HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Gambler’s Fallacy

pexels-naim-benjelloun-3894215

Gambler’s Fallacy is a cognitive bias, proposed by Amor Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which states that people tend to hold erroneous belief that an event which occurs more frequently in the past is less likely to occur again in the future, even though it is well-established that occurrence of each independent event depends on probability and have no connection to what happened in the past. The best example is a gambler who is playing at a roulette table, when he sees that red has come up several times in succession, he will start believing (erroneous belief) that a black is more likely to come up in the next spin, and thus will continue to bet; or when parents after having multiple children of same sex, believe that next child will be of opposite sex. Also known as Monte Carlo fallacy, Gambler’s fallacy occurs from an erroneous belief that small numbers are representative of the larger population.

Advertisement
HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

The Pomodoro Technique

Are you struggling with Time Management? Try the Pomodoro Technique.

pexels-cottonbro-studio-3943197

The Pomodoro Technique is a method of managing time that was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. As per the technique, the work is divided into different intervals, generally of 25 minutes each. Each interval is followed by a short break. This interval of work is called pomodoro, which means ‘tomato’ in Italian. The technique is named after a tomato shaped timer used by Cirillo during his university days.
The technique comprise of six steps:
Step 1. Select a task to be completed.
Step 2. Set pomodoro timer for 25 minutes.
Step 3. Start working on the task.
Step 4. As the pomodoro starts ringing, stop the task and put a checkmark on your list of tasks.
Step 5. Take a short break of 3-5 minutes, if there are less than four pomodoros tick marks.
Step 6. After completion of four pomodoros, take a break of 15-30 minutes.

The basic premise of this technique is to cut down the effect of internal and external disturbances on flow and focus required to complete the task.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Planning Fallacy

Planning fallacy refers to a phenomenon where people display optimistic bias while predicting time required to complete a task in the future and thereby underestimate the actual time needed to complete the task. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, first proposed the phenomenon in 1979.

Interestingly, the phenomenon often takes place despite the individual’s knowledge that similar tasks took longer to complete even after careful planning. Another important point is that this optimistic bias corrupts the predictions about one’s own task completion only; when it comes to predicting the task completion of others, individuals show pessimistic bias, thus overestimating the time required to complete the task.

In 2003, an expanded definition was proposed by Lovallo and Kahneman, where it was explained as  the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risk of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions. Thus, indicating that the phenomenon not only leads to time overruns, but also cost overruns and at the same time shortfalls of benefit. The Sydney Opera House, Boston Central Artery, and Denver International Airport are some of the real life examples of planning fallacy.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Capgras Syndrome

pexels-pavel-danilyuk-8057365

Capgras syndrome (CS) is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that their loved ones or those they know have been replaced by imposters or doubles. Nothing can dispel this illusion because it is so strong. The Capgras delusion is categorized as a delusional misidentification syndrome, a type of delusional belief in which people, locations, or objects are misidentified. It might manifest itself as acute, temporary, or persistent.

CS can be caused by brain damage in the bifrontal, right limbic, and temporal regions. This brain damage causes problems with memory, self-monitoring, and reality perception. Such neurophysiological deficiencies result in a failure to correctly integrate emotional information processing and facial recognition.

The illusion is most common in people with schizophrenia, although it has also been observed in people with brain damage, dementia with Lewy bodies, and other types of dementia. It frequently manifests in people with neurological diseases, especially in the elderly.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

15 Facts about Human Brain

robina-weermeijer-so1L3jsdD3Y-unsplash (1)Here are 15 fascinating facts about the human brain that will wow you:

  1. Recollection practice can help with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
  2. Having easy access to knowledge can make it difficult to remember.
  3. The human brain begins to slow about the age of 24.
  4. It consumes 20% of the entire oxygen and energy in the body.
  5. The brain itself cannot experience pain
  6. 95% of all decisions are made subconsciously.
  7. Memories begin to form in the womb.
  8. Emotion prioritizes memory.
  9. The human brain consists of 73% water
  10. It is unable to develop memories while drunk.
  11. It produces 12-15 watts of electricity.
  12. Vitamin B1 can boost both short- and long-term memory. Fruit and vegetables that are common sources include cauliflower, oranges, potatoes, asparagus, and kale. Other sources include liver, eggs, and brewer’s yeast.
  13. Five minutes without oxygen can result in brain damage.
  14. Sweating can cause temporary brain shrinkage.
  15. Learning new things increases the amount of grey matter in the brain.
HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Munchausen Syndrome (Factitious Disorder) 

Munchausen syndrome is a mental health illness in which you fabricate, exaggerate, or cause physical, emotional, or cognitive impairments.

