology for creating the most recent iteration of this model varies wildly from part-to-part. The vision system was adapted from Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks, the basal-ganglia and thalamus came from an anatomical model and the working-memory model came from engineering analysis of dynamical systems. None of these could have come from evolutionary algorithms or any other sort of algorithm known to humanity at this point.

Another way of modelling the brain (mostly the human behaviour part of it) is ACT-R, which doesn't use neurons at all. Once again, there's no algorithm for evolving this system and interestingly it's the foundation behind a lot of the intelligent systems you mentioned.

The search for evolution and learning methods for groups to gain intelligence is generally called Artificial Life (ALife).

You'll notice that there's a bunch of different levels to approach the problem of modelling the brain. Your friend was at the biological bottom-up level, ACT-R is at the behavioural top-down level and Spaun is the weird hybrid. Although all of these systems use IT in some way (Spaun was built with a Python library called Nengo, ACT-R is written in LISP), the processes for creating these systems cannot be automated and would require the creation of a general artificial intelligence.


Techniques that measure brain activity at a distance such as EEG and MEG measure spiking activity very poorly and indirectly. Instead, these techniques primarily measure synaptic currents.

Synaptic currents of course originate in some way from spiking activity, however:

Synaptic currents may not occur in the vicinity of the spiking cells
The amplitude of synaptic currents depends on the current state of the cells impinged upon
Synaptic currents of different types in the same area can cancel each other out
Phase, polarity, and geometry can lead to a complex inverse problem at the sensor that has an infinite number of solutions.

However, by making some rather strong assumptions, one can attempt to solve this inverse problem. Higher frequency EEG/MEG activity is more closely associated with spiking activity, and therefore most appropriate for attempting to localize spiking rather than other types of activity. See for example David and Friston 2003.

I'd also add that although the current agreement seems to be that EEG/MEG primarily come from synaptic currents, because synaptic currents do originate ultimately from some sort of spiking, EEG/MEG signals can correlate well with spiking activity measured with depth electrodes (for example Whittingstall & Logothetis, 2009). It's just likely that the correlation is indirect, mediated through synaptic potentials.

Buzsáki, G., Anastassiou, C. A., & Koch, C. (2012). The origin of extracellular fields and currents—EEG, ECoG, LFP and spikes. Nature reviews neuroscience, 13(6), 407.

David, O., & Friston, K. J. (2003). A neural mass model for MEG/EEG:: coupling and neuronal dynamics. NeuroImage, 20(3), 1743-1755.

Whittingstall, K., & Logothetis, N. K. (2009). Frequency-band coupling in surface EEG reflects spiking activity in monkey visual cortex. Neuron, 64(2), 281-289.


Why does strobe lighting trigger seizures in photosensitive epilepsy?

Seizures induced by stroboscopic lights are an example of reflex seizures. This type of epilepsy includes seizures evoked by touch and movements as well. The mechanism behind generalized reflex seizures (generalized epilepsy, as opposed to partial epilepsies, is accompanied by a loss of consciousness) was abstracted nicely by Ferlazzo et al., 2005:

  Patients with [] generalized reflex seizures appear to have regions of cortical hyperexcitability overlapping or coinciding with areas physiologically activated
  during specific sensory stimulations and cognitive or motor activities. When these areas receive appropriate afferent volleys and a critical mass of cortex is activated, an epileptic activity is produced that ultimately involves cortico-reticular or cortico-cortical pathways resulting in a generalized or bilateral epileptic event.

In other words, stimuli such as stroboscopic light evoke activity in sensory cortex. If the area of excitation is large enough and occurs in a region of the brain that has an epileptic focus (hyperexcitable cortex) than it may trigger a seizure characterized by an uncontrolled wave of activity spreading across the cortex.

Specifically for flashing-light induced seizures it is thought that seizures start in the visual cortex in the occipital lobe due to impaired cortical mechanisms of contrast gain control for certain visual patterns, producing an abnormal excitatory response to patterns of relatively low temporal frequency and high luminance contrast. Specifically, the seizures may be caused by a loss of control over high-frequency oscillatory processes that normally operate transiently to connect the involved neural assemblies. Generalized seizures can occur if normal excitation of visual cortex involves a ‘critical mass’ of synchronized activity in a cortical area with synchronization and subsequent spreading of excitation from the occipital lobe trigger zone (Parra et al., 2005).

References
- Ferlazzo et al., Brain (2005); 128: 700–10
- Parra et al., Curr Opin Neurol (2005); 18(2):155-9


Questionnaire that measures participants emotion at the time of completion of the questionnaire

Your question is very specific in that it pertains to memory recall in eyewitness testimony. But presumably the context is not the main point. The main point is that you want to get a measures of state emotion.

The most common measure that I'm familiar with is the PANAS (Watson, Clark, Tellegen, 1988). It asks about the frequency of experiencing a set of common positive and negative emotions. It yields overall scores positive affect and negative affect. It can be asked with different time-frame instructions (e.g., last hour, today, last week, etc.). Choose the time frame that most aligns with your construct of interest.

See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_measures

Watson, D.; Clark, L. A.; Tellegen, A. (1988). "Development and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect: The PANAS Scales". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 54 (6): 1063–1070. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063.


As the above poster mentioned, CBT is a recognition of unhelpful or destructive patterns of thinking. And thus, though it may be aided by a professional, it is largely 'performed' by means of the self.

That being said, the utilization of CBT techniques without guidance from a trained professional may or may not be beneficial, depending on the person. Without professional guidance, it is difficult to know where to look for information, and to know what sort of information is reliable. Furthermore, it can be difficult to stick to a behavioral routine, or to learn for oneself what to believe and what not to believe. In fact, evidence has occasionally shown that professionally-guided self-help is the only significant means of self-help, in terms of beneficial effect. [1]

On the other hand, other studies have shown that self-help CBT is more effective than TAU (treatment as usual) in the long run. [2] Though I think it is worth mentioning that participants in these trials were given clinically approved CBT manuals, as well as a regime to follow.

