How to calculate composite factor scores post factor analysis for a questionnaire?

Typically, questionnaires where all items are on the same response scale are coded differently to composite variables where you have variables on different metrics (e.g., a set of ability tests).

Sums and means: For questionnaires like yours, you would commonly just take the mean or the sum of items that belong to a given subscale (note that you may need to first reverse code some of the items). I have a few notes here about doing this in SPSS and R. I generally prefer this method: (a) it's simpler; (b) it's easy to compare scores across studies; (c) it doesn't force orthogonality or require choices about degree of correlation between factors, rather it is determined by item content; (d) by using the mean, you get values that are on the same scale as the original response scale.

Test manual: More generally, assuming the test has been used before, you should examine the test manual or other published studies to see how the test is intended to be scored. By following these instructions, you will make your results more comparable to other studies that have used the test.

Factor saved scores: There is also an argument for using factor saved scores.
If you do that, there are various methods for deriving scores from a factor analysis. Your software will often provide various means for extracting factor saved scores with various properties. You can also save the coefficients from the factor coefficients table. You can then compute your own factor saved scores by multiplying the coefficients for a given factor by the scores for a particular individual.

Centering: All the above methods (sum, mean, factor saved scores) are examples of weighted composites (i.e., $y_i = \beta_1 x_{i1} + \beta_2 x_{i2} + ... + \beta_p x_{ip}$ for participant $i$ where there are $p$ items, $x$ is the response, and $\beta$ is the weight and where $y$ is one subscale score; you could add another index for multiple subscales). Centering only changes the mean of such a subscale. If you were to create two scales scores, one with centered variables, and one without, the two scale scores would be perfectly correlated. Note that rescaling (e.g., creating z-scores) does make a difference, and is often appropriate where items are on different metrics.

I agree with @Damien's answer that the DiStefano (2009) reference is a good place to get an overview of the issues.

References

DiStefano, C., Zhu, M., & Mindrila, D. (2009). Understanding and using factor scores: Considerations for the applied researcher. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 14(20), 1-11. PDF


What factors determine a healthy individual's required amount of sleep?

It is a multifactorial question dependent or correlated with a large list of variables or factors that could be grouped into:

Functions (mainly effects on neurotransmitters, also have been much studied the functions related to memory and learning).
Biological factors or bases: Indistinguishable from the previous section.
Sleep dysfunctions (terrors, somnambulism, somniloquies, nocturnal jactatio capitis, bruxism, epilepsy, mental retardation)
Disorders (initiation and maintenance disorders, apnea, myoclonus, restless legs syndrome, narcolepsy, hypersomnia, Kleine-Levin, Pickwick)
Patterns There are many sleep patterns.

It is not so easy to distinguish between health and disease since some individuals are very well adapted to patterns, dysfunctions and even some disorders.
The general intelligence factor may influence further adaptation.
The weight of the weight factor will influence to a greater extent when it is an extreme weight (mainly if there is difficulty in the breathing).

There are many manuals that address both general topics related to sleep (International Classification of Sleep Disorders, ICSD, good general books can be found in any library of psychology faculties) and very specific research (search in psycinfo).

Recommended source: Buela-Casal, G. (Comps.) (1990). Avances en la investigación del sueño y sus trastornos. Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores.


Threshold time for stimulus to be consciously perceived. Why?

If by consciously perceived, you mean recognizing a feature (and possible reactions accordingly), there are several tasks to be considered that seem to cause delays:

Saccades and eye movements: During saccades we are blind, so we must wait a little to bypass a saccade so participants are able to see. It is called saccade masking.
Transmission: neurons are not that fast (around 100m/s for myelinated ones), so transmitting action potential from retina to the primary visual cortex takes time, of around hundreds of milliseconds.
From visual cortex to other area of the brain (for verbal responses, reasoning, matching, or further recognitions that are not simply visual features),
Transmitting reaction signals from motor cortex to the hand so participants can respond.

These are just neurological pathways. Considering some other cognitive shortcuts (e.g. schemas and categories), participants need to bypass their default reasoning modes (unconscious?) that are learned by training, stereotypes, or being stimulated so long that it's been moved from foreground to the context (speaking of perception without awareness).


What's the behaviour of downplaying the importance of something you wanted but didn't get called?

In  general, rationalization is:

... a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings
are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner
to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable—or
even admirable and superior—by plausible means.

The specific case mentioned in the question is one of Sour Grapes, from Aesop's fables:

The story concerns a fox that tries to eat grapes from a vine but
cannot reach them. Rather than admit defeat, he states they are
undesirable.

"Defense mechanism" however, is a psychoanalytic (Freudian) construct, which is generally considered pseudoscience or outdated.  The more modern theory of cognitive dissonance now subsumes what was previously thought of as rationalization:

In practice, people reduce the magnitude of their cognitive dissonance
... by changing the conflicting cognition [or] Ignore or deny
information that conflicts with existing beliefs.


What are the effects of casual sex on men versus women?

One factor that should be considered is the culture surrounding casual sex and the social judgments that men and women may experience as a result of casual sex. Conley, Ziegler, and Moors (2012) report a series of experiments conducted on an American university campus that show that women who accept offers of casual sex are perceived more negatively on a variety of dimensions than men. In their experiments:

Subjects judged women who accepted offers of casual sex as being "less intelligent, less mentally healthy, more promiscuous, less competent, and more risky" than men who accepted offers of casual sex.
When subjects imagined a hypothetical offer of casual sex, men were more likely to accept than women. Subjects were given a series of questionnaires to examine their attitudes towards offers of casual sex. A mediation analysis indicated that "part of the reason that women are less likely to accept casual offers than men is that women perceive that they will be evaluated more negatively for accepting the offer (or more positively for rejecting the offer) than men do."
Similar results were found when subjects recalled a recent offer of casual sex, and imagined the reactions of people had they accepted the offer.

Thus, social stigma seems to play a significant role in how men and women perceive casual sex, which may explain the relative willingness of men and women to engage in casual sex. This particular set of social stigmas will certainly not be universal across cultures, and the point of this answer is not to suggest that the experiences of American college students are universal. What is likely to be universal is the idea that the culture surrounding casual sex will have a direct impact on how men and women choose to engage in casual sex.


What makes something relevant to an argument and how can people improve in determining relevance?

The Wikipedia article on relevance references a couple of books and a few journal articles.

The Wikipedia article says

  Cognitive science and pragmatics

  Further information: Relevance theory

  In 1986, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson drew attention to the central importance of relevance decisions in reasoning and communication. They proposed an account of the process of inferring relevant information from any given utterance. To do this work, they used what they called the "Principle of Relevance": namely, the position that any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance. The central idea of Sperber and Wilson's theory is that all utterances are encountered in some context, and the correct interpretation of a particular utterance is the one that allows most new implications to be made in that context on the basis of the least amount of information necessary to convey it. For Sperber and Wilson, relevance is conceived as relative or subjective, as it depends upon the state of knowledge of a hearer when they encounter an utterance.

The books referenced are:

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN-13: 978-0631198789Available from:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Amazon Canada

and

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (2004). Relevance Theory, In: Horn, L.R. & Ward, G. (eds.) 2004 The Handbook of Pragmatics Oxford: Blackwell: pp 607-632. ISBN-13: 978-0631225485Available from:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Amazon Canada

There is free access to this part of the book on Dan Sperber's website

When going to the amazon pages for the relevant books, it also suggests other books other people have bought with these books along with other possible related books.


Many of our associations for color, order and music are derived from our culture rather than from biology or some inert psychology. That is to say the bright green house with Christmas lights and tinsel on it all year long might look trippy to you but to the person who designed it it appears to match their society's norms.

When you experience the trip its because of the violation of the norm of images your brain has been trained to recognise. The culture shock eventually errodes as you watch the videos more often because your brain begins to learn the patterns and incorporates it into your culture.


How does body temperature and oxygenation affect thinking ability?

Warmer temperature are shown to raise aggression level (Anderson, et al, 1995).  Citing this study, DeWall, 2009 found a similar correlation between words associated with high temperatures and hostile behavior.  This could be perceived as a threat to clear thinking.

Moss, 1996 shows oxygen administration increases memory. However, intermittent hypoxia on developing children led to adverse effects (both mental and physical), according to Bass, 2004.  Though, I must say, you can't really determine the oxygen content indoor vs. outdoors without sensors, even if you raise in elevation and who's to say what competing particulates there are between the two environments?

It's known that kinetic motion itself increases neurogenesis, mostly in studies with exercise, like this one.  There's been a lot of papers and laymen articles on the subject of exercise and neurogenesis lately.  The act of walking or climbing the mountain might contribute a lot to the subjective experience of thinking.


Would Artificial Super-Intelligence From Science Fiction "Speed Up" The Brain and Wear it Out Faster Leading to Earlier Death?

Our brain runs on a series of chemical and electrical reactions running at a stable pace. Unlike computers, you cannot "overclock" the brain into running these reactions any faster than normal.
However, if we were to assume the psuedoscience to be true, it would be logical for the brain to undergo premature death. With the rates of these reactions increased you would see the rate of DNA mutations increase along with the amount of oxidative stress. All of which are causes of cancer and cell death.

How to actually improve cognitive function:
http://m.wikihow.com/Increase-Your-Brain's-Processing-Speed


Why do I get smaller accuracy when I use 80% of training sets using HMAX model?

I got the answer for this question:

Because the dataset becomes imbalanced. That is why the performance of our classifier decreases instead to decrease. Usually you should have a balance between out positive and negative training.


Is there a bias where long statements, books, articles, etc. are seen as more truthful?

