Can general intelligence be understood as pattern analysis?

You are certainly not the first to conceive of intelligence as pattern analysis. In fact, there is a book by Jeff Hawkins called "On Intelligence" which investigates this idea in depth. His idea is that the best candidate mechanism for intelligent brain function is predictive coding.

In the predictive coding framework, the job of the brain is not to continuously process all incoming information, but instead to continuously predict upcoming information: the brain is an inference machine. Predictive coding is a hierarchical process whereby a any stage in cognitive processing sends its prediction to a previous stage in processing via feedback connections. For example, if area V2 'expects' to see a square, it will send this information to area V1, which codes for line orientation. If the received input matches the expectation, the information is suppressed. The information now doesn't need to go any further than V1, because it has already been fully predicted, i.e. the brain already contains a representation of it. If, however, the input doesn't match the prediction, the mismatch, called prediction error, is transmitted further through the processing hierarchy.

Prediction error is considered the reason why surprising (invalidly predicted) stimuli lead to more neural activity than unsurprising (validly predicted) ones, for example in mismatch negativity paradigms.

The notion of expectation here is automatic, it is a function of each brain area and does not need to be conscious in the sense of us being aware that it's happening.

It is however important to note that this notion of intelligence is nothing like the notion of intelligence in psychology. In psychology, intelligence is a measure of individual differences between people. The predictive coding framework is, in contrast, posited as a general feature of the neocortex.


Is there a name for arguing with other people in one's mind?

I'm not aware of a term specifically for this phenomenon.

Having a conversation in one's head has been termed dialogic inner speech by several researchers.  You didn't mention if the people you are arguing with reply back - if they don't, then it's just regular (monologic) inner speech.

One common function of inner speech is sometimes referred to as speech rehearsal - ie, where one might practice a monologue or dialogue (eg, debate) in their mind ahead of time.

In a more pathological context, repeatedly looping through a conversation in one's head can be a form of rumination, and simulating a future argument could be considered action rumination if it is a reaction to a recently failed argument.


Death caused by "Failure to Thrive" (FTT)

The reason for failure to thrive other than insufficient nutrition, can be suppressed growth hormone secretion due to emotional neglect. In the following example, both the emotional neglect and insufficient nutrition were combined, though:

Psychosocially stunted growth masked as growth hormone deficiency, (Klinische Pediatrie, 1999):

  Short stature is a common reason for presenting a child to the
  pediatrician. Emotional deprivation may cause short stature and may
  simulate growth hormone deficiency. Diagnosis of emotional
  deprivation as the cause of growth retardation is difficult and
  misdiagnosed frequently despite of suspicious clinical signs. We
  report on 2 patients with growth retardation because of emotional
  deprivation. At the age of 5 years both children had a severe growth
  hormone deficiency. They received therapy with growth hormone and
  showed an increase of growth velocity to > or = 8 cm in the first year
  of treatment. But in the third year of treatment both patients showed
  a diminished response to the growth hormone therapy. During the period
  of observation the features of emotional deprivation became obvious
  through the extreme behavioural abnormalities. Both children showed
  disturbances in their social behaviour, and striking disorders
  concerning eating and digestion. The families of these children had
  severe social problems; alcoholism, low income and rejection of the
  child were risk factors. Removal from the current environment led to
  a characteristic increase of the growth velocity. Growth hormone
  deficiency was spontaneously reversible, so that treatment with growth
  hormone was terminated. The social environment and the psychical
  prosperity are essential growth factors in childhood and adolescence.
  The common features and risk factors of emotional deprivation are
  described. Spontaneous catch-up growth after removal from the
  current environment distinguishes this form of short stature from the
  other organic growth disorders.

Hopkins Medicine says that:

  Other factors that may lead to failure to thrive:

  Emotional deprivation as a result of parental withdrawal, rejection or
  hostility

and

  Problems with the endocrine system, such as thyroid hormone
  deficiency, growth hormone deficiency or other hormone deficiencies...

...some of which might be triggered by emotional neglect despite proper nutrition:

Failure to grow: lack of food or lack of love? (Professional Care of Mother and Child, 1994):

  One of the most important criteria for good health in childhood is
  normal growth. Taking regular accurate measurements of length and
  plotting them on a centile chart is essential to spot early signs of
  growth disorders. Be alert for a "zig-zag" pattern on the chart: it
  could indicate psychosocial dwarfism (see opposite). Length is
  more important than weight for identifying growth disorders. Lack of
  love, or an adverse emotional or social environment, can cause growth
  failure even in a child who is eating enough. Such children have a
  condition called psychosocial dwarfism, which is due to
  hypopituitarism (too little growth hormone secretion from the pituitary gland). This condition does not respond to growth hormone
  treatment. Once the child is placed in an alternative environment, eg
  a good foster home, the hypopituitarism is reversed and rapid
  "catch-up" growth takes place. It often emerges that such children
  have been physically, emotionally or sexually abused.

I'm not aware of any case in which psychological reasons alone in a properly fed child would result in death associated with failure to thrive. When it comes to failure to thrive in certain orphanges, I would not ascribe it solely to psychological reasons...


How can Semantic Pointer Architecture be used to capture dynamical systems?

As explained in the NEF book, all non-linear dynamical systems can be represented in the NEF.

The SPA is simply applying semantic meaning and manipulations to the vectors represented by the NEF. The two most prominent examples of this are the motor system and the inference system in Spaun, which are shown in the aforementioned "rapid variable creation" task.

The vision system represents symbols (numbers) which get sent to the inference system. The inference system figures out the answer and sends it to the motor system. The motor system converts the symbol to a path and follows it.

Adding dynamics in a similar system with dynamics being visually identified, manipulated and then output, instead of static paths. One could imagine a system where the dynamics of the movement of an object are identified, manipulated neurally and then imitated. For example, having the running of a cheetah represented a series of limb movements, mapping them onto the human body and then having a human imitate that gait.

Of course this hasn't been implemented yet (and would look quite silly), but it shouldn't be super difficult. The main problem would be a good "demo" or psychological data to match, but I think this is still a good example.


Finding the anterior comissure to set origin in a SPECT image using SPM/ISAS

You can use the Whole Brain Atlas by Harvard to look at the normal brain anatomy in 3-D with MRI/PET.

Check the Anterior Commissure (AC) on the MRI and sync it with the PET or SPECT. It helps.

More specifically, select "Anterior Commissure" and T1/FDG and click sync to show all the orientations in the same modalities and anatomical structure. It helps to find the anterior commissure in a normal brain using nuclear medicine image.


I came across this question whilst researching CBT for a course I am studying.

The short answer

As I will cover in the long answer, there has been a lot of articles stating that CBT is very effective, and there are articles which have stated that it is not as effective as has been claimed.

  CBT is not a single model of therapy, applicable to all clients in all situations.  This has been one of the criticisms levelled at CBT, that its 'one size fits all' approach to the complex nature of human problems will, inevitably, fail to meet the needs of many, or (at best), simply focus on symptom reduction. (Reeves, 2013)

There are a fair few factors which can prevent CBT from becoming effective, and a trained and certified CBT practitioner will be able to assess the suitability of CBT.  If they operate ethically, they will not go ahead with providing CBT to someone who it would not benefit.

One of the biggest factors which doesn't allow CBT to work is that if the client is not willing or able to challenge their thoughts and behaviours, then CBT will not be effective.

Long answer

For the long answer, which will help to explain some of the reasons why CBT may not work with some people, I will be using a lot of the work I put into an essay I had to write for my psychotherapy course which covered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and integrative approaches to therapy.

CBT is an integrative model of approach and we had to look at how an integrative approach may be used to support the client within a case study provided.

Case study provided

Hassan has been referred to you for work-related stress and anxiety.  He has a management position and is finding it difficult to cope.  At present the information you have is that he is a 42 years old Muslim man, married with 2 children.  He has lived in the UK since the age of 5 when his parents travelled here.  His father died two years later and Hassan, as the eldest son, has felt responsible for the wellbeing of his mother and sisters as well as his own family.

Your referral is through an employee assistance scheme.  Hassan’s assessment shows high level of anxiety without depression.  He is otherwise fit and healthy.  You may offer him six sessions with a further six sessions if appropriate.

An article (Dhami & Sheikh, 2000) adapted from a chapter in Caring for Muslim Patients, published by Radcliffe Medical Press, Oxford, England; provides key insights needed to allow Muslim clients' concerns to be adequately heard.  The vignettes section of the article gives a few sayings of Muhammad regarding relationships with parents and one of them points out that you should “strive to serve them”.

If the client has had the opportunity to fully integrate with the western culture they are living in, they may be more open to challenging their thoughts and beliefs, however we need to be mindful that as therapists, just like we are not here to judge, for an example, on sexuality (Pink Therapy, 2016) (UKCP, 2015), we are not in a position to judge whether a cultural or religious belief is right or wrong, especially when we are not priests, vicars, rabbis, imams or the like.  Not only that, if the client is devout in their religious beliefs, then we are not going to change those beliefs very easily, if at all. (Babilonia, 2015)

The only time when we can intervene in any religious or cultural beliefs is when it is believed that laws may be broken such as the FGM Act (Home Office, 2016) (Crown Prosecution Service, n.d.), in which case, we would refer the legal case to the necessary authorities and it would be down to the legal profession and not the therapist.

