Is it possible to distinguish recall and calculation?

A consensus within cognitive psychology is that there really is no such thing as "computation",  though that depends how you define it. It seems all arithmetic ( + - * / ) is simply fact retrieval from long-term memory. More complex problems simply rely on the fact that we can break them down into simpler problems. For instance, when you learn to solve 364+192, you're really doing a set of simpler retrieval operations, e.g.:

Add 4+2 (6)
Add 9+6 (15)
Add 3+1+1 (carrying the one-- 5)

The only true "computation" aside from fact-retrieval is counting, which we resort to when we don't have a fact required... e.g., If I forget 4x6, then I'll add 4+4+4+4+4+4

There's still the question of whether someone memorizes 20x20=400, or whether they break this down into smaller components (2x2=4, add two 0s). It would be hard to tell what strategy someone is using here, but reaction time may give a clue. Retrieval time is going to be influenced by the number of steps in the problem, and the strength of the memory for each retrieval.  John Anderson has used his ACT-R (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/) model explicitly to model reaction time in arithmetic which can give you quantitative predictions. Still, I think in most cases it will be difficult to distinguish between such a small difference in reaction time.

Re: cognitive arithmetic as mental fact-retrieval, see Ashcraft, 1992. Or, this quote from Ashcraft, 1995:

  As I have suggested elsewhere (Ashcraft, 1992), a broad consensus has
  developed across models for issues of basic memory representation and
  processing. Current theories (e.g., Ashcraft 1992; Campbell &
  Oliphant, 1992; Sigel & Jenkins, 1989) propose that the simple
  whole-number facts (i.e. single-digit operands 0 + / x 0 through 9 +
  /x 9 are stored in an associative or network representation in
  long-term memory,with the strength of the network connections among
  operands and answers reflecting the degree of learning and mastery,
  and probably the degree to which the representations can be accessed
  via automatic processing. […] Processing strategies other than
  retrieval are prominent only in Siegler's model […]

M.H. Ashcraft (1992). Cognitive arithmetic: A review of data and theory. Cognition, 44, 75-106.

M.H. Ashcraft (1995). cognitive psychology and simple arithmetic: a review of summary and new directions. mathematical cognition.


Dreams don't always make sense, nor do they always have to make sense, although founder of the psychoanalytic field Sigmund Freud believed in dream interpretation: that dreams have a manifest content (literally what goes on in the dream) and a latent content (symbolic, not-initially-apparent meaning of the dream). It's worth noting there's no scientific evidence to back this up, and it's just something Freud believed.

In the case of your dream, it could simply be that your mind associated your neighbor's aggression/distress with a display of aggression (homicide) and somehow connected the two in one dream. Freud would probably argue something along the lines of "Your repressed anger or frustration towards this individual manifests itself in the form of a dream in which he is murdered". Don't overthink this, and don't think your dream means anything bad. Dreams can be pretty bizarre.


Your discussing the cog sci called graphology. It doesn't really work in general cases but its a nice idea. I would say its a happy accident that they look alike. My letter R look like my father's R because I wanted to please him at that age so I mimicked his handwriting.

Graphology is the study of handwriting. As a theory or practice for inferring a person's character, disposition, and attitudes from their handwriting, graphology is generally considered pseudoscience.
Graphology has been controversial for more than a century. Although supporters point to the anecdotal evidence of thousands of positive testimonials as a reason to use it for personality evaluation, most empirical studies fail to show the validity claimed by its supporters.

-wikipedia


What happens to brain during meditation?

I'm not sure about what happens in the brain while someone is actually meditating (i.e., the state effect of meditation), but a meta-analysis from last year (Fox et al., 2014) looked carefully at what long term brain changes result from meditation. This is from the abstract:

  Anatomical likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis found eight brain regions consistently altered in meditators, including areas key to meta-awareness (frontopolar cortex/BA 10), exteroceptive and interoceptive body awareness (sensory cortices and insula), memory consolidation and reconsolidation (hippocampus), self and emotion regulation (anterior and mid cingulate; orbitofrontal cortex), and intra- and interhemispheric communication (superior longitudinal fasciculus; corpus callosum).

The paper is available online here: http://www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/Fox2014-MeditationMorphometry.pdf


Any documented applications of engineering psychology?

After some brief research, it seems that most mechanical forms that are designed with human use in mind are examples of engineering psychology. Engineering psychologists specialize in the relationship between humans and the products we use every day.

Tufts University, MA, offers a major in engineering psychology called "Bachelor of Science in Human Factors Engineering (Engineering Psychology)" which seems to support this idea.

So any tool that has been designed specifically to improve the relationship between humans and their working environment is an applied example. Take, for example, this hilarious hamster wheel desk. Probably not the greatest example of engineering psychology, but an interesting example anyway.

Perhaps a more practical example, taken from a text-book:

  Research by engineering psychologists has demonstrated that using cell phones while driving degrades performance by increasing driver reaction time, particularly among older drivers, and can lead to higher accident risk among drivers of all ages. These and similar research findings are instigating state regulation of cell phone use.


Is there a reduction of "Brain Fog" with fewer hours of sleep?

The scientific concept which most closely matches your description of "brain fog" is sleep inertia.

Any theories on why this may happen?

First, a brief detour.  Sleep is divided up into 5 stages (stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and REM). Since 2007, NREM sleep has been reclassified into stages N1, N2, N3, with N3 being a combination of the former stages 3 and 4; however, most scientific papers are still using the old system, so I'll refer to them by the old stage names.  Below, you can see a typical hypnogram, where sleep stage is plotted versus time for one night's sleep.  Cycles through the night tend to progress from 1→2→3→2→REM, but can change unexpectedly if the subject is awakened.

(image from Wikipedia)
While sleep inertia has been well researched since the late 70s, its definition relies on changes in responses to behavioral measures rather than any specific anatomical structures that might be involved.  In other words, it is difficult to "diagnose" someone with sleep inertia without seeing their performance on a demanding cognitive task.
It is known that waking up results from a signal that travels between the reticular system of the thalamus to the thalamus itself, and from the thalamus onto the cortex.  Many studies have used fMRI as a means to catch the brain as it falls asleep, but there don't seem to be too many which capture that moment of awakening.
Sleep staging (how levels of sleep are scored, as seen above) relies on EEG measures, so it is natural that after a subject wakes up from a study, their EEG signals can continue to be measured.  This gives researchers an opportunity to see into the dynamics of the cortex, but anatomical resolution and involvement of subcortical structures (like the thalamus) is not measurable.  It would be nice to have a functional picture of subcortical activity to gauge the progression of waking.
A recent EEG study by Marzano (2011) found that the waking brain had a higher degree of delta activity in occipito-parietal (more posterior) areas, and a lower degree of delta activity in the frontal areas.  They found increases in beta activity in the frontal areas, which tended to be stronger after awakening from stage 2 sleep than from REM sleep.  This study did not attempt to localize any anatomical structures, but in general indicates that more posterior portions of the brain (perhaps associated with vision and posture) tended to mimic the activity found in slow-wave sleep for a time after awakening.
Sleep inertia has been found to depend on

prior sleep duration
sleep stage prior to being awake
time of day of awakening

and last between 30 minutes and 3-4 hours depending on prior sleep deprivation and other factors.
However, the effects of it seem to vary greatly based on the task that the brain is asked to attend to during that time.

Is anyone familiar with any research regarding less brain fog with less sleep?

On the extreme timescale of a short nap, this has been shown to be true, but the results can be extrapolated to longer time scales.  Tassi (2000) reported on a study in which the subjects took 20, 50, and 80 minute naps.  The 50 minute nap-takers were found to have more intense sleep inertia, most likely due to the chance to lapse into a higher percentage of slow wave sleep during that time (stages 3 + 4 under the old system, and stage N3 in the new one) and potentially not return to stage 1 or 2 before awakening.  The 80 minute nappers, which one might think would have worse sleep inertia upon waking, were able to get into REM sleep, and so experienced less sleep inertia (this is a slight contradiction to Marzano's result above, but I think Tassi's assertion is more widespread in the literature).  However, Tassi also reported a study where decrements in performance were reported in REM sleep with a higher density of eye movements.
Sleep deprivation tends to increase the amount of deeper sleep once the person has the opportunity to rest.  In that case, regardless of stage upon awakening, the sleep inertia tends to be worse.
Matchock (2010) has reevaluated some of the experimental evidence in light of circadian influences.  He added ultradian phase (the marker of one's progress through the circadian day) and whether awakenings were forced or self-imposed to Tassi's list of factors above. Levels of cognition and performance, both hindered in sleep inertia situations, are found not to be uniform throughout the 24 hour day.  Matchock reported on studies where late afternoon naps were more restorative and hindered cognitive function less (less sleep inertia).  Other findings in his review found a relationship between both drops in core body temperature and body temperature of the extremities (both factors known to vary over the day) tended to increase sleep inertia.

[1] Marzano, C., Ferrara, M., et al (2011). Electroencephalographic sleep inertia of the awakening brain.  Neuroscience 176:308-317.
[2] Matchock, R.L. (2010). Circadian and sleep episode duration influences on cognitive performance following the process of awakening. International Review of Neurobiology, 93:129-151. doi
[3] Tassi, P., Muzet, A. (2000) Sleep Inertia. Sleep Medicine Reviews 4:341–353.


What does "they tend within and between classes" mean in 'The Irreducible Mind'?

