Glider

Show some outstanding personal merit, particularly in ways that benefit the country or its people. Or pay large sums to the incumbent gorvernment. Actually, the latter seems to be more effective now.

Arguably, any 'feeling' is psychological. The hypothalamus is responsible for the basic behaviours; 'the three Fs' as they're known: Feeding, Fighting and Reproduction. Destruction of certain areas in the hypothalamus of rats results in uncontrolled feeding (gluttony). These areas respond to input from stretch receptors in the stomach, which signal the current state of the stomach, empty, full or whatever in between, and also when physical capacity has been reached. These areas also respond to input from chemoreceptors which signal glucose levels in the body. Low levels trigger feeling of hunger, higher levels suppress apetite (usually). Whilst the triggers and actions of these receptors and hypothalamic nuclei are physiological, their activity results in changes in psychological state. An empty stomach, or low blood glucose results in a psychological state involving feelings of hunger, preoccupation with possible sources of food and a strong psychological motivation to search for it. There was an experiment in which hungry people and people who had recently eaten were shown large posters which contained a number of images related to food which were distributed among lots of distractor images (neutral things like trees, spanners, lamps etc.). The people were instructed to find the images relating to food as fast as they could. The hungry people located all the images significantly faster than those who had recenty eaten. Subsequent research shows that we are a lot more sensitive to food related stimuli when we are hungry; colours, scents and anything else that relates to the possibility of food all become more pronounced and noticable to a hungry person than to a sated person. In sated people, these states are suppressed. This is partly due to the actions of the hypothalamus which supresses the feeding behaviour and associated psychological drives, and partly due to blood being diverted from the periphery to the gut to aid digestion. The latter is responsible for the feelings of drowsiness and lethargy people often experience after eating.

The 0.002% of people who are statasticians

Not for any useful period of time, no. You could keep the blood oxygenated and circulating for a time, but all you're doing is preventing (delaying) decomposition. This is done sometimes to maintain organs that are to be removed for transplant, but it cannot be maintained for long. For example, you could use heart-lung bypass and so on, but the mechanisms for controlling BP are gone, as are the vaso-vagal systems. The body would leak fluid through congested and uncontrolled capillary beds from the central system to the periphery. The tissues would become oedematus and overloaded and the lungs would fill. You could haemodyalyse to try to control that problem, but as the chemoreceptors are also non-functional, the body could not compensate for the concentration of dialysate that would be needed and the higher brain would be poisoned and/or starved (dialysis is traumatic enough on a relatively healthy system). There would be no homeostatic mechanisms to maintain the physiological balances required to support the higher brain, which is extremely sensitive to chemical imbalance. Further, the brainstem is where incoming (afferent and proprioceptive) information enters higher CNS areas. If that's gone, the rest of the brain becomes pretty redundant.

Anything at all that interests you and can hold your attention for long periods. The simple fact is that the best (and arguably the most rewarding) way to improve your skill and speed in reading, is to do a lot of it. If you are going to do a lot of it, it's best that you choose material that interests you. There is a whole world of literature (several worlds in fact, if you include Sci Fi) to choose from. Good hunting, and enjoy!

I don't know of any such software. What's wrong with books?

Cool! I bet you could run something like a clock with that weight on a string thing for quite a long time.

That's because they are situation dependant. 'Relevant' simply means having some bearing on the situation at hand. Therefore, it is the situation at hand that determines relevance. For example, if you are evaluating someone's suitability to perform the general functions of a customs officer at an airport, then both sex and race are irrelevant; neither have any influence on an individual's ability to perform that function. So, to employ an individual on the basis of their sex or race would be discriminatory. However, if that post involves having to perform intimate searches of female suspects then sex becomes relevant. In that situation, it would not be discriminatory to exclude males from the selection process, but to exclude candidates on the basis of their race would be.

I have seen anaesthetic and some theraputic hypnosis work, yes. But exactly how it works is still poorly understood (especially by me). Broadly, hypnosis is supposed to evoke an altered state of suggestibility, simply making the subject more open to suggestion. It is thought to do this by bypassing our consciousness and directly influencing the way information is treated in the limbic brain. For example, anaesthetic hypnosis is said to influence the way in which the limbic brain interprets incoming information, so that nociceptive (pain) information does not evoke pain-related cognitive and emotional response (which is the bulk of the pain experience), but instead evokes non-pain related responses. The patient is still aware of the stimulus but stimuli that would normally evoke a pain sensation is 'mis-translated' in the limbic brain and so carries different 'meaning'. Exactly how it does this, I have no idea.

Good hypnotherapists will test you for susceptibility before charging you or attempting to treat you.

Nor have you developed the ability to focus for longer periods So there is your answer. It is highly unlikely that you have ADHD. You do not list any of the more negative but extremely salient symptoms. These are all explained by lack of concentration. Yes you do, and it's going to take a lot of effort. You have some catching up to do. Practice and effort. That's up to you. You have the intelligence, now you're going to need self-discipline and effort to develop the focus you need to study for more challanging tasks. As is implicit in your post, effort is new to you, thus your study skills and concentration span are under developed. Only you can fix this. You can get guidance on study skills from a number of sources (including the net), but they are skills and require practice, which requires self-discipline, like learning to play the piano. There is no 'short-cut' solution; there are no drugs that will help you study and concentrate, and casting around for an alternative explanation (e.g. ADHD), even if you find one, will not resolve the problem, it will only provide an alternative explanation for it. On the upside, if, through effort and application, you can overcome this, then your successes will be more valuable to you and you will appreciate them a lot more. Also, it will also help you to 'fine tune' your social intelligence and your social skills because it will give you a practical insight into the amount of effort less gifted people have put into their achievements. Good luck.