Therefore, it may be best to view CBT like one may view taking medication. If you are relying on anecdotal evidence or advice from non-professionals, you may be setting yourself up for failure in the long run (or even damaging yourself further). On the other hand, if you were to consult a trained professional for advice and then follow that advice, then you may have better luck. However, I am not sure if this constitutes as 'self-CBT' in the way that you are describing.

Sources used:

[1] Gellatly, Judith; Bower, Peter; Hennessy, SUE; Richards, David; Gilbody, Simon; Lovell, Karina (2007). "What makes self-help interventions effective in the management of depressive symptoms? Meta-analysis and meta-regression". Psychological Medicine 37 (9): 1217–28.

[2] Williams, Christopher; Wilson, Philip; Morrison, Jill; McMahon, Alex; Andrew, Walker; Allan, Lesley; McConnachie, Alex; McNeill, Yvonne et al. (2013). Andersson, Gerhard, ed. "Guided Self-Help Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Depression in Primary Care: A Randomised Controlled Trial"


Are thoughts transferred along with a brain during a brain transplantation?

Short answer
Human brain transplants have never been performed, so any answers to what will happen are mere speculations.

Background
Whole-head transplants have been performed on animals, the first reports go back to the 1970's (Canavero, 2013). The practice is still pursued today (e.g.., Ren et al., 2015)). Up until now, however, it has not been done in humans, and likely it never will be (source: The Guardian). This, because of medical limitations (Canavero, 2013) as well as ethical considerations (Wolpe, 217)

The biggest problem medically is the re-connection of the thousands of spinal neurons linking the brain to the rest of the body (Canavero, 2013). Further, immune responses and immediate cell death due to oxygen depletion may all further hamper the process. Nonetheless, certain groups envision it will be at one time possible in humans (Canavero, 2013).

The same limitations as with head transplants discussed above apply for a brain transplant. The thing is that with a whole-head transplant the major arteries can be quickly connected to feed the brain. With a brain transplant this also becomes a major bottle neck, making it even more difficult. Transplanting a head can be done with relative ease by sacrificing the donor and straight away stitch it to the beheaded recipient. A brain transplant needs even more steps. The big advantage of a head transplant is also that  the brain, being within its own cephalon, still connects to the cranial nerves (White et al, 1975).

References
- Canavero, Surg Neurol Int (2013); 4(S1): S335–S42
- Ren et al., CNS Neurosci Therapeutics (2015); 21(8): 615-8
- White et al. Resuscitation 1975;4,197-210
- Wolpe, AJOB Neurosci (2017); 8(4)

Further reading
- Is brain transplantation possible?


Q1 — Your Main Question — Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?

The studies

Two studies attempted to observe the effects of session frequency in routine practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Both relied on retrospective evaluations by patients after completing therapy, and on naturalistic data regarding session frequency and dose. Each was asked to rate his or her recovery in therapy, including decrease in symptom distress and increasein morale.

Both studies indicated a relationship between the frequency of sessions and patients’ perceptions of recovery, where patients being seen only once a week had less positive perceptions of their experience than patients being seen two times a week or more. In fact, positive perceptions of recovery were incrementally related with the frequency of sessions, with once a week indicating the least amount of recovery, twice a week somewhat more, and three times a week the most recovery in therapy (Freedman, Hoffenber, Vorus, & Frosch, 1999; Sandell et al., 2000). This provides some evidence that patients’ perceptions of their own recovery may be affected positively by increased session frequency.

A follow-up study to Sandell et al. (2000) found an interaction effect in long-term follow-up (i.e., 3 years, with measures taken each year) between duration and frequency, where outcome was better among the low frequency/low duration group and among the high frequency/high duration group (Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar, 2002). These findings illustrate the potentially complex relationship between session frequency and other parameters, including the number of sessions and duration of the course of treatment; ultimately, they indicate that session frequency seems to be related not only to immediate perception of therapy, but to long-term outcome.

So what is this telling us?

Twice weekly or more sessions may gain quicker results in perception, but in the long term, it is doing the client a disservice.

The frequency of sessions helps balance cost, intensity, and emotional containment (Seeman, n.d.).  Therapy can be emotionally intense and someone may learn many things (about themselves and what they are dealing with) in session. More time in session can raise an amount of information which can be difficult to absorb mentally and emotionally, and this is what Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar (2002) was starting to realise.

High frequency/high duration therapy as indicated by Sandell, Blomberg, & Lazar would be very costly, and, from my experience as a therapist who as part of training has had to undergo therapy too, would not be as beneficial as low frequency/low duration therapy.   With high frequency/high duration therapy, the client is not necessarily fully assimilating the information at their own pace, and, the chances are, the therapist is guiding too much on how to interpret the information raised in session. Low frequency/low duration therapy is about pacing your therapy, and the fact that therapy does not just happen in the room.

The time outside the room enables the client to assimilate the information which has been discussed in session at their own pace.  Depending on the form of therapy, the therapist may even set some "homework tasks" outside of the session which are optional, but may help with assimilation processes.

Being weekly, it will be recent enough that session continuity will be maintained.  Any longer in duration between sessions runs the risk of continuity problems as what was discussed can be hard to remember to a certain degree, and the flow of conversation and therapy can be upset slightly, affecting rapport.  There may be times when you may wish to cancel a scheduled appointment with your therapist because you are finding things too difficult.  That is fine as long as you give the pre-agreed notice to your therapist.  Late cancellations can incur cancellation charges with most therapists.

