NLPhilia Blog

Here’s some cool research on subliminals:

Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.

However, some subliminal messages may have an opposite effect than expected. For example, exposing people to a subliminal image of a national flag moderates rather than intensifies their political attitudes.

Go check out the rest of The Influence of Subliminal Messages at Psych Central News.

Someone at work found this fun graphic, which is a demonstration of a phenomenon discovered by Ridley Stroop several decades ago:

The University of Washington has an interactive demo of the Stroop Effect which will show you your difference in mental processing time. I didn’t find it that difficult, but there was almost eight seconds’ difference between the first and second sets.

Psych Central News writes about some interesting research showing a link between being depressed and a lack of olfactory sensitivity:

Can’t smell the roses? Maybe you’re depressed, say researchers from Tel Aviv University. Scientists recently linked depression to a biological mechanism that affects the olfactory glands.

It might explain why some women, without realizing it, wear too much perfume.

I used to know a woman who was rather severely depressed (she had good reason!) and she’d leave a scent trail one could follow for several minutes. She used a lot of perfume. When someone mentioned it to her, she was surprised; she really had no idea.

I wonder how this might affect the way I approach people who tell me they want help with depression. Maybe I’ll make sure to add in some hallucinated “aromatherapy” during the session.

Powells.com has an interview with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of several excellent books on language and the mind.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read that Dr. Pinker has written, starting with The Language Instinct.
Approachable and intelligent at the same time. Great stuff.

Powells.com Interviews – Steven Pinker

Over at Interesting Thing of the Day there’s an interesting article on how experience in one modality can affect experience in another modality. It’s given me some insight on why they score “plating” so highly on the TV show, Iron Chef.

Color can even fool our taste buds into perceiving taste differences where none exist. This point was illustrated by a recent study that appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue.” By changing both the sweetness and the color of orange juice in various increments, researchers found that test subjects ascribed a greater difference in taste between juices of different colors than they did between juices with unequal levels of sweetness.

I actually liked Crystal Pepsi. I thought it tasted lighter, not as sweet… and it didn’t bother my stomach the way most colas do. Now I have to wonder.

More detail is at The Influence of Color on Taste Perception.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hey, they work, and we want what works, right? From Psych Central:

A survey of doctors practicing in Chicago found that 45% recommended placebos — interventions not known to have any scientific treatment effect on the problem — to patients in their clinical practice. The same doctors also said they believed in the mind-body connection.

It’s funny how they refer to “the mind-body connection,” as if the two could be separated. But at least they’re waking up to how powerful the human mind is.

Read the full article at Psych Central News.

Alvaro Fernandez at the Huffington Post writes about the Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains:

1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”
2. Take care of your nutrition
3. Remember that the brain is part of the body
4. Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts
5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges
6. Aim high
7. Explore and travel
8. Don’t Outsource Your Brain
9. Develop and maintain stimulating friendships
10. Laugh. Often.

Also visit SharpBrains for more information.

A little surfing around led me to the Web page of researcher Sanjay Srivastava on what he calls “The Big Five Personality Factors”. I haven’t finished reading the docs available, but at first blush it seems that he’s found five Meta-Programs that tend to go together somehow in most people:

• Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency). The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive.
• Agreeableness. This dimension includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate.
• Conscientiousness. People high in Conscientiousness tend to be organized, thorough, and planful.
• Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability). Neuroticism is characterized by traits like tense, moody, and anxious.
• Openness to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination). This dimension includes having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

I’m going to want to spend some time examining this, as I’m not certain how useful it might be to NLPers.

Link to Measuring the Big Five Personality Factors

(Oh… the word “OCEAN” in the title refers to an acronym of the names of the “Big Five”.)

In a recent BoingBoing post referring to a study of computer-altered celebrity photographs done at the University of Central Lancashire, it was pointed out that we tend to recognize a person from caricature twice as easily as from a photograph.

I wonder how this could be useful in, say, state elicitation, memory recovery, and changework.

Link to article in The Guardian

Just in time for Christmas, BoingBoing shows us a beautiful map of the human brain:

If you go to New Zealand’s Unit Seven Web site, you can get free desktop wallpaper images and can purchase high-quality prints. The perfect gift for the brain lover!