I have been, in this blog, maintaining that Science at best is workable hypothesis for the time being and there is no certainty about it.
And the Scientists hide under the cloak of Axioms, which you are not allowed to question.
They say it is self-evident.
Science is built on faulty logic.
That a certain result shall follow a given set of cause/s/events under similar conditions.
What people forget or do not dare to question is that all the conditions in any scientific testing or experiments are not in our control , we do not know how reliable they are and we are not guaranteed the circumstances shall remain repeatedly the same.
That Nature shall behave uniformly is a fallacy not supported by Logic.
We can not say Nature shall behave uniformly for we have not examined all the cases of Nature and it is impossible to know this.
We assume it shall.
Many researchers have labored under the misbelief that the p-value gives the probability that their study’s results are just pure random chance. Credit: Lenilucho/Wikipedia
Secondly Science is certain of Causal relationship ,that is an effect has a Cause and a Cause must produce a result.
Logically a Cause may have more than One effect and one effect may have more than one Cause.
Therefore this is also faulty.
(Indian Philosophy addresses this problem by Parinama Vada and Vivatha Vada)
And the scientists also assumes many tools for verification of data,those that are purely imaginary and have no factual basis.
Now a Testing tool used by Psychology is found to be wrong and so are the three million scientific papers based on these tools.
Worse is that this has happened in Applied Psychology
How the patients were ever cured based on these scientific papers only GOK!
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Psychology researchers have recently found themselves engaged in a bout of statistical soul-searching. In apparently the first such move ever for a scientific journal the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychologyannounced in a February editorial that researchers who submit studies for publication would not be allowed to use a common suite of statistical methods, including a controversial measure called the p-value.
These methods, referred to as null hypothesis significance testing, or NHST, are deeply embedded into the modern scientific research process, and some researchers have been left wondering where to turn. “The p-value is the most widely known statistic,” says biostatistician Jeff Leek of Johns Hopkins University. Leek has estimated that the p-value has been used at least three million scientific papers. Significance testing is so popular that, as the journal editorial itself acknowledges, there are no widely accepted alternative ways to quantify the uncertainty in research results—and uncertainty is crucial for estimating how well a study’s results generalize to the broader population.
Unfortunately, p-values are also widely misunderstood, often believed to furnish more information than they do. Many researchers have labored under the misbelief that the p-value gives the probability that their study’s results are just pure random chance. But statisticians say the p-value’s information is much more non-specific, and can interpreted only in the context of hypothetical alternative scenarios: The p-value summarizes how often results at least as extreme as those observed would show up if the study were repeated an infinite number of times when in fact only pure random chance were at work.
This means that the p-value is a statement about imaginary data in hypothetical study replications, not a statement about actual conclusions in any given study. Instead of being a “scientific lie detector” that can get at the truth of a particular scientific finding, the p-value is more of an “alternative reality machine” that lets researchers compare their results with what random chance would hypothetically produce. “What p-values do is address the wrong questions, and this has caused widespread confusion,” says psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers at the University of Amsterdam
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Ostensibly, p-values allow researchers to draw nuanced, objective scientific conclusions as long as it is part of a careful process of experimental design and analysis. But critics have complained that in practice the p-value in the context of significance testing has been bastardized into a sort of crude spam filter for scientific findings: If the p-value on a potentially interesting result is smaller than 0.05, the result is deemed “statistically significant” and passed on for publication, according to the recipe; anything with larger p-values is destined for the trash bin.
Quitting p-values cold turkey was a drastic step. “The null hypothesis significance testing procedure is logically invalid, and so it seems sensible to eliminate it from science,” says psychologist David Trafimow of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, editor of the journal.’
In plain English the p value is imaginary and has no basis.
I can foresee a host of scientists coming out against this post using fancy jargon, while the questions raised by me remain unanswered/will remain so.
While perceptions of color are somewhat subjective, there are some color effects that have universal meaning. Colors in the red area of the color spectrum are known as warm colors and include red, orange and yellow. These warm colors evoke emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of anger and hostility.
Colors on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colors and include blue, purple and green. These colors are often described as calm, but can also call to mind feelings of sadness or indifference.