It is part of therapy in some cases to want to skip a session once in a while, and as long as there are not too many cancellations, your therapist will understand and can pick things up when you return, whilst examining with you what made things difficult.  If there are a lot of cancellations, questions will be raised as to whether you are ready for therapy. in order for therapy to work, the client needs to be ready for it

  Clients immersed in intense emotional or life changes may see their therapist twice a week or more often to help keep them be emotionally centered and assist them in activating coping skills (Seeman, n.d.)

however, once things have reached a certain point, it is better for the client to revert to once-weekly sessions for reasons already pointed out.

Q2 — Why do we pause mid-conversation and wait seven days?

With the idea of conversations being cut mid-way because of the end of session, a good therapist will manage the session and enable as smooth an ending as possible.  Although sessions booked will be an hour long, the typical “therapy hour” is 45 to 50 minutes.  In some situations a therapist may offer longer sessions. For instance, a couple in therapy may find themselves just getting into a long-needed conversation. Added time may help them maintain the momentum.

The 10 to 15 minute difference with the "therapy hour" enables therapy to be closed as smoothly as possible giving time for the client to transition from therapy session to life outside the room.  When you are approaching the end of the therapy hour, your therapist should be mindful of that and work towards a smooth closure of the session in order for the client not to be "left dangling with no support" after just talking about something very emotional without some kind of closure for the time being.

Further Reading

For tips on how to get the most out of Psychotherapy, see the webpage by Gary Seeman, PhD

For more information about what makes therapy work, see:

Duncan, B. L., Miller, S. D., Wampold, B. E., & Hubble, M. A. (2010). The heart and soul of change: Delivering what works in therapy. American Psychological Association.DOI: 10.1037/12075-000

References

Freedman, N., Hoffenberg, J. D., Vorus, N., & Frosch, A. (1999). The effectiveness of psychoanalytic psychotherapy: The role of treatment duration, frequency of sessions, and the therapeutic relationship. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 47(3), 741-772.DOI: 10.1177/00030651990470031001

Sandell, R., Blomberg, J., Lazar, A., Carlsson, J., Broberg, J., & Schubert, J. (2000). Varieties of long-term outcome among patients in psychoanalysis and long-term psychotherapy: A review of findings in the Stockholm outcome of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy project (STOPP). The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81(5), 921-942.No working DOI available[Free PDF available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12217712_Varieties_of_long-term_outcome_among_patients_in_psychoanalysis_and_long-term_psychotherapy_-_A_review_of_findings_in_the_Stockholm_Outcome_of_Psychoanalysis_and_Psychotherapy_Project_STOPPP]

Sandell, R., Blomberg, J., & Lazar, A. (2002). Time matters: On temporal interactions in long-term follow-up of long-term psychotherapies. Psychotherapy Research, 12(1), 39-58.DOI: 10.1080/713869616

Seeman, G. (n.d.). Getting the Most Out of Psychotherapy [Online]Available at: https://drgaryseeman.com/getting-the-most-out-of-psychotherapy


Question about perceived stubborn behavior patterns

As noted, this is a duplicate and was asked due to the complexity of wording my search terms in a way that related to what I outlined.

Confirmation Bias


How can I dream things that are impossible?

Dreams aren't logical. Your mind is in a relaxed state when you dream. Thoughts become super-imposed and intertwined with each other.

Ideas and imagination is never directly related to interpretation. When you say you imagined stairs, it's actually your idea of stairs. It has no correlation to the real world at all. Your idea of stairs or empty space by themselves have no information related to how objects can physically move from one place to another. Therefore when your mind is being lazy and not focusing, concepts like logical physical movement can be ignored entirely.

We still don't know much about dreams that isn't still speculated about. These are some pretty good places to check out; How Stuff Works - Dreams, Wikipeia - Theories,  The Scientific Study of Dreams


Online data repository of research in the cognitive sciences

The ADNI project (2004–ongoing) aims at characterizing change in cognitive functions and brain structures with age, with a particular emphasis on Alzheimer's disease and neuroimaging.

From the website,

  The overall goal of this huge project is to define the rate of
  progress of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, to
  develop improved methods for clinical trials in this area, and to
  provide a large database which will improve design of treatment
  trials. We expect that this project will provide information and
  methods which will help lead to effective treatments for Alzheimer’s
  disease, leading to effective prevention.

Data that are collected include: demographics, clinical data, neuroimaging (MRI/PET) data, and a wide range of cognitive tests. (More on ADCS website.)
Details about protocols, available data can be found under ADNI Scientist's Home. In particular, data are available on ADCS. Please note that you must write an application to get the data (as is often the case).


How does a female measure her own attractiveness?

From p. 207 of Geoffrey Miller (2001). The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49517-X

  In our research on mate search strategies, colleague Peter
  Todd and I found that a rule we call "Try a Dozen" performs as
  well as the 37 percent rule under a wide range of conditions. Try
  a Dozen is simple: interview a dozen possible mates, remember
  the best of them, and then pick the very next prospect who is
  even more attractive. You do not have to estimate the total
  number of potential mates you will encounter in your
  reproductive lifetime; you only have to bet that you will meet at
  least fifty or so. Humans seem to follow something like the Try a
  Dozen rule: we get to know a number of opposite-sex friends
  during adolescence, fall in love at least once, remember that
  loved one very clearly, and tend to marry the next person who
  seems even more attractive. Each individual is "satisficing"-
  looking for someone who is pretty good and good enough, rather
  than the absolute best they could possibly find. But at the
  evolutionary level, these satisficing rules impose sexual selection
  that is almost as strong as the most complicated, perfectionist
  decision strategy.

