Can response time be incorporated into signal detection theory?

I'd suggest checking out the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Donkin et al., 2011) model for a scenario like this. While LBA can be used to model any number of alternatives in a speeded choice task, to model signal detection you'd want to model just two accumulators, one for the "signal" response and one for the "no signal" response. With this scenario, response bias will manifest as a difference between the accumulators in terms of their distance from starting point to criterion, while discriminability will manifest as the mean drift rate (which will probably be the same across the two accumulators).

References

Donkin, C., Brown, S., & Heathcote, A. (2011). Drawing conclusions
from choice response time models: A tutorial using the linear
Ballistic accumulator. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55, 140-151.


Is consciousness a sub product of the brain or is there a duality?

Your question is about the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically the question of how qualia can be explained in a mechanistic way. As alluded to by the name of the problem, it's hard to give a satisfactory answer. The answer right now is: we don't know.
There are some theories about how qualia and consciousness could have a neural basis (see this question and this wikipedia article). But none of these theories are widely accepted by cognitive scientists and there is still considerable debate over the issue.
Your question also illustrates another philosophical issue in the philosophy of mind. You asked:

So why does the human brain take the extra steps of combining both signals into an image - i.e translating the different waves of the electromagnetic spectrum into shapes, colors, etc -, turning it upright and displaying it to ourselves
(emphasis mine)

The idea that conscioussness and qualia reconstruct the world and then we act and perceive on that world creates a problem: how do we act an perceive on that world? Do we reconstruct it? If so, then we are back to the original problem. This is called the homunculus argument, and it illustrates the fact that we haven't explained anything if we posit that the purpose of qualia is to reconstruct what's already out there.


What predicts the severity of rejection pain?

I have found 2 papers that may be relevant to your question -

This paper probably answers your question the most - I have only schemed  through it, and it seems that the results were insignificant.  You can check out the paper in more detail, hopefully it will get you to more resources that can help with your research.

I have also found this paper which does not entirely answer your question, but I think will help with your insight.

Also keep in mind that some neuroimaging research on social exclusion in causing activation in regions (e.g. dACC) associated with physical pain employs reverse inference method.  This does not mean the results are entirely unworthy of considering - just something to keep in mind when looking at neuroimaging result interpretations.

References

McDonald, Melissa & Donnellan, M.. (2012). Is ostracism a strong situation? The influence of personality in reactions to rejection. Journal of Research in Personality. 46. 614–618. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.05.008.

Park, M., Lee, K.H., Sohn, S., Eom, J., & Sohn, J. (2014). Degree of extraversion and physiological responses to physical pain and sadness. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 55(5), 483-8. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12144

Poldrack R. A. (2011). Inferring mental states from neuroimaging data: from reverse inference to large-scale decoding. Neuron, 72(5), 692–697. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.11.001


What is the effect of mindfulness practice on cognition?

General Review of Mindfulness Meditation on Cognitive Performance

There is a review article Chiesa et al (2011) which would provide a good starting point. They review 23 studies looking at the effect of mindfulness meditation on performance on objective cognitive tests.

  Twenty
  three studies providing measures of attention, memory, executive
  functions and further miscellaneous measures of cognition were
  included. Fifteen were controlled or randomized controlled studies and
  8 were case–control studies. Overall, reviewed studies suggested that
  early phases of mindfulness training, which are more concerned with
  the development of focused attention, could be associated with
  signiﬁcant improvements in selective and executive attention whereas
  the following phases, which are characterized by an open monitoring of
  internal and external stimuli, could be mainly associated with
  improved unfocused sustained attention abilities. Additionally, MMPs
  could enhance working memory capacity and some executive functions.
  However, many of the included studies show methodological limitations
  and negative results have been reported as well, plausibly reﬂecting
  differences in study design, study duration and patients' populations.
  Accordingly, even though ﬁndings here reviewed provided preliminary
  evidence suggesting that MMPs could enhance cognitive functions,
  available evidence should be considered with caution and further high
  quality studies investigating more standardized mindfulness meditation
  programs are needed.

In general I take a very sceptical perspective on the potential capacity of mindfulness meditation to improve cognitive performance. A lot of research shows that IQ is difficult to manipulate, and that much of what we learn is domain specific and is developed by practicing or learning about that particular domain. That said, I would be somewhat more open to the idea that mindfulness meditation might improve capacity for attention or motivation control.

Review of Mrazek et al

The study used several measures of cognitive performance. Notably verbal GRE and working memory were both used. Significantly greater improvements (pre versus post) were found in the mindfulness condition relative to the control nutrition condition.

I am generally sceptical that mindfulness meditation could lead to a lasting improvement of something as grand as a verbal ability factor. While it is possible that the program was effective, I would expect there is an alternative explanation.

The first issue is the small sample size (albeit the pre-post element of the design is good). There were only 48 participants. There has been ample discussion of issues with small sample experimental studies like this. It is easier for small sample studie to be conducted, and therefore they are more likely to be published when effective. Type 1 error is an explanation. Likewise, without wanting to cast dispersions on any one study, broadly there is greater potential in small sample studies for little analysis decisions to dramatically increase the potential for a Type I error rate to arise (see for example the discussion of the effect of flexibility in data analysis by Simmons et al 2011).

Similarly, even in the absence of any flexible analytic strategies, there still is the publication bias towards statistically significant and interesting findings.

Mindfulness participants appear to have improved verbal GRE accuracy from around 43% to around 53%. This is probably close to a one standard deviation improvement in verbal ability. Even if mindfulness meditation was effective, it seems a little implausible to expect such a large increase given how presumably an equivalent increase might take three or four years of education to achieve with traditional means.

Even if the finding was replicable, an alternative interpretation would be that the effect was due to some form of effort related factors that varied based on condition (e.g., some form of placebo - effort interaction).

Putting the small sample to one side, this appears to be a well-designed study. That said, based on my prior understanding of mechanisms of cognitive change and the many alternative interpretations mentioned above for the findings, I am not persuaded that mindfulness meditation is effective in changing verbal ability.

References

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. PDF
Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797612459659
Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-Positive Psychology Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1359-1366.


Tendency to see novelty in mundane and trivial statements

Might apophenia be the term you are looking for?

  The term is attributed to Klaus Conrad by Peter Brugger, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness". Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.

Also, as mentioned somewhere above, it is commonly found in patients with schizophrenia.


I would not recommend phrasing it that way.

  the brain of a narcoleptic generally operates at a lower mean amplitude than a “normal” brain

is very misleading and imprecise, because it suggests the amplitude is lower overall, which it may not be, whereas

  a distinctive lack or reduction of slow wave activity

is precise and clear: it is talking about a specific type of brain activity at a particular time of day.

Additionally, the second statement implies nothing about the rest of the day. It could be that there is an increase in slow oscillations during other parts of the day that offsets the change at night, for example. Additionally, it is not typical to talk about "mean amplitude" over a 24 hour period. There is simply no good reason to rephrase it the way you are suggesting.


How does the neuron recover from hyperpolarizationn?

The sodium potassium pump keeps ion concentrations consistently imbalanced with sodium higher outside and potassium higher inside the cell. The direct impacts it has on voltage are negligible, I'd recommend just ignoring them. If your source specifically says the pump returns the cell to rest after hyperpolarization, this is wrong. A cell could fire several action potentials and return to rest without any pump required, because ion concentrations hardly change during the whole process. You only need the pump in the long term to maintain ion concentrations.
What is important for determining membrane potential is conductances to various ions and the weighted sum of their reversal potentials. Individual reversal potentials can be determined by the Nernst equation; the weighted sum can be determined by the Goldman equation. All the questions you have about what voltage a cell is moving towards are answered by these related equations.
The reason a cell can become hyperpolarized after action potentials is because the weighted sum of ion reversal potentials at rest is less negative than that of potassium alone. If you have extra potassium channels open (voltage gated potassium channels), membrane potential will head closer to potassium reversal.
Nothing special has to happen to return to rest, it's just that at rest the combined conductances of all ions through leak channels and other channels give an expected membrane potential that is not as negative as potassium alone. You can think of this as mostly due to modest resting conductances of sodium and chloride.


How can depression and fear be effectively managed in people who know they will die soon?

I'm no expert on imminent death handling but I have some concepts to share. My suggestions are general suggestions that don't only apply for this scenario but that can be applied more generally, including that scenario.

Overcoming fear of death already is not easy, having to do it in an expedited fashion is even more challenging.

Fear of death comes from resistance to it, there are a lot of books that teach how to surrender to it to drop all resistance and the fear of death with it.

I would recommend reading about "impermanence" in Buddhism, the "dying before you die" concept, "the power of now", "spiritual enlightenment".

Those family of books on "spiritual enlightenment" and "power of now" teach you how to surrender and not resist to things you can't control.


Why pale when we fear and red when we are angry

The 5F response (fright/flight/fight/freeze/fawn response) to threats is responsible for both situations.

Specifically, among other reactions, the 5F response causes the following: [emphasis mine]

  Catecholamine hormones, such as adrenaline (epinephrine) or noradrenaline (norepinephrine), facilitate immediate physical reactions associated with a preparation for violent muscular action and :[13]

  Acceleration of heart and lung action
  Paling or flushing, or alternating between both
  Inhibition of stomach and upper-intestinal action to the point where digestion slows down or stops
  General effect on the sphincters of the body
  Constriction of blood vessels in many parts of the body
  Liberation of metabolic energy sources (particularly fat and glycogen) for muscular action
  Dilation of blood vessels for muscles

  Citations
  [13] Henry Gleitman, Alan J. Fridlund and Daniel Reisberg (2004). Psychology (6 ed.). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-97767-6.