Strengths and Limitations of integrative approaches to counselling

Strengths

Integrative counselling and psychotherapy can be seen as one of the most effective approaches within counselling. (The Counselling Directory, 2013)  The idea behind the integrative approach is that no single approach suits every client and therefore you use different approaches and models of therapy to suit the situation and client.  The article within The Counselling Directory cited also states that integrative therapy has four different categories:

common factorsLooking at the common tools available in each approach that can be useful in the therapy.  Therapist/Client rapport, therapist qualities – positive regard, and congruence etc. – emotional release, and clarification etc.
technical eclecticismThe therapist looks at and selects the best interventions by relying on experience and knowledge of what has worked in the past for others, through theories and research literature.
theoretical integrationThe combination of two approaches with a common philosophy.  The combined ideas are theoretically the same as each other.  For example, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is part of the theoretical integration category, as it is a combination of behaviourism and behaviour therapy, and cognitive theories and their application in therapeutic settings (Reeves, 2013), plus, cognitive analytical therapy is also a theoretical integration of psychodynamic therapy and cognitive therapy.
assimilative integrationThe therapist primarily sticks to one therapeutic approach, for example Humanistic or psychodynamic, but the therapist will use strategies and models from other therapeutic approaches as well.  The combination of ideas will assimilate the pure form of the primary therapeutic approach.

Limitations

The limitations of any integrative therapy depend on the category of integration.

Theoretical integration

One problem identified in theoretical integration is that it is difficult to integrate some theories; for example, it is difficult to integrate psychodynamic theory and behavioural theory.  The psychodynamic approach suggests that our early experiences from birth onwards and their impacts lead to our psychological problems, where behaviour theory sees problems as much more agreeable to change (Reeves, 2013).  These differences result in incompatibilities between these theories.

Assimilative integration

With this kind of integration, there is no balance compared to the other forms of integration.  Where the therapist is primarily psychodynamic or humanistic, for example, they will pick and choose ideas from other approaches which may not be put forward by their primary approach, but can work very effectively and contribute to the treatment or treatment plan.

Technical eclecticism

This shares similarities and differences with assimilative integration, but it has no theoretical underpinning to the approach. (The Counselling Directory, 2013)

As CBT is a theoretical integrative model, and it is difficult to integrate some theories, CBT cannot and does not incorporate any psychodynamic theories.  However, if you are going to work in a fully integrative manner, you need to bear in mind the theories within the psychodynamic approach too.  If therapy seems to need some psychodynamic interventions, then you may need to drop CBT sessions sometimes and concentrate on the psychodynamic interventions, maybe through Cognitive Analytical Therapy instead, before continuing with CBT.

The basic concept of CBT

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) was developed by Aaron Temkin Beck, and as mentioned before, CBT is a combination of behaviourism and behaviour therapy, and cognitive theories and their application in therapeutic settings (Reeves, 2013).  CBT helps to change how you think, hence the word Cognitive, and what you do, hence the word Behaviour.

A difficult life situation, relationship or practical problem can lead to:

Altered thinking
Altered emotions and feelings
Altered behaviour
Altered physical feelings or symptoms

Things can happen the other way too.  Any of the above alterations can lead to a difficult life situation, relationship or practical problem (Royal College of Psychiatrists, n.d.).

CBT works by trying to get the client to think about a situation in a more helpful way in order to move forward using more helpful behaviours.

The basic concept of REBT

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) has generally been put under the same umbrella as CBT, however although it has similarities, REBT is different.  Where CBT was developed by Aaron Beck, REBT was developed by Albert Ellis when he started to lose faith in the type of psychoanalysis he was using.

REBT is a practical and action-led model of therapy and personal growth.  It doesn’t just focus on the client’s behaviours, but also allows the client to understand the behaviours of others and provide techniques that will help to solve future problems.

Although REBT looks primarily at our current beliefs and behaviours, it also looks at the cause and effect of past experiences and beliefs which create our present beliefs and behaviours.  It does this whilst aiming to change irrational beliefs into rational ones quickly rather than slowly, however, one key point to note is that the therapist does not impose rational beliefs on the client, but accepts there are non-rational beliefs that may help people achieve happiness.  That way, the therapist is accepting the client’s value system.

REBT, uses an A-B-C-D-E formula.

Activating ExperienceAlso referred to by some as the Initial Sensitising Event (ISE), this is the root cause of our unhappiness
BeliefsIrrational self-defeating beliefs that are the source of our unhappiness, or come about as a result of the ISE
ConsequencesThe neurotic symptoms and negative feelings and emotions that result from the ISE and/or Beliefs
DisputeWe must dispute and challenge these irrational beliefs in order for the client to enjoy a balanced outlook in life
EffectsThe client must learn to enjoy the effects of the new rational beliefs and get used to the changes, letting them become the new norm.

The shortfalls of CBT

As mentioned before, One of the ideas put forward about CBT is that it is a suitable form of therapy for all human problems.  This idea can be damaging in some respects, as CBT is not suitable for all psychological conditions.

Interestingly, whilst researching the overall efficacy of CBT, I came across a few items of note.

Carl Rogers emphasised the quality of the therapeutic relationship as a necessary and sufficient condition for successful therapy (Rogers, 1957) whereas CBT therapists tend to see the alliance as more instrumental in ensuring the patient’s adherence to the treatment protocol (e.g. Dunn, et al., 2006) (Goldsmith, et al., 2015)
The Countess of Mar in the House of Lords suggested the results of a trial into the effectiveness of CBT and GET (graded exercise therapy) had been artificially inflated (BACP, 2013)
An international team of researchers (Cuijpers, et al., 2016) concludes that

  …CBT is ‘probably effective’ with major depression, general anxiety disorder, panic disorder and social anxiety disorder, but not as effective as has been claimed, due to publication bias, poor quality of studies, and the use of waiting list control groups as a comparator. (BACP, 2016)

CBT is as much based on the development of a therapeutic alliance as it is in a psychodynamic and humanistic approach.  The success of therapy will be, at least partly, informed by the nature of the therapeutic process, and not simply the application of particular theoretical ideas, as some suggest (Reeves, 2013)
Recent literature provides fairly strong evidence that CBT in addition to antipsychotic medication is effective in the management of acute as well as chronic schizophrenia (Rathod & Turkington, 2005).  However, I would stress that CBT was not used alone in any of these studies from what I have seen.  It was used carefully in conjunction with psychiatric help and antipsychotic medication.

An alternative to CBT called Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) has been touted to be better than CBT. But it was developed by Manchester University (Addelman, 2020) and studied by Manchester University (Wells, 2019) so more independent studies are needed.

Either way, if the client is not able or willing to challenge their thoughts and behaviours, then CBT will not be effective.

References

Addelman, M. (2020). New therapy more effective than cognitive behavioral therapy for depression.
Retrieved from: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-therapy-effective-cognitive-behavioral-depression.html

Babilonia, S. (2015). Challenging religious privilege in public life.
Retrieved from: http://churchandstate.org.uk/2015/10/the-problem-with-faith-11-ways-religion-is-destroying-humanity/

BACP. (2013). Policy. Therapy Today, 24(2), p. 52.

BACP. (2016). News. Therapy Today, 27(8), p. 6.

Crown Prosecution Service. (n.d). Female Genital Mutilation Legal Guidance.
Retrieved from: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/d_to_g/female_genital_mutilation/#a02

Cuijpers, P. et al. (2016). How effective are cognitive behavior therapies for major depression and anxiety disorders? A meta-analytic update of the evidence. World Psychiatry, 15(3), pp. 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20346

Dhami, S. & Sheikh, A. (2000). The Muslim family: predciament and promise. The Western Journal of Medicine, 173(5), pp. 352-356. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071164

Dunn, H., Morrison, A. P. & Bentall, R. P.  (2006). The relationship between patient suitability, therapeutic alliance, homework compliance and outcome in cognitive therapy for psychosis. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 13(3), pp. 145-152. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.481

Goldsmith, L. P., Lewis, S. W., Dunn, G. & Bentall, R. P. (2015). Psychological treatments for early psychosis can be beneficial or harmful, depending on the therapeutic alliance: an instrumental variable analysis. Psychological Medicine, 45(11), pp. 2365-2373. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329171500032X

Home Office. (2016). Mandatory reporting of female genital mutilation: procedural information.
Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mandatory-reporting-of-female-genital-mutilation-procedural-information

Pink Therapy. (2016). Why I am resigning from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. Retrieved from: https://pinktherapyblog.com/2016/02/17/why-i-am-resigning-from-the-british-association-for-counselling-and-psychotherapy/

Rathod, S. & Turkington, D. (2005). Cognitive behaviour therapy for schizophrenia: a review. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 18(2), pp. 159-163. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001504-200503000-00009

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

Rogers, C. (1957). The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change.
Retrieved from: http://www.shoreline.edu/dchris/psych236/Documents/Rogers.pdf

Royal College of Psychiatrists. (n.d.) 5 Areas Assessment.
Retrieved from: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/treatmentswellbeing/cbt/5areas.aspx

The Counselling Directory. (2013). Integrative Psychotherapy as an Effective Form of Counselling.
Retrieved from: http://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/counsellor-articles/integrative-psychotherapy-is-the-best-approach

UKCP. (2015). Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Conversion Therapy in the UK.
Available at: https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Memorandum-of-understanding-on-conversion-therapy.pdf

Wells A (2019) Breaking the Cybernetic Code: Understanding and Treating the Human Metacognitive Control System to Enhance Mental Health. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(2621). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02621


When the DEA says a drug is X times more potent than another, what do they mean?

At least the 100 number seems based on the CDC parenteral dose conversion:

(Fentanyl has poor oral bioavailability, so it's not intended to be used that way.)


Is it possible to sleep with your eyes open?

Nocturnal lagophthalmos is the search term you're looking for.  But it's less that they "can" fall asleep with their eyes open and more that they "can't" close their eyes during sleep:

  Nocturnal lagophthalmos is the inability to close the eyelids during
  sleep. Lagophthalmos is associated with exposure keratopathy, poor
  sleep, and persistent exposure-related symptoms. There are a variety
  of causes of lagophthalmos, grouped as proptosis/eye exposure
  etiologies and palpebral insufficiency etiologies.


