Originally posted on October 9, 2014. Have you ever just met someone, learned his name, and immediately forgotten it? This happens all of the time. People try all sorts of tricks to remember names, driving routes, or the location of your favorite Hong Kong noodle house. But we might be looking in the wrong spot. All we need is a healthy dose of electricity. In a brilliant study , a group of Northwestern University researchers recruited volunteers and had them undergo a stimulating treatment. Each day for five days, the volunteers had a part of their brain stimulated using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The brain stimulation sessions lasted 20 minutes and targeted the hippocampus, which aids memory. To have a basis of comparison, the same volunteers also completed a week of sessions in which they did not receive brain stimulation. The trick was that the volunteers didn’t know when their brains had been zapped and when they hadn’t. Did the brain zapping improve memory? It did. The brain stimulation also improved how well the hippocampus “talked” to other nearby brain regions, an effect called functional connectivity. My favorite finding was that the brain stimulation effects persisted 24 hours after the volunteers underwent the treatment. Stimulate now, remember better later.  What does this mean? Should we forgo other memory strategies and instead buy a brain stimulation machine? I think not. These findings simply shed light on how the mind works and new ways we can improve how it functions. ... View more

Originally posted on October 16, 2014. One of my earliest memories is my dad giving me a high five. He was training for a marathon and agreed to take me, his talkative four year-old, on a run. I ran an entire mile. When I finished, red-faced and smiling, he said, “Give me five, son.” It was my first high five. According to a new study, high fives go a long way in motivating children. Five and six year-old children completed a task in which they imagined experiencing success. Next, the children received different types of praise. Some children received verbal praise that would highlight an individual trait (“You are a good drawer”), whereas other children received a high five. What motivated the children more, clear praise for being good at something or a high five? The high five won handedly. When the children bumped into a setback, those who received a high five persisted more than the other kids did. We might reconsider how we praise children’s behavior. If we tell children they’re geniuses, we’ve told them that they have a stable trait that isn’t under their control. If they fail a test, the responsibility can’t be theirs because they have a trait that should guarantee success on all intelligence test. Blame the teacher. Criticize the test. Give up and find something else to do. Don’t find a better way to study. By giving a high five, children know they have done something well. They also know that their success is under their control. I have run many miles since my first high five, but that first one with my dad will always hold a special place in my heart. It motivated me, either consciously or unconsciously, to continue to push my limits. For that high five, I’m grateful. ... View more

Originally posted on October 23, 2014. No matter how many babies I meet, I’m always left wondering what they want. Does a short squeak followed by a shrill squeal signal that the baby is hungry? That I left the dog outside by accident again? Or is the baby simply testing out her developing vocal chords? Driven by confusion and frustration, I might insert a pacifier into the baby’s mouth. The baby seems soothed, and I can take a breather. But according to one recent study, pacifiers disrupt our ability to understand a baby’s emotional state. Adult participants viewed pictures of happy and distressed babies. Sometimes the babies wore pacifiers and others times they didn’t. When the baby wore a pacifier, adults showed less intense facial reactivity and also rated the baby’s emotions as less intense. It didn’t matter whether the babies were happy or sad. The pacifiers numbed adults to baby facial expressions. Why did this happen? The idea hinges on the belief that we automatically mimic others’ emotional expressions. When I see people smile, I naturally mimic them because it helps me understand them and show empathy. Mimicking others is a great way to make friends. It lets others know we’re on the same team. Those who feel starved of social connection are the most likely to mimic others. Pacifiers are mimic roadblocks. With a gadget covering your face, I can’t make out what you’re feeling. As a result, I mimic you less, empathize with you less, and ultimately judge your experience as less intense than it really is. I don’t have a strong opinion about pacifiers. My sisters used them with their children, my parents used them with me, and I might use them when I have my own children. Like any consumer of knowledge, I’ll use this science to inform the choices I make. One thing is certain: I’ll never look at a pacifier in the same way. ... View more