Pale face when in fear

During periods of threat, the amygdala and hyppocampus within the brain can initiate "flight" within the 5F response.

  The physiological changes that occur during the fight or flight response are activated in order to give the body increased strength and speed in anticipation of fighting or running. Some of the specific physiological changes and their functions include:[14][15]

  Increased blood flow to the muscles activated by diverting blood flow from other parts of the body.
  Increased blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugars, and fats in order to supply the body with extra energy.
  The blood clotting function of the body speeds up in order to prevent excessive blood loss in the event of an injury sustained during the response.
  Increased muscle tension in order to provide the body with extra speed and strength.

  Citations
  [14] Stress Management for Health Course. "The Fight Flight Response". Retrieved 19 April 2013.

  [15] Olpin, Michael. "The Science of Stress". Weber State University.

Because the muscles in the arms and legs etc. need more blood to operate effectively, the increase in blood flow to the muscles is obtained through Vasodilation of blood vessels leading to those muscles, and Vasoconstriction of blood vessels leading to areas of the body which are in less need of blood.

Diversion of some of the blood from the facial area will remove the colour from the skin in that area.

Red face during anger

The 5F response, and resulting Vasoconstriction and Vasodilation is responsible for this too.  This time with a "fight" response.

  Within a few seconds, your pupils grow large, your heart beats faster, and blood vessels all over your body widen, to increase blood flow. This allows more blood to reach your muscles, providing them with more oxygen, and preparing them for action — whether that’s putting up a fight, or running away,” explains Aranda. “As a result of all this, the vessels in your face also widen, allowing more blood to flow in.

  “Scientists are still learning what, if any, evolutionary function this response — known as flushing — might have, especially because humans seem to be the only animal that has it.”

  “It’s likely that this redness has been useful in helping us communicate our emotions. When your face turns red, the people around you have a better idea of how you’re feeling — which helps you socially.”(Source)


What is Intelligence? Is it based on prediction capability of an agent?

There is no agreement among scholars about what intelligence might be. You must keep in mind that we cannot directly see intelligence. We don't even know if it actually exists! The idea of intelligence was invented to describe what we think might be the cause of certain observable behaviors, but there are others who think that we are throwing together disparate things in one pot that are caused by a whole variety of different powers.

Think of it like you think of love. Does anyone really love anyone? Or do we only follow a bunch of emotions like sexual attraction, fear of being alone, and so on? And even if there is "true love", what is it? Is it the love of a mother for her child? The love of a person for his job? The love of a teenager for an unattainable celebrity?

Similar confusion and doubts pertain to the concept of intelligence. Is there such a thing as a unified intelligence? Or is it made up of a set of partial intelligences (verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, spacial intelligence, and so on)? Or is there no "intelligence" at all and only things like memory capacity, processing speed and so on? And even if there were such a thing as general intelligence, is it the actual current ability to solve a problem, or the level of the most difficult problem you could potentially solve if you were trained to your maximum? Is it the ability to find a solution fast, or to find the best solution?

Psychology tries to avoid the pitfalls of these concepts and rather investigates the observable behavior itself: e.g. mate choice in the case of love, or problem solving behavior in the case of intelligence. Because that way we can all agree on what we are talking about, and it can be measured and quantified and interventions can be planned.

Intelligence is not a really useful concept.


Is there a word or phrase that describes emotional self harm?

When it comes to self-harm, there is not a lot of information available about the emotional form, but there is a lot about the physical forms of self-harm such as self-flagellation (as a punishment and not for religious rituals), cutting, burning etc.

According to the mental health charity, Mind, self-harm is

  when you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories or overwhelming situations and experiences.

The NHS states that

  Self-harm is when somebody intentionally damages or injures their body.

Wikipedia expands on this by stating

  Self-harm (SH), also known as self-injury, is defined as the intentional, direct injuring of body tissue, done without suicidal intentions.(Laye-Gindhu & Schonert-Reichl, 2005; Klonsky, 2007; Muehlenkamp, 2005) These terms are used in the more recent literature in an attempt to reach a more neutral terminology. The older literature, especially that which predates the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), almost exclusively refers to self-mutilation.

The APA states

  Also known as non-suicidal self-injury, or NSSI, the condition is classified in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) as a "new disorder in need of further study,"

The definition in Wikipedia and used by the NHS and the APA has generally been used, but it is becoming increasingly recognised that self-harm can take on the form of emotional harm to the self.  Emotional self-harm can be conscious or unconscious, and self-blame comes into this category.

As "itsrory" said in 7 Cups of Tea

  Self-harm is often thought of as only physical (i.e., cutting, burning, etc.), but self-harm can also be emotional. Self-harm is just that, harming the self. Anything you do to intentionally make yourself hurt for reasons that are not socially acceptable, can be viewed as self-harm. Some emotional things people do that may be classified as self-harm are: staying in an emotionally-unstable relationship and purposefully doing things that you know may make you feel sad, upset, or depressed.

What I would add to the end of this quote is that you need to bear in mind that purposefully revisiting painful memories can come into this category, however if you are revisiting them in a therapeutic environment in order to deal with them, it is not emotional self-harm.

What is different between physical and emotional self-harm is that the physical, such as cutting and burning, is usually employed for emotional release, and not necessarily to punish; whereas the emotional self-harm punishes the person committing it.  What makes this complicated is that exceptions to this include the fact that self-flagellation can be either punishment or emotional release, and revisiting painful memories can also be done for both.  For example, someone who is not feeling anything may deliberately make themselves "feel" by revisiting painful memories in order to release the emotions trapped inside.

The only term I can come up with for emotional self-harm is self-deprecation

References

Klonsky, D. (2007), "The functions of deliberate self-injury: A review of the evidence", Clinical Psychological Review, 27(2): pp. 226—239PMID: 17014942, DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2006.08.002

Laye-Gindhu, A. & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2005), Nonsuicidal Self-Harm Among Community Adolescents: Understanding the "Whats" and "Whys" of Self-Harm, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(5): pp. 447—457DOI: 10.1007/s10964-005-7262-z

Muehlenkamp, J. J. (2005), Self-Injurious Behavior as a Separate Clinical Syndrome, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 75 (2): pp. 324—333PMID: 15839768, doi: 10.1037/0002-9432.75.2.324


What fraction of the population has secure attachment style?

Welcome to Psychology.SE. The answer to your question is not that straight forward. You could have a strong attachment style amongst work colleagues but have an insecure attachment style with superiors or parents.

For different types of attachment (insecure/secure) I would suggest reading the works of John Bowlby who pioneered the theory of attachment.

For further reading there is also a book called Understanding Disorganized Attachment: Theory and Practice for Working with Children and Adults by David and Yvonne Shemmings


How to measure or estimate the prevalence of psychopathology in a particular school?

The answer to this question depends on your ultimate goal. If you want to know whether or not students at this school are more likely to suffer from a psychopathology/s, you'll need to compare them to some other population. This other normative population can be students at another school, students in the country, students in the world etc. If you don't have access to data on another population you won't be able to use most of the truly inferential statisticsal procedures.

If you want to look at the school in isolation, you can use descriptive statistics and "describe" the situation at the school by looking at the way in which psychopathologies present, or, are distributed at this school. Additionally, you can have some arbitrary cut-point or score that you can use to make a judgment call. This probably won't cut it in an academic journal though, depending on the journal and field.

Reiterating Russell's suggestion, you can look at the correlation between the incidence of psychopathology and these stress factors you mentioned. This will at least allow you to compare these students to a hypothetical population of students where there is no correlation between psychopathology and these stress factors.

Your starting point will likely be to properly operationise your variables and then scouring the literature to see if you can glean something to compare or even make sense of your data from it.

First prize will be using an established and validated instrument. If you can't, you can still try and wing it, but be careful of the interviews though. To use the type of statistics I think you're hinting at, you need to properly operationilse your variables and quantify them. This is going to be hard to do with open ended questions, for example.


A concept has the property of depth, which is basically how much background understanding must be recruited to interpret it. The deeper the concept, the more understanding is required. Sheldon talking complex physics is relating many deep concepts.

Your mind tries to make sense of new information by associating it with your background understanding of reality. If you lack the background, it will have to work harder to make sense of it, and if it can't make sense of it, you will find yourself lost.

When new information is taken in and used in various ways (eg. muilling it over; using it in everyday life), redundant portions of it become incorporated into the unconscious mind to be used as a framework to further understanding (i.e. it becomes "second nature"). Unconscious information processing is much faster than conscious processing, so while you lose conscious access to the concept, you gain fast processing speed effortlessly.

When Sheldon speaks, he is accessing a deep unconscious network of understanding.
The way to increase speed of processing is to use related information repeatedly until your mind builds up the background understanding. Much of the more redundant processing will be relegated to the unconscious, freeing up your conscious mind to take in more information.

In other words, you lack the requisite foundation to understand Sheldon's complex physics in realtime, so are trying to consciously process everything said. Practice, practice, practice thinking about complex physics to build a foundational understanding that'll take the load off to speed up processing.

