Can you read my emotion?

In the last post, I talked about symbolic language, which is the language created by humans based on a series of symbols that convey meaning. What can we communicate without using this artificial system? Emotions.

The Language

If I asked you what sets humans apart from other animal species, what comes to mind? For me, it's language. But what is language?

You are a smart person

When have you told someone, 'You're an intelligent person?' What makes you think someone is intelligent? And what makes you think someone is not?

Cognitive bias

In the last post, I mentioned that reasoning sensibly is slow and requires effort, so we prefer quick and effortless solutions that we have defined as heuristics. These heuristics lead to systematic errors called cognitive biases. Let's see some of them.

Logic or intuition?

If we reflect for a moment, making decisions is something that happens often throughout the day. Whether we're in the car, at the supermarket, or at work, there are situations that require us to make choices. Making a decision follows the process of reasoning, which involves all the "things" that the mind does to analyze the starting situation and evaluate which of the possible outcomes is the most appropriate.

I remember it but it didn't happen

Let's continue this journey through memories with a strange question. Did everything we remember really happen? Surely, when it comes to things we have studied, there may have been times when we said or thought, "Maybe it wasn't exactly like that." But when it comes to our personal experiences, can we be convinced that something happened to us that actually didn't? Yes, it's true!

I forgot

I forgot. How many times has it happened to you? Forgetting is losing information that you once had. Yet it is still not clear whether our brain can forget. Let's see why.

Learning and memory

The last two times I talked about perception and attention. Do you want to guess the next topic? After perceiving and being attentive, what is the next task? Learning.

Watch out for the gorilla

"Be careful!" How many times have you heard that? But what does it mean to be careful? It is a habit of psychological research to study the failures of cognitive functions (perception, attention, memory, etc.). Remember that in the previous post we saw how the brain can misinterpret the sizes of two people in a room? Let's do the same with attention.

 

Giants and Dwarfs in the Room of Ames

If in your life you have been curious about psychology and, perhaps, you have bought a book on general psychology, most likely there was at least one section dedicated to optical illusions. But why should Psychology be concerned with optical illusions? I'll try to give an answer.