What exactly happens to brain during anesthesia

General anesthesia is a reversible drug-induced neurophysiological state comprised of unconsciousness, amnesia, analgesia, and immobility with maintenance of physiological stability. How anesthetic drugs create the state of general anesthesia is still not completely understood, but general anesthesia is essential for the safe and humane conduct of surgical and invasive diagnostic procedures.[1]

The goals of general anesthesia include amnesia, analgesia, unconsciousness, and immobilization. The ability of general anesthetics to produce these distinct therapeutic endpoints is not equal. For example, explicit memory is the most sensitive target of inhaled general anesthetics; consciousness (assessed by appropriate response to spoken commands) is preserved in the absence of memory during exposure to low doses; and unconsciousness is produced by lower concentrations of most general anesthetics than those that ablate movement in response to noxious stimuli. [2]

General anesthetics consist of many different drugs. [2,3] These different drugs display distinct relative potencies in their ability to produce different components of general anesthesia. For example, the ratio of the drug concentration producing immobility during incision to that producing unconsciousness is 1.5 for nitrous oxide, about 3 for most of the inhaled halogenated ether, and over 4 for the intravenous anesthetic propofol. They also have different effects on EEG during anesthesia. Thus, clinically, general anesthetics can be classified into 3 groups based on their relative potencies for different clinical endpoints and their impact on EEG:

Group 1 consists of etomidate, propofol, methoxital, and barbiturates. These are intravenous drugs that are much more potent at producing unconsciousness than immobilization and shift cortical EEG toward lower frequencies. Their effects are mediated mainly by a subset of γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABA-A) receptors, which, when activated, reduce neuronal excitation.

Group 2 includes the gaseous anesthetics nitrous oxide (N2O), xenon (Xe) and cyclopropane, along with an intravenous agent, ketamine. Clinically, these drugs produce significant analgesia, while their potency as hypnotics and immobilizers are relatively weak, and they may increase cortical EEG frequencies. Anesthetic agents in this group have little or no effect on GABA-A receptors, but they instead potently inhibit N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, which are excitatory cation channels activated by the amino acid glutamate. In addition, agents in this group also inhibit α4β2 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which modulate synaptic release of neurotransmitters.

Group 3 consists of the volatile halogenated anesthetics: halothane, enflurane, isoflurane, sevoflurane, and desflurane. These drugs induce amnesia, hypnosis, and immobility in a predictable manner and reduce the spectral edge frequency of cortical EEG. General anesthetics in this group lack significant selectivity for general anesthetic target molecules. They enhance the function of inhibitory GABA-A and glycine receptors while also activating 2P potassium channels and inhibiting excitatory glutamate receptors and a variety of excitatory cation channels.

Group 1 and Group 3 drugs that act by enhancing GABA-A receptor activity in various neural circuits appear to impair both unconscious and conscious processing, including associative cortex and synchronous integration among multiple cortical areas. Cortical EEG activity shifts toward lower frequencies in the presence of these drugs, and large doses can lead to the total loss of coordinated neural activity (iso-electric EEG). On the other hand, Group 2 drugs such as ketamine and nitrous oxide appear to act by impairing signal filtration to the consciousness, perhaps altering the amounts or intensities of sensory inputs, or by allowing leakage of unconscious signals into conscious processing. This lack of filtering “jams” or overwhelms the consciousness with signals, leading to a “dissociative” state, frequently associated with reports of vivid dreamlike experiences.

Therefore, while being under general anesthesia, the brain is still functioning, but it is functioning differently from when it is awake or sleeping. [4] Neural circuits that are responsible for consciousness, sensation perception, memory, and motor are not functioning as they do when being awake or sleeping. For different general anesthetics, different effects on neruotransmitter receptors and neural circuits are different; thus, various neural circuits in the different areas of the brain are affected differently, and the whole brain will function in different unconscious states even though, outwardly, the anesthetic patients appear to be in similar unconscious states. Also, for different dosages of the same anesthetics, overall neural circuits are affected differently, and the brain in different anesthetic stages will function differently too.

N.B. The above is a simplified answer about the complex actions of general anesthetics. More details can be found in the following references.

References:

Akeju O, Brown EN. Neural oscillations demonstrate that general anesthesia and sedative states are neurophysiologically distinct from sleep. Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2017 Jun; 44: 178–185.
Forman SA, Chin VA. General Anesthetics and Molecular Mechanisms of Unconsciousness. Int Anesthesiol Clin. 2008 Summer; 46(3): 43–53.doi: 10.1097/AIA.0b013e3181755da5
Brown EN, Purdon PL, Van Dort CJ. General Anesthesia and Altered States of Arousal: A Systems Neuroscience Analysis. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2011; 34: 601–628.doi: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-060909-153200
Müller CP, Pum ME, Amato D, Schüttler J, Huston JP, Silva MA.The in vivo neurochemistry of the brain during general anesthesia. J. Neurochem. (2011) 119, 419–446. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2011.07445.x


Effects of aerobic vs. resistance training on cognition

I tried to do a little research myself and like you observed, there is not much research being done on adults relating to this topic.

What I did find was research done by M.B. Pontifex et al. (2009). Although this research was done on healthy 21 year olds (Young Adults).

They researched the effects of aerobic exercise and resistance excercise on reaction time of tasks as well as accuracy of tasks amongst other things.

This data was collected via the following method:

  Twenty-one young adult participants completed a cardiorespiratory fitness test and maximal strength tests. On
  subsequent days, task performance measures of reaction time (RT) and accuracy were collected while participants completed a modified
  Sternberg working memory task before the start of, immediately after, and 30 min after an intervention consisting of 30 min of either
  resistance or aerobic exercise and a seated rest control.

Their observation was that after aerobic excercise their response time latency (reaction time) was decreased directly after or 30 minutes after the excercise. This was not observed after or 30 minutes after doing resistance excercise.

They stated:

  The current findings indicated shorter RT latency during
  a working memory task that was performed immediately
  and 30 min after an acute bout of aerobic exercise, relative
  to the pretest. Similar effects were not observed after acute
  resistance exercise or seated rest, indicating that different
  modes of exercise have differential effects on the executive
  control of working memory. Further, shorter RT latency
  was observed for task conditions requiring increased
  working memory capacity after aerobic exercise, relative
  to the pretest, providing support for the view that changes in
  cognitive function after acute exercise are disproportionately
  larger for tasks requiring greater amounts of executive
  control.

References:
M.B. Pontifex, C.H.Hillman, B. Fernhall, K.M. Thompson and T.A. Valentini (2009) The Effect of Acute Aerobic and Resistance
Exercise on Working Memory. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc 41(4):927–934


Understanding Carl Rogers' Concepts. What are inconsistent experiences? what is self-structure?

Short answer
Your attempt to define self-structure is almost there.

Self-structure is how a person organizes all their experiences, knowledge, values and beliefs. Ie what is the typical protocol when dealing with new information, new experiences, etc and how do they compact that in their short/long term cognition. How do they accept, challenge or deny new info?

You have one half of its definition in a sense, because self-structure is not just about how a person organises all their experiences etc.
Rogers' concept of self-structure is also about the actual structure of the self. What are the core values and beliefs within the person's experiential world? Are they congruent with the real world or are they incongruent? I will go into that in a moment.
Your attempt to define inconsistent experiences is almost there

Inconsistent experiences are those that is unexpected and challenges how you view yourself or how you view reality. For eg, in childhood, the world seems all about having fun, things seem peaceful. But the experience of working (having new responsibilities, realizing life is hard) and having a dispute with a co-worker (the world is not always peaceful), directly challenge that.