–Yuri


Open access 7T resting-state fMRI dataset

There two 7 Tesla data sets currently publicly available, bith within the OpenfMRI data collection

Here is a link to a 350 GB data set for 20 subjects watching the audio version of Forrest Gump. The authors also have all the scripts available at Github to enable reproduction. The associate publication can be found here.

The other 7T data set you allready mentioned in your question. As far as I know there are only these two as of June 2016.


Can anyone provide a modern source for the average college student IQ of 115?

Ok I finally found the official demographic norming data from the WAIS-IV on page 104 of this book:

"WAIS-IV Clinical Use and Interpretation: Scientist-Practitioner Perspectives"

You can see a preview of this book at http://tinyurl.com/z3vr44e.

The answer to my question is: Some college:      102.28
                                College graduates: 110.77


What projective tests are available for a child and family assessment?

Many projective tests explore family relationships, however it is frankly difficult to find projective tests exclusively focused on family relationships, can be proved:

The Family Drawing Test (the most utilized).
CAT (version of TAT for children) very, but very used.
Test by Patte Noire of Louis Corman.
FTT Riding theory test of Carina Coulacoglou.
Test of Luisa Düss.
TRO of Phillipson (officially focused on a person's ability to establish satisfying relationships with others, emotions in relationships)


Is there a name for a person who looks for a name for another person's supposed faults?

I personally, but explicitly do not support the teachings of Freud, but this sounds like what Freud would call "Intellectualization."  This is supposedly a defense mechanism.


Which are the specifics of a memory that are lost first?

I was taught that recall and forgetting are somewhat worse for episodic memories as compared to semantic memories. I'm having trouble finding a supportive reference now, but that may be due to how basic the concept is (or it may just be wrong). The example I recall was the difference between remembering how to ride a bike vs. remembering the experience of learning to ride a bike – one expects more people to remember how to ride a bike than to remember learning how. This isn't the cleanest example of two different kinds of memories, because knowing how to ride a bike is also more likely an implicit, procedural memory.

In any case, forgetting "when" seems likely if this entails the circumstantial aspects of the event. If it's not especially important that the event in memory happened at a particular time or in a particular situation, those elements of the episodic memory could be forgotten quite readily. I don't think "when" information is categorically forgettable though, as I can imagine some memories being tied very closely to that info – e.g., memories about parties on holidays or birthdays.


Multiple causes of not reading instructions

As @crash notes, there are likely many explanations for not reading instructions.
It may be motivated by not caring about task performance. And such dispositions may be specific to the particular task or setting, or they might be partially related to some general disposition of the individual in terms of conscientiousness or skill.

The skill of not reading instructions

However, more generally, the concept of information reduction is related to skill acquisition. Haider and Frensch (1996) discuss the idea of how gradually over time participants start to ignore elements of a task that appear to be unrelated to task performance. So on one level, learning to ignore irrelevant information is a skill.

With regards to instructions, it is not always the case that reading an instruction manual is the most efficient means of achieving your goals. Trial and error, exploration, and so on are other strategies which often work quite well. In particular, many devices and software these days are designed to encourage people to explore. Likewise, it can often be a waste in learning information that may or may not be relevant, and so in some cases it makes sense to access instructions on an as needed basis.

It is also one thing to sit in the position of all knowing observer where you can know that in a particular case it would make sense to read the instructions over using an alternative strategy. However, from the actors perspective, they are in a sense operating without that knowledge. So they are in a sense averaging over their experience to form a decision about whether or not and in what detail to read the instructions. In some cases this will work out for the best, in others it wont.

General problem of task design

If you know that reading the instructions is particularly important in a given domain then you may want to alter the system or the task to encourage reading the instructions. Many organisations have compulsory training with a test in order to force users to learn certain information. Alternatively, you could make clear why reading the instructions is particularly important for this task. Similarly providing strong negative feedback when task instructions are not followed may help the individual to learn that in this domain reading instructions carefully is important.
That said, it's often even better if you can incorporate human factors principles to design a system which is user friendly.

References

Haider, H., & Frensch, P. A. (1996). The role of information reduction in skill acquisition. Cognitive Psychology, 30(3), 304-337.


Frequency of schizophrenia symptoms related to mass surveillance?

The specific revelations about global surveillance schemes that you reference like PRISM and XKeyscore are relatively recent (June 2013), so it looks like it's too early for any research to have been done into the statistical frequency of such symptoms. (I can't find any, at least!)

However, some have suggested that the common public knowledge that such programs are a reality could exacerbate symptoms in patients who already exhibit delusional narratives (eg. in schizophrenia) along these lines. A Scientific American article entitled "How Secret Spying Programs Affect the Clinically Paranoid" explains that real-life manifestations of imagined threats could interact with symptoms of psychosis. In this article, Dr. David Kimhy, Director of the Experimental Psychopathology Lab in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University says that though revelations about the NSA could increase general anxiety in the individual with schizophrenia, the scandal should only significantly affect those whose delusions mirror the news.

However, he goes on the say it could instead lessen such delusions:

  “The thought that the government is following everyone, in a paradoxical way, may take away from the delusion,” says Kimhy. Individuals with persecutory delusions usually feel that they are unique targets; thus, the broad net of surveillance that is so troubling to the NSA’s critics might reduce feeling of persecution in an individual who previously believed the government was only after him. Indeed, the therapist might use this broadness as a context in which to discuss the patient’s delusions. “You could ask, ‘What’s so unique to you? What special powers do you have? And by the way, why don’t we talk about those special powers,’” says Kimhy.

This is echoed in the writing of psychologist Daniel Freeman in the journal Clinical Psychology Review:

  The more a belief is implausible, unfounded, strongly held, not shared by others, distressing and preoccupying then the more likely it is to be considered a delusion.

Even prior to these recent revelations, it is well established that current events can impact delusional symptoms. A study published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, "The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village" concluded that "although schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder have existed in many different cultures and times, their character and means of expression are highly influenced by the culture the patient comes from, as well as its contemporary technology."

An example of mental health symptoms being culture-sensitive was given recently in a TV documentary series about South London and Maudsley Hospital for mental health. A member of staff explained that in the '80s, when AIDS was heavily featured in the news, patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder frequently showed concern about contamination, worrying that spots of ketchup in a kitchen were blood and similar. He said that this is less common now, when AIDS is in the media less, but they've recently seen an increase in patients having intrusive thoughts that make them worry they are a paedophile, as there have been some high-profile child abuse cases in British media reently.


Do different meta-cognitive measurements depend on the same mechanism?

This is a topic of research currently. The short answer is no (there's quite a clear distinction between e.g. visual and memory metacognition), the long answer is that in some cases, some metacognitive mechanisms might be shared.

Some examples for the short 'no' answer:

Patients with frontal lesions have lower visual (but not memory) metacognition than healthy controls. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25100039)
Different areas within prefrontal cortex seem to underly visual and memory metacognition see http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/42/16657.full.pdf
There are also quite a few (older and more recent) papers within the metamemory literature, argueing that even within metamemory (i.e., in different subtypes of judgements or in semantic vs episodic memory) different mechanisms are recruited. One example here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393211000182.

Some examples showing that there actually is some degree of domain-generality:

Participants in have similar metacognitive ability in two similar visual tasks, despite different first order performance. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203218/ and  http://www.pnas.org/content/108/11/4506.full
Memory (but not visual) metacognition improved after meditation training -also another form of metacognition, perhaps of the focus of attention. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24820248


Are there any studies (fMRI scans, etc) showing why some people (supposedly) are more open to hypnotism?

Overall, while there are developing cognitive neuroscience theories of how hypnotic states are produced, there does not appear to be any known cognitive neuroscience basis for individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility based on a reasonable Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus search on the topic.

There is at least some evidence to suggest that highly hypnotic participants exhibit different EEG activity patterns (Sabourin et al., 1990). A later review of the hypnosis literature proposed an attentional explanation for the difference in hypnotic behavior for highs and lows (Crawford, 1994). They specifically propose that:

  highly hypnotizable persons (highs) possess stronger attentional filtering abilities than do low hypnotizable persons, and that these differences are reflected in underlying brain dynamics.

Finally, a still later study more specifically implicated the anterior cingulate cortex, the thalamus, and the ponto-mesencephalic brainstem in the production of hypnotic states (Rainville et al., 2002), but they make no mention of differences of highly and less hypnotically susceptible individuals. This seems to be a trend in the literature I reviewed, suggesting the concept may have been abandoned.

References

Crawford, H. J. (1994). Brain dynamics and hypnosis: Attentional and disattentional processes. International journal of clinical and experimental hypnosis, 42(3), 204-232.
Rainville, P., Hofbauer, R. K., Bushnell, M. C., Duncan, G. H., & Price, D. D. (2002). Hypnosis modulates activity in brain structures involved in the regulation of consciousness. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 14(6), 887-901.
Sabourin, M. E., Cutcomb, S. D., Crawford, H. J., & Pribram, K. (1990). EEG correlates of hypnotic susceptibility and hypnotic trance: Spectral analysis and coherence. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 10(2), 125-142.


Is cortical magnification in the visual system related to synaptic pruning, or is it a separate developmental or learning process?

No, it's not due to synaptic pruning. If it were due to synaptic pruning babies would have better vision(esp. Peripheral) but that is not the case. Babies only have better hearing.

No, it is not exactly a learning process. Most of the foveal developmental starts during the prenatal period and complete by 18 months postnatal.Most of the inter-individual variance have been linked to genetic factors. There is no conclusive evidence for environmental factors affecting the foveal development. But there is speculation for possible environmental factors.

Reference : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3658155/


What is the optimal combination of text and background color for EEG experiments?

Are you trying to measure something specific to the stimulus you are presenting or is it just a matter of displaying text on a screen where what you are measuring is unrelated to the text per se?

For instance, experiments I run depend on the stimulus presentation. We are targeting a certain visual pathway, so for example one stimulus is red/green and high contrast, the other black/white and low contrast, both on a black background. We have also run on a grey background as that can be easier for the eyes. And we also have dim lit rooms, to help amplify the signal or even lights off. Also, the stimuli are flickering at a high rate so we use a LCD monitor with a refresh rate of 120hz. We used to use CRT monitors though as the black color is blacker there then newer monitors.

It just depends on why you need to optimize it. Is it for a true signal you are recording? Or simply comfort and ease for the participant?

If it is simply for comfort, I would recommend no color, but grey background and black letters, and dimmed lights. If the contrast is too high, such as black background and white letters, this could be a strain to read over time. There is no gold standard. It's according to what your needs are.


How long does it take for electrical impulses from neurons to travel in the human brain?

This is hard to say because not as many studies measuring this in humans have been done as have been done in other primates, like macaque monkeys, and when it is done, it is usually done in patients who have some brain issue like epilepsy and have recording electrodes implanted for preparation for a procedure, and so may not have a typical response. Also it is hard to know how best to satisfy your requirement "the maximal distance between two separated areas in the human brain".

That said, here's my attempt: about 25 to 30 ms. I get this from two sources:

1) a 1983 paper using epileptic patients with microwire electrodes in their brain at various regions. I pick the data of measurements of the visual response arriving in the occipital lobe because--thinking simply--it is at the back of the head on the other side of the head from the eyes, and so the "maximal distance" is the entire front-to-back length of the brain (the pathway being retina -> thalamus -> V1 of visual cortex). From the paper (page 490, bottom):

  Occipital Lobe Units: Using diffuse flash stimuli...the shortest
  latency of the 11 responsive occipital cortex cells was 31 ms; the
  mean latency was 63.6 ms (range, 31 to 110 ms, SD, 25.1).

2) A 2009 paper, also using epileptic patients which found, among other things:

  the evoked potential started ~20 ms earlier in V1 (25
  ms after stimulus onset;


Does the duration of the epoch of interest in fMRI need to be a multiple of TR?

The biology underlying the BOLD response is much slower than typical TRs, so I would say on one hand it doesn't really matter because the TR interval is not the time scale that matters. On the other hand, if you are presenting stimuli of duration where the TR matters, those stimuli are occurring too quickly to be resolved separately using fMRI. You may be able to solve this problem by averaging over many stimulus presentations with orders in different combinations, but that may increase your scan time more than having space between epochs and requires independence assumptions that are likely to be inappropriate.

In summary, look at the structure of some auditory fMRI tasks and see how they are organized before designing your own.


Technical term for the loss of words in your mother-tongue when speaking a different language

It seems to me that it'd be a type of a tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon caused by bilingualism. If you don't use German regularly, it might be attributed to language attrition, but this seems unlikely if you're still being exposed to German more than English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip-of-the-tongue_phenomenon#Effects_of_bilingualism


Does everyone have some degree of Aspergers?

Whatever test you took, it does not test Asperger. It tests for symptoms that are typical in someone with Asperger.

For example one Asperger test asks you to rate the following statement (translated from German) on a skale from 1 = "totally disagree" to 4 = totally agree":

I prefer to spend my leisure time with other people rather than alone.

Now of course people with Asperger often tend to stay by themselves and undertake things alone rather than with friends, but many non-Asperger people might feel that they sometimes enjoy time alone also, for example if they are naturally shy and find being with others enjoyable but exhausting, or if they have a job dealing with people and they like to have some free time by themselves to relax from the constant interaction.

Just this weekend I read an interview with one of the most influential German movie directors, Doris Dörrie, who said how she likes to go on holidays by herself, especially to foreign countries where she cannot interact with anyone because she does not speak the language, and she goes on to tell how she went to Japan and enjoyed her aloneness tremendously and spent whole days basking in being outside society and looking on. Totally Asperger, if you think about it. But her job is to intensely interact with people, and she simply needs time off from that.

It's totally unremarkable that many people show some of the behaviors or emotions that people with Asperger (or other psychological disorders) show. It does not mean that they have Asperger to some degree. Rather, if someone rates very high in that test, that is merely an indication that they very likely have Asperger. No psychological diagnosis relies purely on a single self-report measure, but on a complex series of observation, interviews, and a battery of tests.

Also see the answer by Eoin for a different perspective on the question.


1
There is some relation between what we are interested in and what we are good at. If people are bad at something, they usually lose interest in it and turn to other things. If you are good at something, you enjoy doing it and are interested in it.
Interest, therefore, is a preditor of ability, and you are better at learning things that you can do, than you are at learning things that you cannot learn to do.
2
Learning requires time, attention, and effort. If you are interested in something, you will (want to) spend more time, attention, and effort on it. If you aren't interested in something, you'll find every minute of it unpleasant, so you will limit the time you spend with it, not be as attentive, and not labour as hard.
You will also not think about it while you are not learning, you won't connect it to other interests and activities, and so on. In short, you won't elaborate.
There is a psychological theory, the elaboration likelihood model, that says that the processing of information will be more superficial when the motivation to process the information is low.
3
Doing something interesting is pleasurable, and everything in your mind and body works better if you are in a good mood. Hormones such as oxytocin, whose levels are higher when you are "happy" (and free of negative stress), have a positive effect on memory formation and retention.


As Bryan Krause indicates in the comments, the statement that 'One third of the cortical surface is dedicated to vision processing' is disputable. Especially given that fact that there's evidence that even the primary visual cortex is involved in multimodal processing (MacPherson, 2018). Nonetheless, it is a valuable statement as it makes clear that a lot of our cortex can process visual stimuli and that it is an important sense for us.

If you need a reference for the one third statement, you can use Kupers & Ptito (2014) or (MacPherson, 2018). Note that these references are secondary literature, i.e., they are not research papers where they actually calculated the cortical surface involved in visual processing.

Fig. 1. Functional areas of the cortex. Source: Boundless Physiology Textbook

References
- MacPherson, Sensory Substitution and Augmentation, Proceedings of the British Academy 2018
- Kupers & Ptito, Neurosci Biobehav Rev (2014); 41: 36–52


It depends on the type of addictive substances (i.e., opioid, amphetamine, LSD, etc). Different types bind to different sets of receptors of neurotransmitters (i.e., dopamine, serotonin, GABA, etc.) in the nervous system. And different receptors have different distribution in the nervous system. So the affected regions are different for different addictive substances.

The easy-to-read, entry-level references that you can use are probably How Drugs Affect the Brain and Central Nervous System and Drugs and the Brain. For in-depth references, you can search for the literature on each specific drug at NCBI.


If sleeping is related to 'saving information' you've experience, is forgetting related to more energy?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: The need for sleep is not a function of information received in any meaningful sense. Memory consolidation and forgetting processes are not thought of in terms of energy expense and conservation by any current cognitive science models, and lack of sleep will not necessarily cause you to go mad or die as such. Both are active processes; there's nothing inherently more energy-conserving about forgetting a memory than consolidating one, or vice versa.

Memory consolidation and forgetting processes in the brain are both, ultimately, physical changes like any other, which implies that energy must be spent in some sense. This energy is simply a thermodynamic quantity that has virtually nothing to do with how tired we feel or mental energy, however. Cognitively speaking, energy isn't a well-defined or scientifically meaningful term, so it's not particularly surprising that it ended up on a list of "five simple questions that science can't answer."

For an example of an active inhibitory forgetting mechanism with references, see my question about retrieval-induced forgetting. If you want to know about memory and the study of memory, I recommend reading Baddeley, Eysenck and Anderson's comprehensive Memory (2009). While it does not directly deal with sleep in depth, it will equip you to ask the right questions about how sleep relates to memory and learning.


Can humans keep track of two unrelated rhythms?

I never thought that my Bachelor Thesis would ever come in handy. Thank you for this question!

Short answer
No, you cannot keep up two unrelated rhythms in a stable coordinated fashion when tapping for your finger for instance.

Long Answer
Let us start with (and skip over) the oldest paper that I have about it. Haken, Kelso and Bunz (1985) described in a mathematical model how you would coordinate two rhythmic movements (tapping fingers) and how you change phases. In-phase means you tap at the same time, whereas anti-phase means you tap with one whilst going up with the other and vice versa. I will not describe these formula, but now you know they exist.

From now on, I will refer to "two agents" instead of fingers. I do this, because the coupling and rhythm is not limited to body parts. Even different people start to get synchronized during rhythmic movements. Richardson (2007) showed that people, without explicit instructions, started to synchronize their movements in a rocking chair. However, also during walking/running, people start to synchronize (Nessler, 2012).

What research over the years has shown that (stability of) rhythmic movements rely on three factors to be coordinated.

First, you need to be coupled, i.e. you must be able to see/feel the other agent's rhythm. When you don't perceive a rhythm, their is nothing to adapt to (See also Richardson, 2007; Nessler, 2012; Meerhof & De Poel, 2014).
Second, the phase of the movements: Moving in-phase is very easy and you can do that from low frequencies up to very high frequencies. Moving in anti-phase is a little more difficult. The agents will be stably coordinated at low frequencies, however, as you increase the frequency it will be more and more difficult to keep it up, ultimately leading to a synchronization period, after which you'll move in an in-phase pattern (try it out; Meerhof & De Poel, 2014).
Third, as I already said just now: The frequency of movements. At low frequencies movements are easier to coordinate in a stable fashion than higher frequencies (Konvalinka, 2011)

In this last study, two participants in different rooms listened to a beat (of either 96, 120, 150 Hz, which could differ between participant) for eight seconds, after which they had to continue that beat by tapping their index-finger. Following, depending on the condition, they (1) kept hearing the computer-generated beat, (2) listened to their own generated beat, (3) listened to the beat of the other subject while the other heard his own generated beat, or (4) the two participants hear the beats generated by the second participant. There were many many results given all these conditions. What it all came down to was that the participants' own beat-frequency moved toward the other's, and that the rhythm became less stable, when they listened to the beat of the other participant. When the participants heard each other, the frequencies moved to each other and ultimately produced a very stable beat (they synchronized).

This paper thus showed that, whenever you are coupled (which fingers always are, it's called proprioception) you tend to synchronize. It is thus impossible to keep rhythm when you perceive a completely unrelated beat.


What are there neuroanatomical mappings of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task?

According to Wikipedia:

  As predicted by the acquired brain injury literature, early PET
  studies have shown the task involves significant activation of the
  dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, more recent fMRI studies have
  shown that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex together with the
  caudate nucleus may be the regions most important for the set-shifting
  process required in the WCST. These regions are also associated with
  working memory functions.

Furthermore, according to Andrew Amos preservative errors are due to frontal lobe dysfunction, while random errors are due to basal ganglia dysfunction.

At a glance, this does seem to make sense since the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been associated previously with working memory and the caudate nucleus (as part of the basal ganglia) is known to be associated with switching between rewarding tasks.

More recently a series of lesion studies have been conducted with an analogous task with monkeys providing further insights into brain areas, with a summary of the most important summaries here.


How is it possible for psychometricians to develop IQ tests for people smarter than them?

Short answer:
construct a usable chair out of toothpicks. Now, I certainly can't do this, but I can verify your answer easily enough

Long answer:
Verification of answers is often a lot easier than producing answers. And thats not just anecdotal, there are computational and psychological reasons behind this fact.

Computationally - complexity is different for solving a problem than for verifying it. For example the clad of NP problem cant (probably) be solved in poly time, but they can be verified in poly time.

Psychologically - think recall versus recognition. Recognition just involves your brain lighting up when it sees the right answer, whilst recall or production requires an extensive search at the very least

So the answer is that the test makers don't have produce the answers themselves, and certainly not under test conditions. They simply have to be able to see that the right answer is right (either produced via a group, a computer, or a genius).

Also, remember that no one question separates high IQs from low. Perhaps a 140IQ could answer one of the hardest questions, but not all of them.

Lastly, remember than IQ isn't a single dimension, perhaps the test was written by one expert in each dimension, which could then identify a genius in all dimensions


Are there sex differences in inter-rater consistency of attractiveness ratings  of opposite-sex faces?

There is a very large literature on this, and it features many subtle points, but I will try to summarize some general themes.
In general, subjects are very consistent at ranking pictures of others for attractiveness (thus, eliminating the popular notion of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"). For instance Cunnigham et al. (1995) found a correlation of .9 between individual rating and the average rating of pictures of women. This correlation remains high even if the rater and photo are from different cultures. Further, men and women tend to find the same features good-looking (i.e. heteresexual men and women, deem similar women as good-looking). Johnston & Franklin (1993) let 20 male and 20 female subjects use a genetic algorithm to generate female faces that they deemed good-looking. With the exception of the lower lip (females preferred a larger lower lip) there was no statistical differences between the qualities of the faces produced by male and female subjects.
However, women have a higher variance in ratings of sex-objects (opposite sex for heterosexual, same-sex for homosexual females) than men (Jankowiak et al. 1992; Townsend & Wasserman 1997). But this should be taken with a grain of salt because attractiveness rankings have much higher variation when ranking males as opposed to females. Schulman & Hoskins (1986) found that ratings of female photos had statistically significant lower variance than male photos for both male and female raters. Thus, the effect could partially be in that both sexes are worse at judging attractiveness of males.
Of course, the hardest is judging attractiveness in oneself. Rand & Hall (1983) found that females has a .5 correlation between their self-perception of attractiveness and the rating of male judges. Men are much worse, with only a .1 (almost chance) correlation between self-attractiveness ratings and the ratings of female judges.
The story gets even more complicated, because women respond differently to how they load features when producing ratings depending on if they are looking for a short-term or long-term partner (Widerman & Dubois 1998) and even where they are in their menstrual cycle (Penton-Voak & Perrett 2001).
Due to the complicated interaction of all these factors (and more!) I don't think there is (yet) one final and definitive answer to your question.

References

Cunningham, M., Roberts, A.R., Berbee, Anita, P., Druen, P.B., & Wu, C. [1995] ""Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours": Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female physical attractiveness." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 261-279.
Jankowiak, W.R., Hill, E.M., & Donovan, J.M. [1992] "The effects of sex and sexual orientation on attractiveness judgments: An evolutionary interpretation." Ethology and Sociobiology 13(2): 73-85.
Johnston, V.S., & Franklin, M. [1993] "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" Ethology and Sociobiology 14(3): 183-199.
Penton-Voak, I.S., & Perrett, D.I. [2001] "Male facial attractiveness: Perceived personality and shifting female preferences for male traits across the menstrual cycle." Advances in the Study of Behavior 30: 219-259.
Rand, C., & Hall, J. [1983] "Sex differences in the accuracy of self-perceived attractivness." Social Psychology Quarterly, 46: 359-363.
Townsend, J.M., & Wasserman, T. [1997] "The perception of sexual attractiveness: sex differences in variability." Archives of Sexual Behavior 26(3): 243-268.
Wiederman, M.W., & Dubois, S.L. [1998] "Evolution and Sex Differences in Preferences for Short-Term Mates: Results from a Policy Capturing Study" Evolution and Human Behavior 19: 153-170.


What type of data can we get from fMRI to calculate correlations?

The BOLD response is used in fMRI to provide a quantified measure of activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemodynamic_response. It is based on the ratio of oxygenated vs. non-oxygenated blood, implying blood flow, and inferred to mean more processing or activation of those brain areas.


The role of high-performance in neuropsychology

The short answer to your question is that, yes, you are correct. "Cognitive high performance" is a much smaller part of classic neuropsychology than the study of brain damage. There are studies of the topics that you mention from a cognitive neuroscience perspective (e.g., a study by Krawczyk et al. (2011) which does neuroimaging of chess experts). Some cases such as eidetic memory are disputed, so most of the science has focused on that. "The exceptional brain" is a classic book on "special talents" and neuropsychology, but it is pretty old now.

I don't completely agree with your final point. Extremely good and extremely poor performance can both be studied with single cases OR group studies, but for the latter you obviously need to find multiple people with similar behaviour which is hard for both classic neuropsychology (e.g., selective agnosias) and for special talents.

Some definitions of neuropsychology specifically refer to brain damage and deficits, so in that sense your point is trivially true. Some, or perhaps most, people studying patients are partly motivated by helping people who have problems, and so studying high achievers might be less useful. We have quite a good understanding of some syndromes because of their reasonably high frequency and many decades of research (e.g., Neglect, Balints, Ataxias, Aphasias). I think you could make the argument that the behaviour demonstrated in these cases is not just "less than" normal but qualitatively different. Most people can play chess, improve their memory and memorize long numbers, particularly with training. So it is easier to see those with "special talents" as just the extreme end of a continuum which could be studied with typical people.

Lastly, you might be interested in looking at work with autism which I think is a good example of something where people have looked at both the negative aspects and the (potential) advantages.

Krawczyk, D. C., Boggan, A. L., McClelland, M. M., & Bartlett, J. C. (2011). The neural organization of perception in chess experts. Neuroscience letters, 499(2), 64-69. [PDF]
Obler, L. K., & Fein, D. E. (1988). The exceptional brain: Neuropsychology of talent and special abilities. Guilford Press.


Is a network of neurons the only factor in memory?

Answer
Yes, theoretically.

Now
According to my ongoing informal research, there are two sides of brain preservation innovation: 1) the preservation and mapping (building) the connectome; and 2) the reinstantiation of memories and/or creating consciousness from a connectome.
From http://www.brainpreservation.org/overview/:

[N]euroscience is now identifying the synaptic and nuclear structures
that contain our unique memories and identity, and new electron
microscopy (EM) imaging techniques are allowing us to verify when
these structures have been successfully preserved, from gross
connectivity in the connectome, all the way to particular synaptic
features, receptor distributions, and even the signal states
(phosphorylation, methylation, acetylation, etc.) of individual brain
proteins and epigenomic DNA.
[…]
Recently, MRI machines have been built that can image individual cell
proteins, improbable as this sounds. Such technology may one day give
us the ability to inexpensively and nondestructively scan preserved
brains to upload the molecular features of memory and identity.