Originally posted on February 5, 2015. Even though the smartphone has only been around for the past seven or eight years, it’s sometimes difficult to remember what life was like before we had so much information at our fingertips. You could argue with a friend about what year “Back to the Future, Part 2” came out, or in what year the “future” was set. (It was released in 1989. The future, filled with flying cars and floating skateboards, was set in 2015.) Back then, you couldn’t resolve discussions by swiping a screen and touching a button. Siri wasn’t even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye. If you got lost, you had to consult a map or stop and ask for directions, and if you got bored while waiting in line, you couldn’t pass the time by playing Candy Crush or perusing Instagram. Luddites argue that life was better before the smart phone, whereas others tout the benefits of instant communication and information. But one thing is certain: The smartphone has changed our lives. And our thumbs. Yes, when we spend time on smartphones using a touchscreen, it changes the way our thumbs and brains work together, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Our obsession with smartphones presented the perfect opportunity to explore the everyday plasticity of our brains. With smartphones, we are using our fingertips—especially our thumbs—in a new way, and we do it a lot. And because our phones keep track of how we use them, they carry a wealth of information that can be studied. In the study, the research team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain response to the touch of the thumb, index finger, and middle fingerprints of touchscreen phone users compared to people who still use flip phones or other old-school devices. They found that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. The amount of activity in the brain’s cortex associated with the thumb and index fingertips was directly proportional to the amount of phone use. Repetitive movements over the touchscreen surface might reshape sensory processing from the hand. Cortical sensory processing in our brains is constantly shaped by personal digital technology. So, the next time you use your thumbs to tweet, answer email, or jot yourself a note, remember that you’re training your brain. Keep in mind, too, that excessive phone usage is linked with motor dysfunction and pain. Remember the so-called “BlackBerry thumb”? ... View more

Originally posted on May 6, 2014. At the 2012 International Congress of Psychology meeting in Cape Town, I enjoyed a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Loftus, which offered a terrific demo of how memory works.  Loftus showed us a handful of individual faces that we were later to identify, as if in a police line-up.  Later, she showed us some pairs of faces, one seen earlier and one not, and asked us which one we had seen.  In the midst of these, she slipped in a pair of faces that included two new faces, one of which was rather like an earlier seen face.  Most of us understandably but wrongly identified this face as previously seen.  To climax the demonstration, when she showed us the originally seen face and the previously chosen wrong face, most of us (me, too) picked the wrong face!  As a result of our memory reconsolidation, we—an audience of psychologists who should have known better—had replaced the original memory with a false memory. ... View more

Originally posted on May 21, 2014. A New York Times report on “the extreme sport” of remembering confirms what psychology instructors have long taught:  the power of mnemonic aids, especially organized images, to enable memory performance.  We humans are really good at retaining visual images, and we’re much better at later reproducing visualizable words (bicycle) than abstract words (process).  Thus it can help, when remembering a short grocery list, to use the peg-word system, with numerically ordered items—bun, shoe, tree, door, etc.—and to hang the grocery items on those images. Likewise, reports the Times article, all the competitors in a recent world memory contest used a “memory palace,” by associating to-be-remembered numbers, words, or cards with well-learned places, such as the rooms of a childhood home.  Challengers who claim to have invented an alternative method inevitably “come in last, or close to it,” noted one world-class competitor. Memory researchers who study these memorists report that they are, as you might expect, smart.  But they also have unusual capacities for focused attention and holding information in working memory. Yet, like you and me successfully forgetting previous locations of our car in the parking lot, they also need to be able to replace their place-item associations with new items. In this they are unlike students, who, if they are to become educated persons, need to retain information for months and years to come.  And for that there is no easy substitute for other well-researched memory aids, such as spaced practice, active rehearsal, and the memory consolidation that comes with a solid night’s sleep. ... View more