Message length is a peripheral cue in the elaboration likelihood model. This means that a message's length affects the likelihood that its recipient will be persuaded when the recipient is not scrutinizing the message's content attentively. When a message is evaluated through peripheral attention instead of central focus, simple heuristics that are easily fooled determine the extent of persuasion that results.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 1) cite their earlier study (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984) as demonstrating that more arguments in favor of a message increases attitude positivity toward the message when the audience is not personally invested in understanding it even if the arguments are weak. This doesn't work when the audience is highly involved – then a greater number of weak arguments only makes attitudes worse.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 2) also cite Wood, Kallgren, and Preisler's (1985) study, which persuaded its relatively inattentive participants more strongly with long messages than short messages. Again, this effect did not vary with message quality, but disappeared among participants who paid closer attention.

@Eoin recommended Heit and Rotello (2012), who replicated the results of Wood and colleagues. In fact, they even found the effect of message length among participants who were told not to judge arguments by length. This also occurred when listening to verbal arguments. Good stuff...

References
- Heit, E., & Rotello, C. M. (2012). The pervasive effects of argument length on inductive reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 18(3), 244-277. Retrieved from http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/sites/default/files/eheit/files/argument%202012.pdf.
- 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(1), 69–81. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc84a.pdf.
- Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part1.pdf (part 1), http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part2.pdf (part 2), and http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part3.pdf (part 3).
- Wood, W., Kallgren, C. A., & Preisler, R. M. (1985). Access to attitude-relevant information in memory as a determinant of persuasion: The role of message attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21(1), 73–85. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/nZgcNz.


Why are the founding figures of major religious faiths credited with superhuman qualities?

Perhaps the most compelling explanation of the origins of religions using purely psychological explanations is the theory of religious figures having a high incidence of frontal lobe epilepsy. Of course, this doesn't explain their rise in influence and  - which I think should be left to historians since it goes beyond the realm of science that could prove to be reductive and merely speculative in this case.

However, there is a tremendous amount of literature of the psychology of religion, which would be difficult to summarize in one answer. The reason behind this is that this is a multidisciplinary subject involving social psychology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and so forth - none that can alone provide a compelling answer. The Wikipedia page on this topic can be very helpful. I have tried to quote some sources regardless:

This quoted paragraph gives a flavor of the different ways to answer this problem. In this case, the author mentions the semantic memory theory of religious transmission:

  Where religious ideas are expressed in words (e.g. transmitted through
  oratory), it is likely that the orators themselves will rise above the
  common herd. Most religious traditions of this sort have cel- ebrated
  leaders, who may take the form of gurus, messiahs, prophets, divine
  kings, high priests, mediums, visionaries, disciples, or simply great
  evangelists or missionaries. The very fact that there are so many
  different types of, and terms for, religious leadership is an index of
  how widespread and important the phenomenon is. Partly through their
  skills as orators, these leaders become marked out as special. But, at
  the same time, their pronouncements (real or attributed) pro- vide the
  central tenets of a belief system, and their deeds become the basis
  for widely-recounted religious narratives, transmitted orally. Both
  forms of knowledge are stored primarily in semantic memory.

Primary Source:

Modes of Religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission.
Whitehouse, H. (2004).
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Secondary Sources:

"Religious Thought and Behavior as By-Products of Brain Functions"
Boyer, Pascal.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, pp 119–24

Inside the Cult: Religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea.
Whitehouse, H. (1995).
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

To get a picture of the TLE theory of the origins of religious figures, you should try understanding the behavioral changes caused by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy that involve intense religious experiences and hypergraphia, the intense desire to write - which could account for the cross-cultural production of religious scriptures:

  Revered in some cultures but persecuted by most others, epilepsy
  patients have, throughout history, been linked with the divine,
  demonic, and supernatural. Clinical observations during the past 150
  years support an association between religious experiences during
  (ictal), after (postictal), and in between (interictal) seizures. In
  addition, epileptic seizures may increase, alter, or decrease
  religious experience especially in a small group of patients with
  temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Literature surveys have revealed that
  between .4% and 3.1% of partial epilepsy patients had ictal religious
  experiences; higher frequencies are found in systematic questionnaires
  versus spontaneous patient reports. Religious premonitory symptoms or
  auras were reported by 3.9% of epilepsy patients. Among patients with
  ictal religious experiences, there is a predominance of patients with
  right TLE. Postictal and interictal religious experiences occur most
  often in TLE patients with bilateral seizure foci. Postictal religious
  experiences occurred in 1.3% of all epilepsy patients and 2.2% of TLE
  patients. Many of the epilepsy-related religious conversion
  experiences occurred postictally. Interictal religiosity is more
  controversial with less consensus among studies. Patients with
  postictal psychosis may also experience interictal hyper-religiosity,
  supporting a "pathological" increase in interictal religiosity in some
  patients.

Primary Source:

Spirituality and religion in epilepsy.
Devinsky O1, Lai G.
Epilepsy Behav. May 2008 ; 12(4):636-43.

Secondary Sources:

"Norman Geschwind's contribution to the understanding of behavioral changes in temporal lobe epilepsy: the February 1974 lecture".
Devinsky J, Schachter S (August 2009)
Epilepsy Behav (Biography, History article) 15 (4): 417–24.

"Hypergraphia in temporal lobe epilepsy. 1974."
Waxman, SG; Geschwind, N (March 2005).
Epilepsy & behavior : E&B 6 (2): 282–91.


How to create a course that will give you synesthesia?

You can induce weak/artificial synesthesia on yourself, you cannot induce strong synesthesia on yourself.

The type of synesthesia you describe is the same type that Ramachandran mentions when hypothesizing that synesthesia is not a legitimate sensory experience:

"Could we be absolutely sure that this wasn't happening because early in kindergarten she had repeatedly seen a red seven on her refrigerator door?"

This is simply an association, like remembering the qualities of bacon when it is smelled. True, strong synesthesia is not something that can be induced by association. It is not an association within how they think of something, but a secondary modal experience that is triggered automatically when they experience the first modal experience.

The modern test for synesthesia, the stroop test, perhaps demonstrates this best. In a normal stroop test, participants are asked to recognize a color word that is in a different color (the word "blue" on a red font). The meaning of the word and the color of the word cause a temporary automatic conflict in your brain, and your results are slower than if they matched or were all black. If you ask a grapheme-visual synesthese to recognize numbers that disagree with the colors they see it as, their responses will slow. If you were to undergo this memorization training, your responses would not slow, the association you have is memory based and would occur after recognition processing.

To expand on the differences between weak synesthesia and strong synesthesia

Weak synesthesia is association or metaphor. You do not experience the secondary meaning, you simply think of it. It can sometimes seem very close to experiencing it, but it is still separate. If you are thinking of red after seeing a 7, someone could distract you or you could willingly think of another color equally.

Strong synesthesia is an automatic inappropriate modal response. A modal response is the response of one distinct sense to an input. For most people, this is the normal things, sound and hearing, scent and smell... For a synesthese the color they see on a number or while listening to music is exactly as real as the number or music itself. Someone attempting to emulate this may imagine the number they see in their mind and then think of a color. To the synesthese, not only is the synesthetic color on the number, but so is the actual color of the number. It does not overwrite the actual input, it is simply additional input. It is 'inappropriate' because it is a response that is not supposed to happen for that input. It is automatic in the sense that it cannot be ignored, blocked out, distracted from, changed in any way, or otherwise consciously altered. Trying to do so would be equivalent to trying to convince yourself you do not see a cup. It won't work, your automatic senses will still tell you there is a cup.

For more information, I would recommend any of the following:

The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. Cytowic is the original modern research on synesthesia, though the hypothesis Cytowic puts forth is not held very highly anymore.
The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran has a section on Synesthesia incorporating both real-world examples and the most up-to-date research on the matter in a very readable way.
Varieties of Anomalous Experience is not as up-to-date as Ramachandran but cites specific studies and research in more detail.


Quote: Mental illness is questioning the point of living

In a letter to Marie Bonaparte, Freud wrote:

  Im Moment, da man nach Sinn und Wert des Lebens fragt, ist man krank, denn beides gibt es ja in objektiver Weise nicht; man hat nur eingestanden, daß man einen Vorrat von unbefriedigender Libido hat, und irgend etwas anderes muß damit vorgefallen sein, eine Art Gärung, die zur Trauer und Depression führt. Großartig sind diese meine Aufklärungen gewiß nicht. Vielleicht weil ich selbst zu pessimistisch bin. Mir geht ein "advertisement" im Kopf herum, das ich für das kühnste und gelungenste Stück amerikanischer Reklame halte: "Why live, if you can be buried for ten Dollars?"

In English:

  The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. I am afraid these explanations of mine are not very wonderful. Perhaps because I am too pessimistic. I have an advertisement floating about in my head which I consider the boldest and most successful piece of American publicity: "Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?"

Freud, S. (1960). Sigmund Freud an Marie Bonaparte, 13. August 1937. In E. L. Freud (ed.), Briefe 1873-1939 (p. 429). Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer.
Freud, S. (1961). Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 13. August 1937. In E. L. Freud (ed.), Letters of Sigmund Freud (p. 432), London: Hogarth.


Is low self esteem pushing person toward maximizing (instead of being easily satisfied)

There seems to be indeed some correlation between maximization and self-esteem (as can be seen even in the wikipedia page). However it doesn't necessarily predicts low self-esteem.