This is kinda unclear so I'm not sure my reading is the correct one. But for me the two classes are the electric/magnetic class of imaging techniques and the hemodynamic/metabolic class of imaging techniques, and each class has multiple methods within it. It's a world that looks like this: {[EEG,MEG],[PET,fMRI]}. Within a single class, the multiple methods have complementary strengths and weaknesses, at the same time, the two classes have complementary strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Within a class, you can be looking at the same type of information but have different trade-offs in terms of temporal and spatial resolution, or image quality and expense, depending on the method. Between classes, you're looking at fundamentally different types of information, so you get a different (complementary) picture of the brain's activity.
Squashing both of those contrasts down into one sentence, you have "they tend within and between classes to have complementary strengths and weaknesses"

Probably.


What type of imagination is responsible for hallucinations?

There are certainly some anecdotal stories that hallucinations (as part of psychosis) occured in highly creative people e.g. van Gogh or in the families of some creative people, such as the story of James Joyce's daugher. But that's anecdotal evidence. I tried to find whether some (psychometric) measure of imagination correlates with hallucinations, but not much luck with that insofar. [And that's not because such measures of imagination don't exist at all; some have been proposed. I'll update this part if I find something relating them to hallucinatons.]

What I could find out is that hallucinations are correlated with a confusion between imagination and (actual) perception, both visually and auditory.

On a slightly more positive note, the propensity for hallucinations was also associated with a better pattern matching ability in some visual tests with highly confusing images, but this was only when exposed to the full image before, i.e. a form of bias toward prior knowledge.

Perhaps the above aren't so surprising given that a lot of normal people (about half it seems) hallucinate in sensory deprivation experiments. A somewhat similar situation was observed in people who experienced hallucinations as a side-effect of higher doses of tricyclic antidepressants, namely that their hallucinations occured when background noise was low. Charles Bonnet syndrome is anohter case of reduced stimuli; Oliver Sacks has a talk at TED about it. So if anything, hallucinations are associated with not enough perception.

Note however that there's a rich tradition in philosophy of discussing imagination and hallucinations together. E.g. there's a MIT Press book titled
Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology with quite a few hits inside for "imagination" So it's quite possible I've missed some relevant issue. Do note as a caveat that one of the papers (by K. Farkas) in that book mentioned early on that

  The notion of hallucination most commonly discussed in philosophy is somewhat
  different from the notion used in psychology or psychiatry.

Likewise there's a Humanities paper that discusses them together. (Despite the dubious venue in which it was published, it is cited by papers in more reputable journals, so perhaps worth a read--but it's 50 pages, so don't expect me to do it.)


For the unipolar configuration, why can't we just use Earth ground as
  our reference instead of having a reference electrode or performing an
  average of measurements on all the electrodes?

The ground has a different function than the reference. The reference is the electrode that the voltage is recorded against; a voltage is a potential difference so you need two electrodes. The ground is used for common mode rejection. The primary purpose of the ground is to prevent power line noise from interfering with the small biopotential signals of interest (source: Biopac).

  For the bipolar configuration, if the electrodes are too close to each
  other, wouldn't we measure very low voltages since much of the signal
  appearing on one electrode would also be picked up by the other?

Yes. The smaller the distance, the better the rejection of unwanted signals. But with that, you're also risk to throw away the baby with the bath water.


Why am I sometimes astonished when I doze

When you are awake, the muscles in your body are always at least a little tense to keep your body in your current position. Even when you lie down (while awake) you will usually not be completely relaxed, but holding yourself "in place".

When you begin to fall asleep, your muscles relax, and depending on the position you were in, part of your body will follow gravity and begin to sink from the "tense" wakeful position into a relaxed posture. Your body notices this involuntary movement of your body parts (you may even dream of a falling sensation or some movement) and startle you awake, often with a sudden countermovement to "catch" what your subconscious perceives to be a dangerous "fall".

If you fall asleep at your desk, as you seem to do, you may well knock over something on the table in front of you, when your arms jerk forward to prevent you from falling.

It happens to all of us, except that most of us go to bed to sleep ;-)


Depression can be defined as "a state of feeling sad" (Merriam-Webster), which is an emotion or a feeling in the heart.

Depression can develop as a reaction to a thought, demand, event or word someone said to you.

You may have a certain "character" or "temper" that makes you vulnerable for things that hurt you and make you sad. So, it is correct to say that you are not depressed as a person but you may be prone to become depressed when something hits you.

Depression is a feeling and not a disease and it usually does not come from an underlying disease, but from the conflicts in your thoughts, attitudes, believes and relationships - which you can accept or change, as appropriate. Depression can make you stop functioning, which you can call a disease, but depression on its own is not already a disease.


complex name - surrounding you with inferior (less talented) people

It's not greek, but... Wills classified this as a group behavior, and called it downward social comparison. The gist of the theory is that a person attempts to feel better about him-/herself by socializing and comparing with someone considered performing poorer in areas important to him/her.

Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90(2), 245-271.


Can we draw conclusions about content of thoughts from neural firing patterns?

This is a complicated and loaded question. As Neuroskeptic noted, our understanding of consciousness is very poor (in fact, we don't know how to define it most of the time). To see some of the best current definitions, take a look at:
What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?
We definitely can't infer arbitrary properties of consciousness from something like fMRI. In general, we don't have a clear mapping from brain to mind, and thus all studies are inherently correlational in nature. Since all the work is correlational, it is thus not usually mentioned and the popular press tends to misconstrue this as a for-sure causal connection. But does that mean we can't infer any thoughts? No!
We can "read thoughts" well enough to produce an brain-computer interface. Adapted from my earlier answer:
Erik Ramsey is locked-in syndrome patient and is incapable of movement apart from his eyes. However, he has control of his brain enough to be distinguished by electrodes implanted into his cerebral cortex (Guenther, 2009). Although the sensors were implanted in the motor-area responsible for speech (which you would expect typical inviduals to have control over, since they can speak), the understanding of how to decode this is not full. Thus, the patient had to train in order to adapt to the system:

Accuracy of the volunteer's vowel productions with the synthesizer improved quickly with practice, with a 25% improvement in average hit rate (from 45% to 70%) and 46% decrease in average endpoint error from the first to the last block of a three-vowel task.

In a much more dramatic experiment, Adrian Owen has used brain imaging techniques as means of communicating with vegetative-state patients. It is known that visualizing playing-tennis and walking around the house produce very distinct (to an fMRI) activation in the brain. So Owen used that capability to allow a vegetative-state patient to answer yes-or-no questions. He asked the patient to imagine playing tennis for yes, navigating the house for no (Monti et al., 2010). Hence, neuroscientists think they can distinguish the thought of walking around the house versus playing tennis.
Of course, it is hard to say if this can be continued arbitrarily far, in practice or even in theory. For more info, see this question:
Is performance reducible to brain activity in an unambiguous way?
References
Guenther, F.H., Brumberg, J.S., Wright, E.J., Nieto-Castanon, A., Tourville, J.A., Panko, M., Law, R., Siebert, S.A., Bartels, J.L., Andreasen, D.S., Ehirim, P., Mao, H., & Kennedy, P.R. (2009). A wireless brain-machine interface for real-time speech synthesis. PLoS ONE, 4(12)
Monti MM, Vanhaudenhuyse A, Coleman MR, Boly M, Pickard JD, Tshibanda L, Owen AM, & Laureys S. (2010). Willful modulation of brain activity in disorders of consciousness. New England Journal of Medicine, 362(7):579-89.


Which parts of cognitive tests are under copyright? Can test rights be purchased for modification?

Disclaimer: Obviously this is not legal advice. It is just a few thoughts about what may or may not be true, let alone the fact that legal questions are intimately tied up with particular jurisdictions and so on.

What elements of a cognitive test are copyright?

Part of violating copyright is actually copying. So if you actually copy any specific part of the test, such as specific item wording, or images, or instructions, then you might be in trouble. Likewise, many test names if they are not generic might have a range of intellectual property protection including copyright, trademarks, and passing off.

In contrast taking inspiration from the the idea for a test and building your own seems a lot less likely to breach copyright. It's even better if instead of copying the idea for a test you are able to understand the scientific literature and appreciate that a certain type of test has been developed by many people already. You then take inspiration for the type of test from the literature rather than copying a particular test.

To follow on from your example, "digit span"  is an example of a common experimental task. There are many others (e.g., simple and choice reaction time, stroop tasks, various sensory discrimination tasks, etc.). Likewise, in the case of intelligence tests, there are huge numbers of subtests or item types which are not owned by anyone in particular, such as vocabulary items, analogies, general knowledge, simple mathematical questions, and so on.

You can make tests involving these kinds of tests without having to copy any particular existing test.

Likewise with all these tests there are many decisions that the test developer needs to make including specific item content, which subtests will go together, what to call the tests, how many response options to include, how many items to retain, what difficulty to choose, and so on.

If you are serious about developing a cognitive test battery then you would need to think about these ideas. You would also want to be informed about psychometrics and the many approaches that have been adopted for creating tests of a given type. With this knowledge and a plan you would not need to copy any one test.

Is it possible to buy the rights to a test to adapt it?

I imagine that if you offer enough money to the owner of the test copyright, then they would generally allow you to do this. Presumably the cost of such a deal would depend on what your planned use of the test would be. If you just want to adapt a test for your own research, then that does not challenge their business model. In fact, you sometimes might be able to do this as long as you pay for each test use or whatever the licensing scheme is. However, if you want to sell a  product that competes against their, then presumably that would cost a lot more. By way of example, I remember hearing about a case study of how a US commercial personality test was adapted to the Australian market. Australian norms were developed and some minor wording changes were made. I don't know the details of the commercial arrangement, but it clearly shows that it is possible.

In an academic context, there are many tests that are free to use, and the implied rights of use are often a little ambiguous. Academics often adapt such tests for their specific research purposes. It makes sense in this case to talk to the academic who developed the test to see whether they mind you performing the adaptation.


