Magic Tricks And Media Literacy: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web Sleep researchers often takes a “brain-centric” approach to their work, measuring sleep stages using EEG, for instance, or examining how sleep affects learning and memory. Yet rudimentary creatures also sleep — including the hydra, an aquatic organism which has a basic nervous system but no brain at all.  The findings suggest that our primitive ancestors slept before they even evolved brains, writes Veronique Greenwood at Wired.  In his recent testimony to a House of Commons committee, Dominic Cummings blamed “groupthink” for various failures by the government to adequately tackle the coronavirus pandemic. But at The Guardian, psychologists Stephen Reicher and John Drury explain that the concept of groupthink is “highly contested”, and doesn’t really reflect how groups actually make decisions. When in our history did humans learn to count — and did our Neanderthal cousins also have a system for noting numerical information? Colin Barras explores the possibilities in a fascinating feature at Nature. In a recent paper, researchers report performing magic tricks for a very unusual audience: Eurasian jays. The birds fell for just one of the three different sleight-of-hand tricks, while humans were tricked by all three. The jays’ apparent resistance to the tricks could reflect the fact they don’t have the same expectations as humans about hand movement...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs