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 a great book called Stop Talking, Start Influencing. Also I’ll tell you about the memorization strategies I used in a recent play … Read More
Ep 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 called “cute aggression” and we’ll try to explain it in this episode. Resources I Asked a Neuroscientist Why I Want to Crush … Read More
Ep 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, while liberals are “future-focused”. So what if you frame a statement about gun control by framing that statement around words and images that support … Read More
Ep 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 case. In fact, in some cases, the higher levels of testosterone actually cause men to be MORE NICE than usual. Don’t believe it? Let’s … Read More
Ep 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 in the brain of football player Aaron Hernandez. The Oxygen network produced a fascinating account of Hernandez’s life entitled Aaron Hernandez Uncovered and I was asked to … Read More
Ep 268: Applying an Established Memory Strategy to Improve Literacy (and click-through rates on your web articles…)
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 a tried and true memory strategy called “chunking” and applied it to – get this – the amount of white space between words. … Read More
Ep: 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 drawn in by mystery. There is of course no easy answer for how to get teens to put down their phones but … Read More
Ep 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 popular app called Brain Mnemonics. If you need to memorize the parts of the brain, the neuron, neurotransmitters … Read More
Ep 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 the Rubber Hand Illusion, the Enfacement illusion, and now the Full body illusion. You can now virtually switch bodies with someone else … Read More
Ep 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, Adele’s Someone Like You, the Enterprise Theme from Star Trek, and even two pieces of music from the motion picture Koyaanisqatsi. We’ll especially deconstruct Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” … Read More
