The Psych Student

"Some questions can't be answered by Google" by Mykl Roventine

“For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. (Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak) Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones,” writes Emily Yoffe for Slate. In her essay discussing how the brain is wired for Google, Twitter, and texting… “And why that’s dangerous.”

I’ll get to that last bit of editorializing in a little bit.

“He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections” she writes, “about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.” Read the rest of this entry »

The website Neuro Philosophy features an article on Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome : Neurophilosophy.

In the journal Cortex, researchers describe the case of a patient with severe memory loss who has a tendency to invent detailed and perfectly plausible false memories (confabulations) in response to questions to which most people would answer “I don’t know”, such as the one above. They have named this unusual condition confabulatory hypermnesia, and believe that theirs is the first study to document it.

Also an interesting read at the same site: The woman who can’t forget