Quoted from wikipedia:

  Initial research on maximizing showed uniformly negative outcomes
  associated with chronic maximizing tendencies. Such tendencies were
  associated with lower happiness, self-esteem, and life
  satisfaction;2 with greater depression and regret;2 with lower
  satisfaction with choices;[8][9] with greater perfectionism;3[10]
  and with greater decision-making confusion, commitment anxiety, and
  rumination ... However, as disagreement over the definition of maximizing
  grew, research began to show diverging effects: some negative, some
  neutral, and some positive

Interestingly, those results closely resembles studies regarding correlation between "perfectionism" and "self-esteem" (perfectionism being a similar concept to maximization which you described).

There have been many studies, but in general, perfectionism can be detrimental only when it's maladaptive/ neurotic. On the other hand, positive/adaptive perfectionism tend to correlate with positive emotions, which can factors in a more positive self-esteem.

Some studies further classified that perfectionism coming from one-self is associated with adaptive aspect of perfectionism, and thus more related to positive emotions. While perfectionism that comes form social environment (imposed/prescribed by others), is more associated to the maladaptive aspect. As discussed in this article.

It somewhat make senses considering the definition of "self-esteem". In general, self-esteem is defined as how we evaluate our own worth, which starts early in infancy. It affected by many factors which may changes across lifetime (for example in childhood and teens), but in general it's largely affected by social factors.

So in summary, it's possible that being a maximizer (or being perfectionist in general) correlated to low-self esteem. But it depends on how exactly the maximizing is.


There appears to be a higher correlation with environmental influences affecting handedness, as opposed to the genetic factors; although there is conclusive genetic evidence, it is not the major contributing factor in determining handedness.

I quote from the link @what provided in the comments.

  Handedness displays a complex inheritance pattern. For example, if
  both parents of a child are left-handed, there is a 26% chance of that
  child also being left-handed.[8] A large study of twins from 25,732
  families by Medland et al. (2006) has indicated that the heritability
  of handedness is roughly 24%.[9] This leaves about three quarters of
  the effect to be explained by environmental factors.

  To date, two theoretical single gene models have been proposed to
  explain the patterns of inheritance of handedness, the first by Dr.
  Marian Annett[10] of the University of Leicester and the second by
  Professor Chris McManus[8] of UCL.

  Both models propose that there is a variant in a single gene that has
  two alleles. Carriers of one allele are more likely to be
  right-handed, and the other allele does not specify the direction of
  handedness, instead leaving it to chance. They differ on the precise
  effect of the 'right-shift' allele, but both models provide similar
  fits to data on the inheritance of handedness. Oxford University
  psychiatrist Professor Tim Crow has taken the single-gene model one
  step further, and proposed that mutations in the gene PCDH11X were
  responsible for the evolution of handedness, cerebral asymmetry,
  language, susceptibility to schizophrenia, and was the speciation
  event that created Homo sapiens.[11]

  Although single-gene models can be fitted to the data, a number of
  genetic linkage studies have been performed, all of which have
  provided evidence for different regions of the genome contributing to
  variation in handedness.[12][13] [14][15] Only one of these studies
  has led to the identification of a specific gene that is proposed to
  contribute to variation in handedness. [16][17]

  Medland et al.[18] found a gene that is positively correlated with
  left-handedness in females, and negatively correlated in males. This
  may help to explain why there are more left-handed men than women
  (around 12% in men versus 10% in women globally).3

It is, also, important to define handedness, or types of handedness, and the variability between self-reporting and objective evidence.

  However, genes influencing sidedness remain elusive. We measured
  direction and consistency of hand, foot, and eye preference in 584
  Mexican-Americans from families participating in the San Antonio
  Family Diabetes/Gallbladder Study. Using maximum-likelihood-based
  variance components methods, we estimated weak (.11 ≤ h2≤.17) but
  significant heritability for foot preference, eye preference, several
  hand preferences (writing, drawing, throwing, using scissors, using
  spoon, striking match), and a composite hand preference trait.
  Self-reported handedness was significantly heritable (h2=.57), whereas
  hand preference for opening a box or using a toothbrush or knife was
  not. Many trait pairs had significant genetic correlations, and all
  had significant environmental correlations.

(Heritability and linkage analysis of hand, foot, and eye preference in Mexican Americans  Diane M. Warrena*, Michael Sternb, Ravindranath Duggiralac, Thomas D. Dyerc & Laura Almasyc   DOI:10.1080/13576500600761056)

There is also the concept that handedness is on a continuum and that there is not, necessarily, a definitive left or right handedness, bit rather where the individual sits on the contiuum of cerebral dominance. This study also examines  the genetic modelling versus the environmental factors, and the unreliability of self-reporting. It also, introduces the idea the people may under-report left handedness. This also demonstrates that left handedness is inherited maternally.

  Whereas many assume there is a true incidence of left-handedness, the
  RS theory suggests that degrees of hand preference map onto a
  continuous baseline of asymmetry that can be cut at any point to
  represent observed incidences of left-handedness. The parameters of
  the RS genetic model were derived from findings for speech
  lateralization in aphasics, supporting the argument that the relevant
  genetic locus is “for” cerebral dominance, not handedness. Genetic
  predictions are given for two levels of parental left-handedness (10%
  and 20%). Studies of family handedness distinguishing for sex in both
  generations gave generally good fits where handedness was assessed by
  self-report, but more variable fits for indirect report of relatives'
  handedness. The tendency to find a higher proportion of left-handed
  children born to left-handed mothers than left-handed fathers is not
  likely due to X-linked inheritance, but rather to slightly stronger
  expression of the RS+ gene in females than males, and also
  under-reporting of left-handedness in mothers by right-handed
  children.

(The genetic basis of lateralization Marian Annett dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511576744.006)

There has been research demonstrating that the LLRTM1 gene contributes to handedness. This gene has also been linked with increased incidence of schizophrenia. An interesting observation, given the historic "demonisation" of left handers. Could this be, because there was a perceivable  increased incidence of "insanity" amongst the left handers? (note, my own theory)

  Left-right asymmetrical brain function underlies much of human
  cognition, behavior and emotion. Abnormalities of cerebral asymmetry
  are associated with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric
  disorders.....    This is the first potential genetic influence on
  human handedness to be identified, and the first putative genetic
  effect on variability in human brain asymmetry. LRRTM1 is a candidate
  gene for involvement in several common neurodevelopmental disorders,
  and may have played a role in human cognitive and behavioral
  evolution.

LRRTM1 on chromosome 2p12 is a maternally suppressed gene that is associated paternally with handedness and schizophrenia. Francks C, et al.

So, given my example, it is not surprising that:

The left handed family members were all on the maternal side.
The incidence of left handedness was low.


Do social classes hang more with the same social class?

If we take "social class" to mean income/wealth as it's most commonly the case in the West today, then there's even an academic term for the uncommon friendships across such classes, namely "income-bridging". As for their occurence, let me quote you from a paper by Léna Pellandini-Simányi (which happens to survey Hungarian society, but I think it easily generalizable across the Western world):

  Many of the income-bridging friendships are between former classmates whose class position diverged, yet who kept
  their old friendship alive.

Let me tell you from personal experience that this is 100% the case for me, if we take the "income-bridging" to mean a tenfold difference in income.

Also from the same paper on Hungary, this interesting bit regarding the socialist past:

  During socialism, status-bridging friendships were not more frequent in
  Hungary than in capitalist societies, contrary to the image of an egalitarian and open society promoted by political public discourse. [... However] It is important to note that these [socialist-era] studies measured class by education and working position, omitting income.

The last part kinda reminds me of joke/advice along the lines of: don't get a PhD to impress your friends, once you get a PhD most of your friends will have one.


Dopamine dysregulation syndrome in non-Parkison's subjects?

Not quite the features of dopamine dysregulation I was looking for, but plain psychosis (persecutory delusions and auditory hallucinations) was discovered in a case of conversion disorder who imagined had Parkinson's and self-medicated. Of note is history family of schizophrenia, but psychosis subsided

Also in not quite healthy subjects, there's a 1971 study of L-dopa in depressed patients. Mood elevation was reported in this study (unlike in the one on healthy volunteers) and some sobjects developed hypomania, but practically all who did had mania before (so they were bipolar). But there's not much detail on the hypomanic features developed on L-dopa. The dosage was higher in this old study, mood effects were not noted until dosage exceeded 300mg, which above the one used in the 2012 study on healthy volunteers.


Does social interaction increase intelligence?

NB: my apologies, not enough rep points to post additional links.

this is far too nebulous a statement, and if it were true, would most likely be based on non-experimental data. one example that immediately comes to mind is case studies looking at the effects of social deprivation amongst children in romanian orphanages. there are also a lot of different ways to interpret this question.

for example, is it possible that your teacher was actually referring to vygotsky's  zone of proximal development -- a theory of childhood learning, wherein learning is thought to occur best when interacting with an older, slightly more competent peer?

in animal behavioural models involving rodents and the like, there is robust empirical evidence that social deprivation is associated with cognitive deficits.

some examples:

Social isolation rearing-induced impairment of the hippocampal neurogenesis is associated with deficits in spatial memory and emotion-related behaviors in juvenile mice.
Long-term social isolation exacerbates the impairment of spatial working memory in APP/PS1 transgenic mice.

when looking at animal models one caveat, amongst many, however, is obviously the presumption that we are modelling the same phenomenon in animals as we are in humans. in this case, it certainly looks like social deprivation studies might give us a clue about the effect of social interaction in humans. but could this be modelling something else, say, environmental deprivation? in other words, is there something intrinsically important about social interaction, or is it a form of environmental enrichment, one whose contribution could be supplanted if one were to be exposed to alternative stimuli. but i digress.

  but I found no sources discussing this when I searched on Google and Google Scholar for it.

rather than social interaction and intelligence, searching for the keywords social deprivation and social isolation may prove more fruitful. instead of IQ, you should use some of the purported factors of IQ, such as working memory. but generally, you will likely find more data on animal behavioural studies than humans.

one exception to this may be the effect of social interaction and acquisition upon language ability, particularly foreign languages. in these domains, you will likely find more robust evidence to support the importance of social interaction:

Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.