I've read this opinion in Quartz

Axel Cleeremans pointed out that Freud’s Id-Ego-Superego structure roughly matches onto the Unconscious-Conscious-Metacognition structure of the mind studied in neuroscience today.
“The ‘id’ is what we call the unconscious today or the idea that there’s a vast reservoir of representations that sits there and influences ongoing processing but without being available to conscious awareness,” he says. “The ‘super-ego’ in a sense is connected with meta-cognition, with the idea that in addition to first-order awareness, the technical movie that we have as soon as we wake up and the field of sensations we experience and thoughts we have, there’s an additional monitoring and control system.”
Cleeremans believes that much of Freud’s work has scientific value today. “I think he’s wrongly discredited. He’s discredited for all sorts of political reasons that have nothing to do with the ideas,” he says. While Freud’s work on sexuality and women, for example, are largely dismissed, there’s still considerable value in broad structure of his work. “The core set of ideas hold up,” adds Cleeremans.

YMMV how correct or widely shared that view is. As far as I can tell Cleeremans is a psychologist, not a neuroscientist.
Also Freud's ideas are still pretty popular in France; I don't know about Belgium, but... it's close geographically; Cleeremans holds a professorship at a Francophone Belgian university.
You could also read Rizzolatti et al. "Linking psychoanalysis with neuroscience: the concept of ego." for more details. Looking at the authors' list of this paper, it does seem an interdisciplinary approach (one of the co-authors is affiliated with a neuroscience department). They seem to advance roughly the same analogy as Cleeremans:

We maintain that, in order both to act coherently and to have a basic, first person, understanding of the behavior of others, it is necessary to posit the existence of a neurophysiological "motor" ego similar to the "rider" of the Freudian metaphor. We review then a series of neurophysiological findings showing that the systems underlying the organization of action and conscious perception are both mediated by a cortical motor network formed by parieto-frontal circuits. In conclusion, we show that the activity of this network has strong similarities to that postulated by Freud for the conscious part of ego. We also propose that the default-mode network might represent that part of ego that is mostly involved in unconscious processes.


Why different responses to target and distractor in three-stimulus oddball procedure?

I assume you are talking about a difference in neural activity?

The difference in processing of targets and distracters does not come from their relative frequency, but from their task-relevance: you are paying attention to the targets, thus increasing gain. In auditory MMN, this attention component becomes evident slightly later than the prediction component, and might be missing completely for ignored stimuli (e.g. when the participants are watching a movie while listening to a stream of sounds). Naatanen has more than one review paper that goes into this, this one probably the most recent.


Yeah this is a very common and effective approach. Try doing a google search for: P300 speller github for some implementations. One issue that you should pay attention to is the limited refresh rate of computer monitors. You are going to want very accurate synchronization between what is shown on a monitor and the EEG being recorded. You'll want to use some type of framework that allows for this synchronization such as PsychoPy (for Python) or Psychtoolbox (for Matlab).

Here is a great writeup of how to implement a P300 speller in Python. Looks like they use Pyff.

First step, in my opinion, is to look at some examples that have already been implemented:

Here is a Matlab framework for BCI with an example P300 speller that uses PsychToolbox for good event timing. Looks like the repository is actively maintained.

Also, look at OpenVibe. Another framework for BCI. There are a lot of examples available there.

Try one or a few of these out and see if you can get something that has already been made working. Then you'll be in a much better position to implement your own speller.


What is the field that studies community responses to incentives?

There is a specific field of economics that deals with the process of changing people's responses through incentives: Behavioural Economics.

  study the effects of social, cognitive and emotional factors on the
  economic decisions of individuals and institutions and the
  consequences for market prices, returns and the resource allocation.

A recent issue of The Economist covers some of the current approaches used by governments to change individual behaviour:

  Behavioural economists have found that all sorts of psychological or
  neurological biases cause people to make choices that seem contrary to
  their best interests. The idea of nudging is based on research that
  shows it is possible to steer people towards better decisions by
  presenting choices in different ways.

Some of the approaches, for instance used by the British Behavioural Insights Team, are merely ways of changing a message:

  The Nudge Unit has been running dozens of experiments and the early
  results have been promising*. In one trial, a letter sent to
  non-payers of vehicle taxes was changed to use plainer English, along
  the line of “pay your tax or lose your car”. In some cases the letter
  was further personalised by including a photo of the car in question.
  The rewritten letter alone doubled the number of people paying the
  tax; the rewrite with the photo tripled it.

It's become a very fruitful area of research so would recommend taking your interest further.


What's the difference between flaws of character and a personality disorder?

There is a clear definition of what a personality disorder is. The Wikipedia article on Personality Disorders lists the criteria given in the DSM-5 and ICD-10. Take a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder

If you don't understand those definitions, please edit your question accordingly.


Is there a way to compare the subjective experiences of two different subjects upon an object?

Can We Compare Subjective Experience?
Consider this pain scale, variations of which are commonly used in medical settings:

If two people answer "6 - distressing, miserable pain," can we reliably compare the subjective pain intensities between the two individuals? How would we know that one person's experience of "distressing, miserable pain" is the same intensity as the other's?
Supertasters and Taste Perception
What's helped us to answer a question like this comes from Linda Bartoshuk's work on taste perception in so-called supertasters vs. normal tasters.
Bartoshuk famously uses blue dye to reveal the number of tastebuds on participants' tongues. As you can see below, supertasters have a lot more tastebuds than normal folks (and what Bartoshuk calls "non-tasters"). As a consequence of this, we see variation in taste perception.

What's important is that the number of taste buds provides a reliable physical/genetic basis by which to predict taste perception (e.g., bitterness intensity). So we would expect reports of bitterness intensity like so: supertasters > normal tasters > non-tasters.
Consider this 9-point scale assessing bitterness intensity:

If a supertaster and taster both rated a 5 on this scale, we'd wonder why there wasn't a difference.  In fact, how could we know that a 5 for a supertaster is the same intensity as a 5 for a normal taster?  Perhaps a 5 is twice as bitter for a supertaster than a normal taster, but this scale is not suitable for determining that.
Cross-modality Matching
Without getting into too much detail, the solution to between-group comparison is cross-modality matching.  Basically, we ask participants to compare their experiences of bitterness to, for example, the brightness of a light.
Importantly, perceptions of brightness are presumed to be independent of perceptions of taste (i.e., having more/less taste buds isn't related to perceptions of brightness).  So variation in brightness between the two groups will be the same on average.  Thus, it can serve as a potential means by which to compare subjective intensity of taste perception.
Bartoshuk uses this example with sound that I find easy to understand:

We put earphones on everyone and ask both groups to adjust the loudness of a tone to the sweetness of the soda. If hearing and taste are really independent, then the average perception of loudness should be the same in the two groups, but subjects with the high density of taste buds set the tone to 90 decibels (about the loudness of a train whistle), and those with the low density set the tone to 80 decibels (about the loudness of a dial tone). As we know that a tone of 90 decibels sounds twice as loud as a tone of 80 decibels, we can conclude that the soda tastes twice as sweet to those with the high density of taste buds. We have identified a systematic difference in taste intensity between these two groups.

You can also use imagined sensations. For example, Fast (2004) has found that:

supertasters matched the bitterness of dark chocolate to the brightness of low beam headlights at night, while nontasters matched it to the brightness of the moon.

Consider this scale, which uses cross-modality matching to assess perception of candy sweetness intensity between supertasters (ST) and non-tasters (NT):

When using these matched modalities, you get systematic differences in sweetness perception that you otherwise wouldn't see using the standard 9-point sensory scale above.
Further Reading
I didn't give a particularly comprehensive outline of cross-modality matching, so for more information, consult the sources below.
Bartoshuk, L. (2014). The measurement of pleasure and pain. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(1), 91-93.
Bartoshuk, L. M., Fast, K., & Snyder, D. J. (2005). Differences in our sensory worlds: Invalid comparisons With labeled scales. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 122-125.
Kalva, J. J., Sims, C. A., Puentes, L. A., Snyder, D. J., & Bartoshuk, L. M. (2014). Comparison of the Hedonic General Labeled Magnitude Scale with the Hedonic 9-Point Scale. Journal of Food Science, 79(2), S238-S245.


Are schizophrenia and OCD genetically related?

Yes, there is almost certainly a genetic overlap between schizophrenia and OCD.

Quantifying the overlap in variation requires genotyping a large number of individuals, and a lot of this cross-disorder work is done by consortia. The Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium estimated the genetic correlation due to common polymorphisms between ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity), BPD (bipolar), SCZ (schizophrenia), MDD (major depression), and ASD (autism spectrum) (Wray, N.R. et al. 2013). Their key findings may interest you:

  The genetic correlation calculated using common SNPs was high between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (0.68 ± 0.04 s.e.), moderate between schizophrenia and major depressive disorder (0.43 ± 0.06 s.e.), bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (0.47 ± 0.06 s.e.), and ADHD and major depressive disorder (0.32 ± 0.07 s.e.), low between schizophrenia and ASD (0.16 ± 0.06 s.e.) and non-significant for other pairs of disorders as well as between psychiatric disorders and the negative control of Crohn's disease.

But OCD wasn't on their list, likely because not as many cases have been genotyped for OCD as for the five disorders listed. A review in Science from 2015 shows the number of cases involved in the largest genome-wide association study for each of 13 classes of psychiatric disorder at that time, including OCD, for which 1,889 subjects had been genotyped (Geschwind, D. H. & Flint, J., 2015). Most likely, as the sample size of OCD cases increases, OCD will be incorporated into the PGC's cross-disorder studies.

A recent study used the PGC SCZ data plus data collected from 370 Spanish OCD cases to estimate the shared polygenic risk between the two disorders. They claim that SCZ polygenic risk from the PGC data explains 3.7% of the phenotypic variance in their OCD data, which represents an overlap in the genetics (Costas, J., et al., 2016).

