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Psychologic New user London, UK 77 Posts |
Hey everyone,
I came across this study whilst at work today: Brown, A., & Marsh, E. (2009). Creating Illusions of Past Encounters Through Brief Exposure. Psychological Science, 20 (5), 534-538. It got me thinking about how the idea/effect could be incorporated into a cool routine. I have pasted a summary of the study that the BPS (British Psychological Association) provided: "Simulating Déjà vu. Déjà vu is that creepy feeling that you're living through a moment for the second time, as if retreading the path of an earlier existence. Now Alan Brown and Elizabeth Marsh believe they've found a way to simulate the déjà vu sensation in the laboratory - a finding that could help us understand why the phenomenon occurs. Twenty-four participants were presented with dozens of symbols that had been carefully chosen, with the help of a pilot study, to be either entirely novel, rarely encountered, or highly familiar (e.g. the division symbol). The participants' task was simply to state for each symbol whether they'd seen it prior to the experiment. A vital twist was that some of the symbols were preceded by an exceedingly brief flash - too quick to be detected consciously - of the same or a different symbol. The take-home finding was that a brief flash of an entirely novel symbol before its subsequent, longer presentation, significantly increased the likelihood that a participant would wrongly claim to have seen that symbol prior to the experiment. The relevance of these findings to the déjà vu effect were highlighted by post-test questioning of the participants, in which 50 per cent of them reported having experienced déjà vu during the study and 79 per cent said they'd sometimes been confused about whether or not they'd seen a symbol before. The researchers said their experimental paradigm was analogous to a person glancing fleetingly at an unfamiliar street scene, being distracted by a poster in a window, before returning their gaze to the street and experiencing a strange sense of having been there before. The experiment provides 'a possible mechanism for common illusions of false recognition,' they concluded." Let me know your thoughts. Cheers :) |
jameme Regular user Mexico 193 Posts |
My degree is also on psychology
so I love to read about this experiments to incorporated somehow on my mentalism act.... I think this explanation will go really well with one of joshua quinn´s paralies routines.. so thanks for this post... hey man maybe this is to obvious to even mention but have you read richard wiseman? he is from the u.k. his material is full of these kind of weird findings |
Pablo_Amira Special user Temuco, Chile 682 Posts |
Carl Jung and his works can give you a lot of inspiration
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Asombro...lo más elevado a que puede llegar el hombre Johann Wolfgang Goethe |
MentalAlex New user 58 Posts |
Very interesting,
You know, when I was working at Starbucks, there was a magnet board that set across from my register, so that people could put up fliers and stuff. Every day when I got there, I would re-arange the magnets into a '7' shape on the board. Whenever a cute girl came by, I would ask her to name a number from one to ten. When she would say 7, I would say, "You know why you chose that number? It's really neat actually, look behind you... You see, I set that up earlier today, and you caught it subliminally as you were walking up! Isn't that weird?" When she didn't I would say, "you know, geniuses pick #!" and smile at the cute girl... it came off as a cheesy pick-up attempt, which I am fine with, lol. Kind of similar in nature, the whole "priming" idea anyway. You should check out Kenton Knepper's work. Kentonism ftw.... |
StuartNolan Elite user 479 Posts |
Nice post.
As Déjà vu is concerned with how we remember the past perhaps this could be thematically linked to how we also see into the future? http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/0......ure.html <snip> Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions. Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay. Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd. His research on this topic is detailed in the May/June issue of the journal Cognitive Science </snip>
"One should always be a little improbable." - Oscar Wilde
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Psychologic New user London, UK 77 Posts |
Hi Jameme - I have read some of Richard Wiseman's stuff. Very cool and insightful work. I recommened his book 'Quirkology' (if you haven't already read it). I also saw him give a lecture in london about the psychology of luck. His research has shown that luck isn't a magical ability or random chance. Rather, lucky people create their good luck by making and noticing chance opportunities, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and have a resilient attitude that turns bad luck into good. Again, a possible premise for a routine, or perhaps even something for the practicing mentalist to bear in mind?
Pablo_Amira - I agree.. Carl Jung has some great theoretical concepts that can be used as the basis for a great effect (i.e. his ideas of archetypes, synchronicity, collective unconscious) MentalAlex - very cool anecdote, which may be exemplyfing the study's priming effect in the real-world. Thanks for sharing StuartNolan - thanks for the link and the further food for thought since, as you mentioned, it provides a novel backdrop for effects involving the seeing/predicting of the future. Look forward to hearing any of your other ideas, suggestions, and opinions. Cheers |
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