Originally posted on February 10, 2015. After falsely reporting being grounded by rocket fire while on a military helicopter in Iraq, and subsequently having his reported experiences during Hurricane Katrina challenged, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has been grounded by pundit fire. Williams apologized, saying he misremembered the Iraqi incident. Talk shows and social media doubted anyone could misremember so dramatically, labeling him “Lyin’ Brian,” and grafting Pinocchio’s nose onto his face. It’s possible that Williams is, indeed, a self-aggrandizing liar (meaning he knowingly and intentionally told untruths). But to those who know the dramatic results of research into sincere but false memories by Elizabeth Loftus and others, it’s also believable that, over time, Williams constructed a false memory...and that Hillary Clinton did the same when misreporting landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. Most people view memories as video replays. Actually, when we retrieve memories, we reweave them. We often then replace our prior memory with a modified memory—a phenomenon that researchers call “reconsolidation.” In the reconsolidation process, as more than 200 experiments have shown, misinformation can sneak into our recall. Even imagined events may later be recalled as actual experiences. In one new experiment, people were prompted to imagine and repeatedly visualize two events from their past—one a false event that involved committing a crime in their adolescence. Later, 70 percent reported a detailed false memory of having committed the crime!  False memories, like fake diamonds, seem so real. Is Brian lyin’? Does he have Pinocchio’s nose for the news? Perhaps—though telling blatant untruths surely is not a recipe for enduring success and prestige in his profession. Or might he instead be offering us a fresh example of the striking malleability of human memory? P.S. The morning after I submitted these reflections for posting, the New York Times offered this excellent (and kindred-spirited) application of false memory research to the Williams episode . ... View more

Originally posted on March 4, 2015. When was the last time you studied without distractions? Or did any one activity without simultaneously doing another? Multitasking pops up everywhere. While we work, we check our phones for messages, tweet our thoughts, listen to music, and update our Facebook status. At least that’s what my students tell me they do in their other classes. You may think listening to music while you prep for a big test helps you relax so you can concentrate and study. I used to think so. In college, I’d sit down with my textbooks, pop in my headphones, and turn on my favorite music to set the mood for studying.  Then I’d spend hours going over the material—and play my make-believe drums or air guitar! Yes, I studied alone in college. A lot. Listening to music may help college-aged students stay focused, but one new study found that older adults had more trouble remembering information they had learned while music was played in the background. The study challenged younger and older adults to listen to music while trying to remember names. For the older adults, silence was golden. But when the researchers made the older adults listen to music while they tried to remember the names, their memory lapsed. College-aged participants’ performance did not suffer regardless of whether they listened to music while memorizing names. Before you turn up the tunes to study, consider your age first. If you’re a younger college student, keep pressing play. Older students might be better off studying in silence. Regardless of our age, we might do well by taking a few minutes each day to set aside distractions, slow down, and become mindful of our thoughts, feelings, and environment.  ... View more

Originally posted on May 1, 2015. One of the striking discoveries of psychological science is the malleability of memory, as illustrated by the “misinformation effect.”  Experiments by Elizabeth Loftus and others exposed participants to false information. Afterwards, they misremembered a stop sign as a yield sign, a screw driver as a hammer, a peanut can as a Coke can, and a clean-shaven man as having a mustache. Even just imagining nonexistent happenings can create false memories—of being sickened by rotten eggs, having one’s finger caught in a mousetrap, of encountering Bugs Bunny (a Warner character) at Disneyland, or even of preschool child abuse. For me the most stunning finding is the most recent.  After collecting background information from university students’ parents, researchers Julie Shaw and Stephen Porter prompted the students to recall two events from their past—one a false early adolescent event, embedded in true details of the students’ life, such as the name of a friend.  For some, this nonexistent event involved committing a crime, such as a theft, assault, or even assault with a weapon.  After three interviews, 70 percent of students reported false (and usually detailed) memories of having committed a crime. The bottom line: Our memories are not just replays of our past experiences.  Rather, we actively construct our memories at the time of recall.  And that fact of life has implications for criminal interrogation, eyewitness recollections, and even memories retrieved during psychotherapy. ... View more

