Motivation doesn't have to be conscious; your brain can decide how much it wants something without input from your conscious mind. Now a new study shows that both halves of your brain don't even have to agree. Motivation can happen in one side of the brain at a time. Psychologists used to think that motivation was a conscious process. You know you want something, so you try to get it...
5 Vote(s)
July 1, 2010
Motivation Doesn’t Have To Be Conscious - Is Your Left Hand More Motivated Than Your Right?
Comments Off
October 4, 2009
It Hurts Less When I Can See It
Fig. 1 (Longo et al., 2009). The mirror box technique in which the subject has the experience of viewing their right hand, while in fact seeing their left hand reflected in a mirror.Sight modifies somatosensation, by either enhancing or diminishing the subjective intensity of touch (Kennett et al., 2001) and pain (Ramachandran & Altschuler, 2009), respectively. These phenomena provide fascina
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
Comments Off
June 12, 2009
Musical SNARC: Do we have a musical scale in our heads?
There's lots of research suggesting that we may have something like a "number line" in our head: The SNARC effect says that if you normally read numbers from left to right, you're faster to react to small numbers with your left hand, and big numbers with your right hand. Similar research has also found a SNARC effect for letters (a SLARC effect?).So it might make sense that there would be a simil
7 Vote(s)
7 Vote(s)
Comments Off
May 6, 2009
The hunting of the SNARC
Cognitive Daily has an excellent article on the fascinating SNARC effect, where we react quicker to numbers with the hand that most approximates their position in space as if they were written out in front of us.In other words, people react faster with their left hand for small numbers, and faster with their right hand for big numbers. This suggest that our number concepts are mapped partly mappe
7 Vote(s)
7 Vote(s)
Comments Off
May 4, 2009
How are numbers related to your body movements? Depends on how you read words
The SNARC effect is a fascinating phenomenon (and no, it has nothing to do with cheeky one-off blog posts). When asked to recognize numbers, people react faster with their left hand for low numbers, and faster with their right hand for high numbers. Take a look at this graph:This shows the results of an experiment led by Samuel Shaki: Twelve Canadian university students were shown a series of sin
9 Vote(s)
9 Vote(s)
Comments Off