From http://www.brainpreservation.org/content-2/connectome/:

What is a Connectome?
A connectome* is the complete map of the neural connections in a
brain. It is sometimes referred to as a “wiring diagram” of the
molecular connections between neurons, trading on the analogy of a
brain to an electronic device, where axons and dendrites are wires and
neuron bodies are components. Depending on the scientist, the term
connectome may or may not also include learning-relevant molecular
states at each synaptic connection (the “synaptome”) and any
learning-relevant changes in the nucleus of each neuron (the
“epigenome”).

Progress
Recently, "The Small Mammal BPF Prize" was won. It's one in a series of competitions for brain preservation (BP) achievements. This competition is doing for BP what XPRIZE is doing for space innovation with competitions like the Ansari X Prize.
The winning team used a combination of plastination (chemopreservation) and cryonics (cryopreservation) to preserve a rabbit brain. From the press release http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/:

The Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize has officially been won by
researchers at 21st Century Medicine. Using a combination of ultrafast
chemical fixation and cryogenic storage, it is the first demonstration
that near perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact
mammalian brain is achievable.

Future
In regard to reinstantiation of memories and/or creating consciousness: when progressive innovations in technology enable mapping of the entire connectome, the next step is applying a "runtime" to the structure. This runtime is described as "cycles" by György Buzsáki in his book Rhythms of the Brain.

In a sequence of "cycles," György Buzsáki guides the reader from the
physics of oscillations through neuronal assembly organization to
complex cognitive processing and memory storage.

Book resources:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-Buzsaki/dp/0199828237
EDU (PDF): http://www.caam.rice.edu/~yad1/miscellaneous/References/Neuroscience/Papers/Hippocampus/RythmsOfTheBrainBuszaki.pdf

Example 1
The OpenWorm project is an example of contemporary connectome innovation, which is a necessary step for the memory/consciousness side of BP. From http://www.openworm.org:

OpenWorm is an open source project dedicated to creating the world’s
first virtual organism in a computer, a C.elegans nematode. Throughout
the years we have built a network of relationships with with many
biologists and neuroscientists interested in C. elegant.

From http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connectome/:

Because a lone connectome is a snapshot of pathways through which
information might flow in an incredibly dynamic organ, it cannot
reveal how neurons behave in real time, nor does it account for the
many mysterious ways that neurons regulate one another's behavior.
Without such maps, however, scientists cannot thoroughly understand
how the brain processes information at the level of the circuit. In
combination with other tools, the C. elegans connectome has in fact
taught scientists a lot about the worm's behavior; partial connectomes
that researchers have established in the crustacean nervous system
have been similarly helpful. Scientists are also learning how to make
connectomes faster than before and to enhance the information they
provide. Many researchers in the field summarize their philosophy like
this: "A connectome is necessary, but not sufficient."

Example 2
I believe Stanford's computer model of an organism is in the scope of BP and could be the foundation of what eventually becomes entire brain/connectome virtualization. This breakthrough is an example of the technological capabilities in 2012. Now, in 2016 with AI tech on the rise, exponential progress in this field may become a reality in our lifetime.
From http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/july/computer-model-organism-071812.html:

[In 2012] Stanford researchers produce first complete computer model
of an organism. A mammoth effort has produced a complete computational
model of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, opening the door for
biological computer-aided design.

From http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(12)00776-3:

Understanding how complex phenotypes arise from individual molecules
and their interactions is a primary challenge in biology that
computational approaches are poised to tackle. We report a whole-cell
computational model of the life cycle of the human pathogen Mycoplasma
genitalium that includes all of its molecular components and their
interactions. An integrative approach to modeling that combines
diverse mathematics enabled the simultaneous inclusion of
fundamentally different cellular processes and experimental
measurements. Our whole-cell model accounts for all annotated gene
functions and was validated against a broad range of data. The model
provides insights into many previously unobserved cellular behaviors,
including in vivo rates of protein-DNA association and an inverse
relationship between the durations of DNA replication initiation and
replication. In addition, experimental analysis directed by model
predictions identified previously undetected kinetic parameters and
biological functions. We conclude that comprehensive whole-cell models
can be used to facilitate biological discovery.


This is a large subject area, but I will outline a strong starting point for you to do more research where needed.

James M. Herzog's (1980) term Father Hunger, sometimes referred to as a syndrome, and sometimes referred to as the Father Complex may have its roots in many theories developed over the years.

Those who subscribe to Psychodynamic theories, the roots of Father Hunger could be from Freud and his Oedipus Complex, or Carl Jung and his Electra Complex.  Both of these are in Freud's Psychosexual Theory of Development during the Phalic Stage of development, (around the age of 3 to 6 years), which also equates to Erik Erikson's Psychosocial Theory of Development stage of Initiative vs. Guilt (Sigelman & Rider, 2012: p38).

The Father Complex Wikipedia article, which has plenty of source links, states that

  The father complex also stood at the conceptual core of Totem and Taboo (1912-3). Even after the break with Jung, when "complex" became a term to be handled with care among Freudians, the father complex remained important in Freud's theorizing in the twenties; — for example, it appeared prominently in The Future of an Illusion (1927). Others in Freud's circle wrote freely of the complex's ambivalent nature. However, by 1946, and Otto Fenichel's compendious summary of the first psychoanalytic half-century, [in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946)] the father complex tended to be subsumed under the broader scope of the Oedipus complex as a whole.

Alongside the shift from a Freudian emphasis on the role of the father to Melanie Klein's beliefs surrounding object relations theory stressing upon the mother, what psychoanalysis tended to single out was the search for the father, and the negative effects of the switched-off father.  In postmodernism, the father complex surrounds the loss of paternal authority — the absence of the father.  The father could be absent due to death, marriage separation, divorce or simple withdrawal by the father.

  Father hunger is the result of receiving too little quality fathering as a child or young adult. Some argue that even grown men and women need fathers or father surrogates and that the absence of such role modeling and support is associated with less fulfillment in life. In general, father hunger results from too little intimacy between child and father. (Schaller, 1995)

There is a mixture of psychosexual development theory and postmodernist theory within an article stating that

  The tween years find daughters writhing into a sea of hormones as puberty overtakes their bodies. They become extremely emotional. Girls edging into womanhood want to know how to act. They question “Am I attractive?” “Am I loveable?”

  Fathers are looked to for answers to these developmental questions. Young adolescent girls bring an intensity to dads as they want to talk about these things. Girls long to understand the opposite sex and how they rate. And girls do all this in a style that is over the top – from giggling to screeching, from restless to rebellious. Uncomfortable with emotions to begin with, fathers resist daughters who feel overwhelming to them.

  Add burgeoning sexuality to the mix. As girls physically morph into curvaceous women, fathers often withdraw because the change makes them uncomfortable, unsure if those old hugs or kisses are inappropriate somehow. (Sagarese, 2014)

References

Herzog, J. M. (1980). Sleep disturbance and father hunger in 18-to-28-month-old boys: The Erlkönig Syndrome. In: Solnit, et al., eds. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 35(1): pp 223-230PMID: 7433580 DOI: 10.1080/00797308.1980.11823111URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00797308.1980.11823111

Sagarese, M., (2014) Dads, Daughters and Food [Online]Available at: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-05-16/features/sfp-dads-daughters-food_1_father-and-daughter-dads-yo-yo-dieting

Schaller, J. L., (1995). The Search for Lost Fathering: Rebuilding Your Father RelationshipGrand Rapids, MI: Fleming H Revell Co. ISBN-13: 978-0800755522Chapters 1, 3 & 8 free to read on the author's website

Sigelman, C. K. & Rider, E. A., (2012). Life-Span Human Development. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.


Although we usually refer to memory to describe our ability to consciously remember past experiences, in neuroscience this term is also used to incorporate unconscious influences of our past on our current perceptions and actions.
In other words, sometimes/in some instances, we are not aware of the influences of our past on our way to remember things.

  These unconscious influences on our current behaviour depend on what
  has been called implicit memory or nondeclarative memory that
  can exist in individuals with damage to the hippocampal memory
  system (centre of declarative or explicit / conscious memory).

This example is often made: if you try to describe how you learned to drive a stick-shift car,it is likely that you wouldn't do a good job of consciously reconstructing the chain of sequences that allowed you to learn how to drive a stick-shift car... Nevertheless, your behaviour would be a clear indication of you training.

Memory is not a single entity but consists of multiple processes or systems

References:
Emotional memory across the lifespan Elizabeth A. Kensinger


How do songs trigger memories associated with previous experiences of listening to the  song?

I believe this phenomenon is well known in cognitive science. That is how our memory works.

The simpliest explanation would be the Hebbian learning rule: "Neurons that fire together, wire together." So, you can imagine some neurons firing when you hear the music and some when you see the game. Now, if these used to fire together, they are probably connected. Somehow you've learned that these stimuli come together and your brain is recalling them all even if this time only the audio stimulus is presented.

Try reading more about episodic memory:

  For example, memories of people’s faces, the taste of the wine, the music that was playing, etc, might all be part of the memory of a particular dinner with friends. By repeatedly reactivating or “playing back” this particular activity pattern in the various regions of the cortex, they become so strongly linked with one another that they no longer need the hippocampus to act as their link, and the memory of the music that was playing that night, for example, can act as an index entry, and may be enough to bring back the entire scene of the dinner party.
  Episodic and semantic memory

However, auditory triggers are possibly not the strongest available. According to an idea called "Proustian phenomenon" the strongest would be smell.
Example study to that matter:
Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories

Reference:

Toffalo, M.B.J., Smeets, M.A.M., van den Hout, M.A. (2012).  Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories.  Cognition & Emotion, 26(1):83-92.