The art of exploiting people and taking advantage of them

From a hackers perspective I would recommend to check out a term called "social engineering". This is all about manipulating people in order to get sensitive information.

A great book about this is called The Art of Human Hacking


What is (or is there) a clear distinction between cognitive and motivational explanations for a hypothesis?

Summary: it appears that the contrast from the paper cited is based on a 1970s paradigm where a cognitive approach meant information processing applied only to problem data, whereas the motivational approach allowed for other variables, such as self-esteem, which nowadays would be described as an affective variable.

Here's the fuller context for the claim:

  we propose that—holding judged probability constant—people
  prefer to bet in a context where they consider themselves knowledgeable or competent
  than in a context where they feel ignorant or uninformed. We assume that our
  feeling of competence
  in a given context is determined by what we know relative towhat
  can be known. Thus, it is enhanced by general knowledge, familiarity, and experience,
  and is diminished, for example, by calling attention to relevant information that is not
  available to the decision maker, especially if it is available to others.

  There are both cognitive and motivational explanations for the competence hypothesis.
  People may have learned from lifelong experience that they generally do better in
  situations they understand than in situations where they have less knowledge. This expectation
  may cariy over to situations where the chances of winning are no longer higher
  in the familiar than in the unfamiliar context. Perhaps the major reason for the competence
  hypothesis is motivational rather than cognitive. We propose that the consequences
  of each bet include, besides the monetary payoffs, the credit or blame associated
  with the outcome. Psychic payoffs of satisfaction or embarrassment can result from
  self-evaluation from an evaluation by others. In either case, the credit and the blame
  associated with an outcome depend, we suggest, on the attributions for success and
  failure. In the domain of chance, both success and failure are attributed primarily to luck.
  The situation is different when a person bets on his or her judgment. If the decision
  maker has limited understanding of the problem at hand, failure will be attributed to
  ignorance, whereas success is likely to be attributed to chance. In contrast, if the decision
  maker is an "expert," success is attributable to knowledge, whereas failure can sometimes
  be attributed to chance.

So basically by "motivational explanation" they refer to is the posited existence of a "psychic payoff of satisfaction or embarrassment" in addition to the concrete/monetary one. In my view, the existence of a "psychic payoff of satisfaction or embarrassment" could also be a called a "[more] emotionally charged decision".
There's been rivers of papers on the role of emotion in decision making, e.g. see Lerner et al. (2015) for a review.

By the way (and as an aside), there's a newer paper in this area by Klein et al. (2010) saying that Heath & Tversky basically confounded two effects:

  According to the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991), this pattern derives from favorable perceptions of one’s competence. In most past tests of the competence hypothesis, ambiguity is confounded with personal controllability and the source of the ambiguity (e.g., chance vs. missing information). We unconfound these factors in three experiments and find strong evidence for independent effects of both ambiguity aversion and competence.

Klein et al. seem very careful not to call controllability anything else... or advance any hypotheses for what's behind it, but there's one older paper by Harris (1996) saying

  Evidence that perceived controllability is associated with optimistic bias is reviewed. There is sufficient evidence that people are optimistically biased about
  negative events they perceive to be controllable. More work is needed to establish
  whether this is also true of positive events. There is evidence also that people often
  hold beliefs of their personal superiority on control-related dimensions. More
  experimental studies testing hypotheses about the mechanisms linking perceived
  control and optimistic bias are required. Future work should also expand the
  sophistication with which control is treated conceptually and empirically and the range of potential mechanisms examined

Wikipedia's article on illusory superiority says that "Illusory superiority's relationship with self-esteem is uncertain" (and does cite some studies in support of this statement).

It's also interesting that perceived controllability affects quite a few other things, including neural pain response; see Salomons (2004).

And back to the general question: affect and emotion are not exactly the same thing:

  Core Affect. This term is defined as a "neurophysiological
  state consciously accessible as a
  simple primitive non-reflective feeling most evident
  in mood and emotion but always available to
  consciousness" (Russell & Feldman Barrett, 2009,
  p. 104). Examples of core affect include pleasure
  and displeasure, tension and relaxation, energy
  and tiredness. A person experiences core affect constantly,
  although the nature and intensity of affect
  vary over time. Core affect can be a component
  of emotions and moods (defined next), but it can
  also occur in pure, or isolate, form. For example,
  according to Russell (2003), "pride can be thought
  of as feeling good about oneself. The 'feeling good'
  is core affect and the 'about oneself' is an additional
  (cognitive) component" (p. 148). As explained next,
  this qualifies pride as an emotion.

Since what Heath & Tversky talk about (motivation-wise) is basically an increase/decrease in feeling good about oneself (via satisfaction or embarrassment), technically I could have said "[core-]affectively charged decision" (instead of "emotionally charged") but that sounds really like a mouthful.

Also, even the broader class of affective phenomena has been disputed as being distinguishable from cognition, although this I think is a minority view. For a broader discussion of alternative viewpoints see "On the interdependence of cognition and emotion".

  We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from cognition, (ii) the affective primacy hypothesis, that evaluative processing precedes semantic processing, and (iii) the affective automaticity hypothesis, that affectively potent stimuli commandeer attention and evaluation is automatic. We argue that affect is not independent from cognition, that affect is not primary to cognition, nor is affect automatically elicited. The second half of the paper discusses several instances of how affect influences cognition.

See also "Mechanisms of motivation–cognition interaction", which details the way motivation has been studied in psychology, which is to say in a somewhat fragmentary way:

  The preceding sections highlighted the differences in how motivation is defined and investigated in various subfields. In animal behavioral neuroscience, the emphasis is on learning and conditioning processes, using primary incentives (food, liquid, and sexual stimuli) and measuring simple behaviors (physiological reflexes, response rates, and stimulus preferences). In social and personality psychology, the emphasis is on the pursuit of temporally extended goals involving high-level incentives (power, achievement, and affiliation) and assessing self-reported beliefs and goal striving behaviors. In cognitive neuroscience and adolescent developmental research, the emphasis is on neural representations of incentive value, typically using monetary rewards, and assessing how these modulate effortful cognitive processing. Finally, in cognitive-aging research, there is an emphasis on emotion–cognition interactions, using affectively valenced stimuli and measuring attentional and memory biases.

Unlike the cognitive/affective case, I have not seen a detailed discussion where motivation and cognition are contrasted... except this 1980s article: "Attribution bias: On the inconclusiveness of the cognition-motivation debate". Basically, there the cognitive perspective is taken to mean information processing on the problem alone, whereas the motivational perspective allows for other variables such as self-esteem. I think it's in this paradigm that Heath and Tversky phrased their contrast of cognition vs motivation.


Do the colour blind have a distinct visual cortex structure?

Interesting question! I performed a fairly extensive search in Google Scholar and Scopus using various keyword searches, including, but not limited to "color blindness and plasticity", "color blind and brain", "dichromates brain", and "monochromates brain". Strikingly, I found nothing. The reason is aptly explained by Solomon & Rosa, 2014 and I quote from their interesting review:

  As yet no anatomical correlates of color blindness have been found in the retina (Chan and Grünert,1998; Chan et al.,2001; Jusuf et al.,2006a,b), thalamus, or primary visual cortex (Goodchild and Martin,1998; Solomon, 2002).

If desirable, you should be able to re-trace the relevant citations from the cited review, as it is open source.


"Building rapport" is not actually A technique, but a general phrase that may cover a whole lot of specific techniques.

"Rapport" does not normally occur in scientific contexts, it mostly occurs within anecdotal subjects like sales and NLP.
Individual sales techniques and NLP is usually not based on science at all, so they do not care for what is scientifically correct or what can be scientifically studied.
"Rapport" consists of several smaller subjects, like trust, various psychological phenomenons, various unconscious processes, emotions, etc etc etc - which are the common phenomenons to refer to in science.
So "rapport" is nothing more than an umbrella term including several phenomenons that are far from restricted to "rapport".
Thus it would not even make sense to study "rapport" specifically.

Also note that sales techniques and NLP tutors like to give their own names on phenomenons and processes that already have a scientific name for them.
I noticed this as I read a book on NLP by Richard Bandler, and this may be another reason why "rapport" has not made its way into science.

The field of "rapport" was never meant to be based on science, and you are not meant to look those things up in science.
This means two things:

Don't expect what you learn about "rapport" to make any sense scientifically, because it's not based on science at all.
If you want to better understand that which is actually supported by science, then you need to search for a more specific phenomenon.


Your best bet is to start looking on YouTube and the Internet for various memory methods used by card memorizers, magicians, and other stunt people.  I have used them extensively, and they work.  You can also look on Amazon for books.  Tony Buzan, Harry Lorraine, Dominc O'Brien. Also the book Moonwalking with Einstein.

Don't believe all the nonsense out there about your limited memory, or it takes years of practice, or you need special supplements.  I've met SEALs who used the simple techniques taught in the books to help them.  It worked for them.


What are the key features of dreams that trigger dream recall in the waking state?

No recall happens when reading the description is probably because one is focusing on reading and visualizing it but not recalling. I think there are different key features to prompt recall for different dreams, since dreams are a mixture of several features, and their proportion or intensities varies in different dreams (Foulkes and Vogel, 1965). E.g., in a dream with intense emotion, emotion/feeling contributes more to the recalling while people, place account more for the recalling in a dream consists of events.

Foulkes, D., & Vogel, G. (1965). Mental activity at sleep onset. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 70(4), 231.


Sensory dissonance: Will the visual or auditory channel win?

Yes. The phenomenon is usually referred to as Visual Dominance or Visual Capture.