  So, can social interaction increase IQ or intelligence?

the cliff's notes of it:

i think you could confidently say that social deprivation has deleterious effects on cognitive ability.
social interaction is significant in the development of language development, perhaps also verbal ability.
social deprivation notwithstanding, its contribution in a normative population is unclear.


Does belief in an afterlife play a role in suicide rates?

I think, from a statistical point of view, this question will be impossible to answer, because belief in an afterlife is almost always tied to powerful confounding factors, such as participation in a community of fellow believers, marital status, age, etc. I imagine that religious affiliation probably can have a strong protective effect regarding suicide - though I don't have any statistics to back that up - but I can't envisage how you would separate out the various components of religious affiliation and prove which component(s) made the crucial difference.

You might have heard of Émile Durkheim's famous book Suicide. (Forgive me if I'm assuming either too little or too much knowledge on your part.) Durkheim looked specifically at the effect of religious affiliation on suicide: he found that Jews in late nineteenth century France had the lowest rate of suicide, Protestants the highest, and Roman Catholics somewhere in the middle. Durkheim, however, attributed these findings to the fact that Jews tended to form very tight-knit communities, and that Protestants tended to be much more individualistic, than to any doctrinal difference.

On a more personal note, as a believer who has been through two episodes of severe depression, I think that, broadly speaking, belief in an afterlife probably does have a protective effect with regard to suicide - although there are plenty of factors whose effect is more potent. I have no background in academic psychology, so my advice is probably both unwelcome and unsound, but, if this is part of a formal research project, a good place to start would be to interview believers who had gone through, or were going through, an episode of severe depression. Also, John Donne's Biathanatos provides a very left-field exploration of Christian attitudes to suicide.


Are there any studies that examine the phenomenon of songs stuck in the head?

Here is a study that creates and manipulates the "song stuck in your head" phenomenon. In particular, it is a myth that only "bad" songs are stuck in your head. These songs can be categorized as intrusive thoughts. Also the obvious finding was that recently heard music was more likely to be stuck in your head.

The authors comes up with a term called the "Goldilocks Effect." In particular, songs are more likely to be stuck in your head if you are doing a really easy or a really hard task. If you are doing a really easy task it is easy for your mind to think about other things (e.g. think about driving on a highway and being in a "highway hypnosis"). When you are doing a hard task sometimes a moment of relaxation and insight is needed. This is where songs often come up. Thus to control this, you should do an activity that is not too easy or too hard (or not too little or too much arousal following the Yerkes Dodson Law).

Source

Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head

Ira E. Hyman Jr.*, Naomi K. Burland, Hollyann M. Duskin, Megan C. Cook, Christina M. Roy, Jessie C. McGrath, Rebecca F. Roundhill

Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2009). The Aha! Moment The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(4), 210-216.


Does learning one discipline improve performance in another discipline?

The answer to this question will depend on how you construe 'cognitive abilities.'  For instance, for certain formulations the answer is trivially yes: an economist who learns psychology may come away with psychological knowledge that could help his economics, like how to space out his studying to maximally improve retention; or how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of causing widespread financial collapse.  Demonstrations of transfer in the other direction -- from economics to psychology -- are even easier to demonstrate.  Our department, for example, has in recent years seen an influx of psychology graduate students whose backgrounds are in much more mathematically sophisticated disciplines.  These students are able to leverage their mathematical skills to great advantage in what has, in past years, sometimes been a field with excessively 'fluffy' methodology.  But in both these instances -- psych --> economics and economics --> psych -- we're talking not so much about 'transfer' of knowledge as of literal re-use.  If you buy paper plates for a picnic, can you also use them inside your house?  Of course you can.

The question gets harder when we zoom in further.  If we accept as given that the techniques of economics would be useful in the field of psychology, what about the atomic cognitive units which collectively constitute the edifice of economics knowledge?  Does the way of viewing the world one adopts when one has knowledge of economics, or the process of abstract thinking and symbolic manipulation one must acquire in the course of it, help with other disciplines in ways that do not directly relate to full-blown techniques one learns in economics?

The short answer is that nobody knows, so far as I'm aware.  Which doesn't mean that people don't have strongly held beliefs.  For many years students spent years learning Latin because it was thought to have various beneficial effects, though these have never been demonstrated to my knowledge.  Coming back to the economics example, the issue is that nobody seems to know what it even means to know economics.  Aside from the specific ability to solve economics problems, what kind of cognitive capacity can an economics expert demonstrate?  We have only begun to be able to answer this question with regards to mathematics (c.f. Ansari et al, 2005.) or to much of anything else.  Our sense of what mental representations are -- of what knowledge is built from -- is extraordinarily primitive.

However, there are substantive reasons to continue to believe in the possibility of non-trivial transfer.  The most compelling of these is the study of metaphor, for which the canonical work is probably Lakoff & Johnson's (1980) phenomenal and very readable book (see also Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Holyoak & Thagard 1997 for more technical treatments.)  The idea is that knowledge structures representing one thing can sometimes be mapped onto knowledge structures representing another thing.  When such a mapping can be found, one is able to make additional inferences on the second thing that correspond to inferences based on the first thing.  According to these theorists, the ability to make inferences about the world that flow from these kinds of metaphorical transfer account for a large part of our intellectual ability.

An example might be useful.  A prominant metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is "An argument is a war."  According to this metaphor, we might understand a destination domain (argument) in terms of a source domain (war.)  This mapping between the two domains allows us to structure the former in terms of the latter.  Wars have winners and losers, for instance; wars end when one side surrenders or is destroyed; one succeeds in war by hurting one's enemy; and so on.  By extension, then, an argument has a winner and loser; an argument ends in surrender or destruction; and in an argument the goal is to hurt your opponent.

This construction of what it means to have argument, and of how one should conduct onself in the course of an argument, would lead to very different results than, say, the metaphor "An argument is a dance."  It's clear, from this formulation, how consequential is the choice of metaphor in constructing one's attitude to and behaviors during an argument.  Metaphors are not simply colorful language (the argument goes) they are instructions for how we might leverage certain knowledge structures and behaviors (those involving war, in this case) for application in a completely unrelated domain (an argument, in this case.)

The most powerful idea latent in this metaphorical construction of cognition is that metaphorical extension is not only (or even mostly) about language -- any knowledge representation can potentially be aligned with another, and the tools and circumstances governing the use of the former could (potentially) be used to gain 'experience' in the latter automatically, for free. (See Durso et al., (1994) for a nice example of how this might culminate in an 'insight' experience.)  And in fact, DARPA has been very interested in this kind of 'bootstrap learning' looking for ways where experience in a relatively cheap (in dollars or risk) domain might be leveraged to benefit a more expensive domain, although the results of this work have not yet lit the world on fire.

Concerning the automaticity of this process, the answer seems to be both yes and no.  Insofar as people do use some kind of metaphorical extension to understand the world, and to apply knowledge across situations, then the process occurs automatically, at least to some extent.  (Note that the details of this process are still very much in question.)  But even if it is automatic, Chrysikou (2006) showed that the cross-pollination between disparate types of knowledge can be improved by conscious effort.  In her study, subjects who spent ten minutes performing the "creative uses" task (in which they generated novel and unusual applications for various objects; for example, a creative use for a toothpick might be as a javelin for a grasshopper) solved significantly more insight problems than subjects who did not perform the CUT beforehand.  One theory for these results is that the process of coming up with creative uses energized the machinery used to create ad hoc categories (see Barsalou 1983), and that the ability to blend disparate forms of knowledge in these dynamic bundles is an important component in  problem-solving.

This seems relevant to the original question in that whatever benefit is automatically gained simply by possessing a varied store of cross-discipline knowledge, seems to be enhanced by purposeful engagement and cross-linkage between these cognitive components, an enhancement that manifests concretely in increased problem-solving performance.

All that being said, in my opinion the extent and mechanisms of cross-domain transfer are still largely undetermined.  Despite the considerable theoretical literature in support of it, at this point the proponents of deep transfer are running on faith as much as anything.

EDIT: Note that an earlier question on this site explores some of these same ideas.

References:

Ansari, D., Garcia, N., Lucas, E., Hamon, K., & Dhital, B. (2005). Neural correlates of symbolic number processing in children and adults. NeuroReport, 16(16), 1769.

Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition, 11(3), 211–227.

Bowdle, B. F., & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112(1), 193–216.

Chrysikou, E. G. (2006). When Shoes Become Hammers: Goal-Derived Categorization Training Enhances Problem-Solving Performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(4), 935–942.

Durso, F. T., Rea, C. B., & Dayton, T. (1994). Graph-Theoretic Confirmation of Restructuring during Insight. Psychological science, 5(2), 94–98. Association for Psychological Science.

Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1997). The analogical mind. The American psychologist, 52(1), 35–44.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.


Conditioning/training value of objects in experiment

Subjective value is most often manipulated using some sort of incentive structure in attentional studies. Most commonly, the reward is in the form of time or money earned either directly or through 'points.' This is a very simple and common thing to do, so I don't know what you mean by "reproducible details" -- most studies will report little more than having creating experimental conditions along these lines, because that is sufficient. I will try to give a more detailed example, however.