Inconsistent experiences can be unexpected, but they can be expected sometimes.
Take for example, you could have a belief that a certain other person is a good person and would not harm anyone, although you keep getting little hints that this belief may be wrong.
The first few times could be unexpected, but after a while you may pick up a pattern to when you notice these little hints. You can expect these little hints to come up during those moments and therefore they will not be totally unexpected.
Inconsistent experiences can challenge you or not. It is all down to how you choose to deal with the inconsistency. If you choose to take notice of the inconsistencies and examine them, they can challenge your structure of self, and in certain situations, they can alter your structure of self slightly, or even drastically. In my example your belief regarding that person could change, but it may not change your structure of self. It could do both in the sense that you could take it that you are not a good judge of character and therefore judge everyone else with suspicion. If you choose to ignore the inconsistent experience(s), they will not challenge the structure of self at all.
Longer answer with further clarification
Self-structure and inconsistency with experiences are covered in Carl Rogers' 19 propositions (Rogers, 1951). These propositions form the basis of Rogers' concept of the self.
They state that everyone exists in a continually changing world of experience, and they are at the centre of their experiential world.
The structure of the self is formed as a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluating all interaction with others — an organised, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.
This is because:

The person reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This the person's perceived "reality".

The person reacts as an organized whole to this experiential world.

A portion of the experiential world gradually becomes differentiated as the self.

The structure of the self involves the concepts of who they are — where they believe are in society, who they are as a person, their core values and beliefs.
Notice that this involves the perceived reality, because what is perceived can be, to varying extents, very different to actual reality (See Johari Window for a cognitive psychology example of what I am referring to here)
Now the self has been formed, the person has one basic tendency and striving —  to actualise, maintain and enhance themselves (See Maslow's concept on this).
Your behaviour can be seen to help or hinder self-actualisation, and the best vantage point for understanding your own behaviour is from your own internal frame of reference.
Behaviour, according to Rogers' theory of the self, is basically the goal-directed attempt of the person to satisfy their needs as experienced, in their experiential world.
Again, this is experiential world as opposed to the real world which potentially can be different.
Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behaviour. It is the kind of emotion related to the perceived significance of their behaviour for the maintenance and enhancement of their self.
The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the person, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others. The values can be perceived in a distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
As experiences occur in life, they are either:

symbolised, perceived and organised into some relation to the self,
denied symbolisation and ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure,
or given distorted symbolisation, because there is a perceived relationship to the self structure but experience is inconsistent in some way with the structure of the self.

Most thoughts and beliefs that are adopted by the person are those that are consistent with the experiential world; and, most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the person are those that are consistent with the concept of self.

What exact properties makes an experience "inconsistent" (to the self-structure)?

Your new attempt to define inconsistent experience is correct

An experience is said to be inconsistent when the experience appears to demonstrate to the individual some values or qualities (of people, reality, themselves) that differs to what they have stored in their self-structure.

A shorter definition can be that an experience will be inconsistent when the experience does not agree with your self-structure.
Remember that your self-structure is built from your experiential world which can be different to the real world.
Your self-structure is built from past experiences, knowledge, values and/or beliefs.
If you are experiencing something which is different to your self-structure, the experience is inconsistent with your self-structure.
Your requests for further clarification

What are some good examples of inconsistent experiences (given a person's self concept)?

One example from my work with the abused
A lot of men believe that they will never be attacked and raped, and if anyone was to try, they would be able to fight them off and prevent it.
Many of those who have been raped believe that because they could not fight them off, they must have "somehow" or "for some reason" allowed it to happen and therefore it is their fault.

What are some examples of a person's self-structure in terms of how?

Your example is part of the story.

An individual categorizes information from conversations and media in categories such as information on friends, on world events, on politics...

The self-structure is formed not just from conversations they have had and from the news and other media, but also from personal experiences.
Let's again use my example of these men who are now blaming themselves for being raped.
This is where the choice I mentioned in the short answer comes in. You can choose to ignore the inconsistencies and carry on believing your self-structure is correct, or you can stop and examine the inconsistencies and adjust your self-structure to suit.
These men examined the experience, interpreted the events and adjusted their self-structure accordingly.
Their previous self-structure contained the belief that they could prevent it, but they now believe that the inconsistent experience shows they couldn't.
Their attacker(s) managed to rape them even though the person "should have been able to prevent it and fight them off".
They chose to look at this experience and see it that they must have let them do it.
Their adjusted self-structure now contains the belief that if anyone was to try again, they will not be able to prevent it and, in fact, they may allow it to happen again.
Their self-structure has been severely compromised and maladjusted, to the point that they are now living with feelings of guilt and shame which is not theirs to bear.

Do experiences also demonstrate inconsistency with how a person organizes themselves? If "inconsistency" refers to that aspect as well, what is a good example?

This is a very good question which therapy gives the answer.
In very simplified terms, the previous inconsistent experience within their experiential world and resulting adjustment would need to be examined in therapy in order for the real world interpretation (they did not willing allow it to happen and it is not their fault) to be taken as fact.
The reason for believing it is their fault will be examined by re-examining the events in a safe environment, and challenging how this belief was formed.
It is by challenging this altered belief that the maladjusted self-structure can be altered to be more accurate and helpful.
For a more in depth take on the theory of the self, Rogers (1951) is a recommended read.
References
Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory. London: Constable. ISBN 978-1-84119-840-8.


Benefits of social eating outside of family units

The term I was looking for was "commensal meals". Indeed, the benefits of commensality are seen in:

Firefighters, wherein commensality correlated with measures of effectiveness [1].
The general population of Thailand, wherein commensality correlated with happiness [2]. However, from quickly reading the paper, it's unclear whether this applies as strongly for families as it does for unmarried people.
Seniors in Japan, wherein commensality is associated with "subjective health, food diversity and food intake frequency" [3].

However, I didn't find anything relating specifically to room-mates, which seems like a relevant demographic?

[1] "Eating Together at the Firehouse: How Workplace Commensality Relates to the Performance of Firefighters" by Kniffin et al.

[2] "Health, Happiness and Eating Together: What Can a Large Thai Cohort Study Tell Us?" by Yiengprugsawan et al.

[3] "Eating together is associated with food behaviors and demographic factors of older Japanese people who live alone" by Ishikawa et al.


This question's reference to a classical computer refers to a "Turing Machine" style of computation, also known as a knowledge system, in which decisions and possible results are pre-programmed using if-statements, loops, and other logical constructs.
However, most modern computer programmers and engineers are at least somewhat familiar with neural networks, used for machine learning. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are loosely based on the way the brain (a biological neural network) works.  If you want to use your computing background to understand the brain, then I recommend learning about neural networks instead.  If you already have some understanding of neural networks, then think about how Siri or Watson work.
While neural networks can certainly be thought of as storing data, executing algorithms, parallel processing, and having memory and speed measurements, they are conceptually very different from classical computers, and generally uninstructive to compare. In particular, the "von Neumann" architectural style of modern computers does not have an analog in the brain (there is no separation between areas that compute and areas that store memories, for example). If you are still interested in such a comparison, then many of the questions listed above already have great answers, so check them out.
If you are interested in modeling the brain using a classical computing methodology, then check out ACT-R, a popular architecture for modeling the brain using a modular, knowledge-based system (also see this forum question).
Artificial neural networks are not a perfect model for biological neural networks either, and if you are interested in the difference, then see this forum question.


It seems like ingroup-outgroup stereotyping / bias / discrimination is the concept I'm looking for.  This article seems to sum it up well.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201012/in-groups-out-groups-and-the-psychology-crowds


Why do people fear statistically unlikely things?

This is a great question.  There isn't a single reason for this phenomenon.

There is a genetic predisposition to certain fears.  Though humans are bad at statistics, evolution is quite good at it.  So if there is a benefit to having a fear response to something, whereby it increases the chances of survival to reproduction, then it is more likely to propagate.  The trouble with evolution however, is that it's slow, and depends on survival to reproduction to work, which is not as relevant as it used to be.  So humans are predisposed to fear snakes, heights, and lightning, because this fear increased the chance of survival in our evolutionary past.  A fear of circulatory disease was not an evolutionary advantage at the time, and arguably still isn't, but in any case, evolution has not had sufficient time to catch up.