A very nice demonstration of it, is known as McGurk Effect, in which our vision of the speaker's lips biases our perception of the sound we hear [1]. The McGurk Effect can be seen in a demo video here. Another demonstration of a similar effect is ventriloquism, in which we perceive the sound as coming from somewhere "probable" (like a puppet's vigorously moving lips) and not from its true origin.

One early scientific research into the matter of resolution of conflicting information between senses was done by James Gibson, in a study from early 1930s [2], in which subjects wore prism spectacles, that made straight lines appear curved. Although this was not the main topic of the research, he reports that

  When a visually curved edge such as a meter stick was felt, it was felt as curved. This was true as long as the hand was watched while running up and down the edge. If
  the eyes were closed or turned away, the edge of course felt straight, as it in reality was. This dominance of the visual over the kinsesthetic perception was so complete that when subjects were instructed to make a strong effort to dissociate the two, i.e. to 'feel it straight and see it curved,' it was reported either difficult or impossible to do so.

Posner et al. [3] cite several studies showing visual dominance over proprioceptive, haptic and auditory information, both in perception and in memory judgments, and try to explain the origins of this effect.

Specifically addressing your question of vision versus audition, Colavita [4] conducted a study in which

  Human Ss matched an auditory and a visual stimulus for subjective magnitude. Then each stimulus was used as a cue in a reaction time task. On occasions when both stimuli were presented simultaneously, Ss’ responding was seen to be dominated by the visual stimulus. Of further interest was the finding that on some occasions of simultaneous light-tone presentation Ss were unaware that the tone had been presented. This apparent prepotency of the visual over the auditory stimulus was seen to persist across a variety of experimental conditions, which included giving Ss verbal instructions to respond to the tone when both stimuli were presented simultaneously.

However, there are also reports of the opposite case, visual information is dominated by other sources, for example by haptic information when vision is blurred [5].

Recently it has been claimed that it integration between senses is done an optimal way, i.e the more accurate source in each situation is given more weight in their combination, or relied upon to a larger extent [6]. Since vision is usually very accurate in terms of location and shape of objects in the world, it tends to be dominant more often then other senses.

References

McGurk, H., & MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices.
Gibson, J. J. (1933). Adaptation, after-effect and contrast in the perception of curved lines. Journal of experimental psychology, 16(1), 1. PDF
Posner, M. I., Nissen, M. J., & Klein, R. M. (1976). Visual dominance: an information-processing account of its origins and significance. Psychological review, 83(2), 157. PDF
Colavita, F. B. (1974). Human sensory dominance. Perception & Psychophysics, 16(2), 409-412.
Heller, M. A. (1983). Haptic dominance in form perception with blurred vision. Perception, 12(5), 607-613. PDF
Ernst, M. O., & Banks, M. S. (2002). Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal fashion. Nature, 415(6870), 429-433.


Does anyone know how to explain Quinian bootstrapping process by Carey to a layperson (like me)?

The basic idea of Quinian Boostrapping is that you start off not understanding a concept, but use a symbolic placeholder for it, and then fill in the details over time. For example, right now you don't understand Quinian Bootstrapping but you do have the placeholder term "Quinian Bootstrapping" that you can hold in your mind and relate to other things you know and learn. Over time, your placeholder is replaced with the actual concept.

Note that this is how nearly all of our concepts work. What is "water" or "planet" or "electricity"? You start off with "I learned some arbitrary word that picks out some category of thing in the universe" and then approach the real concept over time. But note that an "expert" on the concept may surprise you: "ice is a form of water even though you think it is not" and "Pluto is not a planet even though you think it is" and "the bright flashes during a storm and the stuff that makes the TV work are the same."

You asked specifically about weight. Imagine a child newly learning "weight" as opposed to "mass" (and as opposed to "density" and "volume" and other nearby terms). The child will start off just knowing that there are various terms that are picking out nearby concepts, but not understanding what makes them different. But as the child is led through examples (e.g., "the same object will weigh more on Earth than on Mars") the placeholders become elaborated into concepts.

This bootstrapping ability relies on being able to relate information from a variety of sources to an arbitrary placeholder symbol, which means it is likely unique to humans.


In NEURON simulator, how do you pan and zoom a plotted graph?

Unintuitive, but it's in the right click > View sub-menu:

Pan/translate:

Right click the chart
View > Translate
Left click drag will pan around the chart

Zoom:

Right click the chart
View > Zoom In/Out
Left click drag horizontally or vertically to zoom the x or y axis

Zoom in on a region:

Right click the chart
View > NewView
Left click on the chart to draw a box
A new window will open, drag the lower-right corner to expand the window


Are the physical sensations of an emotion due to neural activity strictly in the brain or also in the body?

Psychophysiology is totally outside of my wheelhouse, but here it goes…

Those feelings in your chest, face, arms, etc. aren't an illusion.  Indeed, it's long been argued that physiological arousal (in your body) is a core component of emotional experience (e.g., James, 1884; Russell, 1980)--alongside feelings of pleasure and displeasure.

Moreover, that you have interoceptive awareness (i.e., awareness of your internal physiological sensations; Craig, 2002) is absolutely critical for your experience of emotions (e.g., Craig, 2004).  For example, damage to the anterior insula (thought to underlie interoception) impairs the experience, recognition, and regulation of disgust (Calder et al., 2000; Woolley et al., 2014).

In fact, disgust experience is consistently associated with increased activation of the anterior insula (Lindquist et al., 2012). This highly consistent relationship reflects the nature of disgust:  It often involves some potent internal sensation, e.g., a pain in your stomach, a bad odor up your nose, a bad taste in your mouth, and so on.

We can go through the list of emotions and potentially find some consistent and specific psychophysiological profiles (e.g., fear/anxiety involving an increased heart rate, sadness involving a lower temperature), but this has never been successful (Quigley & Barrett, 2014). There seems to be a lot of variability in physiological activity across individuals, contexts, and time.

How activity in the body and the central nervous system interact is pretty complicated (intimidatingly so). But there are lots of psychophysiology guides out there (notably by Cacioppo), and Quigley and Barrett (2014) do a good job of summarizing some things.


Thesaurus for types of psychological projections

Preamble

Before I go into my answer, I should point out that where the theory of psychological projection originated from Sigmund Freud, his theories are considered by many as pseudoscientific. More can be read in my answer to this in meta

Definition of Projection

This is a psychological defence mechanism whereby beliefs, attitudes or other negative aspects from ourselves or the environment are attributed to others or other aspects of our environment (Reeves, 2013).  Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1913) contained his major thinking on the role of projection (Hurry, Novick, & Novick, 1976).

To list all possible forms of projection would be too broad for this site as it would fill a fairly thick book to do so with ample description.  Below I will outline some examples which are on the WikiPedia pag linked in the question and alongside those examples will be references to books which you are free to read to gain more.

Examples of Projection

Victim blamingThe victim of someone else's actions or bad luck may be offered criticism, the theory being that the victim may be at fault for having attracted the other person's hostility (Bingham & Tamarkin, 1985).
Projection of marital guiltThoughts of infidelity to a partner may be unconsciously projected in self-defence on to the partner in question, so that the guilt attached to the thoughts can be repudiated or turned to blame instead, in a process linked to denial.
BullyingA bully may project his/her own feelings of vulnerability onto the target(s) of the bullying activity. Despite the fact that a bully's typically denigrating activities are aimed at the bully's targets, the true source of such negativity is ultimately almost always found in the bully's own sense of personal insecurity and/or vulnerability. Such aggressive projections of displaced negative emotions can occur anywhere from the micro-level of interpersonal relationships, all the way up through to the macro-level of international politics, or even international armed conflict (Jung & von Franz, 1964).
Projection of general guiltProjection of a severe conscience[26] is another form of defense, one which may be linked to the making of false accusations, personal or political (Jung & von Franz, 1964).
Projection of hopeAlso, in a more positive light, a patient may sometimes project his or her feelings of hope onto the therapist (Casement, 1990).

References

Bingham, J. & Tamarkin, N. (1985). The Pursuit of Health: Your Mind, Your Body, Your Relationships & Your Environment. New York: Walker Press

Casement, P. (1990). Further Learning from the Patient: The Analytic Space and Process. Hove, UK: Routledge.

Hurry, A., Novick, J. & Novick, K. K. (1976). Freud's concept of projection. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 4(2), 75-88. DOI: 10.1080/00754177608254963

Freud, S. (1913). Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics Translated by A. A. Brill, 1919 London: George Routledge & Sons Limited

Jung, C. G. & von Franz, M-L. (1964) Man and his symbols. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday

Reeves, A. (2013). An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: From Theory to Practice. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.


What is the minimum angle off horizontal before a line visually appears inclined at first glance?

Vogels and Orban (1985) asked subjects to complete several thousand angle judgments at near-principal angles (horizontal or vertical). They found that the just-noticeable difference (JND), the threshold at which people could reliably detect deviation from a horizontal line, was 0.5 degrees after a 600ms exposure to the stimulus.

The real purpose of their study was to compare learning effects for judgments of deviations from principal orientations with judgments of deviations from oblique (diagonal) angles. They found that while people could double their sensitivity over extensive training to small changes in oblique angles, the principal angles showed no such learning effects, as you can see in this graph:

Additionally, the threshold for detection of changes from principal angles was about twice as good as the oblique angles, even after 5000 trials of practice discriminating oblique angles.

Reference

Vogels, R., & Orban, G. A. (1985). The effect of practice on the oblique effect in line orientation judgments. Vision research, 25(11), 1679-1687.


Is there evidence that brain and mind are separate?

