The Illusion of Cause – Vaccines and Autism

There are many well intentioned folks out there who believe that childhood vaccinations cause Autism. Last week I covered the origins of this belief system as well as its subsequent debunking in Vaccines and Autism. Despite the conclusive data that clearly establishes no causal link between vaccines and Autism, the belief lives on. Why is …

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Looking Forward – Looking Back

I find myself in an untenable situation. I have plenty to write about but I am finding that the choices I am making right now, in the splendor of summer, give me limited time and energy to write. I’ve decided to take a short hiatus.   Over the last seven months my writing has been …

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The Illusion of Attention

In psychology there are some pretty famous studies that have penetrated popular culture. Many folks are at least familiar with Skinner’s rat box, Pavlov’s salivating dogs, Milgram’s obedience studies, Bandura’s Bobo Dolls, and Harlow’s rhesus monkeys reared by wire frame terry cloth mothers. In recent history, perhaps the most well known study pertains to inattentional …

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So You Think Your Memory is Bad? Well, it’s actually worse than you thought.

Imagine yourself walking down a familiar street approaching a stranger who is obviously lost, staring hopelessly at a map.  As you saunter by you provide eye contact and a look of willingness to help. He asks you for directions.  As you begin to offer your advice, you are interrupted by a construction crew carrying a …

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The Illusion of Punditry

Have you ever wondered what makes a pundit a pundit? I mean really! Is there pundit school or a degree in punditry? Given what I hear, I can only imagine that what would be conferred upon graduation is a B.S. of different, more effluent sort. I mean REALLY!   I am certain that many of …

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Bad Blink – Good Gorilla?

Over the last couple months I have submitted posts proclaiming the potency of intuition. One of my major resources has been Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Among Gladwell’s tenets, the most prominent was the power of intuition and its relative supremacy, in certain situations, over rational thought. I have also heavily …

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Retail Mind Manipulation

Believe it or not, freewill, to a large extent, is an illusion. For the most part, what you do, as you go through your day is based on decisions made outside of your conscious awareness. Many of these decisions involve a complicated and largely unconscious interplay among various brain regions that each struggle for control …

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What Plato, Descartes, and Kant Got Wrong: Reason Does not Rule.

For nearly as long as humans have been thinking about thinking, one of the most intriguing issues has been the interplay of reason and emotion. For the greatest thinkers throughout recorded history, reason has reigned supreme. The traditional paradigm has been one of a dichotomy where refined and uniquely human REASON pitches an ongoing battle …

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Self Esteem on a Silver Platter

Recently, Fox News, aired a story posing the question as to whether Fred Rogers was evil.  Why you may ask, would anyone use the word evil in reference to such a gentle man?  They were suggesting that his you’re special message fostered unworthy self esteem and in effect ruined an entire generation of children.  This …

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Emotion vs. Reason: And the winner is?

The capabilities of our adaptive unconscious are really quite amazing. In an earlier post, entitled Intuitive Thought, I covered the general relative strengths of this silent supercomputer running outside of our awareness. It has long been believed that rational thought, the application of logic and reason, over intuition, is the key to a successful life. …

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