Genetics are not the only cause of fears, as learning also plays an important role.  This was clearly demonstrated by the seminal Little Albert Experiment in which a fear of rabbits (very uncommon in practice) was induced in a baby through classical conditioning.  This experiment is no longer ethical to replicate, but it showed that humans can be taught to fear just about anything.  This results in individual differences in fears and phobias that depend on personal experience rather than objective statistical likelihood.  Thus, a fear of something with immediate effects, such as failure or embarrassment, is more likely to develop through learning than a fear of something with long-term effects, such as smoking or junk food.

Classical conditioning is also important in understanding the impact of presentation - as mentioned, the way a fear is presented can influence it as well.  Fears that more closely resemble or are otherwise associated with other things we already fear are more likely to take hold than abstract ones that we can't relate to.  So the key to fears such as radiation, asteroid impact, or aliens, really has to do with framing them in a manner that we can understand.

The role of learning is evident in cultural differences in common fears as well.  As you rightly pointed out, media plays a role in this, but importantly, media emphasizes different fears in different cultures, so it is presumably influenced by what each culture is attuned to.  Additionally, fear is often used in politics and marketing, so cultural differences may be partially driven by needs and goals of government and corporations for example.  This may be why - at least in developed countries - a fear of terrorism is more likely than a fear of ecological disaster for example.  Similarly, an issue with market-driven news is that it tends to focus on particularly rare events, such as child abductions, shark bites, and plane crashes, making them seem more common than they are.

Many other factors, such as memory and cognitive biases, influence the likelihood of developing a particular fear, but hopefully this gives you the sense that objective statistical likelihood is not the only factor.


Do we have a predisposition to view visual stimuli in a clockwise pattern?

Abed, 1991 found cultural differences in visual scanning patterns that seem to reflect differences in the languages of the cultural groups.

Individuals from cultures with languages than may be read vertically as opposed to horizontally tended to have more vertical eye movements than individuals from cultures with horizontally-read languages.
Individuals from cultures with languages that are read right-to-left tended to show more right-to-left eye movements than individuals from cultures with languages that are read left-to-right.

Abed, F. (1991). Cultural influences on visual scanning patterns. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 22(4), 525-534. Link to article.


What prevents a neuron from activating an incoming synapse?

Basically there are two reasons. First, (most) synapses are asymmetrically designed in such a way that synaptic transmission only works in one direction. Second, action potentials usually run in one direction only, from the axon hillock down the axon.

Saying that a neuron fires means that an action potential (AP) is effected, a series of  depolarisations along the axon which constitute a signal that moves down the axon, since APs are usually initiated at the axon hillock. Neural signal flow thus generally is directed orthodromically, i.e. along the axon and away from the soma.

A synapse is constituted partially by the presynaptic neuron, partially by the postsynaptic neuron. It is the axon terminals, located at the distal end of the presynaptic neuron's axon, which can carry a neural signal further over the synaptic cleft to effect an AP in the postsynaptic neuron. This generally works in one direction only – e.g. the presynaptic part of the synapse can release neurotransmitters, and the postsynaptic part of the synapse has receptors for the neurotransmitters, not the other way round (mind that this does not imply that the postsynaptic part of the synapse cannot have any effect on its presynaptic counterpart).

Since the propagation of the AP along the axon basically works through causing neighbouring parts of the axon to depolarize, it would be possible that at some point a second AP is generated which runs back into the direction the original AP came from. However, this is prevented by afterhyperpolarization (also called refractory period): the membrane potential falls below the usual resting potential and thus prevents this running back up of a second, antidromic AP.

The mechanism of afterhyperpolarization is largely responsible for unidirectional propagation. However, it has to be emphasized that this only applies if the AP is initiated at the axon hillock in the first place. If an action potential forms at some point down the axon, it is indeed possible that two APs are generated, one moving down the axon, another one moving upwards towards the soma. This is called neural backpropagation, and while it constitutes an actual phenomenon in the nervous systems, there is not much clarity yet about its (possible) functions. However, the above mentioned unidirectional design of chemical synapses prevents this signal to effect synaptic transmission.

Another phenomenon that can be said to reverse the »normal«, unidirectional flow in neurons is that of electrotonic potentials (but they don't effect anything like antidromic APs), and finally an autapse is a synapse from a neuron's axon onto its own dendrite, so that in some sense it is correct to say that a neuron with an autapse activates an »incoming synapse« (however not in the sense the question seems to imply). Finally, it should also be mentioned that in contrast to chemical synapses, electrical synapses work in both directions (notwithstanding the above).


What are science-based methods to memorize large sets of best practices?

We, as human beings, are generally not able to MEMORIZE that quantity of information. I suggest there are two ways to approach this issue:

1) Remembering WHERE information is as opposed to what information there is.
This works with top-notch scientists and I am particularly fond of this strategy. For example, instead of remembering the parts of the neuron, you could remember where you wrote them down or how you can quickly find those out and you can refer back to those. Or, in your example, instead of remembering what you have to describe, you could remember where your checklist or notes are regarding that and just look it up every time. Now, all you have to remember is that only certain information goes into the description and where you can look that up. (similar to chunking as mentioned by one of the previous replies)

2) Experience -> Incorporating that much information can be done easily only if you have deliberately practised it A LOT. The more information there is, the more practice you need. By the sounds of it - you may need a lot if there are so many rules. I would assume, much like the scientific work I am involved it, at one point it will become second nature to you and you will feel when something is not described or written well.

I realize that these two points do not address your question directly: Generally if you want to remember a long list of items it all boils down to the strength of the connections you build. Build your own associations. In one incredible study, for example, an undergraduate long-distance runner managed to increase his memory span from 7 (which is the average) to 79 digits (in some cases this could also be chunks which can increase the amount of remembered information) after 230 hours of deliberate practice (1h a day 3-5 days/week). He did that by "recoding" long strings of numbers into associations - e.g. 3492 -> 3 minutes 49.2 seconds near world record mile time; 1944 -> near WWII end and so on (Ericsson, Chase & Faloon, 1980).

So, it is possible to remember that amount of information but I strongly discourage you to do so as it would limit the amount of creative work you can accomplish in the meantime.

P.S. Just as an example of how effective 2) is -> In order for me to recall that study I remember that a lot of hours of deliberate practice increase working memory recall span and I remembered that there was a case study. Then in order to remember exactly what the study was, I recalled where it must be (Somewhere in my Memory-related notes) and so that I can sort through them quickly I recalled that there was something with WWII and recoding strategies. I managed to find it within 30-45 seconds among A LOT of notes!

Hope that helps.


How to report a quasi-experiment in APA?

The distinction between experiment and quasi-experiment is often made in undergraduate psychology courses.

In general, the term quasi-experiment is used to identify studies that fall short of a controlled experiment in some respect:
e.g., pre-existing groups;  allocation of participants to groups in a non-random way. In some cases, repeated measures experiments are labelled as quasi-experimental especially if they confound order with condition, especially simple pre-post designs.

The purpose of the term "quasi-experimental" is to highlight that there are potential confounds to causal inference that would not be present in a controlled experiment (e.g., time effects, pre-existing group differences, etc.).

However, more generally, an experiment typically refers to doing something in the world and observing the effect. In this sense, experiments are also sometimes distinguished from purely observational studies.

So in general, researchers should generally not use term "experiment" to describe an observational study. However, "quasi-experiments" can be labelled experiments.

So to come back to your question: how do you know whether a study is an experiment or a quasi-experiment? You have to read about the design and see whether the conditions for a controlled experiment are satisfied.