Another approach to this issue is to consider whether this kind of reductionism ("mind is just a by-product of the brain") is useful. Strictly speaking, architecture is "just a by-product of physics and materials science", but there are phenomena that are usefully described at the level of architecture and would not be well-captured by the atomic and molecular properties that underlie them. The same holds for the mind and brain: we can study the neural correlates of psychological phenomena and these studies are sure to help us understand those phenomena, but they are not logically equivalent. This view has been articulated by many people, here is one (peer-reviewed) example: Miller, G.A. & Keller, J. (2000). Psychology and Neuroscience: Making Peace. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(6), 212-215. You don't need to be a dualist to hold this view, just to understand that phenomena can have different levels of analysis.


Can Transcendental meditation be used in lab setting via Digital instructor or do we need a practitioner for TM?

As per the official site:

  The TM technique is not "one size fits all." It's taught one-on-one
  and is carefully personalized for you.

  Only certified TM teachers can instruct you in the authentic TM
  technique.

You could, obviously, perform some form of meditation that you consider equivalent to it. However, you won't be able to claim that you are testing the authentic TM, which is, in general quite secretive regarding the concrete process.

There are TM dropouts who claim to reveal the whole process, like this guideline. Performing upon these also carries the risk of being considered 'not the authentic TM.'


What is the voltage that an intracortical electrode is expected to receive?

The Utah array is a multi-electrode array for intracortical recordings. In one of many publications on this device, the authors show some sample traces that reveal amplitudes generally between 5 and 40 microVolts. However, measured voltage will depend on the vigilance state of the brain, recording area, time on the millisecond scale, time on the macro scale (gliosis) and insertion depth and so forth.

Note that extracellular electrodes will never measure the high potentials that occur at the membrane surface as recorded through intracellular electrodes. Because of the distance of extracellular electrodes to the neuronal cell membranes, the signals are much smaller.

Reference
- Craig et al., Electroencephal clin Neurophysiol (1997); 102: 228-239


What is the difference between principal neurons and pyramidal cells?

Short answer
In the cortex, pyramidal cells and projection neurons can be used interchangeably, as both terms refer to the same cells.

Background
One way to classify neurons is based on their function. Two functionally distinctive types of neurons have been classified, namely

Projection neurons, which send an axon out of the structure where their soma is located, and
Intrinsic neurons, which make synapses only within the structure where their soma is located.

Hence, projection neurons cover some distance, whereas intrinsic neurons act more locally. Projection neurons are also called principal cells, and intrinsic neurons are also called interneurons (Masland, 2004).

In the cortex, projection neurons are pyramidal neurons, and account for approximately 80% of all cortical neurons Han & Šestan, 2013. They often send their axons for long distances, sometimes out of the brain altogether Beckers, 2011. They serve as both the sole output from and the largest input system to the cortex. Interneurons, in contrast, represent approximately 20% of all cortical neurons and form local synaptic connections (intrinsic) that play critical roles in shaping cortical network activity patterns Han & Šestan, 2013.

In the periphery, the term projection neuron is not used as far as I know. That doesn't mean there aren't neurons that cover great distances in the periphery; in fact, the longest axons in the human body are thought to be situated in the sciatic nerve, which runs from the base of the spinal cord to the big toe of each foot. However these cells are not referred to as projection neurons, but simply as spinal neurons.

References
- Beckers, Curr Biol (2011); 21(24): PR975
- Han & Šestan, Neuron (2013), 80(5): 1103–05
- Masland, Curr Biol (2004); 14(13): R498


Is the hypothalamus part of the limbic system?

Short answer
Yes

Background
There is no universal agreement on the total list of structures comprising the limbic system. The brain regions constituting the limbic system according to Rajmohan & Mohandas (2007) are:

Limbic cortex
Cingulate gyrus
Parahippocampal gyrus
Hippocampal formation
The dentate gyrus
Hippocampus
Subicular Complex
Amygdala
Septal area
Hypothalamus

Note that wikipedia agrees on the inclusion of the hypothalamus. I dare say that in general the hypothalamus is included as an essential component of the limbic system, as it is involved in the expression of emotional responses, such as rage and fear (Purves et al, 2001).

References
- Purves et al, Neuroscience, 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates; 2001
- Rajmohan & Mohandas Indian J Psychiatry (2007); 49(2): 132–9)


If the color black reflects no light, how are we able to see it?

Objects are visually perceived when they reflect light. A black object does not reflect any light. In other words, no photons are reflected to be detected by the photoreceptors in the retina. A black shape on a colored background appears black because its brightness approaches zero relative to its surroundings.

Black, as any other perceived hue, is a relative perception. The visual system, as any other sensory system, detects physical stimuli in a relative way. For example, under bright daylight (photopic conditions) a camera flash might appear as a weak source of light. That same flash viewed under dark (scoptopic) conditions may appear as a blinding flash. When the visual system is light-adapted, it needs a lot of photons to be able to respond to a visual stimulus. Under this condition, dark colored objects may appear black, simply because the photoreceptor's thresholds are too high. Conversely, that same dark object may appear as gray under scotopic conditions when the retina is dark-adapted (colors are not perceived under scotopic conditions - note here that black and white are not colors, but the two extremes on the perceived gray-scale).

An important thing to realize is that colors are perceptions and subject to neurophysiological processing imperfections. For example, blind people rarely perceive the world as black, despite the fact that their visual system cannot detect photons. Instead, they may perceive the world as a grayish hue, they often experience illusionary spontaneous flashes of light (phosphenes), or even entire visual scenes (Charles Bonnet syndrome). Hence, while a black object is physically defined as an object that emits/reflects no photons, it does not mean that the corresponding area in the neural representation of the visual field is silent. Perhaps on the contrary.


Is there a conventional use of the term "empirical grounding"?

A search of "empirical grounding" in my small personal article database showed more results in test validation than in qualitative (though this could be a personal bias: I'd be curious what kinds of articles your search brought up). Searching this term in the university database brings up a large variety of results, really highlighting the diversity of the use of the term (from policy to measurement).

Additionally, a reading of the Eisenhardt and Graebner article makes it clear to me that their definition of "empirical grounding" is primarily focused on the thought that the theory is grounded in the data, and not as its own distinct methodology. In their sense, this could be viewed as an aspect of grounded theory (when done correctly, it is grounded in data).

Based on this, I would say that empirical grounding is not its own method (or, if it is, certainly not a standard/well-known method). To address the second part, I do think that the term has meaning independent of grounded theory: specifically, as its name implies, it is the practice of grounding theory/methods/conclusions within data (and this has a range of applications). In my understanding, "empirical grounding" is almost an epistemology in terms of its practice and scope. Thus it could, in the larger sense, be considered a broad methodology, under which traditional grounded theory (and perhaps all of quantitative) could fall.

I did find the below article that discussed the broadening of grounded theory from "empirical grounding". They, however, seem to come to this term merely by similar processes as Eisenhardt and Graebner (simply trying to communicate that the method is grounded in data) and do not seem to view it as its own proper method or name.

Goldkuhl, G., & Stefan, C. (2010). Adding Theoretical Grounding to Grounded Theory: Toward Multi-Grounded Theory. International Journal Of Qualitative Methods, 9(2), 187-205.

In example of the multiple uses, below is an article where Messick uses "empirical grounding" to mean "trustworthiness" regarding score interpretation (a pretty well known article and author in the measurement sphere).

Messick, S. (1980). Test validity and the ethics of assessment. American Psychologist, 35(11), 1012–1027. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.11.1012

All in all, for the purposes of your question: no, it doesn't appear that this is a well known or accepted methodology distinct from grounded theory. It seems to have many definitions in many contexts. Based on the Eisenhardt and Graebner article, it seems to a desirable outcome of a grounded theory. Based on definitions in the Goldkuhl and Stefan article, it is a piece of multi-grounded theory (and appears to capture the goals of traditional grounded theory).


What is the effect of imagining doing an exercise on muscle growth?

The article by Ranganathan et al (2004) provides some relevant information.
The authors discuss how it can be increased by two main factors, neural adaptation and muscle growth. They note how the motor skill acquisition literature supports the use of visualisation as an adjunct to actual practice as a means of improving performance:

  Research on motor skill acquisition has demonstrated clearly that
  mental practice leads to improved performance (Corbin, 1972; Feltz &
  Landers, 1983). Thus, the neural events controlling the muscle
  parameters for performance (e.g., amplitude, timing) can be improved
  through mental practice.

They mention studies that have found no effect  of visualisation on strength (e.g., Herbert et al 1998).

However, in their study they did find an effect of visualisation on strength. They attribute this gain to neural adaptation rather than muscle growth.

  The key ﬁndings of this study were that mental training increases
  voluntary strength of both distal and proximal muscles of human upper
  extremities and the strength improvements accompanied elevations of
  time-locked (to MVC trials) cortical potential (MRCP). Based on the
  MRCP data (Figs. 3–5), we are conﬁdent that the primary mechanism
  underlying the strength increase is a mental training-induced
  enhancement in the central command to muscle. The data suggest that
  repetitive mental attempts of maximal muscle activation trained and
  enabled the brain to generate stronger signals to muscle.
  ...
  greater strength is a consequence of stronger brain activity. A
  stronger central command could recruit the motor units that were
  otherwise inactive in an untrained state and/or drive the active motor
  units to higher intensity (higher discharge rate), leading to greater
  muscle force

References

Corbin, C. B. (1972). Mental practice. In W. P. Morgan (Ed.), Ergogenic
aids and muscular performance (pp. 93–118). New York: Academic
Press.
Feltz, D. L., & Landers, D. M. (1983). The effects of mental practice
on motor skill learning and performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of
Sports Psychology, 5, 25–27.
Herbert, R. D., Dean, C., & Gandevia, S. C. (1998). Effects of real
and imagined training on voluntary muscle activation during maximal
isometric contractions. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 163, 361–368.
Ranganathan, V. K., Siemionow, V., Liu, J. Z., Sahgal, V., & Yue, G. H. (2004). From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind. Neuropsychologia, 42(7), 944-956. PDF


Difference between conditioned freezing, shock sensitization to startle and conditioned fear potentiation to startle?