Several ancient cultures, including the Egyptians and Chinese, practiced chromotherapy, or using colors to heal. Chromotherapy is sometimes referred to as light therapy or colourology and is still used today as a holistic or alternative treatment.
In this treatment:
Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation.
Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body.
Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels.
Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain.
Indigo shades were thought to alleviate skin problems.
Most psychologists view color therapy with skepticism and point out that the supposed effects of color have been exaggerated. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. Research has demonstrated in many cases that the mood-altering effects of color may only be temporary. A blue room may initially cause feelings of calm, but the effect dissipates after a short period of time.
Studies have also shown that certain colors can have an impact on performance. Exposing students to the color red prior to an exam has been shown to have a negative impact on test performance. More recently, researchers discovered that the color red causes people to react with greater speed and force, something that might prove useful during athletic activities.
There is an interesting article in The Atlantic on Mind and Technological Innovations.
‘One cannot help noting immediately that the theory echoes Kurzweil’s professional achievements as an inventor of word recognition machines: the “secret of human thought” is pattern recognition, as it is implemented in the hardware of the brain. To create a mind therefore we need to create a machine that recognizes patterns, such as letters and words. …
The process of recognition, which involves the firing of neurons in response to stimuli from the world, will typically include weightings of various features, as well as a lowering of response thresholds for probable constituents of the pattern. Thus some features will be more important than others to the recognizer, while the probability of recognizing a presented shape as an “E” will be higher if it occurs after “APPL.”
These recognizers will therefore be “intelligent,” able to anticipate and correct for poverty and distortion in the stimulus. This process mirrors our human ability to recognize a face, say, when in shadow or partially occluded or drawn in caricature.”
When we need the Mind to recognize patterns to perceive and be understood, we can say that while being studied becomes an Object of the Observed.
Chitha, the dispositions( not the predispositions of Indian Philosophy, which means Vasanas or tendencies acquired over years including the previous Births).
Mind Analyses,U.S. National Library of Medicine
The Observer is different from the Observed at the mundane or Transitory world.
To recognize an Object as the object, for that matter as an Object, Recognition is required.
Recognition is possible only when there is Data stored already.
For instance, to recognize a Rose as a Rose, at the first instance, we need some one to describe it .
But extend the logic.
How a Rose would have have been identified as such for the First Human Being as such when there were none around?
This calls for apriori Knowledge.(Knowledge that is innate.
“[H]omunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind, properly so-called, than one really is. If neural clumps can be characterized in psychological terms, then it looks as if we are in the right conceptual ballpark when trying to explain genuine mental phenomena–such as the recognition of words and faces by perceiving conscious subjects. But if we strip our theoretical language of psychological content, restricting ourselves to the physics and chemistry of cells, we are far from accounting for the mental phenomena we wish to explain. An army of homunculi all recognizing patterns, talking to each other, and having expectations might provide a foundation for whole-person pattern recognition; but electrochemical interactions across cell membranes are a far cry from actually consciously seeing something as the letter “A.” How do we get from pure chemistry to full-blown psychology?
Why do we say that telephone lines convey information? Not because they are intrinsically informational, but because conscious subjects are at either end of them, exchanging information in the ordinary sense. Without the conscious subjects and their informational states, wires and neurons would not warrant being described in informational terms.
The mistake is to suppose that wires and neurons are homunculi that somehow mimic human subjects in their information-processing powers; instead they are simply the causal background to genuinely informational transactions.
For the uninitiated it means that the child has a world of its own and we, as Adults know nothing about and we need to train ourselves to communicate with them!
Admitting that the child has a ‘Space, our world is different , we need to ‘get down to their world’ to get to know them, how can we help them grow into the world?
By going down to their level, we will be acting and guiding them from their stand point.
Right?
In that case am I not entering into the adult world, am I not assuming the role of an Adult at least while guiding them?
By kissing them as a child would and lisp ‘we should not do it’ and the child will follow?
If I have to do it,I have to do it as a parent,.
The child is an extension of Me.
The Society and the highly qualified Doctors not withstanding, I know my child better and I have a better interest in their welfare.
Aside…
Many of the Specialists’ Children, I know, have all the problems, including what they treat our children for and more than us idiots’ normal children, have.
In the process, what has happened to my Parental Space?
Dealing with Physical Disease one thing, I am not qualified,but emotional and value systems, I have a better interest and motivation.
