Last year I published a ghostly picture of an airman at Gosport. Here is another of a woman dressed in 1940's clothes on the balcony of St.Botolph's church. It must be a fake obviously since there are no such things as ghosts...Is it that our mind takes a random pattern of light and shade and creates an image from it which actually isn't there:like the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, or a face in the clouds ?




ST BOTOLPH'S CHURCH

Bishopsgate. London EC2.

In 1982, photographer Chris Brackley took a picture inside this historic old church. The only people present were himself and his wife. When the photograph was developed he was astonished to note that a woman in old-fashioned garb was standing on the balcony to the right of the altar. The negative was subjected to considerable expert analysis, which revealed that that there was no double exposure to the film and it was also proved that none of Chris’s equipment was faulty. The only explanation for the mysterious figure was that someone must have actually been standing on the balcony when the picture was taken. A few years later Chris was contacted by a builder who had been employed on restoration work in St Botolph’s crypt. He explained that, in knocking down a wall he had inadvertently disturbed a pile of old coffins. One had come open to reveal a reasonably well-preserved body the face of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had made an uninvited appearance in Chris’s photograph.

Ear Worms and Us!

What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?

PYT was triggered by the letters EYC 

All of us, at one time or another have a tune stuck in our head. It might be " All Things Bright and Beautiful after school assembly. In fact,the brain has its own jukebox. A personal sound system for your private listening pleasure. The downside is that it has a mind of its own. It often chooses the songs and it frequently gets stuck, playing a particular tune over and over until you're sick of it. Psychologists have nicknamed these mental tunes "earworms" (from the German Ohrwurm). A study from 2009found that they can last anywhere between minutes to hours, but that they're only unpleasant in a minority of cases. Now a team led by Victoria Williamson, in partnership with BBC 6 Music and other international radio stations, has surveyed thousands of people to try to find out the various triggers that cause earworms to start playing. Radio listeners and web visitors were invited to fill in an online form or email the station about their latest earworm experience and the circumstances that preceded it.

Just over 600 participants provided all the information that was needed for a detailed analysis. Predictably, the most frequently cited circumstance was recent exposure to a particular song. "My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday," one 6 Music listener wrote in. "Woke at 4.30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON'T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN." In relation to this kind of earworm-inducing exposure, the survey revealed the manifold ways that we come into contact with music in modern life, including: music in public places, in gyms, restaurants and shops; radio music; live music; ring tones; another person's humming or singing; and music played in visual media on TV and on the Internet.

However, a song doesn't have to be heard to worm its way inside your head. Many listeners described how earworms had been triggered by association - contact with certain people, rhythms, situations, sounds or words - sometimes with quite obscure links. "On my journey, I read a number plate on a car that ended in the letters 'EYC' which is NOTHING LIKE 'PYT' (by Michael Jackson)," said another listener, "but for some unknown reason, there it was - the song was in my head."

Memories also triggered earworms - for example, driving along the same stretch of road that a song was first heard. And also anticipation. Another listener had "Alive" by Pearl Jam stuck in their head in the days before attending a Pearl Jam concert.

Mood and stress were other triggers. "Prokofiev 'Montagues and Capulets' opening theme. I was writing an email about a distressing subject. I suspect the mood of the piece matched my mood at the time," said an amateur musician. Another listener had Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror playing in her mind ever since she'd been thinking about the star non-stop and feeling sad (the survey coincided with his death in 2009).

A final theme to emerge from the survey was the way that earworms start playing when we're in a "low attention state", bored or even asleep. "My earworm is 'Mulder and Scully' by Catatonia. In fact I dreamt about running through woods and this was the sound track in my head," said a 6 Music listener. Another survey respondent experienced K'naan "Waving Flag" when mind wandering through a monotonous lab task.

Theoretically, Williamson and her colleagues said earworms can be understood as another manifestation of what Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century identified as "involuntary memory retrieval". They could even provide a new window through which to study that phenomenon.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What about you? What earworms have you experienced lately and what was the context? Please use comments to share your earworm experiences.
_________________________________

Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., and Stewart, L. (2011). How do "earworms" start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery Psychology of Music DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553

Why do we like HORROR ?

Fear coils in your stomach and clutches at your heart. It’s an unpleasant emotion we usually do our best to avoid. Yet across the world and through time people have been drawn irresistibly to stories designed to scare them. Writers like Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Clive Barker continue to haunt the popular mind. Far longer ago, listeners sat mesmerised by violent, terrifying tales like Beowulf and Homer’s Odyssey.