The first sentence of the abstract is:

Rats given a series of shocks exhibit a potentiated startle response to a loud
acoustic stimulus compared to nonshocked animals

Shock sensitization to startle refers to how giving a series of shocks results in a stronger startle in response to a startling acoustic stimulus.
The first sentence of the introduction is:

Presentation of a stimulus (e.g., a tone or a light) that had been previously paired with an aversive stimulus (e.g., shock) markedly enhances the unconditioned startle response to a loud, unexpected noise. This effect is referred to as fear potentiation of startle

Fear potentiation of startle is a more general case of "shock sensitization to startle" - animals who are made fearful respond more strongly to a startling cue. This is probably something you are familiar with as a human, too: think about jump scares in a haunted house, being startled by something while watching a scary movie, a sudden noise when walking in the dark, etc.
When reading a paper you might start at the beginning and find the first places that terms you are interested in are mentioned - that's usually where they will be defined.


What is "intelligence" in "artificial intelligence"?

This is a very broad and not well defined issue, but two theories that may help you to get a better understanding are the following :

Triarchic theory of intelligence by Robert J. Sternberg

  Sternberg's definition of human intelligence is "(a) mental activity
  directed toward purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of,
  real-world environments relevant to one's life" (Sternberg, 1985, p.
  45).

Sternberg divides intelligence into three major subtheories:

  Componential – analytical subtheory

  Analytical giftedness is influential in being able to take apart
  problems and being able to see solutions not often seen.
  Unfortunately, individuals with only this type are not as adept at
  creating unique ideas of their own.

  Experiential – creative subtheory

  Sternberg splits the role of experience into two parts: novelty and
  automation. A novel situation is one that you have never experienced
  before. People that are adept at managing a novel situation can take
  the task and find new ways of solving it that the majority of people
  would not notice (Sternberg, 1997). A process that has been automated
  has been performed multiple times and can now be done with little or
  no extra thought. Once a process is automatized, it can be run in
  parallel with the same or other processes.

  Practical – contextual subtheory

  Sternberg's third subtheory of intelligence, called practical or
  contextual, "deals with the mental activity involved in attaining fit
  to context" (Sternberg, 1985, p. 45). Through the three processes of
  adaptation, shaping, and selection, individuals create an ideal fit
  between themselves and their environment. This type of intelligence is
  often referred to as "street smarts." Adaptation occurs when one makes
  a change within oneself in order to better adjust to one's
  surroundings (Sternberg, 1985). For example, when the weather changes
  and temperatures drop, people adapt by wearing extra layers of
  clothing to remain warm.

Theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner

  The theory of multiple intelligences differentiates intelligence into
  specific 'modalities', rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by
  a single general ability. Howard Gardner proposed this model in his
  1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
  According to Gardner, an intelligence must fulfill eight criteria:
  musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic,
  logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal,
  intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential
  and moral intelligence may also be worthy of inclusion.


Validity of limerance as a romantic evolutionary stage

The theme of love is and will be a very broad subject in psychology. As on other occasions I have always focused on variables to take into account in this theme: attachment, attraction, sexual behavior, esthetics (philosophical theme), likes, interests, etc (as always keep in mind also that there may always be more variables than those considered).

In broad themes:

Certain facts can be studied as phenomena.
A set of facts about a phenomenon can be established in a construct in a theory (here it is not so much about terms or concepts) these constructs have different realities (reality as individual mental state, reality through the influence that causes In the social or interpersonal domain), can not be directly observed, its characteristics must be studied through other objects.
In many cases it is difficult to limit the construct due to its limits, for example other processes or even other social phenomena (for example, how to determine the limit of the stereotype construct in any investigation).

Addressing the issue of validity in a broad sense (beyond validity in psychometry) (epistemological validity) can refer to many things, to perform a certain analysis, to apply a methodology, a hypothesis, an experiment, at in the end can be understood as the correct scientific procedure.

The term limerance has validity in that it is a concept that refers to a construct whose effects are registered by an investigator and seem to be found other sources that handle it (it is not strictly necessary for the construct to be labeled in this way in other sources , It does not matter as much the sources as the methodological validity of the scientific process, in any case if that seems to be a construct that other investigators handle)

Further reading:

"Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process", Hazan, Cindy; Shaver, Phillip(DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511)
"Attachment Style as a Predictor of Adult Romantic Relationships", Judith A. Feeney, Patricia Noller(DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.58.2.281)
"Romantic love: An fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice", Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, Lucy L. Brown(DOI: 10.1002/cne.20772)


Classic cognitive neuroscience studies that highlight conclusions that could not be drawn from behavioral experiments

For introductory cognitive neuroscience, I think it is often best to start with interesting neuropsychological cases -- I think such cases provide an intriguing and intuitive way to get into the relationship between mind and brain. You already plan to talk about HM (and you can mention the movie Memento if you think students might be familiar or interested in it), I would suggest following that approach in the other domains. A few suggestions:

Executive functions/social behavior: Phineas Gage (frontal lobe damage produced impulsivity, rudeness, etc.)
Language: pure anomia (patients can report lots of information about an object but can't name it), jargon aphasia (patients produce nonsense words without realizing they are nonsense)
Conceptual knowledge: semantic dementia (progressive degeneration of semantic knowledge)
Spatial attention: hemispatial neglect (patients don't notice things on one side of visual field, usually the left side following right parietal lesions)
Motor control: ideational apraxia (impairment of action planning), ideomotor apraxia (impairment of object use), optic ataxia (impairment of visually-guided reaching)
Face perception / visual expertise: prosopagnosia (typically described as impairment of face perception, though it affects other versions of visual expertise)

More generally, there is a good two-volume set called Classic Cases in Neuropsychology (Vol. 1, Vol. 2) edited by Chris Code et al. that describes lots of interesting and influential cases.


Does the "use it or loose it" principle apply to the brain?

Yes, brain power is eroded via a lack of practice. This occurs through the processes called synaptic pruning and brain plasticity.

I will leave you with a very basic answer as I am unsure of your level of understanding of cognitive processes. First, you must understand neurons. Then, you can begin to understand synaptic pruning and brain plasticity. Finally, here is a link to a bunch more information and brain plasticity exercises.


What is the meaning of "little efferent input" to retina?

Interesting question!

The paper you read should have inserted an appropriate citation. Moreover, "little input" is a subjective statement and doesn't make much sense in the context, as it can mean that there are few efferent axons (which may still have large effects on retinal functioning), or that the efferent input is relatively unimportant when compared to the afferent visual projections (which may indeed be so). In fact, I think what the authors actually try to say is that there is not much data available on efferent retinal input.

To answer your question: The efferent projections from the brain back to the retina, referred to as centrifugal projections, are indeed not extensively studied. The studies done were mainly performed in avian species. However, centrifugal projections have been shown to exist in monkeys and humans. In the macaque, they originate in the brain in the hypothalamus, and constitute histaminergic neurons which are thought to be involved in regulating blood flow in the inner plexiform layer of the retina. They may also be involved in regulating retinal dopaminergic amacrine cells, at least in mice and other species. Specifically, dopaminergic amacrine cells in the retina may be receiving centrifugal input from the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN, situated in the hypothalamus) where circadian rythms are initiated from melanopsin containing ganglion cells. The dopaminergic amacrine cells in the retina target photoreceptors, horizontal cells and amacrine cells and thereby regulate the retina depending on the state of the circadian clock. Most studies are histological in nature and functional data remains scant.

Reference:
Webvision - Feedback Loops (by Helga Kolb)


What, exactly, is the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy?

I believe there are some minor differences, for example, WebMD Article states:

A key difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is whether he has a conscience, the little voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing something wrong, says L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. He's a psychologist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center.
A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience. If he lies to you so he can steal your money, he won’t feel any moral qualms, though he may pretend to. He may observe others and then act the way they do so he’s not “found out,” Tompkins says.
A sociopath typically has a conscience, but it’s weak. He may know that taking your money is wrong, and he might feel some guilt or remorse, but that won’t stop his behavior.

Also, I've read somewhere (I believe it was Theodore Millon's book) that psychopathy is more about nature and sociopathy is more about nurture. In other words, psychopaths are born the way they are, while sociopaths acquire severe trauma that makes them the way they are.
This also goes along nicely with psychopaths being more calm and able to manipulate, while sociopaths are more impulsive and irritable.


How does the intravenous administration of cholecystokinin provoke panic attacks?

Emotions are often linked to chemical activity in the brain. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin , dopamine, norepinephrine etc are linked to inducing emotional states, therefore if you can take a drug which will increase the amount of a transmitter then you will respond accordingly e.g. MDMA > serotonin > feeling of escstacy/happiness (Meyer & Quenzer, 2013).

In the case of Cholecystokinin (CCK), Singh et al found evidence suggesting that activation of the brain CCK-B receptor induces anxiety and that selective antagonists of this receptor represent a separate class of anxiolytic (relaxing) agents.

Simply:

Inject drug
drug reaches blood brain barrier
drug crosses or is turned into drug that can cross (e.g. codiene > morphine)
drug turns into neurotransmitter/ or precursor to (e.g. 5HTP > serotonin)
binds to/ activates receptor this activation causes an emotional/physical
response

This process varies depending on the drug but that is loosely it as I understand it. Much of this taken from the Meyers textbook, which I read a long time ago so feel free to correct me.