Electricity just depolarises nerves and results in an impulse that cause the muscle they innervate to contract. The same with defibrillation; it just sends a charge through the heart depolarising the cardiac muscle cells all at once to bring them back in phase (beating together). Defibrillation won't work unless there is some activity, even if it's random (as in fibrillation). Asystole is a lethal rhythm. There's no activity and no amount of electricity will bring it back. In short, whilst an electical impulse will cause a muscle to twitch, it won't make dead tissue alive. The same applies to an organism.

Depends how much you have, how frequently and how sensitive you are to it. Too much can result in: Agitation, Anxiety, sleeplessness, loss of concentration, increased irritability, tremor, elevated heart rate and blood pressure and dehydration (as mentioned. It is a diuretic). If you smoke also, it magnifies the effects of smoking on the heart and circulatory system.

Then torture will cause him/her to suffer, but it won't necessarily make them tell you the truth, and if they did, would you recognise it?

Yep, I'm still here. My only free time is pre-work usually (really stupidly early)

The full answer is hugely big and would be very long. So, to keep it short (believe it or not): We have what is known as a 'pain matrix'. This is kind of like a circuit in the brain that receives signals that ascend to the brain via the spinothalamic tract (which carries most pain information to the brain). The pain matrix consists of two divisions; the medial pain matrix and the lateral pain matrix. Projections through the reticular formation and the medial (intralamina) thalamus to the limbic system constitute the medial division of the pain matrix and are associated with the aversive, cognitive-evaluative and emotional-motivational components of pain. Projections through the lateral (ventrobasal) thalamus to the secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) constitute the lateral division of the pain matrix, and account for the sensory-discriminative component of pain. This division allows us to localize pain in time and space (and intensity). Spinal nerves serve particular areas of the body. In the skin, these areas are known as dermatomes, so, for example, the arms are innervated mainly by spinal nerves projecting from the 5th, 6th and 9th thoracic vertebrae (T5, T6 & T9 dermatomes). The somatosensory cortex is mapped out in such a way that topographically, it represents our whole body (this is sometimes knows as the sensory homunculus). I.e. each dermatome maps to a corresponding area of the somatosensory cortex. So, signals from any dermatome are sent to very specific areas of the somatosensory cortex that correspond exactly to the area of the body the signals are coming from. That's how the brain knows where the pain is coming from.

The strength of a relationship and its level of significance are different things. Significance only tells you the probability of being wrong if you reject the null hypothesis. In this case you have < 5% chance of being wrong by accepting the alternative (experimental) hypothesis that there is a relationship between the two variables. This does not mean the relationship has to be a strong one. It only means that you can be >95% sure that the relationship (however weak) does actually exist. One factor to consider is experimental power, and particularly sample size. This is critical in correlation. With a very large sample, comparitively weak correlations can be reported as significant. With a small sample, comparitively strong correlations can be reported as non-significant. This is why we report n as well as r and p in the results. Another thing to remember is that SPSS, as powerful and useful as it is, is only software; it has no common sense. If you ask it to, it will test for a correlation between number of fillings and heart rate (a completely meaningless test as neither can be considered a valid predictor of the other). SPSS will simply answer your question: is there a statistically significant relationship between variable x and variable y? It is always the responsibility of the researcher to ensure that the question is sensible and to decide whether the answer is meaningful. So, whilst SPSS may report that a correlation r = 0.14 is statistically significant (p < 0.05), it is for you to decide whether this relationship is meaningful. I.e. does such a weak relationship have any real-life meaning? This depends to a large degree on what you are investigating.

Torture is torture, though I concede there are degrees of torture. Torture is defined as the causing of pain or suffering to punish somebody or to get them to do something, and is, by definition, inhumane. 'Inhumane' is not a degree of torture, it is an underpinning element. Clearly, you have never tried it. I'm glad of that. Torture does not have to be either brutal or violent to be effective.

I logged on yesterday, and the posts that had gone missing a little while ago were back. I responded to a question by YT concerning Korsakoff's syndrome, but by the time I posted my response, the question had gone, as had all the other posts that had mysteriously reappeared.

Ooopsie...yep, typo. Thanks for the heads up (I fixed it).

It's hard to report an effect size for correlation, as there is no effect. Correlation simply tests the degree to which two related variables vary together. The statistic showing the strength of the relationship is the correlation coefficient (r), and that is reported in the results anyway (along with n and p). However, it is convention to use R squared (sometimes called the coefficient of determination) as an indication of explanatory power. For example if you have a correlation of r = 0.9 between two variables then 81% of the variation in one variable is explained by variation in the other: R squared (0.9 x 0.9) = 0.81 (x 100 to make it a percent= 81). However, if you have a correlation of r = 0.5, then only 25% of the variation in one variable is explained by the variation in the other: R squared (0.5 x 0.5) = 0.25 (x 100 to make it a percent = 25). Therefore R squared will show you how much of the variation in one variable is explained by variation in the other, and so is a better indicator of the strength of the relationship than the correlation coefficient (r).

Lol...possibly

Dammit! That post was a response to a question from YT asking what is Korsakoff's psychosis and how can it be recognised, but by the time I posted the answer, the question had gone! What the pants is going on?