‘If you go to your video store and rent a comedy from Korea, it’s not going to make any sense to you at all,’ says literature scholar Mathias Clasen based at Aarhus University, ‘whereas if you rent a local horror movie from Korea you’ll instantaneously know not just that it’s a horror movie, but you’ll have a physiological reaction to it, indicative of the genre.’

Why is horror the way it is?

Fresh from a study visit to the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Clasen believes the timeless, cross-cultural appeal of horror fiction says something important about humans, and in turn, insights from evolutionary psychology can make sense of why horror takes the form it does. ‘You can use horror fiction and its lack of historical and cultural variance as an indication that there is such a thing as human nature,’ he says.

This nature of ours is one that has been shaped over millennia to be afraid, but not just of anything. Possibly our ancestors’ greatest fear was that they might become a feast for a carnivorous predator. As science writer David Quammen has put it, ‘among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat’. There’s certainly fossil evidence to back this up, suggesting that early hominids were preyed on by carnivores and that they scavenged from the kill sites of large felines, and vice versa. Modern-day hunter-gatherers, such as the Aché foragers in Paraguay, still suffer high mortality rates from snakes and feline attacks.

Such threats have left their marks on our cognitive development. Research by Nobuo Masataka and others shows that children as young as three are especially fast at spotting snakes, as opposed to flowers, on a computer screen, and all the more so when those snakes are poised to strike. Modern-day threats, such as cars and guns, do not grab the attention in this way. That we’re innately fearful of symbolic threats is known as ‘prepared learning’. The snake is a very powerful image imprinted in the human mind.

Another study published just this year by Christof Koch and his team has shown how the right amygdala, a brain region involved in fear learning, responds more vigorously to the sight of animals than to other pictures such as of people, landmarks or objects.

Viewing the content of horror fiction through the prism of evolutionary evidence and theory, it’s no surprise that the overriding theme of many tales is that the characters are at risk of being eaten. ‘Do we have many snakes or snake-like creatures or giant serpents in horror fiction?’ Clasen asks. ‘Yes we do: look at Tremors – they were really just very big snakes with giant fangs’. In fact, many horror books and movie classics feature oversized carnivorous predators, including James Herbert’s The Rats. Alien is, for this reason one of the most frightening films - lizard like, violent and carnivorous -lovely :)

Are we Blind to Internet Banners ?

It's a line of research that Google doesn't want you to know about. Many studies suggest people have a habit of simply ignoring web banners on Internet sites - a phenomenon known as banner blindness. The evidence for this ad avoidance is based largely on tests of people's explicit memory of ads after they've browsed a site. Of course that doesn't mean that the participants hadn't looked at the ads, nor does it mean that the ads hadn't lodged their message subconsciously.

Now Guillaume Hervet and his team have attempted to address these points in an eye-tracking study. Thirty-two participants read eight web-pages about choosing a digital camera. On the third, fourth, seventh and eighth pages, a Google-style rectangular text ad (180 x 150 pixels) was embedded in the right-hand side of the editorial content. The second ad was different from the first, and then the same two ads appeared on the seventh and eighth pages, respectively. Also, half the participants were exposed to ads that were congruent with the camera topic of the web-pages; the other half to incongruent ads. All advertised brands were fictitious.

The results may be of some consolation to Google and their advertisers. Eighty-two per cent of the participants did actually look at one or more of the ads. Or put another way: of the 128 ad exposures, 37 per cent were looked at once or more. Had the ad content made a lasting impression? To test this, after the browsing phase, the participants attempted to read the same ads presented in varying degrees of blurry degradation. Their performance was compared to a new group of control participants who hadn't done the earlier web browsing. If performance was superior among the participants who'd earlier been exposed to the ads, this would suggest they had a lasting memory of the ad content. In fact, performance was only superior for web-browsing participants who'd earlier been exposed to ads in a congruent context.

Another aspect to the results is how the participants' behaviour changed over the course of the web browsing. The first and third ads were looked at for longer than the second and fourth ads. This is probably because the second and fourth ads appeared on pages that had been preceded by a page with an ad on it in the same location - the participants seemed to have learned to ignore that area of the page. On the other hand, it seems a couple of pages without ads was enough to restore ad-looking behaviour.

The lessons for web advertisers are clear: don't advertise on every page, vary ad location, and make sure the ad topic is congruent with the web-site content. 

