Episode 132: What Happens When You Put an Opera Singer in a Brain Scanner
What part of your brain is lighting up when you’re singing? In this episode I take a look at a neat new study that involved having singers lie down in an MRI while their brains were scanned. Take a...
View ArticleEpisode 138: Zombies – 6 Reasons Why We Are So Fascinated By Them
Have you watched the TV show Walking Dead or ever seen a movie about Zombies (perhaps Zombieland or Dawn of the Dead)? What is so fascinating about the undead? Why do many of us get a strange pleasure...
View ArticleEpisode 141: Psychology Gets Smart: A New Kind of Lie Detector?
You've probably heard that the so called "Lie Detector" test (the polygraph ) doesn't actually detect when you've lied, but rather just takes some physiological measures from your body and these have...
View ArticleEp 163: Psych Files Brief #4: Animals Smiling, Yogurt De-Stressing, and the...
Do animals smile? Do they feel emotions and if so how many kinds of feelings do they share with us? In this episode we also take a look at the probiotics in yogurt – how do they affect your thinking...
View ArticleEp 171 Psych Files Brief #5: The Allure of Red Dresses, Telling Jokes to...
A whole bunch of fascinating studies in this episode of The Psych Files! I cover the “Red Dress Effect“, what exactly we’re looking for in the facial characteristics of our leaders, how dark rooms...
View ArticleParts of the Neuron Explained with ThingLink
Have you checked out ThingLink yet? Pretty cool tool. Check out what I did with it by putting tabs onto a neuron image. Each tab pops open a YouTube video: The post Parts of the Neuron Explained with...
View ArticleEp 173: An Interactive Neuron and Map Using ThingLink
Every once in a while a really cool tool comes along and I like to show everyone the fun I had with it. In this video episode I show how I easily made an interactive image of a neuron and an...
View ArticleEp 199: Depth Perception – How Your Brain Sees What’s Not There
How do you create a sense of depth in a flat image? In this video I’ll show you how to use 5 cues of depth perception to turn a flat image into one that looks like it has depth. I’ll be drawing from...
View ArticleEp 229: What Makes a Song Popular? How We Detect Melody
Why are some songs popular? Guess what – psychologists actually know a lot of the answers. In this episode we’ll listen to excerpts from Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, as well as Noisestorm’s Ignite,...
View ArticleEp 235: Want to Swap Bodies?
What if you could swap bodies with someone else? What would it be like to be someone of the opposite sex? A different race? We’re getting darn close to being able to do that with new techniques like...
View ArticleEp 249: How To Build a Psychology App
I created my Brain Mnemonics app in 2009 and ever since then people have asked me, “How do you build an app?”. There are a lot of ways, but in this video I give you a behind the scenes look at my...
View ArticleEp: 258 – Why It’s So Hard To Put Those Damn Phones Down!
Why do we find it so hard to put down our phones? I’ll give you 5 reasons drawn directly from psychological research on how we learn, how teenagers are strongly affected by reward, and how we are all...
View ArticleEp 268: Applying an Established Memory Strategy to Improve Literacy (and...
The printed word has been around for a long time. Bet you thought there was nothing new in how we put words together in a book or website. Well, guess again. Researchers at Asymmetrica have drawn upon...
View ArticleEp 301: The Role of CTE in the Life of Aaron Hernandez
You have probably heard a lot about football and CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), the brain degeneration that results from repeated head impacts. One of the worst cases so far of CTE was found...
View ArticleEp 304: Guess What? Testosterone Doesn’t Necessarily Cause Men to be Aggressive
Most of us assume that one of the reasons men tend to act aggressively is that men have higher levels of testosterone. Let’s take a look at this “testosterone myth” because this isn’t always the...
View ArticleEp 308: How to Change the Mind of a Conservative
How do you get someone is is conservative to support climate change? Or stricter controls on guns? There is a way. Research confirms that conservatives tend to be focused on how good the past was,...
View ArticleEp 317: It’s So Fluffy!
Have you ever seen something so cute you just want to squeeze it to death? Or a child so cute you want to pinch it’s cheeks really hard? Why do we have these odd, powerful, opposite feelings? It’s...
View ArticleEp 324: Put Your Love Life on Automatic
In this episode I cover a few interesting topics. First, have you ever “blanked out” in front of an audience? I recently did and I was determined to find out why this happened. I found some answers in...
View ArticleParalyzed by Fear: Exploring Tonic Immobility in Sexual Assault
In this episode I mention an organization I do work with and which I think is doing such wonderful work. If you are a mental health professional I strong encourage you to visit Safer Society. In this...
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