Singh, L., Lewis, A. S., Field, M. J., Hughes, J., & Woodruff, G. N. (1991). Evidence for an involvement of the brain cholecystokinin B receptor in anxiety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 88(4), 1130-1133.

Meyer, J. S., & Quenzer, L. F. (2013). Psychopharmacology: Drugs, the brain, and behavior.


What is relationship between being a good person and functioning in society?

Since you asked a vague question, I will provide a relatively vague answer.

A standard way to test fairness experimentally, is by having people play the ultimatum game. This is an interaction between two participants, one is randomly assigned to be Alice and the other is Bob. Alice is given a couple of days wage in money (either the local currency or other common units of exchange like tobacco) and can decide what proportion of it to offer to Bob. She can choose to offer as little or as much as she wants. Bob is then told what proportion Alice offered and can decide to accept or reject. If Bob accepts then the game ends and each party receives their fraction of the goods. If Bob declines then both Alice and Bob receive nothing and the game terminates. The interaction is completely anonymous and happens only once. In this setting, homoeconomicus would give the lowest possible offer if playing as Alice and accept any non-zero offer as Bob (any money is better than no money).

Henrich et al. (2001) studied the behavior of people from 15 small-scale societies in the ultimatum game and showed a great variability in how fairness is conceived across the societies they studied. None of the small scale societies behaved in the same way as economists would predict (i.e., take everything), and none behaved the way western university student do (western university students tend to offer around 50% and reject offers below 20% about 40% to 60% of the time).

Read more: Games, culture, and the Turing test (Part II)

Related questions: What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & Shafir? and Human behaviour in one-shot perfect information games

To restate in other words, in such settings it is in our objective self-interest (homoeconomicus) to be unfair, but our subjective conceptions (shaped by evolutionary and cultural forces) entice us to act prosocially. A lot of times this seeming irrationality can be explained as evolutionarily adaptive if we consider concepts like inclusive fitness or group selection.

Read more: Evolving useful delusions to promote cooperation.

Overall, it is an ongoing research question to understand why and to what extent humans and various other organisms cooperate in such games and how this relates to evolution. It is usually studied under the banner of evolution of cooperation. For an introduction that highlights some of the common themes see Nowak (2006), West et al. (2007), or for a video/blog form: Introduction to evolving cooperation.

For a focus on ethnocentrism (one of the highlighted mechanisms) see this question: Do people like those who are similar to them and why?

References

Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., & McElreath, R. (2001). In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. American Economic Review, 91(2), 73-78

Nowak MA (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314 (5805), 1560-3.

West, S. A., Griffin, A. S., & Gardner, A. (2007). Evolutionary explanations for cooperation. Current Biology, 17(16), R661-R672.


What happens in the brain when conscious awareness is changed during dreaming onset?

Here is the first study with fMRI, EEG and eye-video simultaneously recorded while subjects were performing a task (Poudel et al., 2014).

"fMRI analysis revealed a transient decrease in thalamic, posterior cingulate, and occipital cortex activity and an increase in frontal, posterior parietal, and parahippocampal activity during microsleeps. The transient activity was modulated by the duration of the microsleep. In subjects with frequent microsleeps, power in the post-central EEG theta was positively correlated with the BOLD signal in the thalamus, basal forebrain, and visual, posterior parietal, and prefrontal cortices. These results provide evidence for distinct neural changes associated with microsleeps and with EEG theta activity during drowsiness in a continuous task."

Poudel, G. R., Innes, C. R., Bones, P. J., Watts, R., & Jones, R. D. (2014). Losing the struggle to stay awake: divergent thalamic and cortical activity during microsleeps. Human brain mapping, 35(1), 257-269. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22178.


how to train our brain to always use left part for thinking & deciding things?

Unfortunately this question is based on a false premise. Thanks for asking. The oversimplified view on brain lateralisation is so stubbornly persistant and it invaded so many meditation guides, self help blogs, pseudoscientific faith healing and even job interviewer criteria, that it is now a part of "viral" phenomenon.

Yes, brain lateralisation exists. But it does not work in the oversimplified way they describe.

Interestingly, M. Gazzaniga shown sometimes the "random versus linear" relation work in sort of [opposite][1] way than the popular myth.

  Writing an overview of the split-brain research in a 2002 article for Scientific American, Gazzaniga concluded, based on the interpreter phenomenon and other findings, that the left hemisphere is “inventive and interpreting,” whilst the right brain is “truthful and literal.” This seems at odds with the myth invoked by Rabbi Sacks and many others.

[1][https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die]


The terms stem from Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion (e.g., 1984, 1986). They posit that persuasion can go via two different routes, depending on whether people have the motivation and the ability to give the persuasive arguments much thought.

Petty and Cacioppo (1984, p. 70) on the central route:

  One, called the central route, says that attitude change results from a person's careful consideration of information that reflects what that person feels are the true merits of a particular attitudinal position. According to this view, if under scrutiny the message arguments are found to be cogent and compelling, favorable thoughts will be elicited that will result in attitude change in the direction of the advocacy. If the arguments are found to be weak and specious, they will be counterargued and the message will be resisted—or boomerang (change opposite to that intended) may even occur. To the extent that increasing the number of arguments in a message affects persuasion by enhancing issue-relevant cognitive activity, the central route to persuasion has been followed.

Petty and Cacioppo (1984, p. 70) on the peripheral route:

  Attitude changes that occur via the second or peripheral route do not occur because the person has diligently considered the pros and cons of the issue; they occur because the person associates the attitude issue or object with positive or negative cues or makes a simple inference about the merits of the advocated position based on various simple cues in the persuasion context. For example, rather than carefully evaluating the issue-relevant arguments, a person may accept an advocacy simply because it is presented during a pleasant lunch or because the message source is an expert. Similarly, a person may reject an advocacy simply because the position presented appears to be too extreme or because the source is unattractive. These cues (e.g., good food, expert and attractive sources, extreme positions) may shape attitudes or allow a person to decide what attitudinal position to adopt without the need for engaging in any extensive thought about the arguments presented. To the extent that a person agrees with a recommendation because of the simple perception that there are a lot of arguments to support it, the peripheral route to persuasion has been followed.

All attributes given in your example (credibility, attractiveness, eloquence) refer to cues that should be especially relevant if the peripheral route is followed, because they are not arguments about the product itself but refer to the context of the persuasion ("This guy looks legit, sure I'll buy the Slap Chop!").

References

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 69–81. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.46.1.69

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 123–205). Academic Press.


Is there a conflict between Mindfulness-based and Acceptance-based Therapies and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)?

No takers so I've decided to do some research and theorise if there are any conflicts between these two therapy modalities. Drawing on research by Hofmann & Asmundson (2008), three distinct differences are identified between Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):

  The role of cognitions. "CBT helps patients to identify, challenge, and
  re-evaluate these rigid rules and adopt a more relaxed and satisfying
  system of values in order to enhance overall life satisfaction.
  Instead, ACT subsumes cognitions under the more general term behavior
  as it is used in behavior analysis, namely “as a term for all forms of
  psychological activity, both public and private, including cognition”
  (Hayes et al., 2006, p. 2). In essence, the word cognition has a
  different meaning in ACT than in CBT; it is a thought process in CBT
  and a private behavior in ACT."

  The role of emotions. "CBT and ACT target different stages in the emotion-generative process: CBT promotes adaptive antecedent-focused
  emotion regulation strategies, whereas ACT counter-acts maladaptive
  response-focused emotion regulation strategies. The cognitive
  restructuring techniques used in CBT are in line with the
  antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies, providing skills
  that are often effective in reducing emotional distress in the long
  term. Acceptance and mindfulness-based strategies counter suppression
  and, thereby, alleviate emotional distress."

  Philosophical foundation. ACT is based on functional contextualism,
  which has been proposed as the philosophical basis for behavior
  analysis to emphasize the functional relations between behavior and
  environmental events ... CBT is not directly linked to a particular
  philosophy. The philosophical foundation most closely associated with
  CBT is critical rationalism, an epistemological philosophy (Popper,
  1959) that shares its philosophical roots with the natural sciences."

Potential conflicts

These are theorised based on the above differences between CBT and ACT:

Unclear criteria for the suitability of exercises. Since CBT and ACT are clearly disparate  therapy modalities, there is no universal guide on when and how to adopt therapeutic exercises from either CBT or ACT in combination or separately. The decision to use certain exercises is influenced highly by the therapist's subjective judgment and past experiences.
Unknown effects of combining CBT and ACT. As far as I know, there are no studies on the effects of traditional exercises such as cognitive restructuring (CBT) and mindfulness practice (ACT) when combined together on specific mental illnesses. Prima facie, the former involves deliberate attempt to modify cognitions and the latter involves a systematic process of observing non-judgmentally cognitions. It is difficult to see no conflict without empirical counter-evidence.
Potential negating effects. In ACT, Cognitive Defusion involves the process of  distancing or separating oneselves metaphorically from their thoughts (Moffitt et al., 2012). If a client initially uses cognitive restructuring techniques to alleviate distress from their mental illness and this becomes conditioned - using cognitive defusion subsequently after that could negate the positive effects of the previous CBT-based technique.

References

Hofmann, S.G. & Asmundson, G.J.G. (2008). Acceptance and mindfulness-based therapy: New wave or old hat? Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 1-16
Moffitt, R., Brinkworth, G., Noakes, M. & Mohr, P. (2012). A
comparison of cognitive restructuring and cognitive defusion as
strategies for resisting a craved food. Psychology & Health, 27(2),
74-90


Is mapping sound frequencies to the vertical axis universal?

