can u not

RSS
100% confirmed fact, actually!

100% confirmed fact, actually!

roachpatrol:
“ jetgreguar:
“ allrightcallmefred:
“ fredscience:
“ The Doorway Effect: Why your brain won’t let you remember what you were doing before you came in here
I work in a lab, and the way our lab is set up, there are two adjacent rooms,...

roachpatrol:

jetgreguar:

allrightcallmefred:

fredscience:

The Doorway Effect: Why your brain won’t let you remember what you were doing before you came in here

I work in a lab, and the way our lab is set up, there are two adjacent rooms, connected by both an outer hallway and an inner doorway. I do most of my work on one side, but every time I walk over to the other side to grab a reagent or a box of tips, I completely forget what I was after. This leads to a lot of me standing with one hand on the freezer door and grumbling, “What the hell was I doing?” It got to where all I had to say was “Every damn time” and my labmate would laugh. Finally, when I explained to our new labmate why I was standing next to his bench with a glazed look in my eyes, he was able to shed some light. “Oh, yeah, that’s a well-documented phenomenon,” he said. “Doorways wipe your memory.”

Being the gung-ho new science blogger that I am, I decided to investigate. And it’s true! Well, doorways don’t literally wipe your memory. But they do encourage your brain to dump whatever it was working on before and get ready to do something new. In one study, participants played a video game in which they had to carry an object either across a room or into a new room. Then they were given a quiz. Participants who passed through a doorway had more trouble remembering what they were doing. It didn’t matter if the video game display was made smaller and less immersive, or if the participants performed the same task in an actual room—the results were similar. Returning to the room where they had begun the task didn’t help: even context didn’t serve to jog folks’ memories.

The researchers wrote that their results are consistent with what they call an “event model” of memory. They say the brain keeps some information ready to go at all times, but it can’t hold on to everything. So it takes advantage of what the researchers called an “event boundary,” like a doorway into a new room, to dump the old info and start over. Apparently my brain doesn’t care that my timer has seconds to go—if I have to go into the other room, I’m doing something new, and can’t remember that my previous task was antibody, idiot, you needed antibody.

Read more at Scientific American, or the original study.

I finally learned why I completely space when I cross to the other side of the lab, and that I’m apparently not alone.

this is actually kind of great and it’s nice to know there’s something behind that constant spacing out whenever i enter a different place

FINALLY AN EXPLANATION

The upcoming movie Lucy is rehashing the old pop!psych misunderstanding that we only use about 10 percent of our brains.

Though there’s no real need to explain why improved cerebral functioning wont somehow give you the ability to manipulate the world, it is kind of important to point out that if we only used 10 percent of our brains, we would only have that 10 percent.

When babies are born, they have scores more neurons than adults have. This is because as babies become children become young adults, neurons are pruned through a process called apoptosis.

The point of apoptosis is to get rid of neurons/neural paths that we don’t need so that the paths we DO need can be more effecient, make more connections, etc. 

The body has a pretty neat way of figuring out which neurons we need and don’t need, and it’s active throughout your life. Every time an action potential fires off, in addition to releasing whatever neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft, it releases a chemical signal that the cell is active. The more activity, the more chemical signal, the less likely the neuron is to be pruned.

It’s a pretty easy leap from there to realize that if we were only using 10 percent of our brains, which we are most certainly not, the other 90 percent would be long gone in order for there to be room to further specialize the useful part. 

Jun 1

weirdoautisticseacat:

I’d like to remind you all (fellow white people) that the very strong and present stigma associated with schizophrenia and psychosis began when both of those things became associated with being black.

Here’s a quick source.
frenums:
“ note card doodle
”

frenums:

note card doodle 

thepaisleyelf:
“okay so I’m gonna call bullshit on this because this sounds exactly like what an abusive asshole says to justify their behavior like *~haha yeah I got sooooo angry with you but it’s only cause I care lol*~
like yeah obviously people...

thepaisleyelf:

okay so I’m gonna call bullshit on this because this sounds exactly like what an abusive asshole says to justify their behavior like *~haha yeah I got sooooo angry with you but it’s only cause I care lol*~

like yeah obviously people who care about each other will occasionally get angry over silly things but to say that anger itself is an indication of love is so so so SO harmful and gross

also it’s from psych-facts which is literally my sworn enemy

don’t fucking normalize abuse and hide it under the name of psychology

Would anyone be interested in simple explanations of some NeuroPsych stuff? Like Neurotransmitters, effects of drugs on the brain, important brain regions, etc.

I might start making posts about them on this blog as a form of studying.

laboratoryequipment:
“Mental Health Linked to E-cigarette Use
Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine have reported that people living with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions are twice as likely to have tried e-cigarettes...

laboratoryequipment:

Mental Health Linked to E-cigarette Use

Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine have reported that people living with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions are twice as likely to have tried e-cigarettes and three times as likely to be current users of the controversial battery-powered nicotine-delivery devices, as people without mental health disorders.

They are also more susceptible to trying e-cigarettes in the future in the belief that doing so will help them quit, the scientists say. The FDA has not approved e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2014/05/mental-health-linked-e-cigarette-use

The idea that there is a “right brain” and a “left brain” is a myth.

-

(via psych2go)

Kind of!
The public idea of left brain/right brain is a myth but the brain is separated into two different hemispheres connected by the corpus collosum, the left controlling the right side of your body and the right controlling the left side.
I’m on mobile and can’t link to any split brain experiments but they’re super interesting!

More dopamine gets released in the brain when we fall in love.

-

(via psych-facts)

Fairly true! Dopamine, in general, is released when you’re happy/due to pleasurable stimulus. Presumably being in love makes you happy.
This is also what makes breakups so hard- you have been conditioned to associate the dopamine release with your significant other (a la Pavlov and his dogs) and so go into somewhat of a withdrawal when you are no longer around them.
The good news is that these associations will decrease through extinction processes if they are no longer reinforced. If every time you see them you are no longer being reinforced with dopamine, or if you just plain don’t see them at all, this should go away in a few months. Do your best not to dwell on happy memories too much as that could slow the process by continuing to associate them with dopamine release.