I also turned up a 1998 review by Miller and Todd "Mate Choice Turn Cognitive", which does get to mating strategies in its final pages, best summarized by:

  By sampling a much smaller number of
  prospects initially, say a dozen, one can actually attain a
  higher expected mate value than the 37% rule delivers (although
  a lower chance of finding the very highest-valued
  prospect), with much lower search costs and a much lower
  risk of being stuck with a low-value mate[64,65] (Fig. 3).
  More importantly, the ‘secretary problem’ ignores the
  problem that a prospect you desire may reject you. This
  mutual choice constraint makes the search much harder[64,65].
  Game-theory models of ‘two-sided matching’ address these
  complexities[61] directly, and propose various search strategies
  which guarantee that a population reaches a ‘stable matching’:
  a pairwise assortment of individuals where no individual
  would prefer to be mated with someone else who would also
  prefer to be mated with them. However, two-sided matching
  models typically assume strict monogamy (no ‘extra-pair
  copulations’), complete information and exhaustive preferences:
  everyone has complete, consistent, transitive
  preferences across all possible prospects that they encounter.

  Roth, A.E. and Sotomayor, M.A.O. (1990) Two-sided Matching: a Study
  in Game-theoretic Modeling and Analysis, Cambridge University Press

  Todd, P.M. (1997) Searching for the next best mate, in Simulating
  Social Phenomena (Conte, R., Hegselmann, R. and Terna, P., eds),
  pp. 419–436, Springer-Verlag

  Todd, P.M. and Miller, G.F. Heuristics for mate search, in Simple
  Heuristics that Make us Smart (Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P.M. and the ABC
  Research Group), Oxford University Press (in press)

So yeah, the problem is not that simple (as optimal stopping) if one considers mating a game (in the sense of game theory). I haven't yet looked at the latter line of research... but it's a whole book. The idea seems centered on the stable marriage problem. An optimal algorithm also involves a number of rounds, with rejection and "maybe" answers; from Wikipedia:

  In the first round, first a) each unengaged man proposes to the woman he prefers most, and then b) each woman replies "maybe" to her suitor she most prefers and "no" to all other suitors. She is then provisionally "engaged" to the suitor she most prefers so far, and that suitor is likewise provisionally engaged to her.
  In each subsequent round, first a) each unengaged man proposes to the most-preferred woman to whom he has not yet proposed (regardless of whether the woman is already engaged), and then b) each woman replies "maybe" if she is currently not engaged or if she prefers this guy over her current provisional partner (in this case, she rejects her current provisional partner who becomes unengaged). The provisional nature of engagements preserves the right of an already-engaged woman to "trade up" (and, in the process, to "jilt" her until-then partner).
  This process is repeated until everyone is engaged.

So, Miller and Todd cleary don't think this stable marriage problem is too relevant for reality. Unfortunately, by the time of their review (which is now two decades old), there's wasn't much else proposed that was taking into account the mutual-choice aspect of mating and the "satisficing" nature of human choice in general (that Miller and Todd favor).


Are we actually seeing black colored objects?

Actually, black objects absorb light across visible frequencies indiscriminately, but not completely. So some light still reflects off them. This is described on this Q&A of the Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But even if there was a perfectly black objects which absorbs 100% of the light that falls on it, you could still perceive it as it via the contrast to other objects around it.


What is the difference between RR-intervals and NN-intervals in HRV-data?

The difference is rather simple. NN-intervals refer to the intervals between normal R-peaks. During a measurement, artifacts may arise due to arrhythmic events or faulty sensors, for example (Citi, Brown & Barbieri, 2012). This may lead to abnormal R-peaks, which may in turn distort the statistical measures. To ensure reliable and valid data, only normal R-peaks are selected. Alternatively, the abnormal R-peaks can be corrected.

In practice, however, RR-intervals and NN-intervals are synonymous (Tarvainen, 2014; Wiki). The use of "NN-intervals" is merely used to emphasize that normal R-peaks were used.

References

Citi, L., Brown, E. N., & Barbieri, R. (2012). A real-time automated point-process method for the detection and correction of erroneous and ectopic heartbeats. IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering, 59(10), 2828-2837.

Tarvainen, M.P. (2014). Kubios HRV version 2.2: User's Guide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability


Who first used the term 'filter' in cognitive science context?

Colin Cherry coined the phrase the Cocktail party effect to describe the ability for people to tune or filter out distraction and focus on one thing; the illustration being able to focus on a conversation amidst all the background noise at a cocktail party.

Broadbent's filter model of attention  was developed from Cherry's work proposing the concept filtering information. Cherry first used the idea of a filter.  Broadbent was the first person to officially coin the term filter as it is used within this context and within a cognitive model.


Phenomena where group truly feels a certain way, but each member says that they feel the other way to avoid being the odd one out

I believe the name you are searching for is conformity.

One of the most well-known examples: Asch Conformity Experiments.


Does the person's walking say anything about the person's cognition?

In terms of answering this question I will address the one final question;
I'm interested if there's really any correlation between how a person appears outwardly and how the person feels?

A commonsense  answer to this question without any scientific research is; Yes.  All animals have non-verbal communication. Much of human communication is based on non-verbal factors. We ca interpret if someone is hostile, and unapproachable, or if someone is happy; from facial expression and body movements. A person's health and vitality is reflected in posture and gait.

Now scientifically:
There is correlation between how a person appears outwardly and how the person feels.
This question overlaps with interpreting body language and mood.

In terms of gait:
There is extensive research on the effect of a person's mood on gait. The studies I have listed below cover aspects of normal gait, and how gait is analysed, to the effects of mood on gait.

I have quoted from the article mentioned by Jeff in the comments.

  The authors examined the relationship between cognition and gait
  velocity, performed with and without  interference, in elderly
  participants. Neuropsychological test scores from 186 cognitively
  normal elders  were submitted to factor analysis that yielded 3
  factors: Verbal IQ, Speed/Executive Attention, and  Memory. Regression
  analyses revealed that these factors were signiﬁcant predictors of
  variance in gait  velocity, but the relationship varied as a function
  of task condition. All 3 factors predicted gait velocity  without
  interference. However, the Speed/Executive Attention and Memory
  factors but not Verbal IQ  predicted gait velocity in the interference
  condition. These ﬁndings suggest that gait velocity and  cognitive
  function may have both shared and independent brain substrates. Future
  studies should explore  gait velocity and cognitive function as
  predictors of dementia and falls.