If you have Munchausen syndrome, you may have to undertake unpleasant or risky medical tests and operations in order to receive the sympathy and particular attention reserved for the truly ill. You may secretly harm oneself in order to produce symptoms of disease. You can mix blood into your pee or cut off circulation to a limb with a rubber band. Some people will cut or burn themselves, poison themselves, reopen wounds, rub excrement or dirt into a wound to promote infection, or consume bacteria-contaminated food.

People suffering from factitious diseases act in this manner out of an inner need to be perceived as unwell or injured, rather than to get a tangible benefit, such as medication or financial gain. This is distinct from malingering, which occurs when someone exaggerates or fabricates an ailment in order to, for example, avoid work.

Munchausen syndrome was named after Baron von Munchausen, an 18th century German officer noted for embellishing his life and experiences. The majority of symptoms in persons with this disorder are caused by physical illness, such as chest pain, gastrointestinal difficulties, or fever, rather than by a mental disorder. Some symptoms are self-inflicted, while others are exaggerated. You could, for example, exaggerate symptoms such as visual loss, seizures, joint pain, headaches, weakness, vomiting, and diarrhea.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Naïve Realism

phonto

Naïve realism, in social psychology, refers to the human intuitive sense that we observe or perceive the world in an unbiased way and objectively—“as it is”—instead of knowing that we are seeing the world from our own perspective, that is, as a subjective construction of the world and as an interpretation of the actuality.

This phenomenon has two significant implications: One, that others are perceiving and seeing the world in the manner as we are seeing it, as long as others are exposed to same information and are thinking rationally. Two, we tend to believe that others who are seeing the world differently must be the ones who are biased, uniformed, ignorant, unreasonable, or distorted. Famous line of George Carlin summarises the concept, “Have you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

The term naïve realism was first introduced by social psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues in 1990s. The Handbook of Social Psychology acknowledged naïve realism as one of “four hard-won insights about human perception, thinking, motivation and behavior that … represent important, indeed foundational, contributions of social psychology.” Naïve realism provides a theoretical foundation for many other cognitive biases, which refers to systematic errors in thinking, and decision making.


Ross, L., Lepper, M., & Ward, A. History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gillbert, G. Lindzey, & A. E. Jongsma (2010) Handbook of Social Psychology. Vol. 1. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

The Galatea Effect

Believe in meThe Galatea effect is named after Greek mythological story of Pygmalion and Galatea. It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby an individual’s actual performance or completion of a task is affected by his or her belief and trust in his or her abilities and potential for success. When an individual holds a belief and has confidence that he or she will be able to perform good, this self-belief in turn leads to actual success. What happens is that expectations themselves work as self-fulfilling prophecies. Just like in the Pygmalion effect, where a teacher’s high expectations from his or her pupil leads to high performance, the Galatea effect impacts individuals’ ability to finish a task, meet deadlines and also their ability to work as a team.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)

People with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), previously known as extremely picky eating, fail to eat enough food to maintain their daily energy requirements. Common challenges faced by ARFID patients include difficulty in digesting food; avoidance of specific types of food textures, colors, and smells; eating at an abnormally slow pace, or having a general lack of appetite.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Orthorexia Nervosa

healthy-eatingOrthorexia Nervosa is another eating disorder which includes unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food, and placing oneself on seriously restricted diets, which may lead to serious nutritional deficiencies and can harm daily life of an individual. Unlike other eating disorders, orthorexia typically focuses on the quality of food quality, rather than the quantity. Individuals with orthorexia are hardly focused on losing weight, unlike individuals with anorexia and bulimia. They have rather an excessive fixation with the food “purity,” and are obsessed with the advantages of healthy eating.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Binge Eating Disorder

woman eatingBinge Eating Disorder, commonly known as BED, is an eating disorder characterized by frequent and recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food but without subsequent purging episodes, such as vomiting. Although it can be severe and life-threatening, it is a treatable disorder. Individual suffering from BED may feel the inability to stop eating even if they want to. It is sometimes also described as Compulsive Eating. The individual suffering from it eats large amounts of food often very quickly and to the point where a person feels uneasily full in a short period of time. These episodes of binge eating are characteristically categorized as happening, on an average, a minimum of, twice per week, for a duration of six months.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Nudge

Baby elephant nudgedThe concept of ‘nudge’ was first made popular by two American researchers Richard Thaler (economist) and Cass Sunstein (legal scholar) in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008). Nudge is a concept from behavioral science, behavioral economics, and political theory, which suggests that decision making and behavior of an individual or group can be influenced by positive reinforcement and indirect suggestion. It is different from other methods of eliciting compliance like, education, enforcement or legislature.

