The mushroom-derived hallucinogen, called psilocybin, is known to trigger transformative spiritual states, but at high doses it can also result in “bad trips” marked by terror and panic. The trick is to get the dose just right, which the Johns Hopkins researchers report having accomplished.

In their study, the Hopkins scientists were able to reliably induce transcendental experiences in volunteers, which offered long-lasting psychological growth and helped people find peace in their lives — without the negative effects.

If this goes legit I’m likely to give it a go.

Anchoring is a psychological phenomenon that says that whenever you have a number in mind, it will influence your judgment. In one experiment people were asked to spin a wheel of fortune. After it landed on a number they were asked whether the percentage of nations in the UN was larger or smaller than that number. When the wheel of fortune landed on 10, people estimated that 25% of the members of the UN were African. When it landed on 65, they estimated that 45% of the countries in the UN were African. If you asked them why they came up with the number, they said it was their best guess. But clearly the wheel of fortune had an enormous influence. Anchoring is everywhere in the financial markets. When a stock goes to $100 and splits 2 for 1 so that you now have two shares worth $50 each, you naturally expect both shares to go back up to $100. Anchoring informs a lot of our decisions even though we think it doesn’t. When professional auditors were asked whether the incidence of fraud is greater or lesser than 10% and then asked what they thought the actual incidence of fraud was, they gave a number that was close to 10%. But when they were asked if it was greater or lower than 1%, they picked a lower number. When asked why they picked that number, they talked about their experience and how many frauds they’ve encountered. They had no idea their number came from being anchored.

Fascinating.

Top Girl is a mobile role-playing game that leverages a virtual shopping mechanic, turning users into mobile models that must climb the fashion social ladder by doing modeling jobs, buying new outfits and going to popular clubs. The game has a dating feature in which users flirt with boyfriends who give gifts.

My body is trying to figure out how to laugh, while vomiting, while covering my eyes, while saying, “what took so long?”

But in the mid 1970’s, Tim Wilson and Dick Nisbett opened the basement door with their landmark paper entitled “Telling More Than We Can Know,” in which they reported a series of experiments showing that people are often unaware of the true causes of their own actions, and that when they are asked to explain those actions, they simply make stuff up. People don’t realize they are making stuff up, of course; they truly believe the stories they are telling about why they did what they did.  But as the experiments showed, people are telling more than they can know. The basement door was opened by experimental evidence, and the unconscious took up permanent residence in the living room. Today, psychological science is rife with research showing the extraordinary power of unconscious mental processes.

This stuff is fascinating to me.

Machiavellianism is also a term that some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person’s tendency to deceive and manipulate other people for their personal gain. In the 1960s, Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis developed a test for measuring a person’s level of Machiavellianism. This eventually became the MACH-IV test, a twenty-statement personality survey that is now the standard self-assessment tool of Machiavellianism. People scoring above 60 out of 100 on the MACH-IV are considered high Machs; that is, they endorsed statements such as, “Never tell anyone the real reason you did something unless it is useful to do so,” (No. 1) but not ones like, “Most people are basically good and kind” (No. 4). People scoring below 60 out of 100 on the MACH-IV are considered low Machs; they tend to believe, “There is no excuse for lying to someone else,” (No. 7) and, “Most people who get ahead in the world lead clean, moral lives” (No. 11). Christie, Geis, and Geis’s graduate assistant David Berger went on to perform a series of studies that provided experimental verification for the notion of Machiavellianism.

High Mach, low Mach. Love it.

Ease up on the mach there, bro.

You could try doing more listening and less talking. People like that. But listening with empathy has the perverse effect of rewarding the talker for sharing his woes. That’s a problem because if you cause someone to focus on his own misfortune, you make things worse for him. In time, the talker will associate you with all of his most unpleasant thoughts because that’s the connection you keep reinforcing.

My best solution for the scourge of talking is this: Be brief and say something positive.

Brevity will slow the inevitable decline in your popularity caused by talking. And saying something positive as often as possible will be a mood booster to whoever is in the room with you. Humans are followers, and if you set a positive tone, it rubs off.

You’ll never regain the personal appeal you enjoyed as a baby. But if you say nice things, and don’t say much, you might become relatively less unappealing than the people around you. And that’s not nothing.

Scott nails it again. So good.

In other words, Thomson and Andrews imagined depression as a way of forcing the mind to focus on its problems. Although rumination feels terrible, it might make it easier for us to pay continuous attention to our dilemmas. According to Andrews and Thomson, the mood disorder is part of a “coordinated system” that exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

A Male Internet user who tries to distinguish himself as a picky opinionated person, especially in the field of observing women. When in actuality they are very desperate for women, and would fuck anything. Also said male is typically very unattractive himself.

I’m glad to find names for things that I’ve observed so many times.