In general, as you progress in your psychology education, you may find that you use more nuanced descriptions of studies than simply "quasi-experimental". For example, you might describe a study as a simple pre-post repeated measures design. Or you might say that it compared a treatment and control group using pre-existing groups. The point is that these descriptions are more informative than simply saying "quasi-experimental".

In terms of reporting procedures for quasi-experiments in APA style, I think as above, this question does not entirely make sense. There are a variety of different types of quasi-experiments. For each type, there would be common things to report. For example, in simply describing your design, you will say what are between and within subjects factors and how participants were allocated or not allocated to groups.

You might find these APA reporting standards useful: "Reporting Standards for Research in Psychology" https://www.apa.org/pubs/authors/jars.pdf

This APA Task Force article also describes many of these issues quite clearly around how to report methods:
Wilkinson (1999) https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-54-8-594.pdf


Is this some sort of soft-coded Grapheme-Color synethesia?

Very cool image! As for your question, your link includes a link to the authors' poster, which allows you to "read more about the illusion and possible explanations."

From the poster:

  In conclusion, the observations so far suggest that the afterimage effect is not due to higher level effects of shape-specific coloured afterimages but rather to a rapid spreading of local patch-based afterimages within the outlines presented after the image.

From Wikipedia: "Like all forms of synesthesia, grapheme → color synesthesia is involuntary, consistent..." This illusion operates involuntarily as well, but is manipulable by the image designer, as the poster shows. Hence I think it's safe to say this has nothing to do with synesthesia as an abnormal condition, but it could probably be described in perceptual terms that apply to normative function. You might want to look for more of the authors' work or contact them if you're sufficiently curious! Please share with us here whatever info you receive if you do.


To what extent are correlations of father's age with birth defects and autism causal?

This is a partial answer suggesting a possible causal mechanism.
One of the factors leading to birth defects and autism is mutations in the parent's genetic material. In a recently published article, Sun et al. (2012) observed that:

The paternal-to-maternal mutation rate ratio is 3.3, and the rate in fathers doubles from age 20 to 58, whereas there is no association with age in mothers.

In other words, while the mother's age will not have an effect on the number of mutations passed to the offspring, the older the father the more mutations. That means a possible causal mechanism for correlations of father's old age is an increase in the number of mutations (most of which are neutral or detrimental) passed to the offspring.
Kong et al. (2012) explain the connection of de novo mutations (of the sort observed by Sun et al. (2012)) to autism and other disorders more clearly. This blog post suggests why fathers might produce more mutations:

The difference probably comes from the distinct biology of male and female reproduction. Cells that give rise to sperm cells continuously divide throughout a man’s life while cells that develop into ovules stop replicating when the woman is still a fetus. Consequently, an ovule at any time of a woman’s life will have gone through 24 cell divisions while sperm will be at about 200 divisions in a 20 year old man and up to 600 in a man of 40 years. When cells divide, they replicate their DNA to transmit a copy of the genome to each daughter cell but this replication is not 100% accurate. With each division mutations creep in the DNA so the more divisions a cell goes through, the more mutations it accumulates.

References
Kong, A., Frigge, M.L., Masson, G., Besenbacher, S., Sulem, P., Magnusson, G., Gudjonsson, S.A., Sigurdsson, A., Jonasdottir, As.,   Jonasdottir, Ad., Wong, W.S.W., Sigurdsson, G., Walters, G.B., Steinberg, S., Helgason, H., Thorleifsson, G., Gudbjartsson, D.F., Helgason, A., Magnusson, O.Th., Thorsteinsdottir. U., & Stefansson, K., (2012) Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father’s age to disease risk. Nature 488: 471-475.
Sun, J.X., Helgason, A., Masson, S., Ebenesersdóttir, S.S., Li, H., Mallick, S., Gnerre, S., Patterson, N., Kong, A., Reich, R., & Stefansson, K. (2012) A direct characterization of human mutation based on microsatellites. Nature Genetics [press]


Is there a limit on the rate at which incoming information can be comprehended?

I have tried speed reading myself in the past. From the research papers I have read back then, it seemed like there is no basis or evidence to the claim that with practice, reading speed can increase to more than 600-700 words per minute without any loss of comprehension (Some of the most bizarre claims include 25,000 words per minute. I would have been more impressed if the person claiming it wasn't selling online courses about speed reading for large sums of money).

I can't find the studies I found back then, but a meta-analysis by Keith Rayner†, Elizabeth R. Schotter, Michael E. J. Masson, Mary C. Potter, Rebecca Treiman (2016) seems to show that reading pace is highly determined by language skills and an extensive vocabulary. They show that generally there is a trade off between pace and comprehension, and some of the claims for a very high reading pace were based on prior knowledge of the texts. However, mild improvements can be achieved with practice. This article looks extremely fascinating and I wish I had the time to read all of it.

Edit: Only now do I realize how ironic my last remark was.


Need a perspective on science, philosophy, religion, etc

I see where you're coming from, I would argue that they are all based around ideologies or philosophies and to disband the "philosophy" heading in favour of another title.


Is this optical illusion the visual equivalent of binaural beats?

Binaural beats result from a difference between the stimulus presented to each ear. The brain tries to integrate them and the perceived low-frequency beat is an artifact of that processing. There are optical illusions that involve presenting distinct, isolated inputs to each eye, and I'd consider those the closest equivalent to binaural beats.

The apparent motion in the image doesn't rely on binocular vision; you can see that easily by looking at it with one eye closed (in fact, I think that makes it stronger). I'd guess it's probably based on edge detection or lateral inhibition, which don't (I think) have a particularly close analog in sound perception.


Defining shyness towards strangers in confrontational situations

That sort of non-confrontational attitude has been researched as an aspect of interpersonal conflict-resolution style/mode/behaviour. The bulk of the research seems to have been conducted in the field of organisational psychology (which is not my field) since it's particularly relevant to how business is conducted.

From what I've been able to glean from Google Scholar, Blake and Mouton were the first to publish on this topic, defining five interpersonal conflict-handling styles: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Avoiding is simply defined as withdrawing from the conflict situation. Since then other researchers have developed a number of alternatives. The Thomas-Kilmann version dropped one style, compromising, and placed the rest along two dimensions, assertiveness and cooperativeness. This is the result:

Based on your description, your friend could be described as having an avoidant conflict-resolution style when dealing with strangers.

This is an interesting topic for me because I'm somewhat like your friend. I'm quite introverted and I suspect your friend is too to some degree, since there is a link between introversion and having an avoidant interpersonal conflict-resolution style.

In business contexts it's not surprising to find that people who show a high need for dominance are averse to using an avoidant conflict-resolution style.

I'm not sure what the research says about why your friend might choose a different style of conflict-resolution with friends. I'll see what else I can find.

References

Blake, R.R & Mouton, J.S. (1964). The Managerial Grid: The Key to Leadership Excellence. Houston: Gulf Publishing Co.
Thomas, K.W. & Kilmann, R.H. (1974). The Thomas–Kilmann mode instrument. Tuxedo Park, NY: Xicom
Schneer, J.A. & Chanin, M.N. (1987). Manifest Needs as Personality Predispositions to Conflict-Handling Behavior. Human Relations, 40, 575-590
Wood, V. F., & Bell, P. A. (2008). Predicting interpersonal conflict resolution styles from personality characteristics. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(2), 126-131.


What's the optimal type of exercise to increase BDNF

Vigorous intensity (80% heart rate reserve) with long duration (40 min) offers the greatest probability of a significant BDNF elevation according to The Effects of Aerobic Exercise Intensity and Duration on Levels of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Healthy Men study published in 2013.

The study does not give an answer to the optimal frequency of exercises. It is probably based on individuals' personal fitness level, because recovery should be taken into account as well.


Can training on neural networks be selectively undone?

So lets be clear. (I think) we are talking about back propagation here.

