unconscious
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2009
THIS short film clip shows two images of the same scene. Watch it carefully, and see if you can spot the subtle differences between them. As you watch, your eyes will dart back and forth across the images, so that you can perceive the most important features. And even though you might not be consciously aware of the differences, your brain will have picked up on them. This implicit form of remembering is referred to as relational memory; in this case, the brain is encoding the perceptual associations between items in the image. And recent studies have shown that relational…
edyong | November 26, 2008Throughout our language, the vocabulary of physical cleanliness is also used to describe moral cleanliness. We describe saints as pure and thieves as dirty; consciences can be clean and sins can be washed away. But more and more, psychological studies tell us that these concepts are entwined in a very real way. The act of cleaning, or even just thinking about the concept of cleanliness, can influence a person's moral compass, swinging it towards a less judgmental direction.
This isn't the first time that I've blogged about this. Two years ago, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist found that…