This study's results likely underestimate the true genetic correlation between the disorders for two reasons: 1) the sample sizes to date for OCD have been too small to identify genome-wide significant GWAS hits, so our understanding of OCD genetics still has quite a way to go, and 2) this study focused on exonic regions, while most of the polygenic risk for psychiatric disease is not found in exons.

References

Costas, J., Carrera, N., Alonso, P., Gurriarán, X., Segalàs, C., Real, E., López-Solà, C., Mas, S., Gassó, P., Domènech, L., Morell, M., Quintela, I., Lázaro, L., Menchón, J. M., Estivill, X. & Carracedo, Á., 2016. Exon-focused genome-wide association study of obsessive-compulsive disorder and shared polygenic risk with schizophrenia. Translational Psychiatry, 6(768).DOI: 10.1038/tp.2016.34

Geschwind, Daniel H. & Flint J., 2015. Genetics and genomics of psychiatric disease. Science 349(6255), pp. 1489-1494.DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa8954

Wray, Naomi R. and The Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, 2013. Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNPs. Nature Genetics 45, pp. 984–994DOI: 10.1038/ng.2711


What is the psychological explanation for the phenomena that a person sees the solution to a problem as “simple” once it has been found?

As @Arnon suggested in the comments, this looks to be a case of the hindsight bias, especially given the reference to "hindsight is 20/20" in a comment.

Via Wikipedia:

  Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon[1] or creeping determinism,[2] refers to the common tendency for people to perceive events that have already occurred as having been more predictable than they actually were before the events took place.[3][4] As a result, people often believe, after an event has occurred, that they would have predicted, or perhaps even would have known with a high degree of certainty, what the outcome of the event would have been, before the event occurred.


Is there any justification for viewing neurons as self-interested agents?

The answer to "is there any justification" is pretty much always "yes", but that can be a quite uninteresting "yes" if those justifications are poor. People justify bad or unsupported ideas all the time.
A big difference between single cells of a whole organism and single-celled organisms is that only the single-celled organisms reproduce on their own. Natural selection helps optimize that process to preserve the cells (and organisms) which are best able to make new copies of themselves. In that sense, even multicellular organisms aren't really self-interested, they are "my next generation interested", which explains a lot of animal behavior that cannot be explained by self interest.
There are models of brain function that involve competition between neurons (like winner-take-all decision making, used both in artificial neural networks and to understand biological brains), but these algorithms aren't really "self-interest", they're just the way that a whole brain arrives at a conclusion. There is also competition in development of neurons and synapses (and in other cell types as well), but it's not really right to think of this as "self-interest", in particular because the "losers" undergo apoptosis - that's the opposite of self-interest, it's explicitly a behavior selected in cells that kills the cell for the benefit of the organism.
Could one still use a model of self-interest to understand these behaviors of cell survival and neural computation? Yes, probably, but it would be important to think of it as an analogy. The neurons in such a model might behave like a self-interested agent, but that doesn't mean they are one.
Sometimes cells in a multicellular organism do develop tendencies towards self-interest, when the genes that limit and control the cells' growth are not behaving properly. These cells start to do a great job of replicating themselves rather than functioning for the survival of the whole organism. We call this cancer, and it ultimately becomes self-defeating since once the whole organism dies, the tumor does as well.


To what extent is time to complete an intelligence test incorporated into the IQ score?

I'm not familiar with all tests out there, but I'll give an example from the fourth revision of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV), one of the more popular tests.

The time to complete the whole test does not matter (as long as you complete it in one go without long breaks). Usually testing takes between one and two hours, but if you test very old and frail persons, you might even administer parts of the test on different days.

I have not heard of any IQ test that has an overall time limit for the whole test (which does not mean that there is none). In my opinion that would not work for a paper and pencil test, because there are breaks between subtests where the test administrator gives the instructions for the next subtest, and short breaks where the administrator reads out the questions for individual items of a subtest. Thus, the overall time would depend not only on the test subject, but on the administrator of the test as well. In a computer administered test, it would be possible to measure the time used to solve the questions accurately, but, as I said, I don't know of such an IQ test.

In the WAIS-IV, many subtests have a time limit. For example there is one subtest where you have to mark certain geometrical forms (e.g. a yellow triangle) on a page filled with many different tiny geometric forms. Obviously, given enough time, everybody would be able to complete that subtest without errors. But you have a limited time in which you have to find as many of the specific forms as you can. There are enough forms that no-one can finish that page in the given time. So the number of forms you find and the number of errors you make are your score for this subtest. Other intelligence tests have similar time limits for certain subtests.


What is the mechanism behind recurring or looping thoughts?

I think what you're talking about is worry and/or rumination, both of which describe a perseverative and repetitive thinking style (e.g., Watkins, 2008).  Worry is future-oriented whereas rumination is past-oriented. We don't understand the mechanisms all that well at the level of analysis you're interested in, but I'll present some brain-level theories/data about these processes.

Rumination

Rumination is associated with functional hyperconnectivity between the default mode network (DMN) and subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), which may be mediated by connections with the medial dorsal thalamus (Hamilton, Farmer, Fogelman, & Gotlib, 2015). The DMN is involved with affective self-referential thought and the sgPFC supports affective behavioral withdrawal.  Together, the DMN and sgPFC might produce a ruminative state that is "self-focused, valenced, and withdrawn" (Hamilton et al., 2015, p. 227).  Other analyses also reveal structural and resting state abnormalities associated with rumination, involving areas related to cognitive control (Kuhn, Vanderhasselt, de Raedt, & Gallinat, 2012).  Rumination and cognitive control deficits (e.g., in working memory; Joormann, Levens, & Gotlib, 2011) are strongly related, explaining why trait ruminators have difficulties with disengaging from their repetitive, intrusive thoughts.

Worry

Worry seems to be associated with increased activation of anterior cingulate and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, involved with mentalizing and self-reflection.  And pathological worry (in GAD) may be associated with prolonged activation of these areas, possibly representing difficulties inhibiting worrying thoughts (Paulesu et al., 2010).  Hyperanxious individuals also tend to show greater amygdala and insula activity to emotional stimuli (Etkin & Wager, 2007).  This may indicate that pathological worry arises from dysfunctional salience processing ("Is this stimulus biologically relevant to me?") and emotional processing/reactivity.


Effect of words highlighting on reading comprehension

I can speak to this question somewhat from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We memory researchers would think of text highlighting like this in terms of distinctiveness. (An article by McDaniel and Bugg (2008) may shed some light.) Simply put, highlighting a word in a different color than the rest of the text draws what we call item-specific processing towards that word. You'll have a better memory for it, for sure -- and maybe this ties into goals more relevant when writing code.

Increasing item-specific processing, however, comes with a cost: It detracts from organizational processing, which is involved with interrelating sentence (or code) elements, memory for order, and so forth.

Also note that the more items that are made distinctive, the less of a benefit making an additional item distinctive provides (e.g., if words are multicolored already, making a new word red or green doesn't really do anything to the distinctiveness of that word).

So when you use a lot of different highlighting colors, like in the example image, two things are happening: (1) too much distinctiveness is being used, washing out benefits from distinctiveness; and (2) increasing item-specific processing for individual items damages memory and processing for the structure. In essence, the example given is the worst of both worlds.

To answer your question, it might make sense to only use highlighting (or colors, fonts, etc.) to highlight key points, etc.; much like what we already do in writing for the web. Like anyone who highlights a textbook knows, it doesn't do any good to highlight an entire chapter.


In a central pattern generator based on reciprocal inhibition, how does one "side" get picked over the other to start out?

Noise will ensure that there will not be perfect symmetry and therefore that one has an advantage to fire first.  Whichever one fires first will inhibit the other and ensure that the first one to fire will stay on for however long the dynamics of the pattern generator allow.


What is the easiest way to memorize big amounts of information (a.k.a. learning for exams)?

If you want to learn something then investigating how the brain encodes memory, and looking at methods of enhancing these tasks is the way to go. Pop psychology books do the field little credit and are often riddled with academic inaccuracies. However if you are going to use a book I highly recommend Human Memory by the brilliant Alan Braddeley.

Memory is largely split between three according Atkinson and Schiffrin's (1986) model: sensory store->short term store(STM)-> long term store (LTM). Although this can then be sub-split into explicit and implicit memory, and the sensory store is what we would now call attentional processing. Broadly speaking we have little control of attentional processes than STM. So lets look at how you many enhance the encoding between STM and LTM. Much of what I'm about to mention comes developed out of the Levels of Encoding theory which essentially suggests that information is processed at different levels depending upon the complexity and relationships, the greater the depth of the encoding and associations the easier something is to remember. Many Mnemonic (memory) techniques are based on this. For instance, "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain"= the colours of the rainbow. technically this is shallow encoding because its only the first letter or each word relating to the colour in the order they occur in light refraction. But this is are easier than remember the colours based upon there discrete and unconnected names. The more associations you make the easier something is to remember as it makes more associations heres an deeper example remember this list and hide it once you have read it and try to recall after the maths test: Carrot, Monkey, Telephone, Guitar, School, Bottle, Newspaper, Mansion, Henry, Catastrophe, Worms, canopy, Hairspray.

Answer the following: 2x3.5=?, (7/2)x3=?, square root of 27?, A car accretes from 0-50 m/sec in over a distance of 34 meters how long did it take?

Recall the list?

If instead you tried to recall the list as a story it would be easier to remember all the items...

A Monkey was eating a Carrot when the Selephone rang offering Guitar lessons at a School, he/she decided to go and packed a Bottle and Newspaper. Upon leaving the Mansion he/she walked past Henry who was having a Catastrophically collecting worms under his fishing Canopy with a Hairspray can.