DISGUST: its psychological function....

Total Recoil

Survival of the primmest

Chances are, there's a special something that's guaranteed to turn your stomach. Perhaps it's the sight and smell of a decomposing pigeon at the side of the pavement, maggots wriggling from its vacant eye sockets.

Or perhaps you squirm whenever you think of your grandma's mucky dentures by her bedside.

Whatever your pet hate, disgust is a basic emotion common to all humans. But for decades, nobody really understood why it existed. Scientists now believe we can find the answer by examining the things that disgust us.

Easy queasy

At the end of the 1990s, Dr Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine began to survey people in different countries to find out what things they found disgusting. Curtis uncovered some interesting cultural peculiarities. For example, food cooked by a menstruating woman was a frequent cause of disgust in India. While fat people scored highly as disgusting in the Netherlands.

But overall, people kept reporting the same things as revolting wherever they were from. It seems that whether we live in Islington or Isla Pinta, Margate or Marrakech, we are all disgusted by:

• Bodily secretions - faeces (poo), vomit, sweat, spit, blood, pus, sexual fluids
• Body parts - wounds, corpses, toenail clippings
• Decaying food - especially rotting meat and fish, rubbish
• Certain living creatures - flies, maggots, lice, worms, rats, dogs and cats
• People who are ill, contaminated

These universal sources of disgust led Curtis to hypothesise that disgust might be genetic; hard-wired in our brains and imprinted on our biological code by millions of years of natural selection. But what persistent force in our past drove us to evolve such a powerful emotion?

The origin of faeces

Excreta is most common cause of disgust around the world.

The things people consistently find disgusting also make us ill. This link convinced Curtis that disgust was a biological mechanism for avoiding infectious disease. Faeces, pus and corpses are all sources of dangerous bacteria and viruses; faeces alone being the source of more than 20 dangerous bugs.

The genes for disgust probably arose by accident and then became common through natural selection. The observation that most animals avoid eating each other's faeces suggests that disgust could have evolved a very long time ago.

Unwashed genes

Curtis still believes that upbringing plays an important role in determining what we find disgusting. But she believes that we have evolved genes that predispose us to find some things more disgusting than others.

"Imagine a child had never come into contact with either a rat or an orange. If you showed the rat and the orange to that child for the first time, they would probably be fascinated not disgusted," says Curtis.

"If you then decided to condition that child to be disgusted by both things, I think you would find it easier to get them to be disgusted by a hairy, smelly rat than to be disgusted by a nice round orange," she adds.

Out of sight, out of mind

Crucial to this instinctive reaction are visual rules of thumb, which we use to decide what is and isn't a disease threat.

Visual cues are so powerful, we often squirm at the sight of things we know are harmless, simply because they happen to look like a disease threat.

Take worms for example. While many species of worm are harmless - like the humble earthworm - some have evolved to become human gut parasites. Over millions of years, we have evolved an instinctive avoidance of gut parasites in animal meat. And this same visual aversion to long, slimy, wriggly animals makes us squirm at the harmless earthworm.

The gum of a man's mouth infected with larvae from a sarcophagid fly during a nap in the open.

The photograph on the left is of an elderly Israeli man who is thought to have been infected when he sat down under a tree to sleep. A sarcophagid or 'flesh' fly crawled inside his mouth and deposited its live larvae in the gaps between his gums and teeth.

The smell of fear

Another vital trigger is our sense of smell. Smell causes such a powerful response in the brain that the US Army has been trying to develop a stink bomb with an odour foul enough to be used for riot-control. The Metropolitan Police have already expressed an interest in the weapon.

But we can override the disgust response. People find family less disgusting than strangers. And when it comes to sex, we compromise between our instinctive avoidance of disease and our urge to reproduce.

Opposing views

But not everyone believes that we have a genetic predisposition to be disgusted. Unlike Curtis, Paul Rozin of Penn State University thinks that disgust is culturally acquired.

Rozin carried out his own survey on the things people found disgusting and discovered that causes of death rated the highest amongst his North American subjects.

"Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust," Rozin writes. "Disgust functions like a defence mechanism, to keep human animalness out of awareness."

People around the world use the same expression to display their disgust.

Anatomy of disgust

But few people argue that the way we express our disgust is universal. Humans use a distinctive facial expression to signal disgust.

Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco found that this was identical in different cultures across the globe. We make this expression by screwing up our noses and pulling down the corners of our mouths.