Gait
Mansfield, P.J., Newmann, D.A., (2009),
Essentials of Kinesiology for the Physical
Therapist Assistant, Mosby: St. Louis, MO.

Psychosom Med. 2009 Jun;71(5):580-7. doi: 10.1097/PSY.0b013e3181a2515c. Epub 2009 May 4.
Embodiment of sadness and depression--gait patterns associated with dysphoric mood.
Michalak J, Troje NF, Fischer J, Vollmar P, Heidenreich T, Schulte D.

Can J Psychiatry. 1987 Apr;32(3):190-3.
Mood, depressive illness and gait patterns.
Sloman L, Pierrynowski M, Berridge M, Tupling S, Flowers J.

Neuropsychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association
2006, Vol. 20, No. 2,  DOI: 10.1037/0894-4105.20.2.215
Cognitive Processes Related to Gait Velocity:
Results From the Einstein Aging Study
Roee Holtzer, Joe Verghese, Xiaonan Xue, and Richard B. Lipton
Yeshiva University


What is the name of the "Things are more visible once you learn about them" phenomenon?

The scenario you describe is sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

  Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure
  piece of information—often an unfamiliar word or name—and soon
  afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly.

The more scientifically accepted name for this cognitive bias seems to be 'frequency illusion'.

  The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently
  come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable
  frequency shortly afterwards[.]

As to why it occurs, this article seems to state a combination of selective attention (or attentional control) and confirmation bias:

  One, your brain seems to be excited by the fact that you've learned
  something new, and selective attention occurs. Your brain
  subconsciously thinks, "Hey, that's awesome! I'm going to look for
  that thing without actually thinking about it." So now that you're
  looking for it, you find it. To make it all the more powerful,
  confirmation bias occurs after seeing it even once or twice. In other
  words, you start agreeing with yourself that, yup, you're definitely
  seeing it more


Is the price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviours more mental illness?

Kazimierz Dabrowski had a great theory (the Theory of Positive Disintegration) about the relationship between psychoneuroses, the most common symptoms of mental illness, and the  developmental trajectories of gifted people. In brief, gifted people are more likely to live out-of-sync with their social environments (too smart, too intense, too righteous, too sensitive). This causes conflict with individuals and the world at large. Because they live in a state of inner and outer conflict due to their essential differences, they develop psychoneuroses (anxiety, obsessions, existential depression etc). These neuroses are evidence for positive disintegration in the gifted, as the process of becoming one's own person in a world that isn't made for the 'Scary smart' is psychologically painful. Many never pass the disintegrative phase, and live with these symptoms perpetually.
So I imagine that the correlation between smarts/creativity and mental illness arises from their characteristic unwillingness to abandon the parts of themselves that set them up to be at odds with 'normal' life. Those are the same intensities that make them exceptional. The upside is that unwanted symptoms of positive disintegration can be worked through and a 'personality ideal' - roughly analogous to a self-actualizing personality a la Maslow - can be achieved.
I hope that gives some insight into the context and dynamics behind that common observation in folk psychology. It's not "smart people are all crazy" but more like "smart people face challenges that most others don't" and that can make them seem crazy while on their hard path of personality development.


Why are biosignals from the body said to be continuous?

Biological signals are analogues and hence continuous. Early EEG systems simply recorded the analogue signals and displayed it as a continuous signal graphically as wiggly lines written by little pens on a roll of paper (Fig. 1). Only after analogue-to-digital converters became available, could EEG signals and the likes be digitally sampled.

Fig. 1. Analogue EEG signal. source: Britton et al., 2016)

Reference
- Britton et al., Electroencephalography (EEG): An Introductory Text and Atlas of Normal and Abnormal Findings in Adults, Children, and Infants, 2016. Chicago: American Epilepsy Society


Activation of brain reasoning areas during dreaming

I cannot answer from fMRI's, but this theory conflicts with other anecdotal evidence from medicine.

In sensory deprivation, or under psychotomimetic substances, you can be awake and unimpaired logically, and still have reality make as little sense as it does in a dream.  (People on LSD are not less logical, in an abstract sense.  If you can get them to care about an IQ test long enough to take it, they can do just as well.)

To the extent those effects are comparable, I would doubt it is reason that is impaired.  It is more likely that reasoning is fine, but the ability to check predictions against perception is lacking.

Antonio Damasio's observations on brain lesions that limit emotion, explained in his popularizing book, seems to indicate that abstract reason needs physical grounding (from the environment or from internal sensations like emotional reactions) or it goes off the rails and does not result in what we ordinarily consider logic, even if the reasoning skills themselves are in order.

Much perceptual feedback and even internal feeback loops are disabled or attenuated by the physiological paralysis in sleep.


Why past events reappear in dreams after a certain delay?

Because memory is consolidated during sleep (and dreaming).
http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/6/671.full
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/dreams-are-key-to-memory/13157.html
There are also some psychological benefits from easing painful memories.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/23/dream-sleep/


This question seems to be asking "How is knowledge represented in neurons" and then jumps to the assumption "synapses represents relations". As discussed in the linked question, there is a lot of evidence that this method of binding is not biologically plausible, given that it doesn't scale well to the level of human vocabulary.

So, to answer your question, it is hypothesised that there are "special" synapses to do certain operations/relations, however the model you seem to be holding in your mind is incorrect. For more information, please check out "How to Build a Brain" by Chris Eliasmith or the other reference below.

Reference

Eric Crawford, Matthew Gingerich, and Chris Eliasmith. Biologically plausible, human-scale knowledge representation. In 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 412–417. 2013.


Is StackExchange.com Addiction Dangerous?

For something to be considered a mental disorder worthy of it's own definition,  it needs to have some really strong effects that are consistently different from others definitions and are not explained by co-morbidity of others.