Short answer
The retinal image cannot be refocused on an intermediate target during a saccade.

Background
Psychophysical experiments have shown that during a saccade, attention is aimed at the target location. Instructing the subject to make a saccade from location A to C, while focusing on another point B proved impossible.

The authors conclude that:

  [A] saccade executed to a peripheral location in the visual field
  involves the orienting of attention to that location, prior to the
  actual execution of the saccade. The inability to orient attention to
  one location and simultaneously execute a saccade to another location
  suggests that orienting of attention may be an essential component of
  preparing and/or executing saccades.

In other words, a saccade is meant to shift the point of focus, and attention cannot be paid to another point during a saccade.

Reference
- Hoffman & Baskaran, Perception & Psychophysics (1995); 57(6), 787-95


Relationship between social psychology and educational psychology

No, social psychology is not a subfield of educational psychology. Social psychology is one of the basic disciplines of psychology (like e.g. personality psychology or developmental psychology), whereas educational psychology is an applied discipline (like e.g. clinical psychology or industrial/organizational psychology). A sort of standard definition of social psychology is, that it is the

  the study of the manner in which the personality, attitudes, motivations, and behavior of the individual influence and are influenced by social groups. (Merriam-Webster, 2013)

This means that as soon as there is some sort of social interaction involved in an educational setting, both disciplines are concerned.

References:

Merriam-Webster. (August 2013). Social Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20psychology


Insensitivity of MEG to inhomogeneous conductivity

MEG measures magnetic fields and EEG measures electrical potentials.

One property of magnetic fields is that organic matter (scalp, skull, and brain) does not block them in any significant way.

Electrical potentials measured on the scalp, on the other hand, are definitely affected by the matter between the source of the signal and the location they are measured. This is because the scalp, skull, and brain provide significant resistance to the flow of electrons.


Why can't we use 100% of the brain in a certain moment?

The widely quoted figure of "10% at a time" is actually overestimating simultaneous brain activity by up to an order of magnitude. As demonstrated by Lennie 2003 (Current Biology), the

  number of neurons that can be substantially active concurrently

is possibly as small as 1% of the brain's neurons, due to the high metabolic cost of spiking. Generally, metabolic cost is a major determinant in brain activity. This in turn entails that even

  less than 10% of cortex could be active at all

, to quote Lennie again. This number, derived for humans, is lower than for other animals, who are capable of sustaining a larger fraction of their brain's neurons simultaneously. This means that rats and hamsters use more of their brains than humans do.

Paradoxically, the highest metabolic cost comes from inhibitory activity. Also, neurons restrict their own firing rates via refractory periods. For the best example of a failure of this inhibitory control of excessive spiking, consider epileptic fits, which correspond to extreme synchronization of neural activity, in a sense an over activation of the brain.
I think considering that two examples of brains showing more concurrent activity than the healthy human brain are 1. the rat brain, 2. the epileptic brain, it becomes obvious that increasing total activity would not inherently improve brain function.


Does the brain need more sleep after heavy load?

After stressful events the brain is energized by various (evil in this case) hormones from the adrenal system like cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. Good luck getting sleep without some medical help after trying to solve some major world, work or personal issues. So while the brain still needs its normal rejuvenation and maybe an extra 30 minutes or hour to deal with the bad stages of sleep but its probably not going to get it. That is to say there are several stages of sleep and the adreno hormones mess with the length and quality of the stages which can be fixed by a longer amount in some situations or just flat out starting over the next night and trying to catch up on the debt over the course of time.

Stress, Arousal, and Sleep
Stress is considered to be an important cause of disrupted sleep and insomnia. However, controlled and experimental studies in rodents indicate that effects of stress on sleep–wake regulation are complex and may strongly depend on the nature of the stressor. While most stressors are associated with at least a brief period of arousal and wakefulness, the subsequent amount and architecture of recovery sleep can vary dramatically across conditions even though classical markers of acute stress such as corticosterone are virtually the same. Sleep after stress appears to be highly influenced by situational variables including whether the stressor was controllable and/or predictable, whether the individual had the possibility to learn and adapt, and by the relative resilience and vulnerability of the individual experiencing stress. There are multiple brain regions and neurochemical systems linking stress and sleep, and the specific balance and interactions between these systems may ultimately determine the alterations in sleep–wake architecture. Factors that appear to play an important role in stress-induced wakefulness and sleep changes include various monominergic neurotransmitters, hypocretins, corticotropin releasing factor, and prolactin. In addition to the brain regions directly involved in stress responses such as the hypothalamus, the locus coeruleus, and the amygdala, differential effects of stressor controllability on behavior and sleep may be mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex. These various brain regions interact and influence each other and in turn affect the activity of sleep–wake controlling centers in the brain. Also, these regions likely play significant roles in memory processes and participate in the way stressful memories may affect arousal and sleep. Finally, stress-induced changes in sleep-architecture may affect sleep-related neuronal plasticity processes and thereby contribute to cognitive dysfunction and psychiatric disorders.
Stress and Neonatal Sleep
Routine circumcision, done without anesthesia in the newborn nursery, was usually followed by prolonged nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Since this form of sleep has been described as a low point on an arousal continuum, we consider its increase to be consistent with a theory of conservation-withdrawal in response to stressful stimulation.


Can a person be subjected to long term physical pain as a result of psychological abuse

The subject area regarding this question is psychosomatic disorders and problems like what you describe can be difficult to deal with.

First of all it is imperative that all physical and neurological causes of the pain are ruled out, including neuropathic problems, through medical examinations and tests.

Psychosomatic medicine involves diverse specialties including psychiatry, psychology, neurology, internal medicine, surgery, allergy, dermatology and psychoneuroimmunology.

Whenever any physical pain arises without physical injury, it is important to see your doctor to get the source of the pain checked out.  If you jump to the conclusion that it is all psychological without seeing your doctor first, you could cause serious problems now and further along in time.

It is possible that it could be psychological, but only if medical examinations and tests have found no physical cause and the source is not anything but psychological or psychiatrical.

When a diagnosis is made that the pain is psychological, it doesn't mean that the pain is "all in your head".  The pain being felt is very real and in some cases can be debilitating.  You cannot just tell yourself it isn't real in order to stop the pain from being felt.

If the pain has a psychological cause, then therapy will be needed to deal with it.  The therapy will enable you to discuss the issues affecting you and enable you to live your life the best you can.

If the problem is not psychological, although psychological therapy will not deal with the pain, therapy can also help with pain management if the problem has been a long term problem and causing stress, depression, anxiety or other psychological problems.  There are also complementary therapies which may help with both psychological and non-psychological problems.


someone who doesn't grasp that others don't know what they know

The skill of understanding that other people have different knowledge, beliefs, etc, falls under the concept of theory of mind (note that the name is possibly a bit misleading...it's not referring to some scientific theory or to philosophy of mind but rather to this ability to understand that others have different minds).

Difficulties with theory of mind are a common aspect of autism, but can arise from other causes as well including schizophrenia. I don't know of a specific term to describe precisely the symptom you are describing, however, and there may not be such a term.


Do transgender people typically get tested for intersex conditions?

undergo testing for conditions like Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia or XXY?

No.

Chromosomal screening is not routinely done according to the recently released Australian guidelines.
The issue is whether there is a relationship between transgenderism and intersex conditions and no there is not. If a condition is not higher than the usual population, then there is no evidence to screen and perform investigations that are unlikely to produce any useful outcomes. Transgenderism seems to be an independent phenomenon and does not seem to have a relationship with intersex conditions according to current research.

  Chromosomal analyses are rarely abnormal in TGD individuals and should only be performed if there is clinical suspicion (eg, Klinefelter syndrome). Genital examination is not routinely required.

References:

Cheung, A. S., Wynne, K., Erasmus, J., Murray, S., & Zajac, J. D. (2019). Position statement on the hormonal management of adult transgender and gender diverse individuals. The Medical Journal of Australia, 211(3), 127–133.


Is there a name for the psychology behind lowering your bets?

The answer I was searching for is Creeping Normality. It fits better examples and has a clearer definition for what I was attempting to express.

  Creeping normality refers to the way a major change can be accepted as
  the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments,
  when it would be regarded as objectionable if it took place in a
  single step or short period.


What is the relationship between perceived difficulty and mistakes/errors?

Here is an article that seems to describe what you are looking for. The researchers sought to test factors that influence the performance of software engineers. To quote from the abstract:

  Goal difficulty has a negative relationship to performance but a positive relationship to effort. Because of this off-setting effect, the degree of goal difficulty has a relatively small overall effect on performance. Goal clarity also has a relatively small effect on performance. Individual ability has the strongest direct effect on perceived performance, more than twice as strong as the effects of work effort, personality dimensions, and perceived characteristics of the task. High achievement needs were directly related to both effort and perceived performance, whereas self-esteem and locus of control have a direct relationship to perceived performance

In summary, it looks like an increase in perceived task difficulty lends itself to an increase in effort, but not overall task performance. Perceived performance is strongly tied to the individual's self-esteem and locus of control.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this in my original post, but you might find it useful to know that there is also research on effort level relative to task difficulty. This study assigned computer tasks that ranged in difficulty, and then gave participants high or low levels of reinforcement for performance on the task. The participants then were given an anagram task to measure performance.