Yes, you probably could get from the ABCD-trained network to an ACD-trained network.

The network adapts with each data point it is trained on. As such, the relationship between how an individual data point effects the net, changes with training. What really matters to the net is the average of all of these interactions, and this is were a lot of specific information related to individual data points is lost.

So in reality, achieving this would require you to know how the net (trained only on A) changed in response B. So we would need to be saving previous changes to weights and biases (for each data point if we wanted it to be more general/flexible).

I don't see this as particularly practical. But you could do it if you wanted.


what causes this auditory persistence illusion?

It sounds like you are describing an earworm, which is a piece of music that repeats in your head even though it is not actually playing. This is a rather common occurrence, and matches your experience of it happening only with songs you're familiar with, and especially so for repetitive songs. What makes songs get stuck in your head is not fully understood, but research has shown that has to do both with qualities of the song (certain melodic elements, intervals, tempos and repetitions are more likely to be earworms), as well as qualities of the listener (having a musical background, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and being in a non-focused mental state increase likelihood of experiencing earworms).


Is there a term for behaving to the opposite extreme of a way one has been forced to behave?

The pattern of behavior you are describing is called psychological reactance.

Reactance as a concept has been formalized in Jack Brehm's work in the 1960s, who has proposed a Theory of Psychological Reactance (1966). The theory posits that threats to personal freedom cause motivational arousal directed at reestablishing freedom. Consequently, the attractiveness of those behavioral choices that are eliminated or threatened can be increased.

A textbook example is a study (Brehm, Stires, Sensenig, & Shaban, 1966) in which students were promised to choose one of several music recordings. When one of the alternatives was taken away, it was perceived to be more attractive (but only when the students had the expectation that they could decide freely).

Since then, the concept has been applied to a wide variety of settings such as the role of eliminated freedom in consumer behavior (e.g., Clee & Wicklund, 1980), the persuasive effects of promotional health messages (e.g., Dillard & Shen, 2005), or patient noncompliance in therapeutic settings (e.g., Fogarty, 1997).

References

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. New York: Academic Press.

Brehm, J. W., Stires, L. K., Sensenig, J., & Shaban, J. (1966). The attractiveness of an eliminated choice alternative. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 301–313. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(66)90086-2

Clee, M. A., & Wicklund, R. A. (1980). Consumer behavior and psychological reactance. Journal of Consumer Research, 6, 389–405.

Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication. Communication Monographs, 72, 144–168. doi:10.1080/03637750500111815

Fogarty, J. S. (1997). Reactance theory and patient noncompliance. Social Science & Medicine, 45, 1277–1288. doi:10.1016/S0277-9536(97)00055-5


Can cognitive science improve psychology?

Answering this question is very difficult without first agreeing what "cognitive science" is (a problem for this very site!). Unlike another answer here, to me, cognitive science is not necessarily about neuroscience methods (that would be cognitive neuroscience). Instead, cognitive science is an interdisciplinary hodgepodge of people doing empirical psychology, computer science, linguistics and philosophy of mind. And I say this as a member of the Cognitive Science Society. Although neuroscience is often involved, cognitive science is much older and historically linked to computing, AI and the cognitive revolution.

It certainly has made, and will continue to make, unique contributions to psychology. One can argue about the overlap between cognitive psychology and cognitive science (to me it is considerable), but theories of information processing from computing, computational models, linguistic theory and many other examples can make more precise predictions which people can verify with empirical data (these people are normally psychologists). This improves psychology which has sometimes suffered from being too vague ("boxology").

Because I see CS as an umbrella including psychology, I don't think it makes sense to think of it "replacing" psychology.

Because CS has often included people doing empirical experiments on human behaviour, the replication crisis certainly has implications (though it may be buffered by it's emphasis on theory). Cognitive psychologists are certainly guilty sometimes, though much of the soul-searching on replications, p-hacking etc comes from experimental social psychology.


While you are probably better to ask your question over at the AI Stack Exchange for more practical answers on how to accomplish the task, I would also suggest you could take a look into the topics on Wikipedia for Sociolinguistics, and also Language and gender for the underlying theories as to why Machine learning models are able to make guesses/predictions with upwards of 80% accuracy in trained models such as the following.

Machine Learning Models of Text Categorization by Author Gender Using Topic-independent Features (86% accuracy - Russian corpus)
Investigating the Role of Emotion-Based Features in Author Gender Classification of Text (80% accuracy)
Gender Attribution: Tracing Stylometric Evidence Beyond Topic and Genre (85% accuracy)

So to fully answer your question

  Can one reasonably guess the gender of a person from their writing/speech contents?

What is a 'reasonable guess' is not something I can define and is something you would wan't to think seriously about before using the predictions for anything of import to those you are labelling! However it would seem you can make a significantly better than random guess.


Free-to-use parenting style questionnaire

There are a lot of parenting style questionnaires. Without knowing what dimensions of parenting style are of key interest, how long you want the questionnaire to be (e.g., trade-offs between validity, reliability with ease) and such, it's hard to recommend a particular one. You can see several from the parent perspective here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=parenting+style+questionnaire

As to regulations, you may need to contact the authors or journal about whether the scale is permissible for commercial use. I've only ever used scales for academic use.


There are studies where higher order moments are analyzed. Just off the top of my head, see (Johnson, Carothers, Deary, 2008). The actual point of this study was to examine the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (which the data was found to be strongly consistent with), however they also analyzed the distributions of ability more generally. They analyze the Scottish Mental Survey data, which tested essentially all children of Scotland of a given age. They find that the distribution is definitely unsymmetrical with more people below the mode. Here is the relevant part of the abstract:

  ... Clear analysis of the actual distribution of
  general intelligence based on large and appropriately
  population-representative samples is rare, however. Using
  two population-wide surveys of general intelligence in
  11-year-olds in Scotland, we showed that there were substantial
  departures from normality in the distribution,
  with less variability in the higher range than in the lower.
  Despite mean IQ-scale scores of 100, modal scores were
  about 105... This is consistent with a model
  of the population distribution of general intelligence as a
  mixture of two essentially normal distributions, one reflecting
  normal variation in general intelligence and one
  reflecting normal variation in effects of genetic and environmental
  conditions involving mental retardation.

See the study for further discussion around kurtosis and skewness. They also reference other studies you may find valuable.


Have IQ-type measures been tried for other animals?