Originally posted on August 26, 2015. Imagine yourself on a Toronto to Lisbon flight. Five hours after takeoff and with open seas beneath you, your pilots become aware of fuel loss (a fractured fuel line is leaking a gallon per second). Declaring an emergency, the pilots divert toward an air base in the Azores. But while still 135 miles out, one engine dies of fuel starvation, and then, still some 75 miles out, the other. Moreover, your aircraft has lost its main hydraulic power, which operates the flaps. In eerie silence, and with nothing but water beneath, you are instructed to put on a life jacket and, when hearing the countdown to ocean impact, to assume a brace position. Periodically the pilot announces “[X] minutes to impact.” With the ocean’s surface approaching, you keep thinking, “I’m going to die.” Lisa Noble Photography/ Moment Open/ Getty Images But good news: when the engines went silent, you were still 33,000 feet in the air, and your captain is an experienced glider pilot. And the bad news: You are losing some 2000 feet per minute. After minutes of descent, the pilot declares above the passenger screams and prayers, “About to go into the water.” Then, “We have a runway! We have a runway!. . . Brace! Brace! Brace!” Nineteen minutes after losing all engine and primary electrical power and after a series of violent turns, the plane reaches the air base, making a damaging hard landing. You and 305 other passengers and crew members have escaped death. Your pilots return home as heroes. And your flight becomes the subject of television dramas. For psychologist Margaret McKinnon, now at McMaster University and St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, this traumatic flight was not imaginary. It was the real August 24, 2001 Air Transat Flight 236, and she, as a honeymoon passenger, was among those thinking “I’m going to die.” Seizing this one-time opportunity to test people’s memory for details of a recorded traumatic event, McKinnon and her Baycrest Health Sciences colleagues Brian Levine and Daniela Palombo tracked down 15 of her fellow passengers. In a recent Clinical Psychological Science​ article, she reports that seven met criteria for PTSD, and that all of them, some four years later, exhibited vivid, “robust” memories of the details of their experiences. In a follow-up study, also appearing in Clinical Psychological Science​, eight of the passengers underwent fMRI scans while recalling the trauma. Their “enhanced” amygdala activation suggested that the amygdala may, via its links to the hippocampus and visual cortical areas, help create such emotion-fixed memories. The persistent memories from Flight AT236 confirm what other researchers have found—that it’s much easier to forget neutral events (yesterday’s parking place) than emotional experiences, especially extreme emotional experiences. After observing a loved one’s murder, being terrorized by a hijacker or rapist, or losing one’s home in a natural disaster, one may wish to forget. But such traumas are typically etched on the mind as persistent, haunting memories—for survivors of Nazi death camps, “Horror sear[ed] memory.” With many forms of trauma comes not repression but, more often, “robust” memory. Note:  Don’t let this essay leave you thinking that commercial flying is dangerous.  From 2009 to 2011, Americans were—mile for mile—170 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a scheduled flight. In 2011, 21,221 people died in U.S. car or light truck accidents, while zero (as in 2010 and as on AT236) died on scheduled airline flights. When flying, the most dangerous part of the trip is your drive to the airport. ... View more

Originally posted on February 2, 2016. You’ve likely heard the NPR ads for brain fitness games offered by Lumosity. “70 Million brain trainers in 182 countries challenge their brains with Lumosity,” declares its website. The hoped-for results range from enhanced cognitive powers to increased school and work performance to decreased late-life cognitive decline or dementia. But do brain-training games really makes us smarter or enlarge our memory capacity? In our just-released Exploring Psychology, 10th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I suggest “that brain training can produce short-term gains, but mostly on the trained tasks and not for cognitive ability in general.” As an earlier TalkPsych blog essay reported, Zachary Hambrick and Randall Engle have “published studies and research reviews that question the popular idea that brain-training games enhance older adults’ intelligence and memory. Despite the claims of companies marketing brain exercises, brain training appears to produce gains only on the trained tasks (without generalizing to other tasks).” And that is also the recently announced conclusion of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), when fining Lumosity’s maker, Lumos Labs, $2 million for false advertising. As FTC spokesperson Michelle Rusk reported to Science​, “The most that they have shown is that with enough practice you get better on these games, or on similar cognitive tasks...There’s no evidence that training transfers to any real-world setting.” Although this leaves open the possibility that certain other brain-training programs might have cognitive benefits, the settlement affirms skeptics who doubt that brain games have broad cognitive benefits. ... View more

Contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Featuring Dr. Andrew Peter Mallon, CEO and Director of Research, Calista Therapeutics, and contributed by innovative teachers. Currently, my primary interest in connection with Learning and Memory is the discovery and development of new treatments that cure the diseases of learning and memory, either by protecting or regenerating damaged CNS cells, in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, or by enhancing the capacity of the CNS to learn, in diseases like autism. Previously, I taught Learning and Memory for many years, whilst an Assistant Professor (Adj) at Brown University. In my view, the best lessons that can be taught are those that fundamentally inform students about the nature of their own psychology and how it works for and against them without their awareness. My two favorite classroom exercises explore two critical aspects of learning: conditioning and learned helplessness. In my classroom exercise on conditioning, I paired the ingestion of a very sweet, sugary substance (US) that elicits salivation (UR) with a distinctive sound (CS). I have used various sounds as the CS, including a dog-training clicker or saying ”test time” in my inimitable Scottish accent. The pairing can be performed during a normal lecture, and conditioning can quickly be established. Then, after the sugar is removed, the retention and extinction rate of the salivation response (CR) can be assessed in individuals. The association can be extinguished by pairing wasabi with the CS, but in the absence of intentional extinction, I have found that the CS–CR association can last weeks. For me, the real-life lesson from this observation is that it is equally possible to establish an association between a pleasant stimulus and a person: If you (CS) want to be liked by another person, you can pair your presence or your interaction with them with an agreeable US, such as a nice smile, eye contact, humor, friendliness, a compliment, or a bunch of flowers, chocolate, or other small gift. It is a reliable way to enhance one’s interactions with other people and can be remarkably effective. I used the standard impossible anagram experiment to induce learned helplessness in half of my class as a rapid way of demonstrating the power of that pathological psychological effect; however, I follow it up with a discussion that helps students differentiate pathological learned helplessness from the necessary realization that in some cases failure is inevitable. Learned helplessness is widely considered to be an important element of depression, and it is critical for students to understand it and to learn techniques to halt the downward cycles into learned helplessness that can stymie the treatment of depression. It is also important to distinguish between pathological learned helplessness, in which the person submits to failure in an achievable endeavor, and the reasonable recognition that some goals truly are unachievable. In the example I cite to demonstrate learned helplessness, a male student asks a young lady to the prom, is refused, asks another and is again refused, and becomes despondent and never asks another. I contrast that with the example of jumping off tall buildings while flapping one’s arms in the hope of flying, an endeavor in which one should submit to failure. The key to truly understanding learned helplessness lies in distinguishing what is really possible from what is impossible. ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Addicted to Love? Thinking about the object of his desire, Sam’s heart starts to pound, his palms get sweaty, and he feels excitement and anticipation. Denied access, he becomes irritable, has trouble sleeping, and develops an overwhelming obsession that swamps all other interests. Based on the above description, Sam might be a cocaine addict. Or he might just be passionately in love. Humans viewing pictures of their beloved show increased brain activity in areas including the dorsal striatum, the VTA/SNc, and the orbitofrontal cortex (Aron et al., 2005; Xu et al., 2010). These are some of the same brain areas activated by addictive drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine, and they are different from the brain areas activated by sexual arousal, indicating that romantic love is more than just a drive to obtain sex (Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2005). Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can even produce pain relief, apparently by activating reward centers in the brain that overrule the simultaneous processing of pain (Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee, & Mackey, 2010). If romantic love activates the same reward circuits as cocaine, can it be just as addictive? Individuals experiencing intense romantic infatuation can display behaviors reminiscent of drug seeking: pursuit of the beloved to the exclusion of other activities, obsessive and intrusive thoughts, and even impulsiveness and poor decision making—leading, for example, to crimes of passion (Frascella, Potenza, Brown, & Childress, 2010). On the other hand, just because romantic love shares some brain circuitry with cocaine and can elicit some of the same behaviors doesn’t necessarily justify calling love an “addictive substance.” Not everything that elicits reward-seeking behavior or that provokes withdrawal symptoms qualifies for that label. (You seek out water when you’re thirsty, and you experience distress if you go too long without; yet would you consider yourself “addicted” to water?) Many experts believe that the depression and grief that accompany a breakup are a normal part of life— not evidence of an addictive disorder. Nonetheless, some individuals do display excessive devotion to their beloved and experience severe withdrawal symptoms after romantic rejection, including clinical depression and (in rare cases) suicide or homicide. It is possible that, just as some individuals can try cocaine and walk away while others become pathologically addicted, so too some individuals can survive a painful breakup while others remain trapped in a state of loss. Debate continues regarding whether such individuals should be diagnosed with a pathological addiction (Reynaud, Karila, Blecha, & Benyamina, 2010). As research elucidates the brain substrates of drug addiction and suggests therapies (including medication) to reduce the cravings associated with drug withdrawal, should we consider using the same medications to help reduce cravings following romantic rejection? If you’ve ever had your heart broken by a failed romance, would you have taken advantage of such a treatment if it existed? ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. It has long been assumed that sleep, beyond its role in rest and refreshment, also has a facilitating effect on learning and memory. After all, who doesn’t recognize the experience of working fruitlessly on a problem to the point of exhaustion, and then coming up with a sudden solution following a night of sleep? It is only over the last two decades that the effect of sleep on cognition has been studied in depth by the scientific community. This research has led to a growing understanding of how sleep affects learning and memory. A typical night of sleep includes cycles of alternating sleep stages, each characterized by a different profile of brain activity. In one of these stages, rapid-eye-movement (REM), or paradoxical, sleep,  the brain seems as active as when awake. This is the stage in which most dreams appear. Another stage, slow-wave sleep (SWS), or deep sleep, is characterized by highly synchronized brain-neuron activity and is the stage in which it is most difficult to wake the sleeper up. Recent research has combined sophisticated experimental designs, neuroimaging, and single-cell recordings to discover the relative impacts of the different sleep stages on various cognitive functions. It shows that SWS is mostly important for the consolidation of declarative memory, as well as for rule learning, spatial navigation, and insight. REM sleep, on the other hand, exerts its greatest effect on procedural memory. Some of the mechanisms by which sleep contributes to these functions are also becoming clear. During SWS, the hippocampus, a brain region involved in episodic and associative learning, ”replays” some of the waking experiences acquired during the previous day. The replay allows the new memories to be reorganized into a more efficient structure and also contributes to their assimilation into the general knowledge store of the individual. This reorganization is reflected as better performance the following day. Many questions are still unanswered. For example, the mechanism by which REM sleep facilitates learning and memory remains somewhat less characterized in comparison to that of SWS. However, the rapid advancements in this field hold out promise that the years to come will bring a fuller account of why the third of our lives we spend sleeping, a seemingly wasteful behavior from a learning–memory perspective,  is in fact not wasted at all. FURTHER READING Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2005). Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: What is the role of sleep? Trends in Neuroscience, 28, 408–415. Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Review Neuroscience, 11, 114–126. ... View more