  ...individuals who were highly reinforced for performance on the low-difficulty computer task spent less time persisting on the subsequent anagram task, demonstrating that the low level of effort generalized to another activity. Additionally, individuals who were given low levels of reinforcement for performance on the moderately high-difficulty computer task spent more time persisting on the anagram task. This demonstrated that the effort exerted on the first task, paired with low levels of reinforcement, generalized to the following task. However, participants who were given the highest-difficulty computer tasks did not generalize this effort. According to the researchers, this version of the task was so difficult that the participants could not succeed and thus demonstrated a pattern of behaviors similar to learned helplessness.

1


Progressed smoothly in a game while not paying attention

My interpretation of this question is that you are asking about divided attention. Some (normally easy) tasks can continue to be accomplished in conditions of divided attention, and with practice you should be able to control this.

I don't know of any research confirming your suggestion that you actually got better in such conditions. You could also look at recent studies on mind-wandering (which tend to show interruptions in the main task when you are thinking about something else) or the passive/active mode in visual tasks (in which, some argue, people actually get better when they don't concentrate as hard).


Does meditation improve working memory more than exercise?

Focused attention meditation practices improve focus in the long term. So the improvement is difficult to asses and could probably only be found in a standardized test setting. Physical exercise however has been demonstrated to improve mental abilities in the short term (after recovery of physical exercise) levels of circulating neurotransmitter stay elevated for approx. 48h.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2007.7022 (Meditation and focused attention)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691802001348 (Physical exercise and cognition)


Is eye movement important with eyes-closed EMDR therapy?

The state of the art in EMDR research (if not yet in practice) supports a "working memory" (WM) explanation of the therapy that does not support earlier "bilateral stimulation" hypotheses of the method.  A particularly salient summary from M.A. van den Hout et al. in Behaviour Research and Therapy 49 (2011) p.93:

  Traditionally, during EMDR, eyes are moved horizontally. In line with
  the WM account, but in contrast to original explanations, moving eyes
  vertically is equally effective (Gunter & Bodner, 2008). Crucially,
  the same effects occur if WM is taxed during recall with
  non-eye-movement secondary tasks, like listening to a series of
  non-words (auditory shadowing; Gunter & Bodner, 2008), drawing a
  complex figure (Gunter & Bodner, 2008), or counting (Engelhard, van
  den Hout, & Smeets, 2011; van den Hout et al., 2010; Kemps & Tiggemann,
  2007). Tasks that are presumably hardly taxing, like simple finger
  tapping, do not have beneficial effects (van den Hout et al., 2001),
  while more complex tapping does (Andrade et al., 1997). Likewise,
  activating memories about a previously seen trauma film while playing
  taxing computer game reduced flashbacks in the week afterwards
  (Holmes, James, Coode-Bate, & Deeprose, 2009).

This was backed up by correspondence with one of the authors who confirmed that in all their research protocols going back to at least 2000 research subjects must keep their eyes open so the researchers can confirm compliance.  They have no evidence this reduces the effectiveness.  In fact, the WM model suggests this should improve the effectiveness of the therapy vs. allowing subjects to close their eyes.


What are the major changes in the APA Publication Manual from 5th to 6th editions?

If you're going to be submitting articles to APA journals you should have access to the APA Publication Manual 6th edition. And it is useful to use a template (see here for discussion of 6th edition LaTeX packages) and a citation system that supports the rules.

There are changes that permit new things (e.g., longer abstracts, bullet lists, and keywords are permitted, single-spaced tables) and there are new suggestions (e.g., stronger encouragement to report confidence intervals; you can say "subjects" if you want; "I" and "we" are recommended over "the researchers").
However, if you already know the 5th edition, then  changes of particular interest are those  where compliance with the 5th edition would actually lead to violation of 6th edition rules.

Changes that stood out to me:

Provide two spaces at the end of sentences (but this doesn't make much sense if you use LaTeX)
Formatting of headings have changed and are simplified so that five-heading papers have the same first four headings as four-heading papers
Figure captions are now placed on the same page as the figure below the figure.
Tables and figures now appear before appendices
Footnotes are now placed on the same page that they are referenced.
Report p-values to two or three decimal places exactly and those less than .001 as p<.001.

References changes that stood out to me:

Include city and state for book publishers even if city is well known
Provide DOI with any references that have a DOI

General summaries of changes from 5th to 6th edition

Of course there are lots of little changes, check out some of these references for some other reviews of changes and resources:

John Dugan has a good summary of the changes in the 6th edition: mentions changes to end of sentence spacing, running head, headings, bias, repeated citation of same source in same paragraph, recording publisher location, references with 6+ authors, and DOIs.
Ace-editor provides an overview of changes
The APA has a tutorial on the 6th edition. My preference was to mute the voice over and just read the text.
Sample papers in 6th edition: one experiment paper from APA and a two experiment paper from APA, another example with commentary
The official APA style blog has a few posts on 6th edition changes.
Fairly extensive set of notes listing changes
Jody Davis lists changes
Hughes (2010) et al provide an academic review of the changes.
General set of guidelines on APA 6th edition from Indiana Wesleyan University

References

Hughes, G., Onwuegbuzie, A., Daniel, L., and Slate, J. (2010).
Editorial: Apa publication manual changes: Impacts on research reporting
in the social sciences. Research in the Schools, 17(1). PDF


Catching a thief in a closed circle of people

One way to get at this is to use the "guilty knowledge" test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_detection#The_control_question_test_and_the_guilty_knowledge_test

In this test, you would need to first find out exactly how much money was reported stolen, and from whom. Then you would ask each suspect a combination of "true" questions and "false" questions. A true question contains only true details of the incident, while a false question contains some false details of the incident.

Let's say Tom, Dick, and Harry claim to have had 10, 12, and 20 dollars stolen from them respectively. If Tom did it, he is lying about his amount, so during his turn, you would ask him ``Did you steal 12 from Dick and 20 from Harry, for a total of 32 dollars?'' You would also ask him some "false" versions of the question, e. g., "Did you steal 11 dollars from Dick and 2 dollars from Harry, for a total of 13 dollars?" You would then see if he reacted differently to the "true" version of the question compared to the "false" version of the question. If he does, then it could be due to him knowing how much was stolen, and that would be evidence he was the one who stole it. You could enhance the effect by monitoring heart rate (perhaps with a phone app) throughout the questioning.

For this to work, it must be the case that you and the thief both know the exact amount stolen, but that none of the victims know this information because they haven't talked to each other. The thief would know because s/he stole it, and you would know from surveying everyone and adding it all up.

Additionally, you can find out when each person's money went missing, where the wallet was located during each theft, and what denominations the bills were. Include these details in your "true" questions, and change them in your "false" questions.

Even then, this is an unreliable test to implement on your own, so there's no guarantee it would work. Most likely you're out of luck.


What is the meaning of behaviorally oriented outside-in nature of therapy?

The concept of "outside-in" within the context of the article involves looking at how your environment is affecting your mental health. In other words, how the world around you (people you see, people you talk to...) is causing or worsening the depressive feelings and work on changing those things first.
There are a lot of articles online concerning Behavioural Activation, which is the form of behaviour therapy developed by Skinner discussed in the article you linked.
One meta-analysis (Cuijpers et al. 2007) found it very effective, and there are a couple of books on the subject.

Behavioral Activation for Depression: A Clinician's Guide by Christopher R. Martell, Ruth Herman-Dunn, and Sona Dimidjian (2010)
Behavioral Activation: Distinctive Features by Andrew M. Busch, Jonathan W. Kanter, and Laura C. Rusch (2009)

References
Cuijpers, P., Van Straten, A., & Warmerdam, L. (2007). Behavioral activation treatments of depression: A meta-analysis. Clinical psychology review, 27(3), 318-326. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2006.11.001


Cognition of people born by C-section vs born ordinarily?

I don't know if there has been any research on this, but there is reason to doubt that such research would yield any meaningful results.

You would need to control for a large number of things to address your question. For example, people born by C-section are people who have access to medical care. Those people have money, which is associated with education and opportunities, both of which are associated with IQ.

Additionally, a C-section is medical intervention for when something goes wrong. The things that lead to C-sections (such as improper positioning of the baby before birth, compromising oxygen supply) can lead to brain damage. C-sections generally are associated with many more complications than healthy vaginal births.

Another thing to consider is that vaginal birth would be a poor evolutionary solution for human reproduction if it lead to significantly lower intelligence.

I would be much less surprised if the opposite of your hypothesis turned out to be true.


Are there colors women find attractive on men?

The initial report of men finding women more attractive in red or even with a red background on a photo did receive a lot of press.  However, the study has since been done in reverse.  Women tend to find red more attractive on men as well... or even with a red background on their photo.

  Red, rank, and romance in women viewing men.
  Elliot, Andrew J.; Niesta Kayser, Daniela; Greitemeyer, Tobias; Lichtenfeld, Stephanie; Gramzow, Richard H.; Maier, Markus A.; Liu, Huijun
  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol 139(3), Aug 2010, 399-417. doi: 10.1037/a0019689


What tasks is Spaun 2.0 able to perform?

Counting task numbers in Spaun becomes somewhat meaningless due to it's instruction following capabilities. However, the missing task was the stimulus response task, wherein given an image from ImageNet, classify it according to it's given identifier.