ADHD, OCD, and Tourettes all exhibit co-morbidity and common brain regions, but since the symptoms and treatment differ so radically, we treat them as distinct from each other.

In short, you are asking the wrong question : )  I'm sure there is plenty of good lit out there on helping people to the point of harming oneself.  Usually, however, this type of "addiction" is a better understood as a generalized form of something else and you would be hard pressed to come up with symptoms and treatments that would generalize only to help addicts of sites like stack exchange.

It's like talking about "breast cancer" instead of categorizing it according to cell types, treatment, etc.  Sure, you will get more money for breast cancer than a-morphic-sciency-sounding cancer, but that doesn't help one predict what could kill it.


Can motivation for sex be transformed into productive motivation?

In Freudian Psychoanalysis, sublimation is the transformation of unacceptable sexual desires into mental achievements or culturally accepted behaviors. Sublimation is one of the mature defense mechanisms of the Ego. Freud believed that human culture as a whole is a result of sublimation. He sees especially in artistic expression and scientific research the conversion of base desires to a higher realm.

In their review of recent studies in social psychology for evidence relevant to seven Freudian defense mechanisms, Baumeister, Dale and Sommer (1998)

  have found nothing at all to suggest that people can defend themselves
  against unacceptable feelings or desires by transforming them into
  socially desirable activities, thereby producing superior achiement in
  those activities. The best available data concern education and sex,
  and those findings consitently fail to support sublimation theory (and
  in some cases are in the opposite direction). At present, our best
  educated guess is that sublimation is not a genuine or effective
  defense mechanism, and it seems doubtful that anything resembling
  sublimation occurs at all.

The question "What is the effect of sexual abstinence on intellectual and artistic achievment?" has specifically been answered by studies on celibacy, which show either no or a negative effect (Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer, 1998).

Sources

Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, udoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66, 1081–1124. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00043 Available online at http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/vollarj/baumesiter%20roy%20-%20freudian%20defense%20mechanisms.pdf


Does classical music enhance intelligence in children more than other genres?

A great overview of this topic is available in Chapter 6 of the book The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris & Simons. My answer is based, in large part, on their summary of the topic.

The "Mozart Effect" was originally reported by Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky (1993). In the experiment, college students completed a set of typical IQ tests. Before taking the tests, the participants were randomly assigned to either (1) listen to 10 minutes of Mozart, (2) listen to 10 minutes of relaxation instructions, or (3) sit in silence for 10 minutes. They reported that participants who listened to Mozart scored an average of 8-9 IQ points higher on the tests than the other groups.

The effect turns out to be difficult to replicate. This is nicely summarized in the introduction of Steele, Bass, & Crook (1999), who also conducted a replication of the original design and found no evidence of a Mozart effect.

Your question is specifically about classical versus other kinds of music, and this is indeed a topic that has been researched as a follow-up to the Mozart Effect. One theory that arose to explain the Mozart Effect (even though the effect itself may not be all that reliable!) is that it has nothing to do with classical music in particular. Rather, the effect is simply about arousal and mood. Listening to music may not increase your intelligence, but it might make you more alert and engaged than sitting in silence or listening to a relaxation script. Schellenberg & Hallam (2006) reported a study in which participants (8,000 British school children!) listened to either (1) a Mozart string quintet, (2) three pop songs, or (3) a discussion about a science experiment. The children who listened to the pop songs performed significantly better than the others, and there was no benefit of Mozart over the science discussion. Nantais & Schellenberg (1999) demonstrated that there was no overall difference between listening to Mozart or an excerpt from a Stephen King story, but participants did tend to do better if they got to listen to the thing they preferred! One explanation, then, is that listening to something you like before taking an IQ test increases your performance (or, conversely, listening to something you don't like decreases performance).


Q: Why do right-handed people put things in their left pocket, and vice versa?

A: I suppose that the left pocket means the left shirt-pocket because, in the case of pant-pockets, it is the right pant-pocket that most right-handed people usually put things (a wallet, a mobile phone, etc.) in. The reasons that they use the right pant-pocket are probably that it is more convenient and faster and that it consumes less energy than using the left pant-pocket.

The reason that right-handed people usually put things in their left shirt-pocket and vice versa for the left-handed people is probably the same. For right-handed people, putting things in the right shirt-pocket requires more flexing of the finger, wrist, and elbow joints, which is less comfortable and consumes more energy (for muscle contractions). But, unlike your case, I observe that most people who put things in their left shirt-pocket with their right hand will remove the object from the pocket with their right hand, not with their left hand and then transfer it to the right hand, which will take more time and expend more energy.

Finding ways to spend least energy for any action seems to be a well-preserved selected trait in all animals. It certainly gives a basic advantage for survival to the animals. That’s why, mostly, a man or an animal will always try to walk/fly/swim the shortest path it can to the goal. This preference applies to all other actions. This finding ways to spend least energy is called the principle of least effort:

  “The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort".”[Ref 1]

and

  “Summary. The observations in this section can be summarized by proposing three fundamental principles underlying the study of movement economy.

  The first derives from Hull (1943), to the effect that, when the organism is repeatedly presented with a number of equally reinforced alternative responses, that response requiring the least metabolic energy expenditure will become the dominant response.

  The second principle is that, when either the choice of response has been made or no choice given and a goal response specified, over trials the organism minimizes the metabolic energy expended in achieving the task goal. This economy-learning, or efficiency-learning, relationship, as shown in Figure 7, was first suggested by Freeman (1948), but Brener and Mitchell (1989) have also recognized the same principle.

  The third principle serves to explain these phenomena - the principle of least metabolic energy expenditure. In being receptive to sensory information about metabolic energy expenditure, organisms select the least effortful coordination and control function, and, with practice, the selected control parameters are refined to attain the task goal with less metabolic energy expenditure. The following section examines the contribution of various sources of informational support for response selection and metabolic energy minimization.” [Ref 2]

Thus, the reason that right-handed people put things in their left shirt-pocket is probably an evolutionary biological reason, not a psychological reason.