In an unpublished study of eye movements and attentional capacity during a visual memory task, we would manipulate the weights of certain shapes by rewarding the participants with different amounts of points for different shapes. Thus, in one condition, circles would award 90 points, while triangles would award 10 points. Participants were taught this through audio feedback, and were aware that they had to accumulate a certain amount of points to complete the experiment. (The study was not published because a subtle critical error in the experiment code was discovered near the end of data collection.)


Research shows that doing anything in bed other than sleeping can disrupt sleep. What if these other things are done on another bed?

“Mixing sleep and study in the same location sends mixed signals to the brain,” Carter wrote in an email. “It does not know which it is supposed to be focusing on. This leads to less effective studying (and) learning, and it makes it harder to fall asleep when you want to.”

This may have to do in the context of Pavlovian Conditioning.

Pahlov found he could trigger a dog's salivating reflex to the ring of a bell by ringing a bell whenever the dog was fed (over a period of time). (McLeod, S. A. (2018, Oct 08). Pavlov's dogs. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html)

The theory proposed in the article is suggesting something similar: to condition your body to associate the bed with sleeping. So that, just as the sound of a bell makes the dog salivate reflexively, a bed where you regularly sleep in can also make you automatically feel sleepy when you lie down on it and thus help you fall asleep more easily.

But this can only happen if sleeping is the only activity that you do on a bed.

If you do other activities, and your brain find these more stimulating, then the bed can become associated with that feeling / stimulation / action and trigger it.

So for example, if you play video games in your bed repeatedly over a period of time, lying on the bed may automatically remind you of video games and get you all stimulated. Obviously a stimulated brain will find it difficult to fall asleep. And you may then go on to do some other activity instead of sleeping, without realising why you couldn't sleep. Over a period of time, this kind of cycle (not being able to sleep and doing something else till you feel sleepy) could develop into a sleep order.

  So my question is, can I do these other things on a bed on which I do not sleep in (in another room)?

Theoretically, you can. In effect, you can try to condition yourself to associate one environment with your sleeping activity and another for studying. You just have to ensure that the environment has enough differences (maybe use a different mattress on the bed, a bed sheet with a different texture, a bed placed in a different direction, a light source at a very different location etc. etc.).

Once you've differentiated between the two environments, try to keep both unchanged as it is for a period of time.

  Contrary to what the article says, I just don't want to study on a desk, I find it very hard to focus (eg. in school) because my body position from sitting on a desk is not ideal/comfortable for me.

Your body is telling you something when it protests (through aches and pains) when you sit for long hours on a desk. It is because you are not taking the right amount of breaks and hydrating and fueling yourself at regular interval.

And make sure your chair and desk are ergonomically designed.

In general, follow the guidelines as in using a computer. And if you use a computer install a software like Workrave (Windows) or TimeOut (Mac) that will force you to take a break regularly. The difference to the body on taking these micro-breaks and short-breaks can really be surprising.


Are there models of single neurons on slow timescales?

The search for a biologically realistic neural network is never ending. As Sydney mentioned there are many newer models of neurons that take into account activity over larger time-scales, such as the Adaptive Leaky-Intergrate-Fire neuron. The bleeding edge of this search is the Blue Brain Project, which is trying to create the most biologically detailed model of the brain possible. The project should be a good resource if you're interested in the more advanced models.

Since you're interested in Artificial Neural Networks (which implies you're also interested in computation power), I would like to point out that the Neural Engineering Framework allows you to use as detailed of a model of neuron as desired on a realistic time-scale, while still allowing you to compute and learn arbitrary functions as a typical ANN allows.


Is there a range in time on which the mind detects correlation between events?

I think you are asking about quite a high-level definition of "correlated", and this is obviously going to depend on the particular context or stimulus. That is, knowledge about thunder and lightning allows us to infer that they have a common cause, even though perceptually they can be decoupled (that is, we don't perceive them as occurring together).

However, I can point you to a few things that speak to the perception of correlation in time. This literature concerns the perception of synchrony between two stimuli, such as a flash (vision) and a beep (audition). For visual-auditory pairings, the window of "temporal synchrony" can be quite imprecise: events can be separated by up to 200 ms and still be judged as having occurred at the same time (see Dixon and Spitz, 1980, and Vatakis and Spence, 2006).

However, with multiple events in the environment and depending on the type of stimulus, sensitivity can improve. The above literature as well as my general reply is sourced from this article by Roseboom et al (2011), which may be a good starting point for further reading if this is where you were going with the question.

References

Dixon NF, Spitz L (1980) The detection of auditory visual desynchrony. Perception 9: 719–721.
Roseboom, W., Nishida, S., Fujisaki, W. & Arnold, D.H. (2011). Audio-visual speech timing sensitivity is enhanced in cluttered conditions. PLoS One, 6, e18309.
Vatakis A, Spence C (2006) Audiovisual synchrony perception for music, speech, and object actions. Brain Research 1111: 134–142.


What is the psychological basis for people coming together during a disaster or major event?

This article might be helpful. In particular, humans need social connections (according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs). Stress initiates people to come together. It was thought that women would come together during disaster and men would fight (i.e. the fight and flight response). However men also come together during disaster.

A distinction must be made between acute and chronic stress. Acute stress (e.g. once in a life time natural disasters) promote social bonding and connection. Chronic stress (e.g. smoking, ruminating a lot, etc.), however, does not seem to produce the same effect. When the acute stress is removed, there is no imminent need for social bonding with strangers.

From a biological basis, it seems that oxytocin might play a key role. In particular, oxytocin is released as a reaction to a social experience. So if a people see others in distress they may release oxytocin which promotes prosocial behavior.


In a class room setting, why do people look at you when you are asking a question?

Well, your ears are shaped in a way that is optimized for sound sources in front of you, so it could be that. But my non-expert bet is that probably they're using gaze to signal that they're paying attention. The signal is not just to you "I'm following what you're saying" but to everyone else as well, "hey, check out what's going on over there" creating joint attention that coordinates the group in thinking about your question. This might be uncomfortable for you (although it's probably a compliment that you're worth paying attention to), but the general mechanism of having super-obvious cues to attention and a predisposition to follow them to create joint attention is a very effective way of coordinating social behavior. This is so fundamentally human that most people take it for granted, but that doesn't stop academics from studying it. You could maybe try something like

Pfeiffer, U. J., Vogeley, K., & Schilbach, L. (2013). From gaze cueing to dual eye-tracking: novel approaches to investigate the neural correlates of gaze in social interaction. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(10), 2516-2528.

or

Brooks, A. M. M. R. (2017). Eyes wide shut: The importance of eyes in infant gaze-following and understanding other minds. In Gaze-Following (pp. 229-254). Psychology Press.

...if you really want a deep-dive into this.


Is a desire for a certain food related to the nutritional need for that food?

I think this question may be better asked at biology.SE.
I have to cite popular science press here, but nevertheless, clearly the answer seems to be: no.

Scientific American:

  Peter Pressman of the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, Calif. and Roger Clemens of the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy explain. Food craving, defined as an intense desire to eat a specific foodstuff, is a common occurrence across all cultures and societies. These yearnings (...) are not linked to any obvious nutrient insufficiency.

From a more comprehensive take on this from the WSJ:

  For decades, researchers surmised that food cravings were the body's subconscious effort to correct nutritional deficiencies. Longing for steak could indicate a need for protein or iron, according to this theory. Chocoholics might be low on magnesium or other mood-altering chemicals that chocolate contains, including phenylethylamine, a compound humans produce when they're in love.
  But a growing body of research casts doubt on the nutritional-deficiency notion. After all, few people crave vitamin-rich green leafy vegetables and many other foods contain more phenylalanine than chocolate—including salami and cheddar cheese.

So the more cogsci.SE related questions might be about the complex cultural, affective, cognitive and neuropsychological factors (such as stress and social norms) that foster cravings for certain foods.


Proviso: What I write below is simply general advice and does not establish a psychologist-patient or psychologist-client professional relationship.

Here are some general suggestions for individual psychotherapy discussion topics:

Tell your counselor how you are feeling, for example, "I feel nervous before sessions because I'm not sure what to talk about" or "I'm afraid that if I don't bring up enough topics you won't like me, or you will be bored with me."

In my personal experience as a client in psychotherapy, this is both the most difficult and the most helpful of all the suggestions I'm writing in this post.

Ask your therapist for advice on how to prepare for counseling sessions.
If you feel that your counselor is not listening or does not seem to care or is simply not helpful, ask to see another counselor. Depending on the setting (college counseling center, private therapist, mental health agency), you might be asked to explain why you want to see another therapist. If that is the case, write down your reasons, without censoring what you write. You can decide later how blunt (direct) you want to be.
Read self-help books on behavior change; goal-setting; developing good habits; etc.

New Harbinger Publications has a good track record for workbooks and self-help. (I do not have any affiliation with the company.) New Harbinger website |
Most recent New Harbinger catalog

For my own personal growth (and as a psychologist) I really like worksheets because they get me thinking about questions that I would not have considered otherwise. Here are some (all free):

Change Plan Worksheet - created for substance abuse treatment, but they apply to almost any problem or goal.
Personal Values Card Sort - this is one of my favorites. If you download it, get your scissors out as you need to cut up the little rectangles printed on each page. You create three piles for the cards: Not Important to me; Important to me; and Very Important to me. After you cut out all the "cards", go through them one at a time and put them on one of the three piles. Back in the day they called this "values clarification".
The Personal Values Cardsort (and similar cardsorts) have helped me a lot  personally and many of my psychotherapy patients over the years have also find them to be very helpful.
PsychPoint Therapy Worksheets - this site is designed primarily for mental health professionals, but most of the worksheets are not complicated. Look over the worksheets first before downloading them because you can download only three worksheets. (You can download more if you are a licensed mental health professional and want to subscribe for $99 USD per year.) [I am not affiliated with this website or its owner.]
Complete a worksheet before a counseling session, make a copy of your completed worksheet, and give it to your counselor at the beginning of the session.