Our patents knew nothing of these . nor did I do any of these.
I am alright and so are my children.
Before any Specialist jumps the Gun, I am Graduate in Psychology, but I have learnt that it is an evolving attempt to understand the Psyche of Man and nothing more.
Excepting in extreme disorders,the role of a Psychologist is limited to the extent of drugging and suppressing symptoms.
Has Psychology defined ‘Intelligence,Personality,Personality Traits, Abnormality?’
At best Psychology describes these, at worst non sense.
We will not have any problem with the children, if Only,
Parents know to stay together in marriage,
Do not Drink,
Live with elders in the family,
Have regular and clean habits,
Good values in Life,
Do not send children to school at the age of # 3,
Force them to do things which are beyond them,
Send them to all Courses from Karate to Dancing,
Allow them to play in the open and do not lock them up in an apartment,
We are aware , from our adolescence and from our Children that age are often irritable,over-confident,no respect-er of Authority,rebellious,focussed on too many things.
Let us not sit in Judgement .
Teen Brain
Many of us forget that we were the same at their age, if not worse.
Our parents would certify that.
Now please watch the Video for a Study on Teenage Brain.
“Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life. Back then, 15 years ago, we didn’t have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you’d like to take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like, how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI,to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something.
So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it’s not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the ’20s and ’30s.
So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (Laughter) It can go on a long time. (Laughter) One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex. So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front. Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area. It’s proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it’s involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you’re going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid. It’s also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.
So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence. So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 yearsincreases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence. The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that’s probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there’s a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses. This is a really important process. It’s partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren’t being used in that particular environment are pruned away. You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush.You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regionsduring the period of human adolescence.
So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age. So I’ll just give you an example from my lab. So in my lab, we’re interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people. So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work. So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he’s lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don’t are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) —and I think they’re on the wrong end of the stadium, and they’re doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that’s the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people’s behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. So you don’t have to ask any of these guys. You have a pretty good idea of what they’re feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time.
So that’s what we’re interested in looking at in my lab. So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we’ve found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it’s right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head. This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other peoplethan it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence. And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task, and I’ll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab.
So imagine that you’re the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task. In this task, you see a set of shelves. Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you’ll notice there’s a guy standing behind the setof shelves, and there are some objects that he can’t see. They’re occluded, from his point of view, with a kind of gray piece of wood. This is the same set of shelves from his point of view. Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see. Now your task is to move objects around. The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he’s not going to ask you to move objects that he can’t see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there’s a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director’s perspective. So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left. There are three trucks there. You’re going to instinctively go for the white truck, because that’s the top truckfrom your perspective, but then you have to remember, “Oh, he can’t see that truck, so he must mean me to move the blue truck,” which is the top truck from his perspective. Now believe it or not, normal, healthy, intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial. They move the white truck instead of the blue truck. So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults, and we also have a control condition where there’s no director and instead we give people a rule. We tell them, okay, we’re going to do exactly the same thing but this time there’s no director. Instead you’ve got to ignore objects with the dark gray background. You’ll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director’s perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior.
Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you’re going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there’s no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background. Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there’s an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions. But it’s when you compare the last two groups, the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting, because there, there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition. In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there’s still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else’s perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior,which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence. So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people’s perspectives, you’re right. They do. And this is why.
So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They’re parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they’re sometimes moody, they’re very self-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after pubertywas their level of embarrassment in front of him. So, he said, “Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I’d say, ‘Hey, stop messing around and I’ll sing your favorite song,’ and instantly they’d stop messing around and he’d sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave.
So people often ask, “Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we’ve invented recently in the West?” And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today.
So there’s a famous quote by Shakespeare from “The Winter’s Tale” where he describes adolescence as follows: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wencheswith child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” (Laughter) He then goes on to say, “Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?” (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portrayingadolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they’re with their friends. There’s an important drive to become independent from one’s parents and to impress one’s friends in adolescence. But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I’m going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain. So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it’s involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks. It gives you the kick out of taking risks. And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.
So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it’s only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West.All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice. And that’s still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don’t have access to secondary school education. And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable. It’s a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity.
So what’s sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness — shouldn’t be stigmatized. It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)”
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