It should be noted that evolution works in general but not in every case. And variation is another constant facet of evolution. So, not every selected evolutionary trait will appear in all members of a species or will win out over other competing traits and manifest itself every time in a similar situation. Sometimes, another trait wins out. Therefore, some people or some people sometimes will not behave according to this principle of least effort.

References.

Wikipedia. The principle of least effort
Sparrow WA, Newell KM.  Metabolic energy expenditure and the regulation of movement economy. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 1998; 5: 173. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212943


What are the correlations between the facets of honesty-humility in HEXACO personality and the Dark Triad?

Lee and Ashton (2014) write:

  A few studies have directly examined the relations of the Dark Triad
  with the Honesty–Humility factor (as operationalized in the HEXACO
  Personality Inventory [–Revised]; HEXACO-PI[-R]). These investigations
  have found the low pole of the Honesty– Humility factor to be
  essentially identical to the common elementof the Dark Triad variables
  (Lee & Ashton, 2005; Lee et al., 2013).

One study I found by Aghababaei et al (2014) reports the following correlations for 223 employees using 12 item dark triad and 60-item hexaco.

Of course, this is not the ideal study for facet-level measurement of honesty-humility. Ideally, you'd want more items both for facet-level measurement and measurement of each of the dark triad in order to get a broad and reliable measure. But it should give some idea.

References

Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2014). The dark triad, the big five, and the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 2-5.
Aghababaei, N., Mohammadtabar, S., & Saffarinia, M. (2014). Dirty Dozen vs. the H factor: Comparison of the Dark Triad and Honesty–Humility in prosociality, religiosity, and happiness. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 6-10.


What's the difference between a Hamming and Hopfield network?

Hopfield and Hamming networks are older connectionist networks used to classify noisy binary input data.

Hopfield networks are the basis for Hamming networks, so let's focus on those first.

A Hopfield network is a set of neurons that do classification via mutual inhibition, as shown in the figure below from Wikipedia:

Note the neurons are not like your typical biologically plausible neurons, they have two states "+1" and "-1". Their update rule, which forces them into an output pattern, enables these two states.

A Hamming network is a two-layer network, as shown in this figure (taken from here) where the data is flowing from the bottom:

As you can see, the second layer, sometimes called the MaxNet layer, is identical to the Hopfield Network, however the input layer resembles a classic single-layer perceptron. This single-layer perceptron is train according to the Hamming Distances of the inputs.

Performance wise, as shown in the conclusion "A Comparison of Hamming and Hopfield
Neural Nets for Pattern Classification" by Lippmann et al., Hamming nets generally out-perform Hopfield nets.


In order for your 2 questions to be answered I have taken each question in turn.

Can a synaesthete see sounds even when that person is actually blind?

According to Steven & Blakemore (2004), there seems to be 2 forms of visual synaesthesia which blind people can experience.  That is Coloured-Braille synaesthesia, and Coloured-hearing synaesthesia for letters, numbers, and words (including time-related words) This is also known as Chromesthesia (see also this Wikipedia Article).  All quotes below are from Steven & Blakemore's study article, and there is one point of note with the study.

  The synaesthesia described by our subjects is most likely idiopathic (ie of early onset, as opposed to acquired after blindness) because all of them report having had synaesthesia for as long as they can remember (ie from prior to the onset of blindness). Furthermore, three of the six subjects have one or more first-degree relatives who are sighted and have synaesthesia (suggesting a genetic aetiology for the phenomenon)

I haven't come across any study where people blind from birth can experience synaesthesia, yet it doesn't mean it cannot happen.  The question then of course would be how the colours could be relayed to someone studying the case as the person blind from birth would not have any colour references to go by.

Coloured-Braille synaesthesia

This is where the blind person sees colours whilst reading Braile.

  One subject, JF, reports experiencing coloured Braille. For JF, the tactile sensation of each Braille character immediately evokes a synaesthetic impression of an array of tiny coloured dots, "like an LED display", corresponding to the Braille character. However, he does not see colours when he feels other textures or objects with his fingers, nor when he touches dots arranged in shapes or spatial arrangements not related to Braille.

Coloured-hearing synaesthesia (also known as *Chromesthesia* or sound-to-colour synesthesia

This is where heard sounds automatically and involuntarily evoke an experience of colour.

  All six of our subjects have coloured hearing for words relating to time (throughout this paper, 'time' refers to days of the week and months of the year, but not to hours, minutes, or seconds). Some have coloured hearing for all words and many have coloured hearing for spoken letters and numbers. Furthermore, several subjects also see these percepts as vague shapes, forming spatially localised patterns in their "mind's eye".

Coloured-hearing synaesthesia seems to be different in each of the cases in Steven & Blakemore's study, including how with JF,

  When JF moves his eyes or head from left to right, his colours remain stable in space, but if he rotates his whole body, the array of colours moves with him. Hence the synaesthetic phantoms are body-centred, not oculocentric or head-centred.

I would recommend reading this study article as I found it interesting.

How does the brain interpret a picture without a vision?

It seems that synaesthetes see colours because the visual cortex is stimulated by the sensation which triggered it. (Steven & Blakemore, 2004)

  In a single-subject fMRI study, Aleman and colleagues (2001) reported significant activation of human striate cortex when a synaesthete experienced illusory colours in response to hearing words. An earlier positron emission tomography (PET) study, however, had shown activation of visual-association cortex but not primary visual cortex in coloured-word synaesthesia (Paulesu et al 1995). Nunn et al (2002) recently supported this conclusion with their finding that cortical areas thought to be involved specifically in colour analysis (V4/V8), but not earlier visual areas, are activated when coloured-hearing synaesthetes listen to spoken words. Despite some differences in these results, it seems clear that parts of the visual cortex are activated when synaesthetes experience spurious visual sensations.