MRI scans also reveal that we use a special part of the brain when we get disgusted: the anterior insular cortex.

Curtis has even claimed that disgust could have been one of the first words uttered by humans. "The word 'yuck' is similar in languages all over the world. It seems to be a proto-word," says Curtis.

Despite rapid advances in medicine, disease still poses an unprecedented threat to human life in the 21st century. If disgust really is as crucial to our survival as some scientists believe, then we're likely to be saying yuck for a very long time to come.

Happy New School Year!

Welcome back to Psychblog, or Tea and Toast which has been resting over the summer examination period. We're hoping this year to host contributions from the whole school on psychological issues and debates which we will publish on the blog. One topic which has been mentioned to me by several girls is depression. I think we ought to be very clear about this topic - to be 'fed up' is a perfectly normal mood in everybody's life. Somehow society has created an expectation that we all ought to be happy all of the time this is just not possible - 'no sunshine without shadows' as my mum used to say. A clinical depression is very different and , fortunately, rare. All it needs to snap most people out of 'fed upness' is a kind word, a thoughtful deed, or a good laugh. Laughter is Dr.Brown's cure for the blues.. try it and see.

Please post comments on the school web site, what are your cures for the blues ?

Language and thought

Jill Hohenstein's talk last Wednesday demonstrated how psychologists have been attempting to answer a question that is also much-discussed amongst philosophers: what is the relationship between language and thought?

As an experimental psychologist, her work (and the work she cites) involves looking at speakers of interestingly-different languages and seeing whether the differences in language relate to differences in the performance of various non-linguistic tasks.

One example she gave was that of directions. Our language provides us with different ways of thinking about spatial relationships: in absolute terms and in relative terms. In absolute terms, I could say that the main school is South of my current location in Gwyer; in relative terms, I could say that it is straight ahead of me. However, some languages do not provide both of these options: some only allow for the description of absolute spatial relationships.

In order to test whether these differences in languages affected how people thought about spatial relationships, speakers of both languages were given a task where they had to look at an array of objects, then turn around 180 degrees and organise another set of objects “in the same way”. The idea was that the speakers of the “absolute” language should put the objects in the same absolute locations (i.e., if a red circle was at the northern end of the first array they would put a red circle at the northern end of their array), whereas the speakers of languages like English would be able to put the objects either in the same absolute locations or in the same relative locations (i.e., if red circle was on their right of the first array they would put a red circle at the right-hand end of their array).

Professor Hohenstein reported that there had been mixed results from studies such as these, but that there seemed to be some effect of language on response, as predicted. This provided evidence for the view that language does, to some extent, affect the way that we actually think rather than just constraining the ways in which we are able to express our thoughts.

In philosophy, the viewpoint that language structures our thought is known as conceptual relativism, or as the idea that different people could have alternative conceptual schemes. A conceptual scheme is a language, a system of categories that allows us to think and talk about the world and make claims about it. So the claim of conceptual relativism is the claim that there could exist languages that cannot be translated into each other because they carve up the world into such different concepts.

If this were the case, then there would be different “truths” expressable in different languages – true statements could be made in one language that could not be made in another. An interesting paradox is that it is impossible to give an actual example of this relativism of truth claims, because any example of an imaginary untranslatable language would have to be given in our language and thus would not be truly untranslatable. This demonstrates that it is impossible to move outside of our own conceptual scheme and imagine an alternative one.

But not being able to imagine an alternative conceptual scheme does not mean that such a thing is impossible; and we can provide examples which point towards what untranslatable truth claims might look like.

For example, if a group of language speakers had just one word (and one concept) for orange and yellow, then they would be able to say truthfully that “this rose is the same colour as that satsuma”, which cannot be directly translated into English (the indirect, truth-maintaining translation would be something like “this rose is red-or-orange and that satsuma is also red-or-orange”, which is a bit of a mouthful but nevertheless true).

And a small-scale example of real conceptual relativism comes from mathematics: apparently mathematical truths can be expressed in the grammar of Reimannian geometry that cannot be expressed in the grammar of classical, Euclidean geometry.

The studies cited by Professor Hohenstein also point towards the possibility that a radically different language – perhaps one used by creatures with completely different sensory apparatus to us – could cause its users to think about the world in radically different ways to us.

There is some debate in philosophy as to whether the idea of alternative conceptual schemes – languages which cannot be translated into English – makes sense at all, but I think that the insights provided by experimental psychologists suggest that it does, even if such things cannot be imagined.