What is the effect of motherese on development?

Motherese may play a role in emotional development.

Soken and Pick write: "Concurrent with the exaggerated speech of motherese, there are probably exaggerated facial displays, allowing infants to explore the particular aspects of the face... Child-centered displays may serve as opportunities for learning about affective events."

Walker-Andrews (1997) also suggests that "the presence of the face acts as a setting for attending to the affective quality of the voice."

Yet, according to a recent, extensive review on motherese (Saint-Georges et al., 2013), its role in emotion and cognition  is still an open area of research.

References

N. H. Soken and A. D. Pick, “Intermodal Perception of Happy and Angry Expressive Behaviors by Seven‐Month‐Old Infants,” Child development, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 787–795, 1992.
A. S. Walker-Andrews, “Infants' perception of expressive behaviors: differentiation of multimodal information.,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 121, no. 3, p. 437, 1997.
C. Saint-Georges, M. Chetouani, R. Cassel, F. Apicella, A. Mahdhaoui, F. Muratori, M. C. Laznik, and D. Cohen, “Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review),” PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 10, p. e78103, Oct. 2013.


2) Yes, I think so. If you think of your systems as a pattern recognizer, and continuously exposing it to more complex patterns and associated solutions, you can literally invoke your system 2 more easily, for example, in higher level math, you can prove properties and theorems in certain way that is efficient and effective, which depends on experiences to know what's the best method. Proving is certainly an act of system 2, it's complex and logical. Another example, meditation can be used to identify negative thoughts, once you recognize that you are being bothered by your own thoughts, you can immediately ignore them, this takes training of recognizing the pattern and let your system 2 focus your attention on other more important things than the negative thoughts brought up by your system 1. One more example is recognizing your own logical fallacies and cognitive biases. The key is to know the existence of the patterns, repeatedly recognize patterns, and correct/solve the patterns.


EEG research all started with Hans Berger, who in 1929 reported that brain activity could be recorded by measuring electrical activity on the scalp. Although the notion of ‘brain waves’ that were found by Berger was controversial, over the years many researchers replicated the results, which led to the acceptance of EEG as a real phenomenon.

Neurons
Before going into all the different ways of analyzing EEG data, let us first try to understand the brain and how brain activity is generated. Let us therefore look at one of the smallest units in the brain: the neuron. Each neuron has a resting potential of 75 millivolts, meaning that the there is a difference in electrical potential of 75 millivolts between the inside of the cell and the outside. This resting potential is maintained by the Sodium-Potassium pump, by ensuring that there is a high concentration of sodium (Na+) outside of the cell, and a high concentration of potassium (K+) inside the cell.

The neuron can be stimulated by an external electrical potential, which will cause the permeability of the cell wall to change. The Na+ and K+ ions are then temporarily free to move through the cell wall, such that the concentration of Na+ and K+ will be the same both inside and outside of the cell. Accompanied with this free flow is a huge increase in voltage, which is also referred to as an action potential. This action potential will be propagated through the axon to the synapses, which will release neurotransmitters outside of the cell. These neurotransmitters will, in turn, attach to a receptor site at the dendrites of a new neuron, thereby changing the permeability of that neuron. Again, charged ions will flow into that cell, which will result in post-synaptic potential. This potential can be either inhibitory or excitatory. Thousands of synapses can be related to one dendrite. When enough excitatory post-synaptic potentials (EPSPs) occur simultaneously from these synapses, a new action potential can occur in the new neuron.

Electrical fields
The influx of ions at the dendritic side of a neuron, as the result of an EPSP, will result in a negatively charged extra-cellular space, relative to the axon-side of the neuron. This is especially interesting for a pyramidal cell, where the axons and dendrites are clearly separated (See Figure 1; left). Because of this orientation, a dipole will come to exist. A dipole is when a positively charged area is close to a negatively charged area which creates an electrical field: a space surrounding an ion in which force is exerted on other ions (See Figure 1; right). “When a large number of small dipoles, such as those generated by activity in a pyramidal cell, are summed together, the resulting electrical potential can be described as a single, larger dipole referred to as an ‘equivalent current dipole’ (ECD). The ECD has an orientation equal to the average of the orientations of the smaller dipoles” (Dickter and Kieffaber, 2014).

Measuring EEG
The geometry of the pyramidal cells is not all that makes the electrical fields measurable. The orientation is incredibly important. As stated earlier, the electrical fields have the same orientation as the pyramidal neurons (See Figure 1). If the pyramidal cells are perpendicular to the scalp, the electrical fields will be so as well. The electrical fields will then point ‘outwards’ and thereby affect the potential at the scalp (See Figure 2, right). This is what is recorded with EEG. Conversely, when the pyramidal cells are in parallel with the scalp, the electrical fields will be so as well, and therefore will not reach the scalp (see Figure 2; left) and will not be measureable.

The extent to which the electrical fields are summed, depends on the spatial and temporal contiguity of the pyramidal cells. Neurons that are closer together will have a higher summation than two neurons that are far apart. Although the human body is full of fluids and electrical flow can be conducted throughout it, the effect will diminish when the distance increases.

So now we know where the signal comes from. But how is it recorded? Well, an EEG cap contains electrodes, which are “connected” to the scalp by use of a conductive gel. This gel contains free ions that are able to move freely which, therefore, allows the gel to conduct the biological signal. The signal is then conducted to the metallic electrode through “redox (oxidation-reduction) reactions”, which is the interchange of electrodes between the gel and the metal of the electrodes. When considering Silver-Chloride (AgCl) electrodes, Cl- ions can be removed from the silver and, conversely, Cl- can be bound to free Ag+ ions, thereby creating the compound AgCl. This changes in the metal will then be conducted through the cable to the systems.

Analog Digital Conversion
At this moment, the signal is still analog, that is, a natural occurring signal that can have any natural value. The computer however, is nog capable of measuring analog values. Instead, the analog signal must be converted to digital values, such that it can be represented in bits (ones and zeros). This is done by taking a range of voltages that you expect to be measured, and divide that by the amount of bits that the system can take (see Figure 3)

Extra Note

EEG can only measure the activity of pyramidal cells that are perpendicular to the scalp and at the surface of the cortex. Are the other pyramidal cells then just lost? Not really. Another really neat property of electrical flow is that it creates a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the dipole (See Figure 4). For the magnetic field to “move out of the head”, making it measurable, the pyramidal cells must lie parallel to the scalp. Magnetic fields also do not need conductive tissue to be measured. This can be recorded with magneto-encephalography (MEG). MEG is thus a perfect complement to EEG, although deeper positioned structures can still not be recorded.

References

Luck, S. J. (2014). An introduction to the event-related potential technique. MIT press. ISO 690
Dickter, C. L., & Kieffaber, P. D. (2013). EEG methods for the psychological sciences. Sage.


What are the key predictive traits of therapeutic success?

There is a substantial body of literature addressing each of these questions (why do people quit therapy and what predicts positive outcomes); unfortunately there are no easy answers. In part, this is because the literature has looked at these questions from a range of angles, including client characteristics (age, race, gender, motivation, education level, diagnosis), therapist characteristics (demographics, years of experience, therapeutic orientation [cognitive vs psychodynamic]), therapeutic dynamic characteristics (client-therapist demographic match, therapeutic alliance),  and treatment characteristics (whether treatment is manualized, group vs individual therapy, type of therapy). I’ve provided brief answers to both below, but you’ll likely need to do additional literature searches if you have a question about a specific group of patients or therapy.

Why do people quit therapy?

Swift & Greenberg (2012), conducted a meta-analysis of 699 studies and found a nearly 20% dropout rate for therapy. They found that younger clients, clients who were attending university clinics, those with personality or eating disorders, and those seen by providers-in-training had higher dropout rates. Some of these factors may be correlated; younger clients may be more likely to attend university clinics, and those clinics often use graduate student therapists-in-training to provide services. The study also found dropout rates were higher in studies where the therapist rated/decided if a client had dropped out, which may reflect the therapists’ perspective. Additionally, therapy that was not time-limited and not manualized had higher dropout rates. Whether it was group vs individual therapy, the orientation of therapy, provider race or gender, and client race or employment status had no effect. Results were mixed for other client demographic variables such as gender, education and marital status.

Another meta-analysis of 11 studies found that dropout was higher when therapeutic alliance, the relationship between the client and therapist, was weaker (Sharf, Primavera, & Diener, 2010). However, the authors noted that this was moderated by the client’s level of education and the length of treatment. Clients with more education were less likely to dropout. The longer the treatment the higher the dropout rate, though, as in the Swift & Greenberg (2012), it may also reflect the perception of the person reporting dropout. Clients may have felt the therapy was completed, while therapists may have felt the client “dropped out.”

Finally, a recent meta-analyses examined the impact of accommodating client preferences on treatment outcomes and dropout rates (Swift, Callahan, Ivanovic, & Kominiak, 2013). There is extensive literature exploring the importance of client preferences related to type of therapist (sex, race), type of treatment (therapy and meds, therapeutic orientation), or style (collaborative, prescriptive) on therapeutic outcomes. Swift and colleagues (2013) found that accommodating client preferences resulted in better outcomes and decreased dropout; these effects did not vary based on client demographic characteristics (age, sex, marital status, etc.). They also noted that clients who were not accommodated were especially likely to dropout of short term therapy.

