CogLab was used as part of my course in cognitive psychology, and it does a great job of giving you an idea of what you can learn by studying psychology:
http://coglab.wadsworth.com/
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Reinforcement and Behavior
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcem ... edules_of_
BF Skinner giving a lecture:
http://www.youtube.com/user/sciinfo18#p ... VZUjncC_SY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_confo ... xperiments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamenta ... tion_error
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Learning:
If you're looking for books on learning and growth, there are scores of other titles readily available and vastly superior to this one. Check out: 'Flow', 'Peak Learning', any of several books by Edward De Bono, any of several books by psychologist Aaron Beck, Focusing, etc. etc.. If you haven't read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written by Robert Pirsig, one of the endorsers of Waitzkin's book, do so, it's a masterpiece.
Having Good Habits
One strong reason I see for being honest about small things is that people behave in a kind of automatic way when they don't have a lot of time to make a decision, so you may have those bad habits slip out when you don't want them to.
For example, in the speech below, Joe Biden seems to have automatically slipped into an Indian accent even though it was in really bad taste to do it. If I had to guess, I'd say that he was probably using that accent in private conversations as a way of being funny, and it slipped out in this situation because he was talking off-the-cuff and so didn't have a lot of time to think about everything he was about to say.
Biden Employs Indian Accent During NH Speech
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/ ... mes-again/
Q: Why do people sleep?
My impression at the moment is that sleep is when our brains get housekeeping done: they get rid of waste products that have accumulated, they take the important stuff we've learned that day (short-term memory) and make it more permanent (long-term memory), and they clear our short-term memory "chalkboard" so that we can scribble more stuff on it the next day.
There are a bunch of different types of sleep ("stages" of sleep). You actually only dream during one stage of sleep: "REM" sleep. It stands for "rapid-eye-movement", b/c during that stage people will see your eyes looking around under your eyelids. REM sleep is only a small part of the time you're asleep. Most people probably think they don't dream every night, but the truth is that you do; if someone jolted you awake while you were in REM sleep you would remember your dream.
You may be able to induce certain kinds of dreams by getting yourself into a particular mood / mindset before you go to sleep. Eg watching a movie about a love story before you go to sleep may make you more likely to dream about a love story.
Q: Why do people dream?
I took two courses that covered sleep, and I still can't articulate a clear answer to this question. Not good.
It seems like it's necessary to get our brains in order. If you don't dream, you'll eventually die (iirc); I think they did experiments where they kept mice/monkeys from going into REM sleep and they eventually died. I'll have to double-check that.
I think REM is also supposed to be really important for learning; so maybe it's when your brain is transferring memories from short-term to long-term memory.
On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various people would come in to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and in the discussions after the talks we used to have a lot of fun. For instance, one guy in our school was very strongly anti-Catholic, so he passed out questions in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and we gave the speaker a hard time.
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In the great big dining hall with stained-glass windows, where we always ate, in our steadily deteriorating academic gowns, Dean Eisenhart would begin each dinner by saying grace in Latin. After dinner he would often get up and make some announcements. One night Dr. Eisenhart got up and said, “Two weeks from now, a professor of psychology is coming to give a talk about hypnosis. Now, this professor thought it would be much better if we had a real demonstration of hypnosis instead of just talking about it. Therefore he would like some people to volunteer to be hypnotized.
I get all excited: There’s no question but that I’ve got to find out about hypnosis. This is going to be terrific!
... a week before the demonstration the man came to practice on us, to see if any of us would be good for hypnosis. I knew about the phenomenon, but I didn’t know what it was like to be hypnotized.
He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said, “You can’t open your eyes.”
I said to myself, “I bet I could open my eyes, but I don’t want to disturb the situation: Let’s see how much further it goes.” It was an interesting situation: You’re only slightly fogged out, and although you’ve lost a little bit, you’re pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of course, you’re not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can’t do it.
He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.
When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn’t normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis, instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, “Damn it, enough is enough! I’m gonna go straight to my seat.”
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t continue. I walked all the way around the hall.
I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While I was hypnotized she said, “I’m going to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain.”
I thought, “Baloney!” She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, “That’s easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There’s nothin’ to that; it’s a fake!”
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t”—which is just another way of saying that you can’t.