Nervous System and Brain

To understand behavior, we need to know about the engine that drives our actions – the brain. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to talk about the brain, but I'll give it a try in my own words.

Are We Counting Emotions?

Do you like the chart? All colorful... and did you understand anything from it? If not, let me try to explain it in my own words. If I asked you how many emotions there are, what would your answer be? To this day, there is still no definitive answer to this question. Psychologists have attempted to classify emotions, but it is important to note that these are scientifically unvalidated models.

Emotions Competition

Lately, we've talked about emotions and how to recognize them. But are there emotions that are easier to recognize than others? Or emotions that 'arrive' before others? Yes, negative emotions are quicker to activate. Let's see why.

Emotions. Desperately seeking definition.

Last time, we saw that human beings can convey information about their emotions through their facial expressions and body language. But what exactly are emotions?

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!