What predicts therapeutic outcome?

Several recent studies examined the role that therapeutic alliance had on outcomes. A Swedish study of 646 patients found that alliance impacted symptom level in the next therapy session in a feedback loop, such that stronger alliance predicted stronger change in symptoms, which in turn strengthened alliance (Falkenstrom, Granstrom, & Holmqvist, 2013). However, the authors noted that the effect was stronger for some clients (personality disorder patients), than others, indicating that client factors also impact outcomes. Therapy type (supportive, CBT, psychodynamic) did not impact symptom reduction.
Another study found only a weak indication that therapeutic relationship impacts outcomes in complex treatment for psychosis (Priebe, Richardson, Cooney, Adedeji, & McCabe, 2011); these results may reflect a similar finding to Falkenstrom and colleagues (2013), in that diagnosis impacts the role of alliance in outcomes. McEvoy, Burgess, & Nathan (2014) found that another client factor, level of interpersonal problems, predicted dropout and poorer outcomes, regardless of alliance. They also found that type of treatment impacted this relationship, as those patients in CBT who had better alliance were more likely to stay in treatment, but that neither alliance nor personal problems predicted outcomes in those clients.  A 2012 meta analysis questioned previous findings that found alliance predicted outcomes (Fluckiger, Del Re, Wampold, Symonds, & Horvath); they found small effects of alliance and outcomes early in therapy, but not for longer-term therapy and did not find sustained relationships with any other commonly noted predictors, such as type of therapy. In contrast, a recent study (Gullo, Lo Coco, & Gelso, 2012) found that a genuine and real (i.e. accurate and not distorted by past conflict or bias) therapeutic relationship predicted successful outcomes for those clients who stayed with treatment, but not those clients who terminated early.

In terms of other client characteristics that can impact outcomes, one study of 60 Caucasian and Asian American clients found that those with more somatic symptoms and who used avoidant coping had poorer psychosocial functioning and psychological discomfort at end of treatment (Kim, Zane, & Blozis, 2012). They also found that those who preferred Non-English language therapy had worse outcomes and that this was mediated by avoidant coping. The authors proposed that Asian American patients who preferred non-English language therapy may have used coping styles that were culturally relevant to them, but which fit poorly with the style of therapy they received. The expression of psychological symptoms and illness is culturally defined, and should be kept in mind when reading meta-analyses that may reflect the dominant culture.

Another meta-analysis of 23 studies found a small to medium effect of homework compliance (completing therapeutic assignments given by the therapist) on client outcomes, which was present regardless of the client’s primary symptom presentation (Mausbach, Moore, Roesch, Cardenas, & Patterson, 2010). This may reflect the importance of client buy-in and effort in therapy, though it should be noted the effect size varied according to certain methodological factors.

Other analyses have examined the importance of therapist characteristics or client-therapist match on outcomes. A meta-analysis of 64 studies found therapist sex did not impact client outcomes or dropout (Bowman, Scogin, Floyd, & Mckendree-Smith, 2001). As noted in my answer to the dropout question above, Swift and colleagues (2013) noted a range of domains in which clients can prefer to be matched in regards to therapy. A 2011 (Cabral & Smith) meta-analyses of 52 studies found almost no effect for race-ethnicity matching and outcomes when looking across all studies. However, the authors did note that African Americans had mildly better outcomes when matched with African American therapists, a trend which did not hold for the other racial and ethnic groups in the study (Caucasians, Hispanics, and Asian Americans). A second meta-analyses of 7 studies found similar results, with a negligible effect size for ethnic match across all samples, though matching had a greater effect for ethnic minority samples than Caucasians in terms of preventing dropout and increasing the number of sessions attended (Maramba & Hall, 2002). Again, these findings call attention to the importance of multicultural conceptualization when identifying treatments and approaches for clients; this diversity is also an excellent example as to why your questions have no simple answers.

Note: None of the studies I found, focusing on recent, meta-analytic literature, addressed whether the clients found the therapy “helpful” (as indicated in your question) as a primary research question.

Bowman, D., Scogin, F., Floyd, M., & Mckendree-Smith, N. (2001). Psychotherapy length of stay and outcome: A meta-analysis of the effect of therapist sex. Psychotherapy, 38(2), 142-148

Cabral, R. R., & Smith, T. B. (2011). Racial/Ethnic matching of clients and therapists in mental health services: A meta-analytic review of preferences, perceptions, and outcomes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 58(4), 537-554. DOI: 10.1037/a0025266

Falkenstrom, F., Granstorm, F., & Holmqvist, R. (2013). Therapeutic alliance predicts symptomatic improvement session by session. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 317-328. DOI: 10.1037/a0032258

Fluckiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., Symonds, D., Horvath, A. O. (2012). How central is the alliance in psychotherapy? A multilevel longitudinal meta-analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 59(1), 10-17. DOI: 10.1037/a0025749

Gullo, S., Lo Coco, G., & Gelso, C. (2012). Early and later predictors of outcome in brief therapy: The role of real relationship. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 68, 614-619. DOI: 10.1002/jclp.21860

Kim, J. E., Zane, N W., & Blozis, S. A. (2012). Client predictors of short-term psychotherapy outcomes among Asian and White American outpatients. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 68, 1287-1302. DOI: 10.1002/jclp.21905

Maramba, G. G., & Hall, G. C. N. (2002). Meta-analyses of ethnic match as a predictor of dropout, utilization, and level of functioning. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 8(3), 290-297. DOI: 10.1037//1099-9809.8.3.290.

Mausbach, B. T., Moore, R., Roesch, S., Cardenas, V., & Patterson, T. L. (2010). The relationship between homework compliance and therapy outcomes: An updated meta-analysis. Cognitive Therapy Research, 34, 429-438. DOI: 10.1007/s10608-010-9297-z

McEvoy, P. M., Burgess, M. M., & Nathan, P. (2014). The relationship between interpersonal problems, therapeutic alliance, and outcomes following group and individual cognitive behavior therapy. Journal of Affective Disorders, 157(20), 25-32. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2013.12.038.

Priebe, S., Richardson, M., Cooney, M., Adedeji, O., & McCabe, R. (2011). Does the therapeutic relationship predict outcomes of psychiatric treatment in patients with psychosis? A systematic review. Psychosomatics, 80(2), 70-77. DOI: 10.1159/000320976

Sharf, J., Primavera, L. H., & Diener, M. J. (2010). Dropout and therapeutic alliance: A meta-analysis of adult individual psychotherapy. Psychotherapy Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 47(4), 637-645. Doi: 10.1037/a0021175

Swift, J. K., Callahan, J. L., Ivanovic, M., Kominiak, N. (2013). Further examination of the psychotherapy preference effect: A meta-regression analysis. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 23(2), 134-145. DOI: 10.1037/a0031423

Swift, J. K., & Greenberg, R. P. (2012). Premature discontinuation in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80(4), 547-559. doi: 10.1037/a0028226


Is HTM (Hierarchical Temporarl Model) accepted as credible?

In the abstract of the paper you quote, they say (edited by me a bit to make it more brief:

  First we show that a neuron with several thousand synapses...can recognize hundreds of independent patterns of cellular activity... We then propose a neuron model where patterns detected on proximal dendrites lead to action potentials...and patterns detected on basal and apical dendrites act as predictions... We then present a network model based on neurons with these properties that learns time-based sequences.

Basically, they are showing a bunch of things that are true in some simulations they have run, which are based on some biologically plausible assumptions. There is no reason to doubt their simulations, and Hawkins is a credible person.

The basic assumptions they make are grounded in known and agreed upon concepts in neuroscience: the anatomy of different cell types, for example, the effects of synapses at different places in the cell. The whole synthesis of their work, though, is just a hypothesis, and that's also how they are presenting it. It wouldn't make sense, and Hawkins would not claim, that this is "accepted": it's a proposed idea that they show some properties of in silico. Even if some cells in the brain do work this way, it doesn't necessarily mean it is an organizing principle, either. If you're interested, Hawkins' book On Memory tells a bit more.

You can add a bit of skepticism if you'd like because these authors work for a company that sells patented machine learning technologies based on their neuroscientific work, but I don't think that's a reason to throw them out entirely, and their academic publications seem sound. I like to use Google Scholar to track citations of a given paper; if you follow that link or find the paper there on your own, you'll see it has been cited ~150 times, though many of those citations are coming from a more computational/machine learning angle, which makes sense: that's the main application for the paper. It's not really proposing any novel biology, since the biology is mostly based on things already known.


What is the name of this common anti-pattern

You could be talking about a number of issues.  You could be talking about

Freudian defense mechanism repression
Distraction
Procrastination or
Deferring

Maybe you are talking about something else entirely.

The thing is not all observations necessarily need a "scientific" name for them in psychology or neuroscience and whatever the situation is, it would need a lot of background information to determine exactly what it is and how it manifests itself.

As it stands right now, the question could be deemed open to opinion, especially when Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychology is considered by some here to be pseudoscientific.


From ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems),
Asperger's syndrome (F8.45) is:

  A disorder of uncertain nosological validity, characterized by the same type of qualitative abnormalities of reciprocal social interaction that typify autism, together with a restricted, stereotyped, repetitive repertoire of interests and activities. It differs from autism primarily in the fact that there is no general delay or retardation in language or in cognitive development. This disorder is often associated with marked clumsiness. There is a strong tendency for the abnormalities to persist into adolescence and adult life. Psychotic episodes occasionally occur in early adult life.