This is a deeper level of encoding that should be easier to remember because it has more detail applying the words in an episodic and semantic style. This activates more brain regions providing more cues for how associations for the information that one wishes to store. I literally can't write enough about neural encoding of memory there is a plethora of research, and I strongly suggest a google scholar search if you are interested. But the over riding suggestion is increase associations, for instance when I was studying for my exams I would write notes and cue cards which were highlighted, I would also create stories and words made of the items I wanted to remember. In addition I would drink a particular flavour of squash while doing my learning and revising. The reason being is that these all create associations, and if you can take a cue with you into an exam, such as apple juice, it well help you to remember. Visualisation a lot too, imagining the place you were when you learnt something and the smells and related tastes.

Finally it cannot be understated the role that affective (emotional) processing plays, information is often affectively encoded. Trying to remember how you felt or giving data affective significance can aid recall or being in the same state of affect helps.

Essentially a large part of memory can be understood in terms of Pavolivan and operant conditioning, coupled with motivational and affective relevance. In other words learnt associations and reinforcement may act as cues and learning mechanisms that strengthen memory. The relevance of these cues one can give both motivational and affective significance, and these may also be used to help recall. In addition the level of detail and information relative to the encoding process strengthens or deepens the learning process.

This is a REDUCTIONIST explanation of memory there is a lot more on it and the precise mechanisms related to what is being learnt, there is also a lot i haven't mentioned. Sorry for the lack of references I have a job to do, but you can google a lot of these topics and you will encounter most while learning about cognitive neuroscience. Memory research is probably one of the best understood areas of cognitive neuroscience along with perception.


Is there a guide on exactly how to report outputs (regression, anova, correspondence analysis) in APA?

You should get the APA Style Manual (currently in the 6th edition).

  Chapter 5 describes the effective use of graphic elements in text. It provides readers with guidance on which graphic element is best suited to the data being delivered as well as detailed instruction on table and figure preparation.

It has lots of examples of how to report individual statistics and how to present common analyses in tabular form (e.g., group differences, correlation matrices, regression models, multilevel models, SEM results, etc.)

For less common analyses, you can often use the tables provided in the manual as a a starting point. You may also like to search the literature for example publications.


Does associating a color with numbers improve math learning?

I don't know of research that answers this question directly, but I'm going to guess the answer is no, it wouldn't help, based on the following reasoning.
First, people tend to learn math less well when superfluous visual richness is added. I think adding color to numbers counts as superfluous visual richness.

Brown, M. C., McNeil, N. M., & Glenberg, A. M. (2009). Using concreteness in education: Real problems, potential solutions. Child Development Perspectives, 3(3), 160–164.
Mayer, R. E., Sims, V., & Tajika, H. (1995). A Comparison of How Textbooks Teach Mathematical Problem Solving in Japan and the United States. American Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 443–460.

Second, in general, associating something you want people to recall with a larger number of cues is going to help recall.  (Sorry I don't know a citation for this off the top of my head, but I think it's a general principle of information theory.)  In this case, the colors and the numerals are both cues for numbers, which should lead to better recall than if you only had the numerals.  However, you are looking at learning arithmetic and not learning the number sequence.
Learning numbers MIGHT go faster with this additional cue. However, I'd be concerned whether there might be some negative impact on ability to use numerals once the color cue is removed, as it inevitably will be.
Presenting numbers together with analogue representations of magnitude does aid in learning arithmetic facts:

Booth, J. L., & Siegler, R. S. (2008). Numerical magnitude representations influence arithmetic learning. Child Development, 79(4), 1016–1031.

However, analogue representations of magnitude are a cue that's relevant to the actual meaning of the numbers, while colors are not. I doubt colors would deliver this particular benefit.
With all that said, I haven't considered motivational issues.  If children are motivated by brightly colored number blocks, then I'd say go ahead and use them.  I doubt that the cognitive effects would be strong one way or the other, so even if negative, they'd probably be outweighed by any motivational benefits.


Is the ordering of Brodmann areas arbitrary?

The place to find this answer is of course Brodmann's original 1909 manuscript Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Großhirnrinde: in ihren Prinzipien dargestellt auf Grund des Zellenbaues  available here in German  or here in English (Brodmann's Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex: The Principles of Comparative Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex Based on Cytoarchitectonics).

The English version is unfortunately not open access (and I don't have the inclination to pay US$90 for it) and the German version is a scanned copy of the original printing, so there's no easy way to search the text without reading all of it. However, skimming through it, I see that the description of the areas (which he calls Felder, lit. 'fields') begins in Kapitel IV (Chapter 4), page 130. He mentions that this work is largely an extension of his previous 1907 work, but beyond that there doesn't appear to be any mention of why he choose his numbering, at least not that I could find with a quick skim. It appears though that he choose a more or less arbitrary starting point and worked more or less counter clockwise from there, with a few small exceptions.

Elsewhere in the manuscript, Brodmann discusses the division of the cortex into larger homologous regions in both humans and other mammals (p. 129), and it's clear from the description of the areas that they are not divided up based on any study of homology. For example, he mentions that the regio postcentralis (lat. "post central region") is divided up into the cytoarchitectural areas 1, 2, 3 and 43 (pp. 130--132). The regions appear to correspond loosely with our modern notion of "lobes", but tend to be somewhat smaller (for example, there are additional subdivisions near the central sulcus).


Do children follow parents' phobias genetically or by learning?

Yes, phobias appear to be partly hereditary. This encompasses both genetic and environmental factors.

Kendler et al. (1999) review some work in this area:

  We have previously reported, from a population-based sample of female twins, that the liability
  to agoraphobia, social phobia and animal
  phobia was modestly infuenced by genetic
  factors with heritabilities estimated between 30
  and 40% (Kendler et al. 1992a). For situational
  and blood-injury phobia, by contrast, twin
  resemblance appeared to be due to familial
  environmental risk factors, which were responsible for ~30% of the variance in liability
  (Kendler et al. 1992a; Neale et al. 1994b).

A shortcoming of these studies is that they rely on single lifetime assessments, which may be unreliable. Kendler et al. (1999) tries to rectify this by following up with their original sample 8 years later. They conclude:

  Short-term reliability of the five phobias was modest (mean $\varkappa$=0.46), but higher than long-
  term stability (mean $\varkappa$=0.30). Unreliability occurred both for subject recall of unreasonable fears
  and for interviewer assessment of which fears constituted phobias. Examining fears and phobias
  together, in a multiple threshold model, results suggested that twin resemblance was due solely to
  genetic factors, with estimated total heritabilities, corrected for unreliability, of: any 43%,
  agoraphobia 67%, animal 47%, blood-injury 59%, situational 46% and social 51%.

They go on to compare their theory with other theories of phobia acquisition, such as classical conditioning and social learning theory. They state:

  By contrast, our results are supportive of an
  `inherited phobia-proneness' model (Seligman,
  1971; Gray, 1982)

This variance explained does, of course, leave considerable room for learned phobias. So, one should not overemphasize the hereditable components of fears and phobias (Delprato, 1980).

References

  Delprato, D. J. (1980). Hereditary determinants of fears and phobias: A critical review. Behavior Therapy, 11(1), 79-103.

  Gray, J. A. (1982). The Neuropsychology of Anxiety. Oxford
  University Press: New York.

  Kendler, K. S., Karkowski, L. M., & Prescott, C. A. (1999). Fears and phobias: reliability and heritability. Psychological medicine, 29(3), 539-553. PDF

  Kendler, K. S., Neale, M. C., Kessler, R. C., Heath, A. C., & Eaves, L. J. (1992). The genetic epidemiology of phobias in women: the interrelationship of agoraphobia, social phobia, situational phobia, and simple phobia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 49(4), 273.

  Neale, M. C., Walters, E. E., Eaves, L. J., Kessler, R. C., Heath, A. C., & Kendler, K. S. (1994). Genetics of blood‐injury fears and phobias: A population‐based twin study. American journal of medical genetics, 54(4), 326-334. PDF

  Seligman, M. E. P. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior
  Therapy 2, 307-320


How much alcohol is negative for brain function?

There is some debate as to wether alcohol consumption actually destroys brain cells or not. Jensen & Pakkenberg (1993) counted the neurons in the neocortex of deceased acoholics and found that they have the same number of neurons as non-alcoholic men.

Unfortunately the non-alcoholic control group did not consist of teetotallers but only "did not have any history or histological signs of alcohol abuse". It is not unprobable that the brains of people who never drank any alcohol and those of people who drank an amount of alcohol that is merely not considered abusive – a level that is certainly strongly influenced by cultural norms – do differ, so the results of this study have to be interpreted with some caution.

What Jensen and Pakkenberg did find was a reduction of white brain matter to which they attribute the functional deficits that follow alcohol abuse. This brain size reduction is replicated by several other studies, some of which find a reduction in grey matter volume of the frontal lobe as well (Pfefferbaum et al., 1997). For example, Ding et al. (2004) found that the chronic consumption of even smal amounts of alcohol causes brain size reduction. Ding et al. asked 1909 middle-aged adults for their drinking habits, took MRI scans, and found that "each additional alcoholic drink per week was associated with a 0.01 grade greater ventricular size (P=0.03) and a 0.009 grade greater sulcal size (P=0.02) after adjustment for age, sex, race, body mass index, smoking, income, sports index, and diabetes." The ventricles are cavities inside the brain, filled with cerebrospinal fluid, the sulci are the furrows that structure the surface of the brain. What the study found, in other words, was that chronic alcohol consumption enlarged these spaces between brain matter, which means that the brain matter was being reduced in volume.

While Jensen & Pakkenberg (1993) found no difference in the number of neurons of alcoholic and non-alcoholic brains, other studies did find differences, although limited to certain cortical regions. Harper and Kril (1989) found "that alcoholics have reduced neuronal counts in the superior frontal region of the cerebral cortex". That Jensen and Pakkenberg did not find these differences can probably be attributed to a "combined analysis of several cortical regions (Brooks, 2000).