When I first started teaching, not as a grad student, but as real live instructor out on my own, I was 24 years old. I was a part-time instructor at a community college near Kansas City. Thinking I had to look the part, I bought some new clothes -- khakis and button-down shirts. It probably didn’t take me more than a couple weeks to realize that wasn’t going to work for me. Most of the students in my classes were older than I was, some by a full generation or two. And a lot of them were scared. They had never been in a college class before, but life circumstances gave them an opportunity – or forced them – to be here. A lot was riding on their being able to do well. Trying to project some sort of authority didn’t mesh with how I walked in the world, and, frankly, I didn’t think it would help my students. Instead, I decided to go where they were. I traded in my new khakis for new jeans. And over time the button-down shirts were gradually replaced by t-shirts. My overarching philosophy to teaching psychology boiled down to this: I know the theory and the research, and you have the life experience; let’s merge them together and see what we can learn from each other. Long ago I moved on to full-time teaching, currently up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I finally caught up to and then surpassed the average age of my students. Even though I’m now older and my students are now younger, I know that many of them are still afraid. I want to lighten the mood. Over the last 15 years, I have amassed a t-shirt collection suitable for Intro Psych. Frankly, I don’t know if wearing these t-shirts in class makes me more approachable. I do know that it’s common for students to look forward to seeing the day’s shirt. And if the connection to the material isn’t immediately obvious, they are on the edge of their seats waiting for the connection to become clear. Okay, maybe no one is quite on the edge of their seats, but I have heard audible “Oh!”s after explaining the relevance of the shirt. Besides, knowing what I’m going to wear on most every class day -- my classes meet on Mondays and Wednesdays -- eliminates having to decide what to wear. I typically wear a denim shirt or a light fleece over top, and then reveal the shirt when it’s relevant to what I’m discussing. This post will feature nine shirts. Next week will feature an additional ten. [Read that post here.] First day -- It's in the syllabus I debated about getting this one. I was concerned it would sound snarkier than I meant it to be. Snarkiness is not the tone I’m after upon meeting my students for the first time. I carefully frame it by asking, by a show of hands, for whom is this their first college term. I explain that I remember by first college term. As I went from class to class, the professors were all talking about the syllabus – a word I had never heard before. Finally I figured out they were referring to these pieces of paper they were handing out.  “Any time you have questions about anything related to the course, the answer is probably in the syllabus.” Completely anecdotally, when I wear the shirt on the first day, I seem to get many fewer questions about the course later on. Biopsych – Serotonin and the Dopamines: The Happiness Tour In Intro, I don’t spend oodles of time on neurons, but this shirt is a handy reminder of the role neurotransmitters play in our everyday lives. Besides, what better way to remember that serotonin and dopamine influence feelings of happiness? Biopsych - Brain Sometimes, when teaching, it helps to have an extra brain. Memory – Les Déspicables I admit that when I first saw this one, it cracked me up so much I just wanted it. And then I figured out where to fit it into Intro. I use it in the memory chapter when talking about retrieval cues. The image retrieves both memories of Les Misérables and minions from the Despicable Me movies. The juxtaposition of such different memories makes this funny. Thinking – Penguin experiencing insight  When you have wings, you think you should be able to use them to fly. And this young penguin flaps and flaps, all to no avail. And then with what is apparently a flash of insight given the presence of the lightbulb in panel 8, the penguin dons a jetpack. Easy peasy. Operant or classical conditioning – Exercise: Some Motivation Required I love this shirt for both operant and classical conditioning. For operant conditioning, the behavior is running. The t-rex is being positively reinforced (running faster gets t-rex closer to a tasty morsel), and the person is being negatively reinforced (running faster gets the person further away from the t-rex).  For classical conditioning, being chased is the unconditioned stimulus and fear is the unconditioned response. Seeing a t-rex in the future would be the conditioned stimulus, and fear at seeing the t-rex is the conditioned response. Stress or classical conditioning – Godzilla destroying city If Godzilla destroys your city, you will likely experience stress. For classical conditioning, Godzilla destroying your city would be the unconditioned stimulus and fear would be the unconditioned response. Seeing Godzilla in the future would be the conditioned stimulus and fear at seeing Godzilla would be the conditioned response. Stress or operant conditioning – Procrastination… just one more game For stress, this is a nice example of emotion focused coping. As long as you are playing the game, you can avoid thinking about all the homework you need to do. For operant conditioning, game play is one big variable ratio schedule of reinforcement. You never know when you’re going to win, but the more you play, the faster you’ll get to that next win. Attention – Car Talk inattentive driving [Currently on clearance. Not available much longer.] When covering attention, the back of this shirt nicely illustrates how we really can’t do two things at once. ... View more