Like any simple-seeming cognitive sciences question, it is important to start with a series of disclaimers. It might seem like human intelligence or intelligence more generally is an intuitive concept, but once you start to explore your intuition or look at historic definitions of intelligence, you see that intelligence is a very ill-defined and slippery concept. You could, of course, take the behaviorist view, and define intelligence as performance on IQ-tests, and then your question has a simple answer: no, we can't measure that in most animals.
Alternatively, you might try to look at general behaviors that you usually associate with intelligence, then you can often come up with tests for animals. However, this might challenge some of your preconceptions. I want to provide two example tests (but many many more exist) to illustrate my point.
When we usually think of 'intelligence' we are eager to associate things like behavioral flexibility and innovation with it. Both of these can be tested.
Serial discrimination reversal learning
Serial discrimination reversal learning is a relatively standard procedure for studying animal cognition. The first reference I can find to this specific methodology is from 1966 in the sea lion (Schusterman, 1966), but the basic ideas of using similar tests in animals was already common practice before WW2 (Spence, 1936).
The task is usually given in the form of a choice between two actions (say pushing a button). At first whenever the animal clicks the left button, it is given a treat, and nothing for the right button. This training phase is continued until the animal learns that left button gives food. At this point, the reversal phase is enacted, and suddenly the left button stops giving food, and the right button does, and the animal is trained to associate the right button with food.
These learning, reversal, learning cycles are repeated several times and the rate of change from one button to the other after reversal, and consistency of picking the correct button during learning are tracked to give a measure of the animals behavioral flexibility. There is great inter-species variation on this, but also a lot of intra-species variation.
Innovation tasks
Innovation tasks are popular in the context of social learning, where the animal (and the species) has to balance between innovating and copying behavior (Reader & Laland, 2003). The classic example of this is English greats tits learning to break the foil caps of home-delivered milk bottles to eat the cream at the top (Hawkins, 1950).
An example I want to highlight is from Griffin et al. (2013), where myna birds where tested with a novel extractive foraging task. In this task, birds faced difficult foraging tasks like having to pull out a piece of paper from a champagne flute before getting food, or by having to open a dish with a lid that could only be lifted by a hook in the middle and not from the side. Birds show great interspecies and intraspecies diversity on these sort of innovation tasks.
Challenging preconceptions
Naively, one might expect both reversal learning and innovation to be important components of intelligence, and 'smarter' animals to do better on both. This intuition would be well supported if you looked at the inter-species level, you would find an increase in innovation and behavioral flexibility with relative brain size. However, at the intra-species level, Griffin et al. (2013) show that this is not necessarily the case. Among myna birds, those that do better on the innovation task, tend to perform worse on the reversal learning, and those that do worse on the innovation task, tend to perform better on the reversal learning. This means that if you are looking for variation within a species, then you have to be careful with your tests. Two tests that both correspond to an intuitive notion of "intelligence" in humans, might in fact correspond to opposite ends of the spectrum in the non-human animal.
References
Griffin, A. S., Guez, D., Lermite, F., & Patience, M. (2013). Tracking Changing Environments: Innovators Are Fast, but Not Flexible Learners. PloS One, 8(12), e84907.
Hawkins, T. (1950). Opening of Milk Bottles By Birds. Nature 165(4194): 435–436.
Lefebvre, L. (2011). Taxonomic counts of cognition in the wild. Biol. Lett. 7: 631–633.
Reader, S.M. & Laland, K.N. (2003). Animal Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schusterman, R.J. (1966) Serial discrimination-reversal learning with and without errors by the California sea lion. J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 9: 593–600.
Spence, K. W. (1936). The nature of discrimination learning in animals. Psych. Rev,, 43(5): 427.


What is the difference between behavioral science and cognitive science?

The cognitive sciences are largely an element of the behavioral sciences.

The subject matter of the behavioral sciences is animal or human behavior. It is an interdisciplinary endeavor that involves a diverse set of fields such as psychology, ethology, behavioral genetics, criminology, etc.

The cognitive sciences study how the mind determines behavior via mental processes such as perception, reasoning, emotion, and volition. This also is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth (see for example Harré, 2002). In the sense that the ultimate goal of (most) of the cognitive sciences is to explain behavior, they can be regarded as behavioral sciences. At the same time, it is clear that not all behavioral sciences focus on the mind as their explaining variable. Therefore it is the broader term.

It is important to note, however, that the cognitive sciences may investigate the mind without observing actual behavior in a given study. For example, there may be brain imaging studies without any behavioral measures. As another example, artificial intelligence research may simulate thought processes as a means to understand human reasoning, but conceptualize and measure behavior only in a very abstract sense.

Sometimes, the term "behavioral science" is used more strictly to connote a focus on behavioral experimentation and observation. This usage would exclude some research within the realm of the cognitive sciences.

Finally, there is research that may be regarded as cognitive science that is not a behavioral science in any sense of the term. A case in point is artificial intelligence research that does not aim at simulating or understanding animal or human thinking.

References

Harré, R. (2002). Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction. London: SAGE.


experimental tracking and treating bipolar disorder

I am not from a pure field of neuroscience so I did a bit of research. (Part put in bold by me is the bit which pertains to Bipolar Disorder (BPD))

Simon N Young of McGill University in Montréal, Quebec, Canada said in ResearchGate:

  While catecholamines and serotonin in the blood and urine are not derived from the brain sometimes, for reasons that are not known, they do reflect brain levels. For example, urinary dopamine is low in Parkinson's disease (Barbeau, Murphy & Sourkes, 1961) even though urinary dopamine levels are thought to be derived mainly from dopamine formation in the kidney. However, urinary dopamine is not a diagnostic test for Parkinson's disease. There are many papers that measured serotonin related compounds in blood or plasma in psychiatric disorders and there is evidence that sometimes there can be a correlation between blood, or plasma, and brain measures (Yan, et. al. 1993).

The Lundbeck Institute's Brain Explorer website explains that studies of serotonin receptors show "substantial evidence for the role of serotonin in patients with bipolar disorder." Research about serotonin and the way it is metabolized indicates a reduced concentration of serotonin metabolites in bipolar disorder patients (Source).

A quick Google Scholar search for "bipolar disorder and serotonin" produces a list of many studies including:

López-Figueroa, et al. (2004)
Mundo, et al. (2001) and
Rees et al. (1997).

For the bit I do know a bit about, treatment for problems with serotonin levels include SSRIs — Fluoxetine, Paroxetine or Sertraline for example — which work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

References

Barbeau, A., Murphy, G. F., & Sourkes, T. L. (1961). Excretion of dopamine in diseases of basal ganglia. Science, 133(3465), 1706-1707.DOI: 10.1126/science.133.3465.1706-a PMID: 13686753

López-Figueroa, A. L., Norton, C. S., López-Figueroa, M. O., Armellini-Dodel, D., Burke, S., Akil, H., ... & Watson, S. J. (2004). Serotonin 5-HT1A, 5-HT1B, and 5-HT2A receptor mRNA expression in subjects with major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Biological psychiatry, 55(3), 225-233.
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2003.09.017

Mundo, E., Walker, M., Cate, T., Macciardi, F., & Kennedy, J. L. (2001). The role of serotonin transporter protein gene in antidepressant-induced mania in bipolar disorder: preliminary findings. Archives of general psychiatry, 58(6), 539-544.
DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.58.6.539

Rees, M., Norton, N., Jones, I., McCandless, F., Scourfield, J., Holmans, P., ... & Redman, K. (1997). Association studies of bipolar disorder at the human serotonin transporter gene (hSERT; 5HTT). Molecular psychiatry, 2(5), 398.
DOI: 10.1038/sj.mp.4000256

Yan, D., Urano, T., Pietraszek, M. H., Shimoyama, I., Uemura, K., Kojima, Y., ... & Takada, A. (1993). Correlation between serotonergic measures in cerebrospinal fluid and blood of subhuman primate. Life sciences, 52(8), 745-749.
DOI: 10.1016/0024-3205(93)90237-W PMID: 7680408


Psychology Research, Questionnaire Help Needed

You said in your comments

  my goal of research is to figure out actual possible effects. In second approach, effects are being tried to figure out from the audience. While in first approach, direct questions mentioning effects with binary options are asked. I think in that case, second approach is better. What would you have chosen?

Opinion-based questions are off-topic here as we require questions which can be answered based on science rather than what individuals think is correct.

In order to answer your question without opinion being involved, I am going to have to reflect it back to you in order for you to be able to determine the best approach for your needs.

First of all, you need to ask yourself

  How can I work out the possible effects of permissive parenting via a questionnaire?

Once you have your answer to that question you are almost there on deciding how your are going to approach the questions within the questionnaire.

If you look at the questions in the first approach, with the exception of question 2, they all start with

  Do you think....?

These questions are looking for your audiences opinion on permissive parenting.  You need to ask yourself if you can gain knowledge of the actual effects of permissive parenting from these questions.  If you can, then great.  Go down that route and devise a list of questions which can give you the results.  If not, then look at another approach.

Your second approach looks at what kind of parenting your audience may have had and then looks at their opinion on a range of things.  Will their opinion-based answers in the second half give you what you need to determine the possible effects of the parenting style they were brought up on?  If so, then that is the approach you need with your questionnaire.


Is there a correlation between schemas and social constructs?

Yes the two theories are related, but the theories come from two different fields, cogintive science and sociology. First the definitions :

  In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural schemata or
  schemas) describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes
  categories of information and the relationships among them

.

  Social constructionism or the social construction of reality
  (also social concept) is a theory of knowledge in sociology and
  communication theory that examines the development of jointly
  constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared
  assumptions about reality

The social construct is the jointly constructed understanding of many individuals. The understanding of one individual is stored as a schema.


How exactly do we construct perceived IQ by facial features?

The images you've linked are composites, and so probably don't contain the characteristics by which raters were able to judge IQ accurately. The original article (Kleisner, Chvátalová, & Flegr, 2014) is freely available and appears to answer your question in its abstract:

  Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a broader distance between the eyes, a larger nose, a slight upturn to the corners of the mouth, and a sharper, pointing, less rounded chin. By contrast, the perception of lower intelligence is associated with broader, more rounded faces with eyes closer to each other, a shorter nose, declining corners of the mouth, and a rounded and massive chin.

These differences only relate to perceived intelligence, not measured intelligence.
From the conclusion:

  No specific traits that correlated with real intelligence were detected with standard geometric morphometric methods. Men and women with specific facial traits were perceived as highly intelligent. However, these faces of supposed high and low intelligence probably represent nothing more than a cultural stereotype because these morphological traits do not correlate with the real intelligence of the subjects.

The authors speculate on (but did not analyze) other factors that might explain the perceptibility of actual intelligence apart from the factors visible in the composites, including:

  Particular configurations of eyes or gaze, colour of eyes, hair and skin, or skin texture.

All of these characteristics would be wiped out in facial composites, so you probably can't actually perceive intelligence accurately from the images you've embedded according to this study.

Reference
Kleisner, K., Chvátalová, V., & Flegr, J. (2014). Perceived intelligence is associated with measured intelligence in men but not women. PloS One, 9(3), e81237. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0081237.


I think you've got a reasonable handle on why learning vocabulary in a single, fixed order is probably not a great idea. You may also be interested in what is called context-dependent memory, where you recall things best in a context similar to that which you learned those things in (shitty sentence, but you know what I mean).


What differences of opinion led to the Kahneman-Gigerenzer feud?

I have been quite astonished by this nonsensical yet lasting quarrel. You didn't find how they disagree because they don't disagree. The sole difference is that if asked "are human rational ?", Gigerenzer answers "yes", Kahneman answers "no".

However, their model of human reasoning are consistent with each other. They just don't use the word "rational" in the same way.

When asked whether humans are rational, Gigerenzer understands the question as "Are human cognitive mecanisms fitted to the environment ?", whereas Kahneman understands this question as "Are human taking decisions that maximize their utility function ?". Kahneman study decisions, and he finds that they are not good/not efficient (i.e., not rational). Gigerenzer study reasoning mechanisms (his heuristics), and he argues that those mechanisms are good/efficient (i.e, rational). Decisions and mechanisms are not the same thing.

If you ask Gigerenzer whether humans take decisions that maximize their utility function, he will happily answer "No". Indeed, Gigerenzer wants people to take better decisions, but he will not call those "more rational decisions".
If you ask Kahneman whether human cognitive mecanisms are adapted to the environment, he will happily answer "Obviously, because evolution is true". To me, Kahneman's definition of rationality makes much more sense.

For a more extended discussion, you can find the following paper which settles the question on google scholar : Samuels, R., Stich, S., & Bishop, M. (2012). Ending the Rationality Wars. Collected Papers, Volume 2: Knowledge, Rationality, and Morality, 1978-2010, 2, 191.


What are the most effective psychological techniques for unlearning information

From the book memory the following extract might be helpful:

  …, the association between a stimulus and a trace will be weakened
  whenever that trace is retrieved inappropriately. In effect, the bond
  between the cue and the target gets “punished”. For example, suppose
  that you try to retrieve the new password to your e-mail account.
  According to the unlearning view, if you recall your old password and
  realize the mistake, the association between the cue password and the
  original password will get weakened, decreasing the chances that it
  will pop up again in the future. If the old password is punished often
  enough, the association might grow so weak that it will no longer
  activate that trace; stimulus will be decoupled from the response.

So if the old information is punished many times it will start to loose its strength, and if at the same time the new information is rewarded, the new information will replace the old.

Reference:

Melton, A., & Irwin, J. (1940). The influence of degree of interpolated learning on retroactive inhibition and the overt transfer of specific responses. American Journal of Psychology , 53, 173-203.


There is some truth to dopamine correlating with heightened motivation (but dopamine can also be too much of a good thing, such in the case of behavioral addictions, like pathological gambling, especially the presumed iatrogenic kind) However, tiredness or more prceisely sleep depravation affects dopamine receptors so it will impair many brain functions besides motivation. So the advice is probably far more straightforward to formulate as "don't waste your good hours with distractions only to get to work when you're tired".

Furthermore, if the hypodopaminergia hypothesis for ADHD is true, then "preserve your dopamine by not getting distracted" is cart-before-the horse advice since under this etiological assumption, the low-dopamine condition is the cause of distractibility rather than its effect.

There's somehting to be said aobut the kinds of distractions you list:

  Today's society is pleasure seeking. We expect to obtain pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography, games and gadgets whenever we want them. The problem: with this type of pleasure-maximizing choice behaviour we may be turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot. Pleasure-only activities are fun. In excess, however, such activities might have negative effects on our biopsychological health: they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms underlying choice behaviour. Choice behaviour becomes biased towards short-term pleasure-maximizing goals, just as in the addicted brain (modulated by the amygdala, posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex' (VMPFC), striatum, nucleus accumbens; ‘A-system’) and away from long-term prosperity and general well-being maximizing objectives (normally ensured by the insula, anterior VMPFC, hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); ‘I-system‘).

This is not something revolutionary. It's well known that a temporal discounting function is encoded in brains as adaptation/response to the schedule of rewards over time. This almost certainly involves more complex processes (such as long term potentiation and other forms of plasticity) than a simple reservoir-of-dopamine model.

There are certainly researchers looking into behavioral addictions in general, and in particular internet pornography addiction, interet gaming disorder and social-media addiction, but insofar these haven't received the wider acceptance that comes with blessing of being included in the DSM, ICD and so forth (except for gamblig addiction).


"runs" or "sessions" in Structural MRI - Purpose and Implications for Quality Control

It is common to remove especially motion-corrupted MRI runs without excluding the subject.
Without more knowledge about the project it's hard to know why exactly they have multiple runs present and whether there are differences between runs or just repeated scans. It may be that the operators made sure to collect more data when they suspected subjects had too much motion during the scan, they may have done so randomly or by convenience (such as according to patient comfort), or they may have had other reasons.
I would consult other papers published using the same data set (even the functional ones) for their inclusion criteria.


What are biologically plausible ways to model binocular disparity?

Neural Mechanisms of Stereoscopic Vision:
This paper is a 1998 review of the experimental data surrounding stereoscopic vision.

Neural Encoding of Binocular Disparity: Energy Models, Position Shifts, and Phase Shifts:
In this paper, Heeger puts forward computational models of binocular disparity using phenomenological models of neurons (i.e., using receptive fields of neurons, not using biophysical mechanisms).

Neural Models of Stereoscopic Vision:
A 1991 review of computational models of neural responses to binocular disparity.


Does playing video games increase attention and learning agility, therefore career performance

I think your references are good examples of the way that some of this research is covered in the media (World of Warcraft is good for you! Yay!) as opposed to the academic research which is much more cautious and limited. You seem to be familiar with the 10+ years of research by Bavelier, Green and colleagues showing improvements in attention. The first part of your title/question ("Does playing video games increase attention and learning agility?") is well discussed by those papers, and also by this SE answer. My take on it is that there remains some controversy, particularly about whether games (and it is normally action video games they are talking about) actually CAUSE improvements, and the degree to which that transfers to more general tasks.