  In summary, a combination of neuroimaging and histopathological data indicates that heavy alcohol consumption over a long period of time as occurs in chronic alcoholics can result in the death of neurons in specific regions of the human brain, particularly the frontal cortical regions. Careful selection criterion of subjects, along with unbiased stereological techniques, has provided strong evidence that this neuronal loss in ‘uncomplicated’ alcoholics is due to direct neurotoxic effects of alcohol itself, and not to other factors such as malnutrition or liver disease. (Brooks, 2000; emphasis mine)

The good news is that stopping to drink will have a positive effect (Pfefferbaum et al., 1998):

  However, brain atrophy and related neurological deficits induced by chronic alcohol abuse may be partially reversible through sustained abstinence. (Ding et al., 2004)

"Sustained" in this context means that it will take years for the brain to recover, not just the five workdays between weekend drinking bouts ;-)

Apart from neuronal death and brain atrophy directly caused by alcohol, chronic alcohol consumption has many other negative effects on the human organism. For example it damages the blood-brain barrier (Philips, 1982; Kornhuber et al., 1987; Elmas et al., 2001), which is a main factor in the development of neurodegenerative diseases (Singh et al., 2007). Effects on other organs such as the liver or heart can indirectly cause damage to the brain.

I was unable to find any sources that give exact numbers for how much alcohol (in what period of time) destroys how many neurons, directly or indirectly. The only indication I came upon is the correlation between brain volume reduction and drinks per week given in the study by Ding et al. (2004), that I quoted above. This gives some indication at least to the amount of damage, and that every glass per week counts.

Note:

When you read scientific studies about the effects of alcohol, you must consider the author's affiliation. Many studies are financed by the beverage industry and may be biased. For example, a study that found that alcohol protected against diabetes was financed by the Alcohol Task Force of the foundation International Life Sciences Institute, in which Moët & Chandon, Allied Domecq, Brasseries Kronenbourg, Heineken und Diageo are members (Exler, 2007). Studies that show that consumption of red wine reduces the threat of cardiovascular diseases, were forged (Jaslow, 2012).

Sources:

Brooks, P. J. (2000). Brain atrophy and neuronal loss in alcoholism: a role for DNA damage?. Neurochemistry international, 37(5), 403-412.
Ding, J., Eigenbrodt, M. L., Mosley, T. H., Hutchinson, R. G., Folsom, A. R., Harris, T. B., & Nieto, F. J. (2004). Alcohol Intake and Cerebral Abnormalities on Magnetic Resonance Imaging in a Community-Based Population of Middle-Aged Adults The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Stroke, 35(1), 16-21. doi:10.1161/01.STR.0000105929.88691.8E
Elmas, I., Küçük, M., Kalayci, R. B., Çevik, A., & Kaya, M. (2001). Effects of profound hypothermia on the blood–brain barrier permeability in acute and chronically ethanol treated rats. Forensic Science International, 119(2), 212-216.
Exler, A. (2007, March 7). Vom Wein beseelt. Die Zeit. http://www.zeit.de/2007/11/Weinlobby
Harper, C., & Kril, J. (1989). Patterns of neuronal loss in the cerebral cortex in chronic alcoholic patients. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 92(1), 81-89.
Jaslow, R. (2012, January 12). Red wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data: UConn. CBS. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/red-wine-researcher-dr-dipak-k-das-published-fake-data-uconn/
Jensen, G. B., & Pakkenberg, B. (1993). Do alcoholics drink their neurons away?. Lancet, 342(8881), 1201-1204.
Kornhuber, J., Kaiserauer, C. H., Kornhuber, A. W., & Kornhuber, M. E. (1987). Alcohol consumption and blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier dysfunction in man. Neuroscience Letters, 79(1), 218-222.
Pfefferbaum, A., Sullivan, E.V., Mathalon, D.H., & Lim, K.O. (1997). Frontal lobe volume loss observed with magnetic resonance imaging in older chronic alcoholics. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 21, 521–529.
Pfefferbaum, A., Sullivan, E. V., Rosenbloom, M. J., Mathalon, D. H., & Lim, K. O. (1998). A controlled study of cortical gray matter and ventricular changes in alcoholic men over a 5-year interval. Archives of General Psychiatry, 55(10), 905-912.
Phillips, S. C., & Cragg, B. G. (1982). Weakening of the blood-brain barrier by alcohol-related stresses in the rat. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 54(2), 271-278.
Singh, A. K., Jiang, Y., Gupta, S., & Benlhabib, E. (2007). Effects of chronic ethanol drinking on the blood–brain barrier and ensuing neuronal toxicity in alcohol-preferring rats subjected to intraperitoneal LPS injection. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 42(5), 385-399.


Judging from your description I think it has to do with the predictability of a certain event (the activation of the toy in this case) after a certain action (the hand clapping), altering your perception of temporal order between the event and your action. David Eagleman has done some research on this suggesting that when one has the intention of generating a certain event that has a high probability to occur, this event can be perceived to happen earlier than the action that caused it. That maybe explains why it especially happens when you are the agent. At least that is what I got from reading this paper http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/research/papers/EaglemanHolcombeTiCS2002.pdf Feel free to correct me if you think my description is wrong.

Nevertheless, the field of time perception has generally revealed many illusions in human timing and if you are interested in more you can read the work of Benjamin Libet as well on time and conscious awareness http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Time-Consciousness-Perspectives-Neuroscience/dp/067401846X


Does masturbation affect brain in long term?

As the Wikipedia article on Masturbation summarizes, the current consensus among scientists is that masturbation has no negative effects whatsoever, and that all known positive effects are physiological (e.g. reduction of the probability to have prostrate cancer in men over 50) or on the level of general well-being (e.g. it relieves depression and leads to higher self-esteem).

A quick Google Scholar search turned up no results for studies into the relation between masturbation and cognitive functions such as memory, attention etc. This does not mean that masturbation does not affect these functions, positively or negatively, only that apparently this has not been studied.

Sexual stimulation and orgasm activate the parasympathetic nervous system, leading to a production of sex specific sex hormones as well as neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin, which in turn affect the relevant neurotransmitter systems.

Too much masturbation may lead to loss of libido (psychological) and loss of sensitivity (physiological), though what is too much will differ between idividuals. Certainly during adolescence most teenagers indulge in extensive sexual self-exploration with no apparent negative consequences.

As Archimedix pointed out, one study found that frequent masturbation in male teenagers correlated with higher probability of prostrate cancer. But the researchers surmised that it is not the masturbation that causes the hormones that cause the cancer, but rather the hormones cause both the higher sex drive and the cancer. So again masturbation appears not to have a negative effect, and not masturbating would not have prevented cancer, but the causation is all speculation either way. (http://www.webmd.com/prostate-cancer/news/20090127/masturbation-and-prostate-cancer-risk).

Rather, the common consensus among sexologists is to encourage teens and even children to actively exlore this area. For example, the European Regional Bureau of the WHO suggests that masturbation can help an individual better understand their sexual needs and boundaries, communicate more clearly in a sexual situation, and avoid being abused (http://www.bzga.de/infomaterialien/einzelpublikationen/?idx=2042, in German).

Like any activity, for example excessive working, masturbation can become problematic. But like work, masturbation is not problematic in and of itself.


So you're basically asking what are the causes of interpersonal differences in intelligence as typically measured by standardised psychometric tests. This question forms the basis for a large proportion of the literature on intelligence. For example see a journal like Intelligence.

For a review you could read  Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns

A few quick observations include that

Genetics is a major cause
Environmental causes are often less well understood
Head start and related programs designed to increase intelligence typically lead to limited long term gains
Severe environmental factors will negatively affect intelligence


What are the estimates in total neurons and average connections per neuron for each of the processing areas of the visual cortex?

I found a table listing the relative volumes of 39 different BAs in the supplementary material of:
Hazlett, Erin A. et al. "Cortical Gray and White Matter Volume in Unmedicated Schizotypal and Schizophrenia Patients", which seems to be open-access.

This data is from MRI scans of 148 healthy controls. The mean total brain volume was 1216cm.

Not sure how the density of neurons differs across areas.

Here is a link to the supplementary pdf


Does physical aerobic exercise ameliorate depression?

There are different theories about the causes of depression. Three of them assume a cause that could be affected by aerobic exercise.

Neurochemical theory of depression:

It seems that depression might be caused by low serotonin and/or noradrenalin levels. Physical activity releases both neurotransmitters, thus alleviating depressive symptoms.

Cognitive theory of depression:

It seems that negative cognitive schemata cause depression. Sports improves self-efficacy and other schemata.

Diathesis–stress model of depression:

Depression is the result of a predispositional vulnerability combined with stress from adverse life experiences. Aerobic exercise relaxes the sympathetic nervous system thus alleviating stress and, as a consequence, depression.

Maybe someone else will come up with studies showing a causal connection. These (and other) theories might explain the connection.


I would say subliminal is more cognitive, while cathexis is more emotional, though can be triggered/catalysed cognitive or subliminal.

Subliminal is hard to define though, and cathexis from the field of psychoanalysis is kind of speculative. However there is obviously some kind of mechanism occuring, and having good words for the phenomenas occuring in the brain is useful, but prone to misunderstandings.

The wikipedia article is useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathexis


What Big5 facets correlate with practical sense?

As a starting point, you might be interested in studies that have related vocational preferences with personality. In particular, Holland's model of job preferences has been highly studied.

Practical sense sounds a little like the "realistic" dimension in Holland's framework.

Larson et al (2002) report a meta-analysis of the Big 5 and Holland's types.
Based on this meta-analysis, while there were correlations between the Big 5 and other types, there did not appear to be any strong (or even moderate) correlations between the realistic preference and the Big 5:

Note. based on n > 5,000.

