Psychology
Short articles about psychology, one idea in each.
- Why you can't tickle yourselfTickle your own palm and almost nothing happens. Experiments with a pair of robots in London showed why: the brain predicts the touch it is about to cause and turns it down.
- Why the middle of a list slips awayRead someone a list of words and ask what they remember. The first few and the last few come back; the middle mostly doesn't. A 1962 study mapped the shape.
- We tend to like what we've seen beforeShow people a foreign character or a stranger's face a few more times, and they start to rate it more kindly. Robert Zajonc called this the mere exposure effect.
- The man who memorised nonsense to measure forgettingIn the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus learned lists of meaningless syllables and timed how fast they slipped away. Along the way he found a cheaper way to keep them.
- The willpower battery that didn't replicateFor years psychology taught that self-control runs down like a battery. Then dozens of labs ran the same test the same way, and the effect all but vanished.
- Reading is a habit you can't switch offSay the ink colour of the word RED printed in blue, and you slow down. A 1935 experiment measured by how much, and the result has held up ever since.
- Why cramming fails and spacing worksA German psychologist taught himself nonsense syllables in 1885 and found a curve that still explains why we forget, and how to stop it.