Unethical Amnesia

Because of the brain's preference for virtuous memories, unethical actions have a tendency to be poorly remembered, and therefore repeated.  The ego's defense mechanisms encourage dishonesty to discourage psychological distress.  The petty blind spots of individuals thus accumulate, weaving a lying web of dissimulation and deception we like to call society.

On The Unreliability of Witnesses and Scientists

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

Parsing Partisan Psychology

Political discussion among like-minded people polarises political opinion and retroactively alters biases.  Political psychology is so pernicious as to invisibly intensify upon exposure to consensus!

Your Attitude About Aging May Impact How You Age

“Positive age stereotypes seem protective of not experiencing these biomarkers,” she says—so if we can find a way to promote positive age stereotypes on a societal level, our brains may be better off once we reach old age.

Physical activity may leave the brain more open to change

"Our study suggests that physical activity, which is also beneficial for the general health of the patient, could be used to increase the efficiency of the treatment in adult patients," Lunghi says. "So, if you have a lazy eye, don't be lazy yourself!"

Beyond Synchronicity: Mind ≠ Brain

Scientists love to throw out evidence. It makes them feel powerful and important. They especially love to throw out evidence from mushy fencesitters who come to them, cap in hand, tail between legs, begging for validation for someone's pet obsession, whether it's ancient lost civilizations or psi or NDEs.

How emotions influence learning and memory processes in the brain

"It seems that when the emotion is social and positive, the brain tells the different areas to work according to one communication protocol. When a different emotion is involved, such a negative emotion of fear as in our experiment, the brain tells the same areas to use a different communication protocol. We will need to conduct additional studies, including studies on humans, in the future in order to understand the precise ramifications of each emotion on memory."

Digital amnesia: Mobile phones deprive users of memory skills

"49 percent of UK respondents do not remember their parents’ telephone numbers, 57 percent haven’t memorized the number for their place of work, 71 percent of parents can’t dial their children off the top of their head, and 87 percent don’t know the number of their children’s schools by heart. On the other hand, 47 percent can recite the phone numbers they had when they were between age 10 and 15, likely before devices had such large memories."

Depression damages parts of the brain, research concludes

"'Your whole sense of self depends on continuously understanding who you are in the world – your state of memory is not about just knowing how to do Sudoku or remembering your password – it’s the whole concept we hold of ourselves,' he said."

New Study Confirms That There Are Way Too Many Studies

"Some scientists formulated complex equations and concluded that with the new media age comes more material, and with more material comes a decline in our attention towards the important scientific studies."

The Psychology of Wonder

"Arguably one of the most significant contributions of psychology is that our understanding of ourselves is more defined by what we believe in our heads than by the actual external world that we experience.  If you imagine you are the center of the universe, then you experience yourself as a different person than one who imagines they live on a speck of dust.  However, even better, if you can imagine living in different kinds of universes, then who you are becomes a fantastic landscape of possibilities."

Why The Afterlife Is Beyond Science

"'But he is merely dreaming all the time, or rather, living with the fantasy created by his strongest desires on earth.'  Over time, whatever form time takes in that condition, the 'dream' fades and the person or soul awakens to his true condition, Myers said."

What makes an urban legend?

"Norenzayan’s analysis of Grimm's fairy tales found that the most popular stories – as measured by the number of times they have been cited online – only have two or three supernatural surprises. Our brains, it seems, have only so much room for the bizarre before it becomes too confusing to be enjoyable."

People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened

Research published in Psychological Science suggests that three out of four people can be encouraged to form false memories of an event that didn't occur.  A key ingredient in this process is softening the person up with accurate details and memories interspersed with the false.

This is very relevant to law and justice, where witnesses are understood to be prone to error.  The experimental protocol included faulty memory-recovery techniques, now demonstrated to have a deleterious effect on accurate recall.  Minimising the use of these fallible reconstructive modes of recollection in the interview setting would help avoid the creation of imagined events.

Although the study can only be strictly applied to individuals being coached by individuals, the theory that the inclusion of true facts made false ones appear more plausible could have a wider relevance to the dominant historical narrative of society; if true-seeming events can be patched together with enough pieces of truth, then why not values?  This effect could conceivably descend all the way to founding myths, past lives, or original sin.