Category Archives: Psychology

Myth of Monogomy

by VorJack

Psychiatrists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá have a new book out entitled Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. Ryan blogs about its thesis over at Psychology Today:

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as [...]

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Quote of the Moment: Religious Cheesecake

From this perspective, religion is not innate, but rather a cultural development that we might call “cognitive-emotional cheesecake”. I adapt this metaphor from Steven Pinker’s claim that music is not innate, but rather amounts to “auditory cheesecake”. A preference for cheesecake is not innate, since cheesecake did not exist during the early stages of human [...]

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Help Yourself

by VorJack

… to these books about self-help. Self-help is a multi billion dollar industry in America, selling millions of books. Here are a few that take a look at the movement from the outside.
Legacy of the Occult
Pullquote: ”The leaders in [New Thought] have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded [...]

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How to Be Lucky

It’s said that we make our own luck. I believe that, at least most of the time. We can’t always control our circumstances, but we don’t have to have our circumstances control us. (Do you like that? Just call me Pastor Florien.)
Richard Wiseman did a study on “lucky” & “unlucky” people. I found his analysis [...]

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Would I Still Be an Atheist?

by Jesse Galef –
Overcoming personal bias can be one of the most difficult tasks in searching for the truth. The particular experiences and influences in our lives are – to a large degree – out of our control and yet they play a huge role in shaping our beliefs. And it’s not [...]

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On the Origin of Superstitions

by Jesse Galef
Why are dirty underwear, mutant clover, and amputated mammal appendages associated with good fortune?  How did humans develop our “lucky” rituals? And why are they usually gross when you think about them? I hope to address two of these three questions, read on to find out which.
A lucky charm I made [...]

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How Observant Are You?

by Jesse Galef
I’m always astounded at how poor data-gathering devices we humans are.  Forget all the hallucinations and misinterpretations, we simply don’t notice or retain most of what happens around us.  Here’s a great demonstration (via Richard Wiseman’s blog)

I was pretty pathetic. How did you all do?
This is one of the reasons we developed [...]

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Aliens vs Demons

by Jesse Galef
Can you tell the difference between Aliens and Demons?  If you were visited in the night by an intelligent, non-human entity, could you really distinguish between them?  (In a sidenote I’m not addressing right now, how would you know the voice in your head is God and not a tricky demon?  How do [...]

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