The second part of your question (does playing games enhance your career performance) is always going to depend a lot on what careers you are talking about. I wouldn't read too much into the McKinley and Rosser papers which you cite, as they both seem to look at highly specific "simulation-like" careers (drone pilot and endoscopic surgery), and I don't find it hugely surprising that skills from gaming transfer there. I'm also not sure of the definition of "learning agility" which seems a bit vague, and would want to see the evidence that "computer programmer at google" requires particular skill X. Why does it "feel very uncomfortable to make the conscious decision to play video games, in order to boost career performance"? Perhaps it is because such gaming takes time (indeed the amount that some spend is astounding), and that is time that could instead be spent on other sorts of more conventional education and training.

So my short answer to your last question is that those studies are not valid for endorsing gaming to boost general career performance, and that you should seek specific training for whatever career you want (be it something game-like or not).


Precise term for a sort of social pressure

The first practice (sometimes called ladies' nights or similar) is a form of sex-based pricing and is seen by some as a form of commoditization
 (aka commodification) of women. It's illegal in the UK and parts of US.

The casino design part of your question is mostly unrelated, although some casinos surely use even more blatant commodification of women as part of their strategy [for attracting men], such as skimpy outfits for their female employees. The things you ask about such having slots right in your face at the entrance has been (traditionally) considered to be superior to empty entrance lobbies at attracting more bets, but it's not totally clear if that works by peer pressure, exposure or a combination. This type of (heavy) gaming casino design with machines everywhere starting from the entrance is also called Friedman-type after Bill Friedman who wrote a book-size document promoting it.

More recent studies such as Finlay et al. (2009) found however that creating a playground atmosphere is what encourages most bets from most people, simply because they spend more time in the casino. This type of casino design was promoted by Roger Thomas although the playground name for it apparently came from an academic, David Kranes. Interestingly the crowding (of people) in this type of playground casino design is reduced compared to the traditional "gaming" one. Apparently this gets women to bet more than they had planned, but has little effect on men; quoting from the Finlay (2009) study:

  Relative to a densely crowded casino (high information load), a sparsely
  crowded casino (low information load) was more harmful for females who
  reported higher levels of intention to gamble beyond planned levels in the less
  crowded condition. For males, at-risk intention was not affected by crowding.
  For both genders, crowding had no significant impact on restoration and pleasure.
  Tuan (1977) characterized crowding as “an awareness that one is observed”
  (p. 60). A sparsely crowded gambling venue may increase gambling intentions
  among females because they feel unobserved. This release from inhibition is
  not characteristic of males. Loo (1978) indicated that female adults tend to
  react more positively to a dense crowd than do males. Females are more inclined
  to be cooperative which is conducive to a dense crowd. In contrast, males are
  more inclined to be competitive which will be enhanced with a dense crowd.
  These results suggest that females should be counseled to avoid gambling in
  relative isolation. Note that in the case of crowding, a high information load is
  protective for females.


How exactly do "you" think and interact with your body?

You have asked an excellent question. However, this innocently short question involves many dimensions: the philosophical discussion of consciousness, the neurobiological basis of motor movements, reflexive actions, relationship between sensory and motor areas in the brain etc. I'll try my best to elaborate on my answer: meanwhile, your best bet would be to search the term "Control Consciousness" online.

Here is an extract that may (if you can navigate through jargon) help guide you in the right direction. Note that the author is trying to argue for the position that the difference between conscious and unconscious motor tasks depends on the hierarchy of the motor cortex:

Terms:

Allocentric-Egocentric: Allocentric refers to being linked to a reference frame based on the external environment and independent of one's current location in it. For example, giving the direction as "north," as opposed to "right" (which would be egocentric).

  The main idea of ‘‘directness’’ here means something like ‘‘not
  mediated by sensory inputs or imagery thereof.’’ To illustrate, even
  on the sensory theory, motor commands have an indirect influence: I
  turn my head and thus see something other than what I was looking at.
  But here the changes exerted on the conscious state by the motor
  command are mediated by changes in sensory input. If motor commands
  themselves or copies of motor commands - so-called efference
  copies — can make a difference on conscious states without the
  difference being mediated by changes caused to sensory inputs, then
  this would be an instance of the influence of motor commands being
  direct. As stated, the most basic form of the theory is inadequate for
  distinguishing conscious from unconscious control states. Not just any
  contribution from motor commands will make a contribution to
  consciousness. This is especially evident in the case of unconscious
  control states. What is needed, then, is a means for distinguishing
  conscious control states from unconscious control states. And here an
  extension of AEI can do the trick. The applicability of AEI to motor
  systems looks to be a straightforward affair. First, motor systems are
  arranged hierarchically in much the same manner as sensory systems,
  with the highest levels being most remote (in terms of intervening
  connections) from the periphery of the nervous system. Focusing here
  just on cortex, the highest level is in the prefrontal cortex, the
  lowest level is in the primary motor cortex, and intermediate is in
  the premotor cortex. Further, there exist both forward projections and
  back projections between successive levels of the motor hierarchy
  (Churchland, 2002, p. 72). We may further characterize levels in the
  motor hierarchy as differing along an allocentric-egocentric
  dimension. To illustrate, a high-level motor representation may have
  an abstract content such as 'Grab a coffee mug' - a content that abstracts
  away from low-level egocentric details about the precise sets of
  muscular contractions required to get the job done. The most specific
  details will be the task of motor representations at the lowest levels
  of the motor hierarchy.

Sources:

Control Consciousness
Pete Mandik
Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010) 643–657

Brain-wise: Studies in neurophilosophy.
Churchland, P. S.
(2002). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Additional Reading:

Consciousness of action., The Blackwell companion to consciousness (pp. 540–550).
Jeannerod, M. (2007). M. Velmans & S. Schneider (Eds.)
Oxford, England: Blackwell.


How does hPES compare to the learning rates of ANNs?

According to the paper, the advantage of this new approach over conventional ANNs, Deep Belief  Networks (DBN) and Self-Organising Networks (SON) are:

  Remains functional during online learning.
  Requires only two layers
  connected with simultaneous supervised and unsupervised learning
  Employs spiking neuron models to reproduce central features of
  biological learning, such as spike-timing dependent plasticity
  (STDP)

So arguably, hPES is superior to ANNs in terms of capability, but in terms of performance, you'll have to compare the code from his experiments with ANNs meant to accomplish the same task, but since both methodologies are designed with different purposes in mind, it might not be worth comparing. Additionally, it should be noted that although the author claims to have created a SON, the validation of this claim in the paper (and his master's thesis) is pretty weak. In the paper he only proves that the SON increases sparsity, which is not what SONs (for example Kohonen networks) are generally used for.

Finally, note that although hPES is more biologically plausible, it still has some of the same problems that ANNs have. Namely, the parameters that it takes in must be optimized for the specific task it's learning (some approaches for solving this with ANNs include Genetic Algorithms) even if it is less sensitive to parameter modification. The author mentions this investigation of parameters as being part of future work.


The relationship between working memory and emotion

Working memory and other aspects of executive function (attention, for instance) are linked. There is evidence that improving self control improves emotional outbursts (see article below).  So, improving working memory should improve self control, which should prevent emotional outbursts.

See: Denson, T. F., Capper, M. M., Oaten, M., Friese, M., & Schofield, T. P. (2011). Self-control training decreases aggression in response to provocation in aggressive individuals. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(2), 252–256. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2011.02.001


Is there a term to define the influence and sharing of common expressions among people?

You might be referring to mimicry or linguistic mimicry. Mimicry is more broad than just vocabulary and expressions, but the general principle of imitating what others in a social group are doing applies.