Humans technically don't perceive frequencies, they perceive pitch. According to Wikipedia:

  the idiom relating vertical height to sound pitch is shared by most languages.

citing a 1930 article by Pratt, which in turn says that:

  Stumpf has found that adjectives meaning high and low (or words closely related in meaning) have been applied to tones in almost every known language.[2]  But why should tones be characterized as high or low? Do these characteristics refer to differences in spatial height and depth? The answer to this second question has been almost without exception in the negative. A high tone does not mean a tone which is high in space. The phrase is merely figurative, and must be accounted for in terms of secondary criteria such as, e.g., the apparent localization of high vocal tones in the head and low ones in the chest.  The composer Berlioz makes sport of such explanations and reminds his readers that high and low tones for the pianist lie in the horizontal directions of right and left and that the violoncellist must reach downward to produce high tones, and suggests that those composers of opera who use descending passages for a person falling downstairs have stupidly transferred to the tones the arbitrary downward character of the printed notes on the staff. And yet Stumpf, convinced that there can be no intrinsic height and depth in tones, has felt obliged to argue that here again some associative mechanism, strangely obscure and elusive, has been at work. Even Wundt was forced to agree with Stumpf in calling these terms metaphorical when applied to tones [3], and most psychologists who have given the matter any thought have expressed similar views [4].

  [2]:   C. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 1883, I, 192 ff.

  [3]:   W. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1910, 11, 78.

  [4]:   J. Redfield, Music: a Science and an Art, 1928, 42 ff.

All these sources are pretty dated alas.

There are however some newer papers on this; e.g. Fernandez-Prieto et al. (2017) which do qualify such statements, e.g.:

  Higher frequency and louder sounds are associated with higher positions whereas lower frequency
  and quieter sounds are associated with lower locations. In English, ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ are used to
  label pitch, loudness, and spatial verticality. By contrast, different words are preferentially used, in
  Catalan and Spanish, for pitch (high: ‘‘agut/agudo’’; low: ‘‘greu/grave’’) and for loudness/verticality
  (high: ‘‘alt/alto’’; low: ‘‘baix/bajo’’). Thus, English and Catalan/Spanish differ in the spatial
  connotations for pitch. To analyze the influence of language on these crossmodal associations, a
  task was conducted in which English and Spanish/Catalan speakers had to judge whether a tone
  was higher or lower (in pitch or loudness) than a reference tone. The response buttons were
  located at crossmodally congruent or incongruent positions with respect to the probe tone.
  Crossmodal correspondences were evidenced in both language groups. However, English
  speakers showed greater effects for pitch, suggesting an influence of linguistic background.

They also cite an older review paper (Cassanto, 2013) which highlights a similar studies (co-authored by Cassanto) on Dutch vs Farsi:

  Like English, Dutch describes pitches as ‘high’ (hoog) or ‘low’ (laag),
  but this is not the only possible spatial metaphor for pitch. In Farsi, high
  pitches are ‘thin’ (nāzok) and low pitches are ‘thick’ (koloft). Dutch and
  Farsi speakers’ performance on non-linguistic pitch reproduction tasks reflects
  these linguistic differences (Dolscheid, Shayan, Majid, and Casasanto
  2013). Participants were asked to reproduce the pitch of tones that they
  heard in the presence of irrelevant spatial information: lines that varied in
  their height (height interference task) or their thickness (thickness interference task). Dutch speakers’ pitch estimates showed stronger crossdimensional
  interference from spatial height, and Farsi speakers’ from the
  thickness of visually presented stimuli. This effect was not explained by
  differences in accuracy, or in musical training. When trained to talk about
  pitches using Farsi-like metaphors (e.g. a tuba sounds thicker than a flute)
  for 20-30 minutes, Dutch speakers’ performance on the non-linguistic
  thickness interference task became indistinguishable from native Farsi
  speakers’. Experience using one kind of spatial metaphor or another in language
  can have a causal influence on non-linguistic pitch representations. [...]

  infants as young as four months old are sensitive to the height-pitch mapping
  found in Dutch-speaking adults (but not in Farsi-speaking adults), and
  also to the thickness-pitch mapping found in Farsi-speaking adults (but not
  in Dutch-speaking adults; Dolscheid, Hunnius, Casasanto, and Majid 2012).
  There is no need, therefore, to posit that using linguistic metaphors causes
  people to construct these mappings de novo.

A somewhat similar paper on infants, perhaps with stronger claims is from Walker et al., 2010:

  Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic
  correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched
  sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds.
  Claims that neonatal perception is synaesthetic imply that such correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception. To
  date, the youngest children in whom such correspondences have been confirmed with any certainty were 2- to 3-year-olds.
  We examined preferential looking to assess 3- to 4-month-old preverbal infants’ sensitivity to the correspondences linking
  auditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this was
  accompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This is
  the strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.

Cassanto and colleagues also develop a Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT) according to which

  correlational mental metaphors develop in two stages, the second of which may extend throughout the lifetime.
  The mental metaphors that adults typically use are specific instances
  of more general families of mappings. These families may be evident in
  behavior from infancy, and reflect regularities in humans’ experiences of
  the physical and social world, many of which may be universal. As children
  are exposed to peculiar aspects of their languages, cultures, or even their
  own bodies, certain mappings from a given source-target family become
  strengthened through repeated use, which weakens ‘sibling’ mappings as a
  consequence. The result is that people tend to think in language-specific,
  culture-specific, or body-specific mental metaphors: Relativity emerges
  from universals. [...]

  One prediction of HMMT is that specific source-target mappings
  should be easy to activate via linguistic training so long as they are members
  of one of the families of source-target mappings encoded in our minds
  (over phylogenetic or ontogenetic time) on the basis of observable sourcetarget
  correspondences in the world. Mappings that are not members of a
  pre-linguistically established family (and that do not reflect correlations in
  our experience) should be relatively hard to activate via training, because
  these mappings would need to be created, not just strengthened.

  In a test of this prediction, Dutch speakers were trained to used a thickness-
  pitch mapping that is the reverse of the mapping found in Farsi, and in
  the natural world: thin=low and thick=high. These ‘reverse-Farsi’ trained
  participants received the same amount of training as the participants trained
  to use the Farsi-like mapping. Whereas Farsi-like training had a significant
  effect on participants’ nonlinguistic pitch representations, reverse-Farsi
  training had no effect (Dolscheid et al. 2013). Thus, brief linguistic experience
  caused participants to use the thickness-pitch mapping that reflects
  correlations between thickness and pitch in the world (and is evident in prelinguistic
  infants). Yet, the same amount of linguistic experience was not
  effective at instilling the opposite thickness-pitch mapping, which has no
  obvious experiential correlates, and is therefore not predicted to be among
  the pre-linguistically established space-pitch mappings.

That's referring to the same paper as the first citation in the previous quote. Oddly this experiment isn't summarized in the paper's abstract, but does appear in the paper (as Experiment 4). Cassanto has a free pdf of that paper as well.

A 2014 PNAS paper by Parise et al.
proposes that the low-high pitch metaphor has a natural basis in the elevation of the sources of such sounds in nature.


Would you classify confusion as an emotion?

Cambridge Dictionary defines confusion as "a situation in which people do not understand what is happening, what they should do or who someone or something is." This means that confusion occurs in one's thoughts, in the brain.

I define emotion as "an irritation of the heart" or simply "a heart feeling." By heart, I mean a physical heart. Emotion is a heart response to whatever irritates it: thoughts, memories, what someone sees or hears, etc.

So, if you say that confusion is about thoughts and emotions are about heart feelings, then confusion is not an emotion. Confusion may or may not be accompanied by emotions, for example, someone does not understand what is happening (confusion) and, as a result, feels fear in the heart (emotion).

I'm not sure if I want to classify confusion, but it is a "problem with understanding," not necessary as a "condition" but as a temporary or chronic state.


Why vision cannot count things instantly?

You probably mean instant quantity recognition

Counting requires a rather complex high-level process. For an animal to count you'd need:

Memory
Consciousness (to access and manipulate that memory)
Basic algebra skills
Some basic semantic abstraction mechanism (ie, language) which will probably have to be recursive as well.
Some symbolic mechanism

Honestly, even capable adult struggle counting in binary although on paper it should be far easier than counting in the decimal system.

Anyhow, counting will always be effortful and slow as it is a conscious process (ie, system 2, for which you can perform very roughly 5 calculation per second).

I guess what your really mean is instant quantity recognition.

Useless for survival, useless in modern culture

One simple answer would be that such ability will add little to none to your survival chances. Furthermore, within modern cultural, such ability would give little advantage.

The brain is capable of many great things, for instance, the ability to comprehend this text is nothing short of a 'miracle' - despite decades of research, no computer is capable of such feat. But enter mirror reading (where the text is mirrored on the horizontal plane) and now the brain enters a slow, effortful manual mode. With enough practice, mirror reading should become an automatic process, but what benefit such skill give?

Most animals can't count at all

All animals seem to have survived having no or extremely limited counting ability. For us humans, counting is a fairly recent skill (I'm pretty sure it is dated back to the beginning of the trade era) - us humans have survived without it for most of our past. Visits to uncivilised tribes revealed that some can only count to around 3 (then it's "more than 3" or "many") - odd to us as it may sound to us, they are baffled by why would anyone need to count more than 3 things.

One of the fascinating findings about counting is that it seems to be a completely cultural thing - experiments done with both young children and uncivilised populations suggest an innate exponential, rather than linear, sense of quantity. The explanation for this is that for survival it is much more important to know the ratio than the precise count:

  This tree has twice as many apples than this one.

Is more important than

  This one has 204 apple, this one has 408.

To summarise, there's no reason for our primal brain to be able to recognise precise quantities instantly, nor there is modern cultural advantage in having such skill.