References

Larson, L. M., Rottinghaus, P. J., & Borgen, F. H. (2002). Meta-analyses of Big Six interests and Big Five personality factors. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61(2), 217-239.


How to test people's compatibility for friendship

There is no such thing as a test for compatibility in a friendship. There are measures for amity (that is, how much we feel someone is our friend), but no tests that predict whether two people would become good friends.

There are tests that aim to test for compatibility in romantic relationships. These are based on theories about what makes romantic relationships work, and some of them are employed on certain online dating platforms. Some of these platforms (e.g. Parship.de and Edarling.de), conduct studies to test their "scientific dating" principles and publish them. What is interesting in this context is that while there are clear indications for what makes a majority of romantic relationships work, but psychologists have as yet been unable to predict what makes people fall in love. So we know what would make them happy in the long term, but we don't know how to get them together. People fall in love for reasons that are very individual and cannot be systematized, yet.

In friendships, there are of course similar predictors as in romantic relationships, but since friendships are often much looser, friends spend very much less time with each other, and therefore don't need the same level of compatibility (because much incompatibility is compensated by less expectations and more time without each other), it is often enough for friends to share the same hobby, the same job, or live in the same neighborhood.

If you think of friendship as very intimate relationships with much sharing of emotions and thoughts, that is, of close "best" friends, then tests for romantic relationships would very likely cover aspects of these friendships as well.


Fitting a psychometric function when data does not lend itself to a sigmoidal fit

What you are looking for is called Hierarchical, Multi-level or Random-effects model. In your particular case the solution is a hierarchical logistic regression.

Assume $y_{st} \in \{0,1\}$ is the response of subject $s$ on trial $t$ and $x$ is the dependent variable then a simple hierarchical model that solves your problem is:

$y_{st}\sim \mathrm{Bernoulli}(\mathrm{logit}(\alpha_s+\beta_s x))$

$\beta_s \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu,\sigma)$

where $\mu$ is the population value of the slope and $\beta_s$ is the subject level estimate. Roughly, $\mu$ is a weighted average of all $\beta_s$ where the weight of each $\beta_s$ is inversely proportional to the variance of the estimate of $\beta_s$. For more details on hierarchical logistic regression and for extensions of the simple model, that I have suggested above, refer to Chapter 14 in Gelman & Hill (2006).

  Fitting a function to this data, the slope should be nearly flat, right?

No. The slope should be uncertain. Flat slope looks differently, say $(10,0.61), (20,0.59),(30,0.6),(40,0.58),(50,0.6)$. The corresponding estimate of $\beta$ should show wide interval such that you can't conclude that $\beta>0$ or $\beta<0$ or  $\beta=0$ (as you suggested).

How will a hierarchical model handle such uncertain $\beta_s$? This $\beta_s$ will contribute little to the estimate of $\mu$. Instead $\beta_s$ for this particular subject will be pulled towards $\mu$. The hierarchical model will effectively tell you that if your data is inconclusive, it will just assume that the subject is a typical member of the population (that is if $\mu$ had been estimated reliably) and discard the erratic data.

Literature:
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2006). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press.


Can brain hemisphere activity/ dominance be inferred from the test subject's drawings?

You say you are "aware that all tasks that a person undertakes involve both halves of the brain". Then, On what kind of patients would this hypothetical test be suitable as healthy people use both hemisphere and split brain use just one hemisphere depending on the drawing hand ?

If you refer to healthy patients I don't think such a test is possible.
For the moment left-brain/right-brain dominance is usually considered as a neuromyth.For example:
- this blog article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die
- or this paper http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v7/n5/full/nrn1907.html .

Maybe some tests (drawing or whatever) would correlate a bit with partial and short term hemispheric activation with desirable inter-individual differences. But aiming for a test bringing more than that is in my humble opinion vain hopes, as hemispheric dominance on healthy subjects has weak (or no) scientific ground.


Why do many people play Candy Crush without ever buying anything while some spend all their money on it?

The economic concept of marginalism comes to mind. Actors will spend money to buy virtual goods if the marginal cost (price) is lower than the marginal (subjective) utility of the virtual good. If you have lots of money it's easier to spend $10 on extra lives. This explains some of it.

Most of the purchases are small, so the individual cost/utility analysis is biased, it's "just" $10. Over time it might become a problem.

It's a lot like any other kind of addiction, and I think (baseless speculation) that the "big whales" are more likely to be predisposed for addictions than the general population. The utility, positive affect generated by a feeling of progress and accomplishment, becomes harder to maintain and creates a "need" to keep playing. And when the individual transaction costs are so low it's that much harder to resist.

Edit: I've found some sources that might answer your question better.

This paper discusses how game designers might think about it. Not peer-reviewed.

From a different behavioural economics perspective.

Some other papers on the topic.

Note: Most of these discuss microtransactions and virtual goods. Candy crush is mostly lives, leading to different motivations than games like Team Fortress 2 with cosmetics like hats and skins (and keys).


Can one alter their auditory perception?

Imagine a music recording studio, with a band playing in the soundproof room.  Now imagine 2 mic->speaker connections: A mic inside the room records the music, and plays it on a speaker outside, and then another mic records the sound coming out of that speaker, and delivers it to the recording equipment.  You can imagine the loss of quality involved in that set up I'm sure, but bear with me.  Both mic->speaker connections are set to 50% volume.  Say we want to increase the volume: We can increase the volume on either connection (or both).  If we increase the volume to 100% on only one of the 2 connections, then the volume of the recorded sound will increase by approximately the same amount whichever one we choose.  However, increasing the volume of the first connection is better - it results in a better quality recording.  This is because each connection can only lose quality, not add it.

Now, supposing that the first mic->speaker connection represents the auditory nerve (ear -> primary auditory cortex), and the second connection represents "perception" (auditory cortex -> rest of brain), then we can discuss increasing the "volume" at either "connection" via conscious control (I'm assuming that this is what you mean by "force of will").

The auditory nerve passes through the central auditory system, an area of the brain considered unconscious:

  Damage to the Primary Auditory Cortex in humans leads to a loss of any
  awareness of sound, but an ability to react reflexively to sounds
  remains as there is a great deal of subcortical processing in the
  auditory brainstem and midbrain.

In other words, so far as we know, there is no conscious control over this "connection".

Neuroplasticity of "perception" is much greater.  A variety of studies have shown certain improved hearing capabilities in blind people, correlating with how early hearing loss occurs (the earlier the better), and the involvement of neuroplasticity as the visual cortex can be usurped for auditory processing.  Whether or not this corresponds to a change in "volume" is unclear, and this effect does not appear to be "consciously" controlled.

However, more recent research has demonstrated how similar effects can be induced in non-blind adults: Through temporary blindness (as little as 90 minutes with a blindfold).  Corresponding research on mice has shown that this may be the result of increased "volume" in perception:

  The cells fired faster and more powerfully in response to sounds and
  were more sensitive to quiet sounds.

So not exactly "sheer will", but temporary blindness, that you can easily induce on yourself consciously, may improve certain aspects of hearing, possibly including "volume".

Hope this helps.


From wikipedia :

  A concept map or conceptual diagram is a diagram that depicts
  suggested relationships between concepts. It is a graphical tool that
  designers, engineers, technical writers, and others use to organize
  and structure knowledge.

  A concept map typically represents ideas and information as boxes or
  circles, which it connects with labeled arrows in a downward-branching
  hierarchical structure. The relationship between concepts can be
  articulated in linking phrases such as causes, requires, or
  contributes to.

The technique was first developed in 1970's by Joseph D. Novak. You can try one of his books e.g. Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations


How to measure/predict the difficulty of a conflict?

Questionnaires and measurement scales typically take a lot of revision and validation. Otherwise, it is very common that you measure things you don't intend to measure, are missing relevant options, or omit critical factors entirely.

I'd recommend some piloting and to use existing and validated measures whenever possible.

Some of your items sound incredibly broad to me. Are you going to rate "influence of emotions" on a 7-point scale by asking people "On a scale of 1-7, how emotional do you feel about this situation?" That might be fine, but there's also a ton of nuance to emotion that will be missed.

You also have a lot of factors, so it will take a lot of data to resolve their relative influence (potentially hundreds of cases; thousands if you care about interactions between factors) in order to determine proper weights, and you still need to come up with a ground truth "conflict difficulty" outcome measure. Otherwise you are just guessing at weights which isn't very useful.

Make sure you have IRB approval before continuing with human subjects research (I've been surprised how unaware some tech people are about regulatory requirements, especially at Academia.SE).

Given this is a bachelors' thesis, it may be sufficient to start some of these processes rather than complete them. It might be simpler to just do an experiment, test two versions of your software, and compare some satisfaction outcomes. You won't know which conflicts were more difficult, but you won't necessarily have to: you can rely on random assignment to assume that the comparison groups are equal.


Intentionally making ourselves remember things that never happened

If I understood correctly, you are talking about "false memories" in the context of the following definition in (Johnson, M. K., 2001)

  "A false memory is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be
  a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past.
  Memories can be false in relatively minor ways (e.g., believing one
  last saw the keys in the kitchen when they were in the living room)
  and in major ways that have profound implications for oneself and
  others (e.g., mistakenly believing one is the originator of an idea or
  that one was sexually abused as a child)."

From  Scientific American,
September 1997, Vol. 277 # 3,
pages 70-75

This is a an article from 1997 by Elizabeth Loftus that may shed light on your question.
Yes, the information may be outdated and recent research might have expanded on it. In that case, I might edit my answer soon to reflect those updates after completing further readings relating to the topic

If recent developments interest you, in a study published in the journal Science, Tonegawa et. al [associated with RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics] manipulated individual neurons to manipulate encoded memories in the brains of mice. Read here.

