Medium Psychology Highlights (Issue 7)
On memory, colours, even video game tournaments
2 min readJul 10, 2018
Long time no see! After a rather prolonged absence due to deadlines and other commitments, I’ve come back to Medium, and so have the Highlights! You’ll forgive me that these posts have not been curated from the past weeks—I think you’ll enjoy them nonetheless ;) Here goes:
- Memory is an intriguing thing. Psychologists have wondered for a while why we remember some events but forget others; however, one phenomenon stands out: sometimes we vividly remember an event that… wasn’t. In The fallacy of memory (4 min), Raeesa Gupte gives you a fascinating glimpse into the neuroscience of false memories (most commonly associated with unreliable eye-witness testimony or false confessions) and points to one way we might be able to use this brain glitch for good.
- My favorite color is blue. So is yours, alex ioana might guess. Take a deep dive into colors and find out what’s so special about blue in Why most people’s favorite color is blue (12 min).
- Heather Turgeon, MFT and Julie Wright, MFT are the authors of the recently-published Now Say This and they give us a taste of their work in A Parent’s Guide to Sibling Rivalry (9 min; members only). Reading this post was an intense and bittersweet experience that taught me much about the kind of parent I would like to be. Read it.
- We’ve read a lot about cognitive biases in the Highlights and on Medium in general, so you might be wondering how you could avoid falling prey to them. Paras Chopra shares useful tips on How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think (10 min).
- Take a fascinating tour of inner speech—that voice in your head that just said “voice in your head”—and learn to use it to your advantage with Chris Bourn’s Can You Make the Voice in Your Head Sound Nicer? (7 min)
- I love it when people are able to apply psychological theories to domains you would not expect. That’s exactly what Ryan Strenkowski accomplished with How a Century Old Russian Theory Can Help Video Game Tournament Organizers (7 min).
- There are many who dislike evolutionary psychology, but do their arguments have merit? In this post, Bo Winegard makes a strong case in favour of the approach and dispels one common argument against it: Critics of Evolutionary Psychology Say It’s All Just Storytelling. Here’s Why They’re Wrong. (18 min; members only).
That’s all for today! If you’re yearning for more articles to read, do check out the other Highlights issues in the Archive or simply follow the links below each post :)
