Mind Hacks
Dec. 14th, 2010 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightcastleThis is just a mess of links from Mind Hacks that I found interesting.
**Since mzrowan posted something on attacks of sleep, I will follow up with violent sleepers.
**A brief bit about the history of sexual surgeries, including some words from the patients in the 19th century.
**An interesting interview with Wade Davis, who has done a lot of work on mind-altering substances and how cultural context interacts with their effects, which is fascinating.
Two bits struck me. The first because I have friends who have tried ayahuasca.
In PR, the theory of the sleeper effect is a powerful one, but counter-intuitive - messages that are more effective later than when they are first presented. There does seem to be such effect, but under two specific circumstances: A big first impression and a source we don't trust. One caveat, we have to be made aware of the source's untrustworthiness after we've heard the message, or we just dismiss the message out of hand and the effect is diminished.
**Using some of the research on the Illusion of Control to battle pseudoscience
**A pretty extensive roundup of the controversy about the American Anthropological Association's controversial decision to change the wording of their mission to remove the word "science".
**Since mzrowan posted something on attacks of sleep, I will follow up with violent sleepers.
**A brief bit about the history of sexual surgeries, including some words from the patients in the 19th century.
**An interesting interview with Wade Davis, who has done a lot of work on mind-altering substances and how cultural context interacts with their effects, which is fascinating.
Two bits struck me. The first because I have friends who have tried ayahuasca.
It’s interesting how these things change though. I find it fascinating that there is this ayahuasca phenomenon, it’s literally sweeping Europe and sweeping the United States. I meet young people who take ayahuasca and they speak so positively about the experience whereas I remember the whole point of ayahuasca was facing down the jaguar, being ripped away from the tit of jaguar woman. That was sort of what its point was.And the second because it makes a lot of sense to me.
That said, I found that psychedelics were extremely useful to me when I was young, when I was trying to de-construct the world that I had been born into but didn’t necessarily want to live in. And then as I carefully constructed a world, became married, became a father, developed a career, created a world, I found psychedelics profoundly disorienting and not very helpful.
In PR, the theory of the sleeper effect is a powerful one, but counter-intuitive - messages that are more effective later than when they are first presented. There does seem to be such effect, but under two specific circumstances: A big first impression and a source we don't trust. One caveat, we have to be made aware of the source's untrustworthiness after we've heard the message, or we just dismiss the message out of hand and the effect is diminished.
**Using some of the research on the Illusion of Control to battle pseudoscience
**A pretty extensive roundup of the controversy about the American Anthropological Association's controversial decision to change the wording of their mission to remove the word "science".
