Michael Stevens highlights the positive effect that fear can have on our personal health, but questions the reason for our fear of objects that might not be inherently dangerous. In essence, he asks – “Why are some things creepy?” Stevens stresses the importance of “vagueness” and “ambiguity” in giving someone “the creeps” and explains the fascinating concept of the “uncanny valley.”
Despite its seemingly complex title, NLP, or Neuro-Linguistical Programming, is really not at all complicated. In fact, fundamentally, it is simply about studying the proposition of positive foundations in the mind and replicating them, in order to produce positive outcomes Continue reading
Vsauce’s Michael Stevens asks extremely thought provoking questions regarding the human perception of color and whether or not our experiences and ideas regarding color are the same between different individuals. He also raises the issue of the explanatory gap and highlights how the limitations of human language hinders any potential perception of another person’s feelings.
In a landmark experiment in 1935, John Ridley Stroop demonstrated a cognitive effect which has fascinated psychologists for centuries. In the first of a series of experiments reported in his dissertation, Stroop asked participants to read the names of a list of colour words (e.g. blue, red, etc) under two conditions. In the first condition, participants were asked to read words that were printed in black ink whereas in the other condition they were expected to read words which were printed in ink colours that did not match the color names. For example, the word blue may have been printed in red ink (i.e. blue – in this case, the correct answer would have been blue). In this experiment, Stroop found that there was no significant difference in performance between the two conditions. Continue reading
This infographic gives a brief overview of the history of the use of placebos in medicine. It explains how placebos were originally a derogatory term used to describe medication prescribed by false physicians, but how, in light of the “placebo effect,” medical perception has since changed to the extent that placebos now play an active role in medical treatment. Continue reading
