Interesting Stuff On-line

• Were you born this (un)happy or did you marry into it? An interesting article by Time Magazine on whether people are born with a certain ‘natural’  base level of happiness, or whether this base level can alternate.
• Back in the 1950s when they didn’t have a clue about ethics, three men who believed they were Jesus were forced to live in a mental institute together. What happened?
• Speaking of ethics, crazy doctors use tarantulas to scare people (and subsequently observe their neurological response to panic)
• Tetris can reduce flashbacks of people who have witnessed traumatic events
• Advice for how to go to a party if parties scare you –  helpful to the agoraphobics out there
• This snippet was in a post that has nothing to do with psychology(at least not in the strictly scientific sense). Yet it’s an experiment I would like to know a bit more about:

Back in the 1940′s two psychologists set up an intriguing experiment.  They asked a group of people to identify playing cards.  For example, the four of clubs or the queen of hearts.  To make it a bit more tricky, they popped a few freak cards into the deck, like a red six of spades.  All went well, the cards were shown at high speed and the subjects found it simple to identify and name the cards as they appeared.  Only thing was, they didn’t pick up the anomolies at all, but subconsciously approximated them to what they were expecting, for instance calling a red six of spades as “six of hearts” or perhaps just as “six of spades”.  Just like in the movie The Matrix, they didn’t notice what was going on right before their eyes.

The psychologists then slowed the cards down a bit.  At this speed, the subjects were uncomfortable, feeling that occasionally something wasn’t right, but unable to say quite what it was.

Eventually, as the pace was slowed even more, most subjects were able to see and identify the freak cards.  Some subjects, however, were disoriented. Unable to even consider the possibility that there was anything wrong with the deck, they became anxious and confused.