Actually, the Wikipedia article that you are pointing to also makes it clear:

  It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development.

However, there is no consensus if there is difference between Asperger's Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism. Perhaps also there is no clear distinction between clinically-significant autistic traits and complete absence of them.

Currently autism and Asperger's Syndrom alike are not fully understood on neurobiological basis (there are ongoing research, for a review see e.g.  E. Pisula, The autistic mind in the light of neuropsychological studies (2010) or a special issue of Nature on autism).

However, the premise

  The only criteria seems to be that people with AS are anti-social and do not have some other more serious psychological disease.

is clearly false.


How much information on the "Identical Strangers" experiment was actually released?

To learn about other twins reared apart, investigate the earlier Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the ongoing Minnesota Twin Family Study.

To pique your curiosity:

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer stand out in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart because some of their two histories were strikingly identical; several notable examples:

1st wife: "Linda"
2nd wife: "Betty"
Dog: "Toy"
Cigarette: Salem
Job: Sherrif's deputy
built a circular white bench around a tree in the yard

References

  Bouchard Jr, T.J., Lykken, D.T., McGue, M., Segal, N.L. & Tellegen, A. (1990) Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Science 250:223-228. [pdf]
  Holden, C. (1980) Identical Twins Reared Apart. Science, 207:1323-1325. [extract]


Cognitive bias - Confirming the attitudes of your peers

I think what you are describing here is the balance theory by Fritz Heider.

The following extract is from Online Psychology Laboratory, social balance article :

  Heider's Balance Theory (Heider, 1946) primarily focused on
  perceptions of relationships in the form of a triad. This triad,
  typically involving two people (the perceiver and another person) and
  an object of their attitudes, included three relationships. Heider
  (1958) labeled these attitudes as "sentiments," personal evaluations
  of other entities that underlie people's actions. A triad of
  attitudinal relationships is considered balanced if all three
  relationships are positive, or if one is positive and two are
  negative.


Language is a means of expression and communication. It serves as a medium of expression. Consciousness is independent of language. One (human or any animal) can be conscious however to report and verify, as you said, we need a language or any medium of communication.
Consciousness could safely considered an axiom in psychology.
For the second question, you have bumped on to one of the canonical pairs. How do we explain nothing? Ideally we cannot. The same is with consciousness. It is a fundamental thing. A formal verification might require a revisit to the fundamentals of philosophy and psychology.
Reference:
Thought without language: Thought without awareness? - L.Weiskrantz


Could the knowledge of the construct of self-efficacy affect the student's aptitude to a certain task?

Bandura and Cervone (1983) posit: "Those who have a low sense of self-efficacy may be easily discouraged by failure, whereas those who are assured of their capabilities for goal attainment intensify their efforts when their performances fall short and persist until they succeed" (p. 1018). The same paper also provides empirical evidence for this claim.

Accordingly, the answer to your question is yes. However, it seems more appropriate to speak of "sense" instead of "knowledge" when referring to the self-efficacy.

References

Bandura, A., & Cervone, D. (1983). Self-evaluative and self-efficacy mechanisms governing the motivational effects of goal systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(5), 1017–1028. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.5.1017


Taken from here

The Fear Paralysis Reflex begins to function very early after
conception and should normally be integrated before birth.  It can be
seen in the womb as movement of the head, neck and body in response to
threat.
It is sometimes classified as a withdrawal reflex rather than
a primitive reflex. If this reflex is retained after birth, it can be
characterised by withdrawal, reticence at being involved in anything
new, fear of different circumstances, and is often described as the
“scaredy cat” child who bears the brunt of teasing by normally
adventurous children.
This behaviour appears to be
due to the reflex’s involvement with the parasympathetic nervous
system.  Most of us are familiar with the “fight or flight” adrenalin
rush of the sympathetic nervous system, however the FPR taps into the
opposing system urging the body to “eat and stay”.  The
parasympathetic nervous system is intimately involved with the vagus
nerve.  This nerve comes directly from the brain to aid the organs.
It bypasses the spinal cord, so in the case of spinal injury we are
still able to digest our food.  The vagus nerve may be mechanically
trapped in the skull, chest, abdomen or neck.  Release of this nerve
entrapment corrects one physical factor that contributes to the
retention of the FPR.


In what order do you preprocess EEG data?

You kind of have to do some kind of baseline correction first (or a highpass filter on the unepoched data) because of slow drifting. Lowpass filtering before artifact rejection is fine as long as you don't ever go back to the unfiltered signal in your analyses.

After that, you can either throw out trials that exceed a set threshold, or you can do a two-step artifact rejection procedure. For the two-step rejection throw out anything beyond a large threshold. Then throw out any trials with points that exceed a set number of standard deviations from the mean of all trials at each time point.

The reason I say that filtering before artifact rejection is okay is because the artifacts that you are filtering out should not be related to the brain activity you are interested in. This is reasonable for frequencies above, say, 50Hz, because that should just be external and muscle noise. Anything lower than that could affect task-related brain activity, say eye movements for example. You might not want to include trials where the subject was looking away from the screen or closed their eyes.


How can pain sensations appear to originate within the person's skull?

This question might be better handled by biology.SE. I think the short answer is that there are many pain receptors around the skull.

From wikipedia:

  The brain tissue itself is not sensitive to pain because it lacks pain
  receptors. Rather, the pain is caused by disturbance of the
  pain-sensitive structures around the brain. Nine areas of the head and
  neck have these pain-sensitive structures, which are the cranium (the
  periosteum of the skull), muscles, nerves, arteries and veins,
  subcutaneous tissues, eyes, ears, sinuses and mucous membranes.


From a biological viewpoint, these experiences are associated with the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin, which activate the "reward pathway" of the brain that is associated with feelings of happiness and mood alleviation. Since these are pleasurable experiences, we crave more and more of it, which is why a lot of our actions are governed by it.

References:

The Science of Happiness. (2016). More Good Deeds. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from https://www.moregooddeeds.org/blog/2017/1/20/the-science-of-happiness

Fehlhaber, K. (2012). The Reward Pathway Reinforces Behavior - Knowing Neurons. Knowing Neurons. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://knowingneurons.com/2012/10/31/the-reward-pathway-reinforces-behavior/

Icahn School of Medicine | Neuroscience Department | Nestler Lab | Brain Reward Pathways. (2017). Neuroscience.mssm.edu. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://neuroscience.mssm.edu/nestler/brainRewardpathways.html

Know your brain: Reward system. (2015). Neuroscientifically Challenged. Retrieved 19 April 2017, from http://www.neuroscientificallychallenged.com/blog/know-your-brain-reward-system


Freud's psychic apparatus is pure theoretical psychology, which isn't cognition's best friend.

It's really hard to think how one could map the 3 construct to cognition (perhaps id is the easiest - primal brain, instinct). But even if you could, suggesting an inconsistency between 3 brain mega-systems to explain dreams is a bit of a stretch (albeit not completely unfounded - consider phantom limbs).

So as far as cognition goes, dreams have a few key characteristics:

Recency - they involve things that you have experienced since you've last slept.
Saliency - they involve things that are of subjective importance.
Randomness - random combinations and often incoherent flow.

If you try to infer anything from dreams, your best shot is that whatever you dreamt of was either recent, salient or random.

I know it may not be exciting like Freud's theories, but it is by far more founded on empirical evidence.


Why is training better when following an easy-to-difficult schedule?

SVM training is typically done in a batch processing, and thus the order of data presentation doesn't matter. You should consider online learning algorithms, for example, the perceptron learning rule. These algorithms are in general stochastic gradient descent optimization procedures, and easy examples early on with larger learning step would be much more efficient (faster convergence towards the correct answer) than learning with difficult examples first.


I work with people who have Asperger's Syndrome every day and have had no major problems at all.  The reason is that I do indeed follow some documented strategies, particularly those outlined in "Working with a Person with Asperger’s Syndrome" (Autism Victoria, 2007). A brief list of strategies suggested by that document suggest that workers with Asperger's Syndrome need:

consistency 
predictability
a calm and controlled supervisor (this also applies to coworkers)
an organised workplace

Most of all, don't make a big deal of their condition, just be aware of what is needed.


EEG and MEG measure two different but related signals. While EEG records the electric activity from the scalp, MEG records changes in the magnetic field induced by electric activity in the brain. Because of this, MEG is largely insensitive to sources oriented radially, but can pick up sources oriented tangentially to the cortex. Moreover, EEG is sensitive to volume currents (i.e., the spread of currents across the brain), while MEG less so [1].

Because of this distinction, while two components can have the same latency — let's say the face-specific N170 and the M170 — the sources originating them might be different. Naming the components differently stresses this important distinction.

For reference, I recommend the following articles and books

Baillet, S., Mosher, J. C., & Leahy, R. M. (2001). Electromagnetic brain mapping. Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE, 18(6), 14–30.
Hansen, P., Kringelbach, M., & Salmelin, R. (2010). MEG:An Introduction to Methods. Oxford University Press, USA.


Why do we wake up from sleep (from a dream) as soon as we figure out reality?

When you are dreaming, and you realize that it is a dream, the initial surprise can wake you up. However, you can build a skill for staying in the dream by anchoring yourself to simple actions in the dream. For example, as soon as you realize that you are dreaming, look at your hands and start shaking them in the dream. Generally, you will start to wake up, but then will feel yourself moving back into the dream. Once in this state of being fully aware of the dream and fully in the dream, you can start taking control of the dream.

There are several other techniques to help spot your dreams and help you remain in them to facilitate lucid dreaming. Here is a pretty decent article.