As long as there is no damage to the visual cortex, if other conditions are set for it within the brain connections, all that is needed is the correct stimulation within the visual cortex for colours to be seen.

  Sadato et al (1996), using PET, demonstrated that the visual cortex is activated when (non-synaesthetic) late-blind subjects read Braille, and others have reported activity in visual areas during non-Braille tactile discrimination in the blind (Büchel et al 1998; Burton et al 2002). Not only was primary visual cortex activated during Braille reading in the blind, but extrastriate cortex was also activated, including areas in the fusiform gyrus with Talairach coordinates corresponding to V4, which normally processes colour vision in sighted subjects (Burton 2003; Burton et al 2002). Again, this unusual visual cortical activation appears to be functionally significant, since TMS of the primary visual cortex has been shown to disrupt the ability to read Braille (Cohen et al 1997; note that TMS of V4 is not currently feasible), and it might somehow account for the fact that tactile acuity is enhanced in blindness (Goldreich and Kanics 2003)

References

Steven M. S., & Blakemore C. (2004). Visual synaesthesia in the blind. Perception 33(7), 855-68PMID: 15460512 DOI: 10.1068/p5160Free PDF available from semanticscholar.org

References in quotes from Steven & Blakemore (2004)

  Aleman A, Rutten G-J M, Sitskoorn M M, Dautzenberg G, Ramsey N F, 2001 "Activation of striate cortex in the absence of visual stimulation: an fMRI study of synesthesia" NeuroReport 12 2827—2830

  Büchel C, Price C, Frackowiak R S, Friston K, 1998 "Different activation patterns in the visual cortex of late and congenitally blind subjects" Brain 121 409—419

  Burton H, Snyder A Z, Conturo T E, Akbudak E, Ollinger J M, Raichle M E, 2002 "Adaptive changes in early and late blind: a fMRI study of Braille reading" Journal of Neurophysiology 87 589—607

  Burton H, 2003 "Visual cortex activity in early and late blind people" Journal of Neuroscience 23 4005—4011

  Cohen L G, Celnik P, Pascual-Leone A, Corwell B, Faiz L, Dambrosia J, Honda M, Sadato N, Gerloff C, Catala M D, Hallett M, 1997 ``Functional relevance of cross-modal plasticity in blind humans" Nature 389 180—183

  Goldreich D, Kanics I M, 2003 "Tactile acuity is enhanced in blindness" Journal of Neuroscience 23 3439—3445

  Nunn J A, Gregory L J, Brammer M, Williams S C R, Parslow D M, Morgan M J, Morris R G, Bullmore E T, Baron-Cohen S, Gray J A, 2002 "Functional magnetic resonance imaging of synesthesia: activation of V4/V8 by spoken words" Nature Neuroscience 5 371—375

  Paulesu E, Harrison J, Baron-Cohen S, Watson J D, Goldstein L, Heather J, Frackowiak R S, Frith C D, 1995 "The physiology of coloured hearing: A Positron Emission Tomography activation study of coloured-word synaesthesia" Brain 118 661—676

  Sadato N, Pascual-Leone A, Grafman J, Ibanez V, Deiber M P, Dold G, Hallett M, 1996 "Activation of primary visual cortex by Braille reading in blind subjects" Nature 380 562—568


Looking for a source for Valence/Arousal values Russell's advance circumplex model of emotion?

Circumplex models of emotion with the dimensions 'arousal' and 'valence' are not grounded with neurobiological support.

There is however an alternative 'atlas' model with two dimensions that does have neurobiological support (Mobbs, 2020).  The atlas model uses the dimensions of 'affiliation' and 'dominance' with broad emotional categories as shown below.  The atlas is supported with a catalogue of over 3000 emotions each with precise coordinates.

The facial expressions for each location in the atlas is shown below:

Mobbs AED (2020) An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PLOS ONE 15(1): e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877


Utility or software to visualize Neural Network?

If you have CSV files a quick way to generate images would be to open it in Excel (or a similar spreadsheet software) and use some sort of colour scale conditional formatting (under home>styles in Microsoft Excel) - set the width and heights of the cells to small in order to view all the data at once.

You could also use a surface chart in order to visualise the data in Excel.

Otherwise if you are familiar with a tool like Matlab or R, you might wish to use some sort of graphic tool to represent it, e.g. meshgrid in Matlab might work.

Matlab and/or R can be programmed to load several CSV files and create graphics from them.  The first two techniques I mentioned (although accessible to a more novice computer user) have to be carried out manually.


Checklist to evaluate the validity of a personality test

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_validity

This wikipedia page seems be a good starting point for answering to your quesion, but as has been noted elsewhere, there's no neat, concise way to respond. Still, although classical models divided the concept into various "validities" (such as content validity, criterion validity, and construct validity), the currently dominant view is that validity is a single unitary construct. So the answer might be somewhat more unitary than other commenters claim.

Guion, R. M. (1980). On trinitarian doctrines of validity. Professional Psychology, 11, 385-398.

Messick, S. (1995). Validity of psychological assessment: Validation of inferences from persons’ responses and performances as scientific inquiry into score meaning. American Psychologist, 50, 741-749.


Are superhero masks effective at concealing your identity?

I don't know of any proper identity recognition experiments using such a mask, and obviously it depends on how difficult the recognition test is. However, here is a paper where they found that sunglasses (and facemasks) impeded accuracy in an emotion recognition task. I would guess that often identity recognition is just as difficult as emotion recognition, so I would assume glasses or a mask would make people (slightly) worse. In general, this is a question about what features are necessary/useful for face recognition. There is lots of research about this, and studies such as this show that the eyes are particularly important. So disrupting this part of the face, and potentially the relationships between them, is actually not a bad way to disguise yourself (though obviously a full-on balaclava would be better!).