Misinformation Effect

  My own research into memory distortion goes back to the early 1970s,
  when I began studies of the "misinformation effect." These studies
  show that when people who witness an event are later exposed to new
  and misleading information about it, their recollections often become
  distorted. In one example, participants viewed a simulated automobile
  accident at an intersection with a stop sign. After the viewing, half
  the participants received a suggestion that the traffic sign was a
  yield sign. When asked later what traffic sign they remembered seeing
  at the intersection, those who had been given the suggestion tended to
  claim that they had seen a yield sign. Those who had not received the
  phony information were much more accurate in their recollection of the
  traffic sign.

  My students and I have now conducted more than 200 experiments
  involving over 20,000 individuals that document how exposure to
  misinformation induces memory distortion. In these studies, people
  "recalled" a conspicuous barn in a bucolic scene that contained no
  buildings at all, broken glass and tape recorders that were not in the
  scenes they viewed, a white instead of a blue vehicle in a crime
  scene, and Minnie Mouse when they actually saw Mickey Mouse. Taken
  together, these studies show that misinformation can change an
  individual's recollection in predictable and sometimes very powerful
  ways.

False Childhood Memories

  My research associate, Jacqueline E. Pickrell, and I settled on trying
  to plant a specific memory of being lost in a shopping mall or large
  department store at about the age of five. Here's how we did it. We
  asked our subjects, 24 individuals ranging in age from 18 to 53, to
  try to remember childhood events that had been recounted to us by a
  parent, an older sibling or another close relative. We prepared a
  booklet for each participant containing one-paragraph stories about
  three events that had actually happened to him or her and one that had
  not. We constructed the false event using information about a
  plausible shopping trip provided by a relative, who also verified that
  the participant had not in fact been lost at about the age of five.
  The lost-in-the-mall scenario included the following elements: lost
  for an extended period, crying, aid and comfort by an elderly woman
  and, finally, reunion with the family.

  After reading each story in the booklet, the participants wrote what
  they remembered about the event. If they did not remember it, they
  were instructed to write, "I do not remember this." In two follow-up
  interviews, we told the participants that we were interested in
  examining how much detail they could remember and how their memories
  compared with those of their relative. The event paragraphs were not
  read to them verbatim, but rather parts were provided as retrieval
  cues. The participants recalled something about 49 of the 72 true
  events (68 percent) immediately after the initial reading of the
  booklet and also in each of the two follow-up interviews. After
  reading the booklet, seven of the 24 participants (29 percent)
  remembered either partially or fully the false event constructed for
  them, and in the two follow-up interviews six participants (25
  percent) continued to claim that they remembered the fictitious event.
  Statistically, there were some differences between the true memories
  and the false ones: participants used more words to describe the true
  memories, and they rated the true memories as being somewhat more
  clear. But if an onlooker were to observe many of our participants
  describe an event, it would be difficult indeed to tell whether the
  account was of a true or a false memory. Of course, being lost,
  however frightening, is not the same as being abused. But the
  lost-in-the-mall study is not about real experiences of being lost; it
  is about planting false memories of being lost. The paradigm shows a
  way of instilling false memories and takes a step toward allowing us
  to understand how this might happen in real-world settings. Moreover,
  the study provides evidence that people can be led to remember their
  past in different ways, and they can even be coaxed into "remembering"
  entire events that never happened.

Imagination Inflation

  What happens when people imagine childhood experiences that did not
  happen to them? Does imagining a childhood event increase confidence
  that it occurred? To explore this, we designed a three-stage
  procedure. We first asked individuals to indicate the likelihood that
  certain events happened to them during their childhood. The list
  contains 40 events, each rated on a scale ranging from "definitely did
  not happen" to "definitely did happen." Two weeks later we asked the
  participants to imagine that they had experienced some of these
  events. Different subjects were asked to imagine different events.
  Sometime later the participants again were asked to respond to the
  original list of 40 childhood events, indicating how likely it was
  that these events actually happened to them. Consider one of the
  imagination exercises. Participants are told to imagine playing inside
  at home after school, hearing a strange noise outside, running toward
  the window, tripping, falling, reaching out and breaking the window
  with their hand. In addition, we asked participants questions such as
  "What did you trip on? How did you feel?" In one study 24 percent of
  the participants who imagined the broken-window scenario later
  reported an increase in confidence that the event had occurred,
  whereas only 12 percent of those who were not asked to imagine the
  incident reported an increase in the likelihood that it had taken
  place. We found this "imagination inflation" effect in each of the
  eight events that participants were asked to imagine. A number of
  possible explanations come to mind. An obvious one is that an act of
  imagination simply makes the event seem more familiar and that
  familiarity is mistakenly related to childhood memories rather than to
  the act of imagination. Such source confusion when a person does not
  remember the source of information can be especially acute for the
  distant experiences of childhood.

Impossible Memories

  A procedure for planting "impossible" memories about experiences that
  occur shortly after birth has been developed by the late Nicholas
  Spanos and his collaborators at Carleton University. Individuals are
  led to believe that they have well-coordinated eye movements and
  visual exploration skills probably because they were born in hospitals
  that hung swinging, colored mobiles over infant cribs. To confirm
  whether they had such an experience, half the participants are
  hypnotized, age-regressed to the day after birth and asked what they
  remembered. The other half of the group participates in a "guided
  mnemonic restructuring" procedure that uses age regression as well as
  active encouragement to re-create the infant experiences by imagining
  them.. Spanos and his co-workers found that the vast majority of their
  subjects were susceptible to these memory-planting procedures. Both
  the hypnotic and guided participants reported infant memories.
  Surprisingly, the guided group did so somewhat more (95 versus 70
  percent). Both groups remembered the colored mobile at a relatively
  high rate (56 percent of the guided group and 46 percent of the
  hypnotic subjects). Many participants who did not remember the mobile
  did recall other things, such as doctors, nurses, bright lights, cribs
  and masks. Also, in both groups, of those who reported memories of
  infancy, 49 percent felt that they were real memories, as opposed to
  16 percent who claimed that they were merely fantasies. These findings
  confirm earlier studies that many individuals can be led to construct
  complex, vivid and detailed false memories via a rather simple
  procedure. Hypnosis clearly is not necessary.

Sources:

The formation of false memories.
Loftus, E. F. & Pickrell, J. E. (1995).
Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.

Imagination Inflation: Imagining A Childhood Event Inflates Confidence That It Occurred.
Maryanne Carry, Charles G. Manning, Elizabeth F. Loftus and Steven J. Sherman  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, pages 208-214; June 1996.

Remembering Our Past: Studies In Autobiographical Memory.
Edited by David C. Rubin.
Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Additional Reading:

Crisis or Creation: A systematic examination of false memory claims.  Dallam, S. (2002).
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9 (3/4): 9–36.

False Memories Affect Behavior.
Association for Psychological Science  (2008, August 20).


Intelligence Quotient is a relative score, comparing you to the current average. It is not a fixed, raw intelligence score.

  When current IQ tests are developed, the median raw score of the
  norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation
  (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less,[2]
  although this was not always so historically. By this definition,
  approximately two-thirds of the population scores between IQ 85 and IQ
  115, and about 5 percent of the population scores above 125.[3][4]

....

  Raw scores on IQ tests for many populations have been rising at an average rate that scales to three IQ points per decade since the early 20th
  century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect.

...

  Since the early 20th century, raw scores on IQ tests have
  increased in most parts of the world.[45][46][47] When a new version
  of an IQ test is normed, the standard scoring is set so performance at
  the population median results in a score of IQ 100. The phenomenon of
  rising raw score performance means if test-takers are scored by a
  constant standard scoring rule, IQ test scores have been rising at an
  average rate of around three IQ points per decade. This phenomenon was
  named the Flynn effect in the book The Bell Curve after James R.
  Flynn, the author who did the most to bring this phenomenon to the
  attention of psychologists.[48][49]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

In addition to various IQ tests giving varying scores, each of them is also standardized to the current average intelligence score. So every test can give you a different score.
Put in other words: An old IQ-test will compare you to what was average IQ at the time the test was standardized - which may be lower than todays average.


In anatomy/physiology, there are 2 major categorizations of the nervous system:

Central nervous system (brain + spinal cord) and peripheral nervous system (all other neural structures)
Somatic nervous system, which controls skeletal muscles and skin, and and autonomic n. system, which controls internal organs, blood vessels and glands and is further divided to sympathetic and parasympathetic system. Both the somatic and autonomic system have motor neurons that control muscles and sensory neurons that convey sensory signals.

Image source: Wikipedia, creative commons license

Neurons can be further categorized by neurotransmitters involved (dopamine system, acetylcholine system, etc.), and by various anatomical and functional subsystems.

Examples of anatomical and functional structures formed by neurons:

Cortical areas (functional areas of the brain cortex) (Lumen)
Main parts of the brain: cerebrum, cerebellum and brainstem, some of which can be further divided into hemispheres, lobes and folds
Deep structures of the brain: thalamus, hypotalamus, hypocampus, amygdala, corpus callosum, limbic system, pituitary gland, pineal gland, and structures collectivelly called basal ganglia, which include the caudate, putamen, and globus pallidus in the cerebrum, the substantia nigra in the midbrain, and the subthalamic nucleus in the diencephalon (Mayfield Clinic).
Areas containing either neuron cell bodies or axons: gray matter (cell bodies) and white matter (axons) of the brain and spinal cord (Indiana.edu)
Histological areas of the brain: layers and columns (Wikipedia)
Nuclei of the cranial nerves (Wikipedia)
Centers (cardiovascular center, reflex center for cough, vomiting, etc.) in medulla oblongata (Wikipedia)
Corticospinal tracts (Wikipedia)
Pathways - the term is usually used for cranial nerves: visual pathway, auditory pathway, etc.
Ganglia - anatomical structures containing neuron body cells in the peripheral nervous system (Wikipedia)
Nerve plexuses - branching networks of intersecting nerves (Wikipedia)
Reflex arcs (Wikipedia)