The principle of nudge increases the probability that a given person will make a certain choice, or will behave in a certain manner, by modifying the environment so that unconscious or automatic processes of cognition get triggered to elicit support for the desired result.

It is believed that there is often a gap between the intention and behavior of an individual, in other words both are not always in alignment, which is termed as value-action gap. And that people have a tendency to often take actions that probably are not favorable to them, despite being aware that such actions are not in their best interest. Thus, nudges are aimed at influencing such choices, but at the same time, the power to choose still remains with the individual. In this senses, nudges are quite helpful as humans don’t always think and take decisions in a logical manner and most of these decisions are often unconscious, without weighing the costs and benefits of these decisions and choices. So in an attempt to bring positive change in the behavior of individuals, tapping on these instinctive styles of thinking is required. This is what nudge does.

A lot of British and American politicians have been influenced by nudge. Numerous nudge units exist around the world at both national level (UK, Germany, Japan and others) and international level (e.g., World Bank, United Nations, and the European Commission). Nudge theory has application in various fields, like government, healthcare, and business.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Diabulimia

diabulimiaDIABULIMIA, also known as ED-DMT1 or Eating Disorder-Diabetes Mellitus Type 1, is a type of eating disorder that affects people with type-1 diabetes. People suffering from diabulimia deliberately restrict insulin in an attempt to lose weight. Although there is no distinct diagnostic code for diabulimia, in DSM-5, based on the eating disorder behavior and manipulation of insulin, diabulimia can present with features of both bulimia and anorexia. Diabulimia can be classified under Other Specified Eating Disorder (OSFED) in DSM-5.

HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Rumination Disorder

Rumination-disorderRUMINATION DISORDER, also known as rumination syndrome, is a rare and chronic eating disorder. Individuals with Rumination Disorder unintentionally and repeatedly regurgitate food before swallowing it again, chewing it once more or spitting it out. They often spit up food from their stomach; re-chew partially digested or undigested food unintentionally and either re-swallow or spit it out. As per the reports of the patients, since the food hasn’t yet been digested, it isn’t acidic, as vomit is and tastes normal. Rumination usually happens soon after eating, at every meal but it appears to be the result of increased abdominal pressure.

Watch and flowers
HeartyPsych Interesting PsychREADS

Interesting Facts about Human Memory

1. The human mind can form, amplify, or reinvent a memory.

2. Short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM) are two different types of memories. Short term memory can hold 7±2 things for up to 20 seconds. Information received from the environment, first passes through short term memory before it becomes the part of long term memory.

3. Humans start to form memories when they are in the womb. This memory is described as prenatal or fetal memory. Various experiments have revealed that babies are capable of remembering sounds that were played to them during pregnancy.

4. The storage capacity of the human brain is practically limitless. Human brain can store approximately 2.5 petabytes of data, which means that human brain has as much memory as the entire internet.

5. Apparently, aging does not seem to have any direct effect on memory. People experience memory loss during old age merely because they use it less as they age.

6. The human mind can remember things that didn’t even occur. This obvious recollection of something that one did not actually experience is known as false memory. This phenomenon was demonstrated in an experiment where the interviewer was successfully able to convince 70% of the participants that they had committed a crime, when, in fact, they had not.

7. In the absence of rehearsal, memories become harder to access, this means that memories, in actual, do not decay.

8. During jet lag, certain stress hormones are released, which have been found to damage the memory.

9. While a person is drunk, he or she is not capable of creating memories.

10. There is no specific region in the brain where a given memory exists. Instead, it is distributed in different regions of the brain.

11. Memory is reconstructed from distinct fragments in order to be recalled.

12. Human memories are prioritized by the emotions. Emotions attach new information and function as an indicator of significance. Memories that are emotionally intense can last longer in the mind and can be recalled much more clearly.

13. Procrastination is an important tool of memory. Not focusing on something actively gives the subconscious time to work on the ideas in the background while the person performs other things.